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Serena Burdick, THE GIRLS WITH NO NAMES

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Serena Burdick, THE GIRLS WITH NO NAMES

Serena: I think that the biggest challenge authors have is completing their work. I feel like so many people start out, they want to do it. Then they get discouraged at some point and set it aside. My biggest advice would be that even if you feel discouraged and you think it's terrible, I think you should finish it. It probably is terrible. The first draft's always terrible. The first book I wrote, which is not published, five years I wrote it. Then I remember there was a single day where I deleted sixty pages in one day. It was five hundred pages. I was a mess. It was such a mess. I just kept going and kept going. Then you overwrite. Then you take it away. My advice, it's just to finish the work and to have something complete that you can work with, is I feel like the biggest advice I could give to a writer.

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Dibs Baer, LADY TIGERS IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

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Dibs Baer, LADY TIGERS IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

Dibs: [Lady Tigers] is about a guy named Chris Astacio who got his first job as a PE teacher at one of the most dangerous, poverty-stricken neighborhoods in America, really, in the South Bronx. When he got to the school, it was his first job, and he noticed the girls were going after each other in such a vicious, violent way. He had never seen anything like it. He was so shocked by it. He was like, how can I help the girls? There was no extracurriculars for the girls at the school. They didn't have the money for it. He decided just to start this softball team. The first tryout, four girls showed up. He said, "I don't care who it is. Bring all your friends back so we can have a team." The next day fifteen of the worst girls in school who all hated each other walked through the door. It was because they didn't want to go home and they didn't have anywhere to go. They couldn't go outside in the neighborhood. They just wanted to be in the gym. They didn't care about softball. They just showed up to hang out in the gym. It's about how he turned that group into a team of sisters, really. It's just this crazy year of him finding out all of them have an issue in their personal life. It was about him navigating that. They weren’t doing well in school, most of them. It's really not about softball, the book. It's really about girls coming together and learning how to be a team.

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Chris Bohjalian, THE RED LOTUS

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Chris Bohjalian, THE RED LOTUS

Chris: I will ride 3,500 miles a season in Vermont on my bike. When I decided that I wanted to explore a novel in Vietnam, it seemed natural to research it on my bike. I do my best work, in some ways, on my bike. I don't recall who said this, but someone once said the most important tool a writer can have is a walk. For me, it's a bike ride. I do so much thinking about my characters. Who's going to live? Who's going to die? What are their anxieties? What are their dreads? What is their heartbreak? I've pulled over on the side of the road on my bike so often and written whole scenes on my iPhone.

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Anne Bogel, DON'T OVERTHINK IT

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Anne Bogel, DON'T OVERTHINK IT

Anne: When I started writing, I thought that I would write the things I knew about and the stories that I had that I wanted to tell. I've realized over the year that I write to figure out a certain topic or I write to figure out what I think, this is a topic, as you know, as you've read, this is a topic that has mattered to me for a long time.

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Andi Buchanan, THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

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Andi Buchanan, THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

Andi: I had to do a lot of research on my own life. I had to look at medical notes from doctors' visits. I had to look at the CT and MRI and other procedure results and interpret those. I had to look back on emails I'd sent to my family in moments of lucidity just giving them updates. I had some text messages I'd saved. When I was trying to look for clues about what exactly I'd experienced, I even came across some writing I'd tried to do, which was completely nonsensical. I didn't even remember having done it. I had to do a bit of investigation. Out of these breadcrumbs, I had the dates and times of appointments, and emails to friends and family about the results, and some other things that I'd jotted down at the time. I was able to kind of recreate that journey. It was tricky. For me, it called into question what I think is the real fundamental question of memoir anyway, which is, who is telling this story? How much of it is true? What is truth? What is the self? Who's the I that's doing this storytelling? I talk about that a lot in the book because it's so interesting to me and because my experience was very much about that, that questioning of, who am I if I can't think, if I can't use words? I'm a writer. Who am I? If I'm not there, who am I?

