First Draft Episode #223: Amanda Montell
December 10, 2019
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Amanda Montell, debut author of Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, joins Sarah to talk about socio-linguistics, and her upcoming book Mindfuck: The Secret Language of Cults (Spoiler: You’re Already Using It).
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Amanda Montell, debut author of Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Her upcoming book is Mindfuck: The Secret Language of Cults (Spoiler: You're Already Using It.)
Listener [chuckles], I think you can tell I'm pretty excited about what Amanda is studying in her professional life. I had so many questions for her. I loved what she had to say about what parts of internet speech are here to stay, inspiring a generation of foul-mouthed feminist nerds, and what goes into creating a nonfiction book proposal. Also, I loved her thoughts on thinking of her work as less of an art and more of a craft. So please, sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Hello Amanda, how are you?
Amanda Montell: I'm good. Thank you for having me on your lovely podcast.
Sarah Enni: Thanks. I'm so excited we can make this happen. Let's start where I always to start, which is at the very beginning. So I would love to hear about where you were born and raised.
Amanda Montell: Oh my God, we're going back, honey.
Sarah Enni: Uh-huh!
Amanda Montell: I was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. I come from a long line of research scientists. My parents are PhDs, researchers. My dad is a neuroscientist. My mom is a developmental biologist. So I'm the slacker of the family, truly.
Sarah Enni: Talk to me about reading and writing as a kid, and how you thought about language when you were young. And what made you kind of pulled to thinking about it.
Amanda Montell: Right. Gosh, I don't know what about my early childhood made me so interested in language, but all I know is that from a very early age I was obsessed with words, and foreign languages, and foreign dialects and accents.
A story I tell is, and it’s true, is that I got a thesaurus one year for my birthday and I was obsessed with it. And in high school I took Italian. And I know that when you take a language in high school, especially in America where learning to become bilingual is not considered particularly useful or prestigious here, you don't expect to come out of high school knowing a language fluently. But I was obsessed with it. I had an amazing teacher, and I was lucky enough to be able to go and study in Italy for a little bit over a summer when I was in high school. So by the time I graduated, I really did speak Italian. Cause, I dunno, I was just transfixed by words.
But I didn't know that I wanted to be a writer until I got to college and I studied linguistics and poetry. Sort of the two sides of someone who's obsessed with the phonetics, like the sounds and thwacks and gurgles of language. Poetry and linguistics are kind of like the two sides of that. One is the science of language and one's the art of it.
So I spent my college years really trying to think of how I could combine these two disciplines; which were writing, and I also studied fiction and creative nonfiction... although I finally settled on creative nonfiction as the thing I wanted to write. Because I realized, and it should have been obvious, that it's the only genre I really ever read. When I was a kid and other people were reading YA and stuff, I was reading memoirs. Well, I was obsessed with Sedaris in high school (author of Calypso, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim), but I was also reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt in high school and...no, maybe even middle school.
And in middle school I was obsessed with Augusten Burroughs like Running with Scissors and Dry: A Memoir, and books like that. And when I was really little, I loved those Chicken Soup for the Soul collections.
Sarah Enni: Dude. I read all these books also before college.
Amanda Montell: Oh my God, the Chicken Soup for the Teen Soul book. I devoured that at the age of ten or whatever, a million times over. So I think that was the beginning of my obsession with nonfiction. I liked fiction and there were a few novels that I liked, but really from an early age I was much more interested in essays and memoir.
And then when I got to college, I discovered the author Mary Roach, she's a pop science writer who just has this incredibly funny, astute, whimsical, weird approach to writing about science for a general audience. And she has books like, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. And Gulp: Adventures Down the Alimentary Canal. She just takes these topics like dead bodies and digestion, that you would never think would be interesting for someone who doesn't explicitly study them, and she makes them really fun and accessible and cool. And so, I was obsessed with her. And obviously Joan Didion and Nora Ephron and all these people.
So I finally realized like, "Oh, nonfiction is the only thing I've ever really loved. That should be the thing that I write. That only makes sense." Not to mention I was a pretty poor poet and fiction writer. And there was a period, maybe a summer when I was twenty-years-old, when I was really thinking like, "How can I combine linguistics and creative writing?"
There was a summer when I was twenty when I started telling people I wanted to grow up to be a pop linguist. And people were like... not only does nobody know what a linguist is, but a pop linguist, what is that? And so people would look at me and they were like, "Mm, that's cute sweetie. But that's not a job." And it wasn't until, at least I didn't realize it wasn't, until I invented it [says with a smile in her voice].
