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Margarita Montimore, OONA OUT OF ORDER

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Margarita Montimore, OONA OUT OF ORDER

Margarita: Every step of it has been incredible. I self-published my first book. I wrote another book in between that book and Oona that I just set aside and didn't do anything with. It took four and a half years. During that time, I saw a lot of writers that I knew get agents and editors and book deals. One writer I knew hit The New York Times best seller list. I saw what a tough road that was and how many obstacles you had to surmount and how tough the odds were. Every time I crossed another hurdle, for me, I tried to be very present and grateful about every one of those moments, whether it was getting the agent, whether it was getting that book deal. Everything on top of that, it just blows my mind on levels that I truly, truly never expected. When I found out about Good Morning America, I always think of this line from My So-Called Life, it's like a stun gun to your brain. There's been so many moments where I have truly been like, is this real life? No, but really, have I drifted off to a parallel world or a dream state? What I've heard from other authors, especially during their debut year, the biggest issue for them has been that it goes by in such a blur. They wish that they had time to really stop and enjoy it more and worry about it less. I've tried to keep that in my mind so that every time something wonderful happens, whether it's just somebody posting about the book on Instagram or seeing my book on a Times Square billboard, that I stop and just really go, wow, I feel so lucky and I'm so grateful for this.

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Jeff Gordinier, HUNGRY

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Jeff Gordinier, HUNGRY

Jeff: I don't think he intended that to be the case, but [René Redzepi] was kind of my therapist. Jokingly, a friend of mine, about a year ago before the book came out, when he read it in galleys, he said, "I love it. It's eat, pray, eat, love, eat, eat, eat," like Eat Pray Love with way more eating. I was like, yeah, it kind of is actually. I love Elizabeth Gilbert, so I thought that was flattering. Even if some of your audience is not into high-end tasting menus and the high stakes of gastronomy and all that, all of which I admit right now seems very far away, the book is actually really about reinvention and personal change. It's really about how I changed and René changed in the course of these four years we spent together.

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Kari Lizer, AREN'T YOU FORGETTING SOMEONE?

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Kari Lizer, AREN'T YOU FORGETTING SOMEONE?

Kari: It's a collection of essays. There's diversity there, but a lot of them are about my coming to terms with the loss of my identity as a mom, more or less, coming to this place in my life where all three of my kids are out of the house and what it meant. I had stopped working as hard as I was working too. Things sort of came to a screeching halt all of a sudden. My house was empty. I didn't have three kids who I was constantly nagging about getting into college, up in the morning, getting their homework done, figuring out what they were going to be and do with the rest of lives, and also running television shows, working on television shows, writing scripts, trying to do that, sell things. All of that sort of ended all at the same time. I found myself in this void of purpose. I started writing about it and this no-man's-land time of life. Also, it's the same time when my parents are aging. That added to the equation of, who am I and what I am doing with myself? I wrote stories about it.

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Amy Klein, THE TRYING GAME

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Amy Klein, THE TRYING GAME

Amy: I'm a writer and an essayist. I never thought I'd be writing a prescriptive book, but it has a lot of my story when it's relevant in there. I am a health journalist, so I've interviewed a lot of doctors and a lot of patients because I want to help people not make the same mistakes I did. I want to give them answers to the questions. Because there's so much information out there, I want to help them get through the journey. Even if it's something that they show their mother, "Read this book," or show their best friend, "Read this chapter on baby envy. This is why I'm having trouble being happy for you. It's not that I'm not happy for you. It's just that I'm not happy right now, and I want what you have," if that could just make people feel less alone. I say if you think going to all these events is going to make you a better person, like going to a bris, where I had a cry myself in the bathroom stall, if you think going there is going to make you a better person, then go. If you can, try to take care of yourself. I have an article coming out soon about what I learned about infertility is helping me during quarantine.