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Alice Berman, I EAT MEN LIKE AIR

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Alice Berman, I EAT MEN LIKE AIR

Alice: The story has seven main characters. You find out on page one that one of them is dead. You follow that thread back in time through what happened to bring him to that moment in time. There's a traumatic event early on that affects all of these seven people. They are working through that while you as the reader are also trying to figure out what happened to Alex, who is dead. It's all centered around a wedding party and a wedding, which was always something I really wanted to do because I've been a bridesmaid a few times. I think it's really interesting to be in this combination of people where you're really close friends with everyone else who's a bridesmaid, and you don't know any of the groomsmen. You're thrown together over and over again for a year, year and a half. Then you never see each other again.

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Rachel Barenbaum, A BEND IN THE STARS

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Rachel Barenbaum, A BEND IN THE STARS

Rachel: I am just a lover of science. One of the big questions that I struggled with, and still struggle with, is what is time? What is this notion of time? A second, an hour, a calendar, it’s something we have invented. We've all agreed on it. It’s really important to have schedules to organize, for example, train schedules, but it's just made up. What is time? I really came at it and Einstein from this philosophical perspective. He wasn't even really a very good mathematician. He was better than me, but he was a not a genius mathematician. He was more this genius thinker. He had genius mathematicians help him.

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Alex Berenson, TELL YOUR CHILDREN

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Alex Berenson, TELL YOUR CHILDREN

Alex: Because the kind of psychosis that cannabis produces is so heavy on paranoia -- psychiatrists, they’ve done a lot of work about this issue because it’s so important. If you think about modern society, one of the most important things as a modern society, or as any society, is the prevention of violence. People spend a lot of time studying the causes of violence. They even spend time studying what specific delusions or paranoid ideation makes people violent who have severe mental illness. It’s clear that paranoia is a driver of severe violence. You put all of this together. Then you look at the individual cases, and it becomes harder and harder to argue that, “This is nonsense. I get stoned. I sit around. The only thing I murdered is a bag of Doritos.” 

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Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, THE NINE

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Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg, THE NINE

Jeanne: The Nine is the story of a boy who goes off to a very prestigious boarding school. It was his mother’s hope and dream to get him into this school. She really is under the impression she's got him all set and he's headed off for a stellar future. When he gets to the school, he uncovers an underground world. The Nine is the name of the secret society that taps him. He uncovers a crime as he's cavorting around with this group. He becomes more obsessed with solving the crime than making his mother’s hopes and dreams come true. Their realities need to reconcile. It’s about a family’s experience as this boy goes off and the redefinition of success for them.

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Adrienne Brodeur, WILD GAME: MY MOTHER, HER LOVER, AND ME

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Adrienne Brodeur, WILD GAME: MY MOTHER, HER LOVER, AND ME

Adrienne: The truth of it is some part of me has been writing this story my whole life, mostly in my journal. At different points in my life, I tried to tackle it in different ways. There was some period in my life where I told this story entirely humorous as cocktail party patter or funny essays. I tried to write it as a romantic comedy at one point. Why now or why when I did start to write it, it was having children and starting a family of my own that made me realize I really needed to reckon with my past. I love my parents. I love my mother, but I did not want to parent or mother as I had been parented or mothered. That was probably the biggest impetus for writing it the way I've written it. Aside from the point that I think it’s worth noting that my daughter will be fourteen at the time of publication -- that was exactly the age I was when all this started in my own life. There's probably some unconscious timing and considerations that went on as well.

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Rachel Brathen, TO LOVE AND LET GO

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Rachel Brathen, TO LOVE AND LET GO

Rachel: To Love and Let Go essentially is about a year in my life where I had the most amazing things happen and the most terrible things happen at the same time. My best friend passed away really tragically in a car accident. She was supposed to be the bridesmaid in my wedding. Three months after that, I got married to my husband, which was a highlight, of course. Then my grandmother passed away. Then we lost our dog. Then my mom tried to commit suicide. This all happened in the scope of one single year. It was a really big journey for me. Already then, I knew I wanted to write these stories down because I had so many intricate moments of things that felt like divine intervention, little miracles that happened in those really dark times. I wanted to write about it. It’s taken me five years to actually complete the book.

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Deborah Burns, SATURDAY'S CHILD

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Deborah Burns, SATURDAY'S CHILD

Deborah: This book is about my very unconventional, larger-than-life mother. I was an only child who danced around an otherworldly beautiful goddess of a mother. Life with her was really all I knew. She may have been a tad narcissistic, not a word I knew back then. She was always central to my life. When she was fifty-six, she got breast cancer and after some lingering, was not a survivor. More than twenty years after her death, always carrying her with me, my life was changing. I realized it was time to reflect on that critically important relationship to me. The book was born from that reflection, which was full of revelation. Then I got inspired to actually write a book when I was on a trip to London with my own daughter. The mother-daughter story continues.