But then I was like, "Fair enough. That's not a job. I don't know how I would pull that off, writing about linguistics for general audience." So I ended up pursuing something different in terms of my full time day job. But all the while wanting to write nonfiction and putting linguistics in a back pocket. And the fact that I get to write about language in a creative nonfiction format now is, it just feels like a lottery win.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that you were always really wanting to bring linguistics into what you were writing.
Amanda Montell: Definitely.
Sarah Enni: I'm interested in... I feel a couple of things were happening possibly at the same time. You were a reporter, and an editor and a writer. And then also you had The Dirty Word.
Amanda Montell: Oh, right. Okay. So yes. So when I graduated from college and moved to LA, I just hit the ground running with the hustle. As I mentioned, my parents are scientists. They have no writerly connections. I would have exploited them if they did. So I didn't know what to do. And then I had had mentors warn me that I shouldn't move to LA if I wanted to be a creative writer, that I should really stay in New York. And that kind of lit a fire under my ass like, "I have to make this happen in any way that I can."
And so by day, I pursued a career working in digital media as an editor/writer at a variety of different women's digital lifestyle publications. Nothing hard hitting. Beauty, fashion, lifestyle, that sort of thing. It was fun but it wasn't my dream. And then on the side I hustled a bunch of different side projects. I was writing my own essays. I was taking classes at a writing school here in LA. I think they have it in San Francisco too, called Writing Pad. Have you heard of it?
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
Amanda Montell: I took a few classes there just to keep up my creative nonfiction chops as best I could. I would go to so many author events by myself here in LA. I had no friends. Nothing going on.
Sarah Enni: You were hustling.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, just to try to ingratiate myself in the community here, which is small but so supportive...I found. And it was submitting my work, trying to get it published in places here and there. I remember when I was twenty-two, I set a goal that I wanted to publish something in The Rumpus.
And I finally published something in The Rumpus and I was so excited. Because an author, a young female author that had come and visited my creative nonfiction class in college, had something published in The Rumpus when she was twenty-two or twenty-three. And I was like, "I want to do that." Julie Buntin, do you know who that is?
Sarah Enni: Yeah!
Amanda Montell: She wrote Marlena: A Novel. So she came and talked to us, I think before she got that book deal. And I just connected with her. She was an example of the type of person that I could be. So I modeled some of these milestones or some of these goals after her.
Sarah Enni: That's why mentors are important, right?
Amanda Montell: Totally. And I doubt she would know who I was. We've communicated a little bit here and there. Actually, she once was writing a piece about the history and evolution of the word queen and reached out to me (Julie also wrote “How Queen Became the Ultimate Compliment”). This was years and years and years ago, when I had just graduated from college.
And I hooked her up with one of my linguistics contacts. This was before I knew that I was gonna be writing about linguistics. But I was like, "Oh, that's great. Someone's writing about etymology" for Cosmopolitan, I think it was. So I was like, "Oh, that's cool."
But anyways, so I was doing the hustle. And then another thing that I was doing on the side, was creating content about language and gender, but in video format. Or, I guess, language gender and pop culture. That was kind of the theme, in video format, which was not something I ever aspired to do. And I'm very glad I'm not doing anymore because it was so stressful and not my wheelhouse. But I was very happy to be doing it at the time, because these videos were going on a website called Wifey.tv, which had a YouTube channel where they were also going. Which was this media brand that was founded by Jill Soloway, writer on Six Feet Under and creator of Transparent.
And I was such a fan of Jill's because they had written a collection of personal essays in the mid-two thousands that I liked. It was a funny feminist essay collection. Jill was also a writer on the show, Six Feet Under, which I stand to this day. It's my write or die. This is an HBO series from the early two thousands. My two cats are named after two characters on the show. It's my everything.
And so I met Jill at a book event either right before, or right after, Transparent came out. And I just introduced myself as a fan, and got Jill to sign my book, the book that they had written. And then basically, long story short, I ended up making these videos for this video content platform that they had called Wifey, which I was doing for free on a ten-year-old camera in my apartment. Super bootstrap, makeshift. But I think the video... I mean, the videos are extremely cringey to me. I didn't know why I was doing them at the time, really just to breathe Jill's air.