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R. Eric Thomas, HERE FOR IT

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R. Eric Thomas, HERE FOR IT

Eric: I originally wanted to call the book Why Bother. It was right around the time that Hillary Clinton's book What Happened came out. I was really fascinated by the idea that you could pose a question that maybe was a statement, maybe was a question. For me, Why Bother kind of encapsulated the spirit of the book, which is like why bother to get out of bed in the morning? Why bother to try to make the world a better place? Why bother to try to feel like you belong? Of course, it would've been a harder sell, a book called Why Bother, but I do feel like, particularly in this moment -- I didn't write it for this weird, strange moment that we're in, but I think that spirit still carries through. Why are we trying to reach each other still? Why are we trying to make our mark in the world? Why are we trying to speak truth to power? I think it's because we feel like there must be something better on the other side. That's what the book is about, figuring out what's on the other side or at the end of the book or behind the next page.

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Emily Gould, PERFECT TUNES

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Emily Gould, PERFECT TUNES

Emily: Perfect Tunes is the story of a mother and daughter who are very close in age because Laura, the protagonist of the book, got pregnant with Marie, her daughter, when she was in her very early twenties. The circumstances of that pregnancy and Marie coming into Laura's life really changed the course of what she thought her life was going to be like. Laura moved to New York, as many people do, with big dreams of being, in her case, a singer-songwriter. She is someone who has a lot of talent and not a lot of ambition in terms of figuring out how to get her talent out there. She falls in really quickly with a group of people, including the man who ends up being Marie's father, who are much more driven, much more ambitious, and much more savvy in the ways of the big city than she is.

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Susan Isaacs, TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

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Susan Isaacs, TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

Susan: I think people need narrative. My daughter has her PhD in philosophy. Her field is aesthetics. She believes we're hardwired for narrative. We need a story, not necessarily once upon a time, but we need to make sense out of things. We need to hear about other experiences. It's not only books. Look, we all know that there's -- this is the golden age of TV. There's wonderful narrative on TV. The series and the streaming series reminds me very much of the era of Dickens and Dostoevsky when their work used to come out as a serial. There's a comfort in holding a book. I think it's also something visual. Even though you get the book jacket on the e-book, it seems when you pick up your iPad or your Kindle or whatever that you're picking up the same book over and over. There's a kind of sensual pleasure in picking up a fat book, a thin book, a large one, a small one, looking at the jacket art, trying not to read the flap copy because sometimes it gives away too much but then succumbing. There's much pleasure in that.

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Mallory Kasdan, ELLA

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Mallory Kasdan, ELLA

Mallory: Ella is a parody of Eloise at the Plaza. This was a few years ago. My daughter was six at the time. We were big fans of Eloise. I grew up loving it and thinking, what an amazing life to live in New York City and live in a hotel and have that adventure. Then it was my fortieth birthday. I went to a hotel in Williamsburg that had just opened with my husband. We had a party for me. We left the kids at home. Zoe was six at the time. We were just so psyched to be getting out, having a party, being in a hotel. It was very Brooklyn. It was very hip. There was no sign. It was super groovy. Everything was reclaimed wood and brick. It was an old factory that they made into a hotel. I was just picturing Zoe there and seeing her scootering all around the lobby. I was really glad that she wasn't there, but thinking how funny it would be if she was there mucking up this hipster haven.