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Leslie Anne Bruce, YOU ARE A F*CKING AWESOME MOM

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Leslie Anne Bruce, YOU ARE A F*CKING AWESOME MOM

Leslie Anne Bruce: It’s a mama book. It’s not a baby book. It is a book for women who are transitioning into motherhood. It is a book that focuses on that journey. So much of preparing for becoming a mom is baby-centric. We plan for the nursery. We plan for the hospital and our diaper bag and what kind of crib mattress to get. We’re not planning for what happens when we become mothers, that moment when your child is born and you realize you're the least important person in that room. When I had my daughter in 2014, I really struggled with that transition. On top of the hormone shifts and the body shifts and all of that, I was going through a real identity crisis. I had spent so much of my life being one person. Overnight, I was becoming someone new. I didn't have the foresight to really honor that change. This book talks about that journey and largely about my journey. Its goal is to help women, support women who are going through it as well and also offer them a little bit of guidance. I don't like to say so much advice because I think that only you know what is best for your child in your home. I like to have little tips and tricks along the way.

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

Jennifer: Out of Place is the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Cove who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island off of Cape Code, with her mom. She's never left the island once in her entire life, which was fine with her until the day that her best friend Nina comes and tells Cove that Nina’s going to be moving to New York City with Nina’s two fathers. In that moment, Cove’s entire life feels like it’s falling apart. She has no idea how to make it better. It’s a story about friendship and mistakes and big acts of courage.

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Candace Bushnell, IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

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Candace Bushnell, IS THERE STILL SEX IN THE CITY?

Candace: To me [Is There Still Sex in the City?] it’s really about a journey that I had in my fifties. My fifties were not anything like I thought they were going to look. For one thing, I got divorced . I really didn’t want to live in New York all the time anymore. Something was happening in my brain. My brain was changing. I really spent three years pretty much alone. I rode horses. I didn't date. I really just wrote all the time. That actually is a phase of what I would call middle age madness.

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

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Jennifer Blecher, OUT OF PLACE

Jennifer: Out of Place is the story of a twelve-year-old girl named Cove who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island off of Cape Code, with her mom. She's never left the island once in her entire life, which was fine with her until the day that her best friend Nina comes and tells Cove that Nina’s going to be moving to New York City with Nina’s two fathers. In that moment, Cove’s entire life feels like it’s falling apart. She has no idea how to make it better. It’s a story about friendship and mistakes and big acts of courage.

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Lisa Barr, THE UNBREAKABLES

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Lisa Barr, THE UNBREAKABLES

Lisa: The Unbreakables is about a woman from Chicago whose husband and best friends end up betraying her. She loses everything in one fell swoop. She decides to go to Paris first to meet her daughter who’s also dealing with her own heartbreak. Once she gets out there, she makes a split decision to go to the South of France to really heal from her wounds. There she reclaims her sensuality and also her abilities as a sculptor which she pretty much let go of. The book came about, it was July 2015. I don't know if you remember this, the Ashley Madison hack.

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Gary John Bishop, UNF*CK YOURSELF

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Gary John Bishop, UNF*CK YOURSELF

Gary John Bishop: I've coached many, many, many thousands of people. It’s always shocking to them when you reveal somethin’ that they’ve concluded. Then they actually get a chance to get a real broad view of how they’ve lived their life with that. For many people it’s stuff like, “I'm not smart enough. I'm not loved. I'm never going to make it. I don't belong. I don't fit in.” Whatever your personal brand of it is, you're actually out to prove it every day.

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Sara Bliss, TAKE THE LEAP: Change Your Career, Change Your Life

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Sara Bliss, TAKE THE LEAP: Change Your Career, Change Your Life

Sara: I kept waiting for someone to give me that opportunity. It didn't really come. I had to make it for myself. That took a lot of time to do. Now, the whole landscape is different. Just do it, really. That's really the bottom line. Whatever it is you want to do, you need to prepare. You have to research. You need to connect with other people who've done it. You need to buy my book.

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