But it worked to my benefit because I ended up making these videos. And I also thought like, "I don't really know why I'm making these." But I'm twenty-three years old, twenty-four years old at the time, and I thought like, "These are just a part of my portfolio. They're something that demonstrates a voice of mine. Maybe not my only voice, but a voice that I can tap into."
This one of like, "Your friendly neighborhood linguist who can make a five minute snappy video commenting on why everybody loved Oprah's Oscar speech so much." Videos like that. Or when Sweden added the gender neutral third singular pronoun “hen” to the dictionary. I could do a cute little video on that, and tie a pronoun themed drinking game into it. Or, do a video on Vocal Fry or why people bristle at the sound of the word vagina.
It was videos like that. They were very light linguistics content. It's really too good to be true, and I kind of can't believe it, that those videos ended up being the proof of concept for my book. Because when I finally got on the phone with a literary agent in 2017 and word vomited everything about myself that I had been doing, telling her about all these different side hustles. The language, and gender, and pop culture stuff, seemed the most compelling to her, again, to my surprise and delight.
Sarah Enni: Pop linguist was in your head as like, "Okay, this thing I'm kind of wanting to work toward, or that's out there. I'd love that." When you are developing this with Jill, Dirty Word, were you conscious of that this was maybe one step down that path?
Amanda Montell: So I mostly actually developed it with Jill's partner that they created Wifey with, an artist and writer named Rebecca Odes. And we just kind of brainstormed at the beginning about the content and the aesthetic of the show. And then after the first few episodes, I kinda just did whatever I wanted and uploaded them myself. Again, I was doing this for free. It was not a big deal.
But while it was happening, I was just truly like, "I dunno what this is but it's fun, and Jill thinks it's cool and tweets it when I post. That's good enough for me." I was still in the stage of kind of just figuring out what it was that I wanted to say. Because I was twenty-three, twenty-four, I had set a goal in my mind that I wanted to have my first book deal by thirty. That was just a goal that sounded feasible to me. Having no idea how I would accomplish it. I just in my head was like, "I want to have a book deal by thirty. So I have a little bit of time to experiment with what I'm saying, and doing."
Sarah Enni: And what you're writing and covering.
Amanda Montell: Exactly. It just so happens that it happened much sooner than that, which again, it feels like a lottery win. I mean what is luck? But I do feel very lucky that this thing that I'm so interested in happens to [pauses] we're in a moment where it's becoming more interesting to people, language and gender, and just because of my background writing for the internet, I'm able to talk about it in a way that's accessible. So it just was this perfect storm of this thing that I know about, and can also talk about in an internet-y fun and relatable way... that's my book.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's so great! You were in a unique position to write a book that was very colloquial, because you wrote for the internet. The thing that's scary, fascinating, and kind of dizzying as a writer of books, books are so permanent feeling. And the internet, it feels like language on the internet is changing by the day. So how have you kept up with that? Or how do you think about that?
Amanda Montell: Well. Right. So your voice when writing for the internet can have more ephemeral slang and it obviously just is a completely different medium, and that's something that I had to learn. And so there were a lot of cheap jokes and asides that were cut out of the book. Tell me if you disagree, but I think... and there are some books that are definitely written in a jokier more slang-heavy voice than mine is. When I'm talking about slang in the book, I'm talking about it kind of empirically, and I'm not using a lot of slang in my personal descriptive narrative voice.
I definitely had to learn how to formalize, a little bit, when writing in this format. But what I will say remained from my internet comeuppance are the structure of the chapter titles is very click-baity. So chapter zero, I didn't know whether to call it chapter one or the intro, so I just called it chapter zero. This one's simple, it's "Meet Socio-linguistics, what all the Cool Feminists are Talking About." That's a colloquial phrasing that I don't think is going to go out of style.
And then chapter one is called, "Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate But Also Kind of Love?" Kind of in that listical format. Chapter two, "Wait. What Does the Word Woman Mean Anyway? Plus Other Questions of Sex, Gender and the Language Behind Them."
So they're in the format that I would use to write one of the headlines for one of the women's publications that I was writing for for the internet. But I also know, because of my studies of internet slang, that I have an instinctive feeling, at this point, for what are the sorts of words that are going to fade into obscurity fairly quickly, and what are the sorts of words that are gonna stick around.