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Lisa Damour, UNDER PRESSURE

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Lisa Damour, UNDER PRESSURE

Lisa: Anxiety disorders have always been disproportionally diagnosed in girls and women as opposed to boys and men. The reason for this is we think it's largely socialization, that girls and women are taught that if they're distressed, to sort of collapse in on themselves, depression, anxiety, things like that. Boys and men are taught by the culture when they're distressed, to act out, to mix it up, to get themselves in trouble. It's not that boys and men don't suffer. They don't suffer as often as girls and women suffer in terms of feeling highly anxious and having, the technical term is internalizing disorders, holding it all in. There's that reason. The other thing, though, if we think about why is it getting worse, what's happening now, why does this feel like it's taken this particular shape? I worry that we keep adding stuff to girls' plates and nothing's coming off. Girls are crushing it academically. And they're incredible athletes. And they're incredible musicians. And they're starting businesses. And they're still supposed to be cute. And they're still supposed to be nice. And they're supposed to still make everyone feel comfortable and maintain a whole lot of social ties and be agreeable doing the things we ask them to do. I think that piece, not that I want to go back to some retrograde moment when girls don't have all the opportunities they have available, but all of this opportunity without the permission to excuse oneself from culture pressures to be adorable or thin or pleasant all the time isn't a great recipe for girls.

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Amy Fish, I WANTED FRIES WITH THAT

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Amy Fish, I WANTED FRIES WITH THAT

Amy: My number-one tip for when someone is running late is that it's not fixable by you. No alarm clock that you're going to get them or no gadget that's going to help them organize their keys is going to help get them get out the door on time to meet you. That is where I talk about the serenity prayer, which is accepting the things you can change and knowing what you can't change and knowing the difference, I think. It's not in front of me, but it's a very beautiful quote that has always resonated with me. I can't make you on time. That's the story in the book where someone has a family member who's always, always late. It drives her crazy, but she can control what time dinner starts. If you invite people to your house and you have a recurring family event, let's say Passover's coming up and every year you have the Seder or you have your Easter dinner, whatever your family celebrates, Spring Solstice, and people are always late, then you don't have to wait for them. You can start dinner when you start dinner. That's how you cope with someone who's always late. You don't change them. You just decide what you're willing to live with and what you're not willing.

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Rachel Bertsche, THE KIDS ARE IN BED

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Rachel Bertsche, THE KIDS ARE IN BED

Rachel: I always say if you're lying on the massage table and you're thinking about the emails you need to return and the birthday presents you need to buy and diapers you need to order, then that time doesn't really feel that relaxing even if you're doing the ultimate relaxing activity. I think when people say, oh, you should just take me-time, it can feel so nebulous and endless. There's dishes in the sink waiting for you. It can feel sort of intimidating, so they don't do it. I talk in my book about what I call pockets of indulgence which are literally pockets of time with a beginning and an end. I think the end part is the important part where you can really lean into doing something for yourself. That doesn't have to be two hours. It can be twenty minutes.

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Janelle Brown, PRETTY THINGS

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Janelle Brown, PRETTY THINGS

Janelle: Pretty Things is about two young women. One is a con artist. The other one is an Instagram influencer who happens to also be an heiress. It's about a con artist who basically takes on this heiress and moves into her guest house with grand schemes in mind. Then everything goes very sideways from there.

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Nicole Kear, FOREVERLAND

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Nicole Kear, FOREVERLAND

Nicole: Foreverland is about Margaret who's a shy, anxious, eccentric twelve-year-old who's having trouble at home. She runs away to live in an amusement park called Foreverland. When she gets there, she meets Jamie who is also a runaway, though her polar opposite. He and she forge a friendship and have an exciting adventure which is also a transformative journey of self-discovery for both of them.

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Rebecca Serle, IN FIVE YEARS

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Rebecca Serle, IN FIVE YEARS

Rebecca: In Five Years is the story of Dannie Kohan who's a corporate lawyer living in New York City who has a very airtight five-year plan. We meet her on the day of her big job interview, the place she's wanted to work forever. She nails the interview. That night, she gets engaged to her boyfriend. Everything is going exactly according to plan. She comes home that night and falls asleep on the couch and wakes up and lives exactly one hour five years in the future, and wakes up in an apartment she's never been before with a man she's never met before. Then she wakes back up in her real life. Four and a half years go by. She meets the man who was in that hour with her. Everything starts to both ravel together and unravel to bring her towards that hour.

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Darcy Miller, CELEBRATE EVERYTHING!