And so I wasn't gonna put a word like "lit" in my chapter titles, but that sort of formatting, the listicly formatting, I think has some staying power. And I think it is a fun challenge to be able to make your voice fun and playful and colloquial without relying on so many jokes and slang. And that's totally a skill that I had to acquire. But yeah, I think when you're reading the book, I don't think it sounds internet-y. I think it sounds like a friend talking about linguistics to you.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. You're taking high academic language and just bringing it way a little bit farther on the scale of...
Amanda Montell: Yeah, I mean, the voice is not silly by any means. There's reverence there, and there are certainly parts of the book that are a little bit lighter than others. There's a chapter called, "Fuck it: An ode to Cursing While Female" that I would say is more playful in voice than the chapter about catcalling and women's linguistic disparagement in that way. So, because the book is kind of a collection almost, I definitely expect people to read it in a linear way, from chapter zero to chapter eleven.
But if you wanted to, you could pop in from chapter to chapter and still understand what was going on. I definitely, as I was putting the chapters in order, thought about the journey that I was taking the reader on. So we want to start with a bang with the chapter on gender and insults. And a history of our languages favorite gendered slurs and what they say about our culture at large.
And that continues to be the chapter that I'm asked about the most. It's the chapter that the publishers glommed onto from the start. So I started there and then I went on a journey from going from that to a slightly more gender-theory heavy chapter, which is the chapter on "What is the Word Woman Mean Anyway?" And then the next one talks about gossip and how women talk when they're solely in the company of other women and that sort of thing.
And then we go really nerdy and talk about grammatical gender. So I was really trying to take the reader on a journey where each chapter was well balanced in terms of tone. Oh, I will say the only criticism I ever got in terms of diction and tone is... oh, I got a positive review in the New York Times, but the reviewer - and I looked her up and she's in her seventies - she did say that I overused the word dude as a synonym for man when I'm like, "And dudes do this, blah, blah, blah." And that's just was just a choice on my part. I happen to have an affinity for the word dudes, so sue me.
Sarah Enni: Well you say in there that dude is one of the most beloved words in the language right now.
Amanda Montell: It really is. It really is.
Sarah Enni: I say it all the time.
Amanda Montell: Yes. Actually, a big final paper that I wrote in my sex, gender, and language college course was on the word dude.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Amanda Montell: That's the fun of linguistics, is that you get to write a serious scholarly article on a word like dude.
Sarah Enni: So, okay, by talking about the chapters and what's in there, you've already given a lot of the pitch for the book, but I just want to give you a chance to do a formal pitch. What is Wordslut about?
Amanda Montell: Okay. So, Wordslut is this quick and dirty crash course in the academic topic of language and gender. So it's pop socio-linguistics. And every chapter tackles a different topic having to do with that general subject. So there's, as I mentioned, there's a chapter on the history of gendered slurs in English, and what they say about our culture at large. There's a chapter on common criticisms made of women's voices, of things like saying 'like" every other word, and vocal fry, and hedging, and asking too many questions.
And empirically what linguists have found are the very useful social purposes of those things. There's talk of criticisms of the voices of women in power, and the use of words like shrill and shrieking and things like that. There's a chapter on catcalling and other linguistic power moves that are made against women. And I tried my very hardest, and it was a number one priority of mine, to make the book as intersectional as possible.
So when I'm talking about "women" here, that's in quotes, I definitely try my very best to represent the wide spectrum of what that word means. There's an entire chapter on it. Ultimately, it's not a book about women and language, it's a book about gender and language. And obviously, I'm not just talking about cis-gender white women when I talk about the language of women.
Sadly there is a pitifully tiny canon of language, on studies that have been conducted on the language, of women of color. Largely because socio-linguistics is a relatively new field that's only been around since about the seventies.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I was shocked by that.
Amanda Montell: Yeah. So part of what I'm trying to do with this book is to inspire a new generation of people from different backgrounds and identities to pursue this field of study. And what's cool is that I had a reader slide into my DM's a couple of weeks ago saying like, "Oh my God, I studied linguistics in college, but I thought that speech pathology was the only thing that I could do with it. But I read your book and now I realize that this is what I want to do and I want to write about the intersection of language and Latinex women or Latino women."
And I literally DM'd this stranger my phone number, and I was like, "Call me right now. I'll tell you everything I know." And we had a forty-five minute conversation. I just visited a high school in D.C. doing an author visit, and one of the students in that class, who I did this presentation for, told me that she wanted to pursue linguistics and study the language of Black women.
And I was just like, "This is my goal." I just want to inspire a generation of foul-mouthed, feminist nerds, who whenever they're criticized for a way that they speak, or whenever someone uses a slur against them, they're able to fire back with a logical, provable, argument and cite hard facts about why that's not cool. That's the whole idea.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. I love that so much. I do want to talk really quick, and back you up just a little bit, to that initial conversation with the literary agent. I haven't gotten the opportunity to talk on this podcast too much about what goes into conceptualizing a nonfiction novel [says in an aside] a nonfiction novel...wow. Whatever. That's how much experience I have talking about this.
But what's it called? The proposal part. Do you mind just talking about what was the conversation like with your literary agent and how did you put one together?
Amanda Montell: Yeah, so we first had to settle on a concept, and it was what became Wordslut. And then basically, she sent me a template for a proposal. She sent me an example proposal from another one of her clients. And basically what that proposal included was an overview of the book, an author bio, marketing and publicity information. Who were your contacts. How can you get this book out there? A detailed chapter outline, comp titles to prove that there's a market for it. What else?
A full sample chapter. And I might be missing something, but that was the proposal. It was about forty pages. It took me six weeks just doing it in my free time, on the side from my day job. Faking a couple sick days to get it done. And basically, I was able to put it together actually fairly effortlessly, because I used my college syllabus from my sex gender and language class, kind of as a starting point to base the table of contents on.
Because I figured if this was the class that introduced me to this topic as a lay person who knew nothing about it at the age of twenty, and got me to totally fall in love with it, I figured that would probably work on other people too.
So obviously, it's changed enormously since the proposal, and the proposal wasn't based exactly on my syllabus. There was no section in my course specifically about cursing. So I obviously took my creative liberty and spun it. But that's where I started from and that really made it much easier. And then I went back and forth a few times with my agent. Got her feedback on, "Is this a comparable title that should be included? Maybe we should include this one instead. Should we maybe cut this chapter?"
She gave me a few light edits on my sample chapter, which the sample chapter is very close to what ended up in the book. It's the book about "like" and "vocal fry". It's called Women Didn't Ruin the English Language, They Like Invented It.
So that was the included sample chapter. And then my agent sent the proposal around to all of her editor contacts from all the big publishers that she thought it would be a good fit for. Then I flew to New York in secret. I hope my boss, my old boss, is not listening to this. But I faked a family emergency! It's so unethical.
But I didn't want her to know what I was doing because if nothing came of it, I didn't want her to know that I was focusing on something else and trying to get a new gig. Oh my God, it's so bad. But that's what I did. I was twenty-five [stutters] that's not an excuse. I don't know. That's what I did. I just, whatever. You gotta do what you gotta do.
So I flew to New York in secret and I went on eight different publisher meetings. It was a total whirlwind, because these meetings are long. And you're pitching the shit out of your book. And then the publishers who wanted to bid on it entered an auction that my agent facilitated via email. And I ultimately got to choose the winner and I eventually went with Harper Collins.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That's so great. I love that. The auction process is over, now you have to write it.
Amanda Montell: Now you have to write it [laughs weakly].
Sarah Enni: For you, I know everybody's a little bit different, but for you, what was that process like? Did you immediately start researching? I know you did a lot of interviews for this that are in the book too.
Amanda Montell: Yeah. So I was blessed. My old gender and language professor snail-mailed me a thumb drive, that I covet to this day, full of a thousand scholarly articles as a jumping off point.
Sarah Enni: Oh wow. That's amazing.
Amanda Montell: Yeah. So basically what the book is is essentially, I did a lot of my own interviews with linguists which was paramount, but what I'm essentially doing is taking a bunch of information that already exists and repackaging it, curating it. Picking what I think would be the most interesting. Picking what I think is the most relevant. I'm filtering it through my voice and presenting it that way.
So I basically just had to... and it was so hard. This was the hardest part. Just narrowing down what to include, knowing I wasn't gonna be able to include every study that I found fascinating. Knowing that I wasn't gonna be able to include every identity that deserves representation. Eventually, as the process went on it, it became clearer and clearer what belonged in the book and what didn't. There are full chapters that were cut.
But the whole beginning was pure imposter-syndrome. I know that a lot of people, the book that they finally published, is not the first book they ever write. A lot of people write a novel or two or ten, and shelve them. I'd never written a book before this. So I was [unintelligible]]. It was horrible. I hated the first four months of what I was writing. I thought it was garbage. I was writing really self-consciously because I was so nervous about not representing this field of study well. Just imposter-syndrome up the wazoo. But then it got easier and easier.