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Darcy Miller, CELEBRATE EVERYTHING!

Darcy: I have always loved to celebrate. For me, celebrate is less about actual parties, but more about just celebrating people you love. It can be a big party like a fiftieth birthday or an anniversary party or wedding, but it can be something as simple as making the breakfast table festive on Valentine's Day. My mom is super creative. Growing up, she always was making our Halloween costumes and making our birthday invitations. Growing up, it was just part of me that I had parents who spent the time to do something that was appreciated. It was a way of showing a token of your love and affection. When I was a kid, I started to make things, and make things for people. I actually had a party favor business when I was in seventh grade.

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Adrienne Miller, IN THE LAND OF MEN

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Adrienne Miller, IN THE LAND OF MEN

Adrienne: I got the job as an editorial assistant at GQ because a professor of mine knew someone who knew Granger who was an editor at GQ. I had no sparkling CV at the age of twenty-two. I'd had an internship in New York. That was it. I was an English major like everyone else. I was a women's studies minor like everyone else. There was nothing, really, to distinguish me, but I studied before my interview, back issues of GQ. I went to the library at school, pre-internet obviously, mid-nineties. I studied like a Koranic scholar, back issues of GQ for like ten years. I was able, when I went to New York for my interviews, actually able to talk about what I had read in GQ. The writers who wrote the pieces, I knew their names. I stylistically was vaguely able to talk about them. That's the only reason I got the job. Granger finally admitted years later that he had hired me because I was the only candidate for the job who’d bother, even, to open the magazine. I think that's an important part, also, of my story and really any professional story. Be overprepared.

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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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Fanny Singer, ALWAYS HOME

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Fanny Singer, ALWAYS HOME

Fanny: What I think is really wonderful about people adopting it now is the quality of the experience of those things, being more sensuously acquainted with your food and cooking more, which I think everyone's doing now and realizing how much pleasure there is there. It's getting back into the kitchen. Really using your senses too I think gives you this reprieve from, especially in this moment, all the anxiety and all the other preoccupations around work or homeschooling, I can imagine, and all those things. I'm happy that this book comes at -- a lot of people have been telling me that it feels like a very sense-activated kind of text. There's a lot of sensory material. It's easy to go into this other place, not just travel to some of the destinations that are spoken about in the book like the South of France where we used to go when I was a kid, but also just traveling through the sense descriptions around food or around smells and flowers or nature.

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Marisa Meltzer, THIS IS BIG

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Marisa Meltzer, THIS IS BIG

Marisa: I'm a New York Times reader and writer. I was reading the obituaries. I saw the one for Jean Nidetch. I admit I had never heard of her or had any idea of who she was. I had this sense of, oh, I can't wait to read this because this is the woman who I can finally put a face to all of my rage. I can sort of blame her for messing up my life. Instead, I read it and I saw this rags-to-riches story. I saw a woman who was about the same age that I was at the time also reckoning with her forties and changing her life, a Jewish woman in Brooklyn. We even look a little bit alike. I thought, we have so much in common, I want to know so much more, and just had so many questions that I wanted answered about her life, about mine. That's kind of the impetus. Then just couldn't get it out of my head and finally decided to write about it.

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Joanna Hershon, ST. IVO

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Joanna Hershon, ST. IVO

Joanna: You know, no. I would say that I'm definitely an extrovert. I get so much joy from other people. I'm collaborative by nature, super social, but I have chosen this life of -- I was acting, but I always wrote my whole life. I've always written stories. I have chosen this life in which I'm alone a lot. It's very isolating work. I'm fascinated by my own choices because I do feel like I'm an extrovert and I do feel like I need that time totally alone with my own thoughts. So I don't know. My guess is that a lot of writers are like that. There's this image of the writer as an introvert and kind of socially awkward and not able to socialize. Surely, there are many introverted writers. I also feel like it's that contradiction. I certainly see it in other writers. I need both.

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