I will say that once my manuscript was done, I had to write it in about six months - more-or-less six months -because that was the time that I'd taken off from my full time job. My job let me take this six months maternity leave, basically, book leave. And I got such harshly worded feedback on my first draft. Because my editor, and I love her, she's an icon. She's a VP at Harbor Collins. I owe her the world.
Sarah Enni: Who is she?
Amanda Montell: Her name's Karen Rinaldi publisher of HarperWave, an imprint of HarperCollins. Shout out, "Love you!" She kicked me in the ass. She never works with first time authors, but she agreed to work with me and she wouldn't even edit the whole book. She was like, "Here's some high level notes. Here are some more line edits on the first two chapters. Figure your shit out and get back to me in four months." And she ripped me a new asshole. I think she thought I needed a slap in the face.
I'm like twenty-five-years-old. She was like, "Bitch, if you're gonna thrive in this industry, you need someone to kick you around a little bit".
Sarah Enni: I think that happens though. I've had people's editors give them a note that's like, "Oh, try this again." Basically.
Amanda Montell: Yeah. I mean it was the sort of thing where she would highlight a whole paragraph and then in the margin just write" lazy."
Sarah Enni: Ooh! Oof! You gottta read those notes one at a time and take walks.
Amanda Montell: I know, truly. I cried on the phone to my agent, it was a whole thing. But then you stand up, you dust yourself off. You remember how lucky you are that you're getting to write a book at all. You remember how grateful you are that the book didn't get canceled. And you just figure it out. And then it was all the more satisfying when I turned in the first draft, she read it, and she got back to me and she was like, "I fucking love it. She was like, "You nailed it."
And then it was off to the races. Then everything started. The cover design started, and the press started, and we were working on illustrations, cause I hired an illustrator to do cute little illustrations throughout the book. They're these fun, cheeky takes on the type of illustrations you might find in a textbook. And that was kind of the idea from the start. Rose Wong, shout out my illustrator love her.
So, yeah, but it was grueling. And now I'm writing my second book. And in a sense it's easier because I know not to make those little rookie mistakes. I know not to leave gaps in logic where you're expecting a reader to put two and two together, when really you need to connect it for them.
I know not to include the cheap jokes. My second book is also pop science. It's more like pop sociology, really. It's about the language of cults.
Sarah Enni: Oh, we are gonna get to that!
Amanda Montell: Yes. This is how Sarah and I even met, talking about cults. But now I know a lot of those early lessons.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, you are learning and honing your voice.
Amanda Montell: Totally. And, I'm just more familiar with the voice that you need to write a book. Because of the formality of the format. The second book is also harder though, in a sense, because unlike Wordslut, where most of the research already existed, I'm having to do it all myself, firsthand.
Sarah Enni: Oh, shit.
Amanda Montell: So this feels more like one of those Mary Roach books. Now I'm having to do way more interviews and come up with these arguments and this logic all by myself.
Sarah Enni: Okay, well hang on. We're gonna get to that, cause that's fascinating to me. So let's talk about adapting for TV. I'm just so curious, how did that come about?
Amanda Montell: My literary agent set me up with my TV agent, which I still have because I'm not a member of the WGA (Writer's Guid of America West). And that's a bunch of Hollywood drama that I don't even understand. But yeah, I never aspired to write for television. Which I say with a lot of smugness as an Angeleno. But when I was presented with the opportunity to come up with a TV show idea, I was like, "Sure, I'll take a crack at that."
So then, obviously, Wordslut is a nonfiction book. It doesn't naturally lend itself well to a narrative story idea. But I did come up with one, and it's a story about a young language genius who's awkward, and kind of an asshole, but also brilliant and sexy and all this stuff. And she comes from a very interesting background. And basically, when you first meet her, she's kind of bumbling and rudderless and doesn't know where her life is going. She's kind of the black sheep of her family. She's also adopted, and mixed race, and this genius language girl. So her whole life she's always been asked, "What are you?" For multiple reasons.
And then in the pilot episode, she scores the career break of a lifetime as I'm an undercover reporter. So for the first time in her life, her ambiguous appearance and her language genius are finally useful. And, speaking of lightly procedural, throughout the show she goes on these different assignments where she's making good use of her ability to adapt so well linguistically in different communities. And through those different assignments she ends up unlocking these different parts of herself that she never knew before.
She is one of these people who knows everything under the sun about this one nerdy topic, in her case language, but nothing of her own sexuality, spirituality, values, all of those things. She's like twenty-five. And so the show is kind of about that journey. We've all seen shows about geniuses like, House, Psych, The Mentalist, Mr. Robot. and Dexter.
But we've never seen a female genius. And we've never seen a language genius. So she's a very unique character and at this point, I'm very attached to her. I've been writing the pilot and I'm on draft two and I'm working with FX, that's who I signed the deal with. And I have the most unbelievable showrunner, supervisor, director, Pamela Adlon, who has a show on FX called Better Things, which is sensational.
And I'm just very lucky. It all fell into place. Again, it was the sort of thing where the one TV idea that I had, happened to resonate. And writing for TV is so much... the process just feels like a cakewalk compared to writing a nonfiction book. First of all, there are only one-hundred-and-fifty words or something a page, and you just get to make them up! I mean, I guess that's how fiction works. You just get to make it up out of thin air.
When you're writing nonfiction, it's so much research. It all has to make rock solid sense. And there's just a lot more freedom when you're writing dialogue. And it's so much fun. I definitely want to keep doing it. I really hope the show gets made.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. I love that. I can't resist the parallel of pitching these eight publishing houses, and then going into these Hollywood studios.
Amanda Montell: It was so much more intimidating pitching to publishers. Because, I don't know what it is, but book people just seem so smart.
Sarah Enni: The nonfiction world too. It just feels like a bunch of brains.
Amanda Montell: Yeah. Hollywood people, even if they're phony as hell, they just blow... they just flatter you. And they will look at me like I was just an adorable little alien nerd, you know? In book world, they're like, "Who are you?" And in Hollywood world they're like, "Oh, she wrote a book?"
But book world is just the world that I aspired to be in. And so there's something more enchanting about it to me. Hollywood is just the cherry on top. It's just like, "What? Why am I sitting here talking to this literal Oscar nominated movie star about this little book that I wrote. That is absurd." It was just absurd. It was absurd.
Sarah Enni: I love it. Let's talk about your next book. I am so obsessed with this.
Amanda Montell: So the next book is called Mind Fuck: The Secret Language of Cults (Spoiler: You're Already Using It). It's a mind fu... [splutters]. No, it's a mouthful, not a mind fuck. The title is very clear. It's again, that sort of click-bait structure, the spoiler thing. But again, I think that sort of thing's gonna stick.
Sarah Enni: It's fun.
Amanda Montell: The idea of a spoiler is decades old. I think that has some staying power. So basically, the elevator pitch is that it's about how cults from Scientology to Soul Cycle use language to "quote-unquote" brainwash us. And through my research I've learned that brainwash is a controversial and pseudo-scientific concept. Stay tuned. But yeah, it's really cool. I'm just exploring the wide spectrum of cults, or groups that could be considered cults, or groups that you would never consider a cult but eerily have a lot in common with groups you would consider cults.
Obviously, diving deep into what that word even means. And then specifically talking about how cult leaders and cult followers use language to create a belief system, create a reality, manipulate people, et cetera. So create that "us versus them" mentality, dissuade independent thinking. And again, these are groups from the most canonic Jonestownian cults, to the most seemingly innocuous groups that might not be so innocuous after all.
Sarah Enni: So this, first of all, felt like the most Los Angeles second thing you could ever do. But I want to hear what made this the next idea for you. We're kind of swimming in cult stuff out here, in LA at least.
Amanda Montell: Yes, we are. I mean, I grew up with stories of cults because my dad was forced into one, against his will, for his high school years.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Okay... what? You have to tell me this story.
Amanda Montell: For three years, while my dad was in high school, his dad moved him, and my dad's stepmom, and my dad's two little step, or half sisters - who were four and six, or maybe even younger - into this cult in the Bay Area called Synanon. You can Google it. S. Y. N. A. N. O. N. And I'm interviewing people who are a member of that cult. It's sort of this secular "utopian", quote-unquote, really creepy cult that started as a rehabilitation facility for people with drug addictions. Then referred to as junkies in the seventies.
And evolved to include, quote unquote, "lifestylers." People who just wanted to live there because it was the seventies and cults were all the rage. It had these kind of socialist undertones, the group. And my dad lived there. And knew, off the bat, cause he was fourteen when he got there like, "Oh my God, this is a cult." And his threshold for cult rhetoric is very low, as is mine. Which is probably why I don't have any friends. No, I'm just kidding [laughs].
But I really do bristle at "group think". It really is why I can't have an office job. Because terminology like "learnings", and "pivot" and blah, blah, fuckity blah. It just makes my skin crawl. So I was super interested in that from a young age. And the idea of marrying it with language came about when I was chatting with my best friend, who had just gotten sober and started going to AA, which has such a specific lexicon. And she was talking to me about it. And it was like she was speaking another language.
And I was always super fascinated by the language of evangelical Christianity. They have so many weird word redefinitions and ways of phrasing things, that are so distinctly evangelical. Like when someone says, "This was on my heart," something was on their heart instead of on their mind, that's very evangelical. And when someone says that they were spending time "in the word," they were reading the Bible. And there's a whole contingent of evangelical YouTubers that I am anthropologically fascinated by because of the way they talk. And super fascinated in the idea of speaking in tongues, glossolalia all of that.
So I was like, "I have to write a book about this." And it was those two things working at the same time from fundamentalist Christianity and speaking in tongues to the language of office culture. I was like, "These two things have something in common and I need to figure out what that is."
Sarah Enni: This is like... it's gonna be hard for me to stay on task here. But did you just listen to The Daily's episode about WeWork?
Amanda Montell: No.
Sarah Enni: Okay. What it talked about was the WeWork IPO writeup. That their pitch for IPO had the word community in it no fewer than one-hundred-and-fifty times.
Amanda Montell: Oh wow.
Sarah Enni: And that was, honestly first listen to the episode, cause it's like a thirty minute refresher on all that bullshit. But then I think you would probably really want to read a bunch of that stuff.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, totally.
Sarah Enni: He got people to invest four billion dollars in him, based on nothing but just being a charismatic guy.
Amanda Montell: Oh my god, here's the thing, is that Lindy West spoke, we were just talking about Lindy West. Lindy West's book talks about how, quote unquote, "charisma"... so many men who have so much power, they're not charismatic! (Lindy West’s The Witches are Coming discusses how utterly unconvincing these cult leader men can be).
Sarah Enni: They're so not!
Amanda Montell: They don't have any charisma.
Sarah Enni: What is that? It's like, I don't how deep did you get into Theranos stuff?
Amanda Montell: Oh yeah.
Sarah Enni: And it's like watching her, first of all hearing all these old white men be like, "I don't know. There was just something about Elizabeth Holmes." And I'm like, "Yeah, she had tits."( Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is another fascination of mine - I recommend listening to The Dropout podcast series about her, and Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley by John Carreyrou is amazing)
Amanda Montell: She's hot.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, "She's one of the only young women who you ever come across, now that you're this old lecherous VC." Of course!
Amanda Montell: So I'm having trouble because I'm still structuring my book, and maybe I can get your thoughts on this. But again, it's so hard to narrow down what categories of cults to include because there are so many. And there are just so many directions you can take it in.
So basically, my first chapter that I'm writing, I wrote my chapter zero, I'm doing that whole thing again, which is the setup chapter. But the first chapter that I'm writing right now, which is about suicide cults, is already forty pages. So I'm just like, "I don't know what to do." And that's just suicide cults. And then there's religious cults, utopian communes.
There's so much I don't even know where to... again, it could be like fifty books. And I was gonna have a chapter on academia and university clubs, but now I'm thinking maybe I should swap that out for cult-y corporations cause that seems more interesting. I don't know. What do you think?
Sarah Enni: Well, here's my question, and this is why I'm both so allured to, If that's a word, to nonfiction and also just completely like, "No, I'd be so overwhelmed."
Amanda Montell: It's so overwhelming.
Sarah Enni: I could see the stratification being types of cults. I could also see it being like, "What has wellness meant?
Amanda Montell: Oh, there is a chapter on wellness.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And what what's its application been in all these different...?
Amanda Montell: Oh, I mean, you could write literally an entire book about any number of these topics. I'm just gonna be galloping through it. But there's hands-down going to be a chapter on wellness and exercise cults.
Sarah Enni: Mm-hmm. Yeah, cause that's been the one that's been the most [pauses] there was that podcast series, 30 for 30, on Bikram Yoga. He's obviously a cult leader. But just how that's how it can happen now in our modern world, more than in other ways in the past. Now, what is CrossFit if not...? You know?
Amanda Montell: Yes, exactly. The beginning of my book makes a parallel between these two stories that have an eerie amount in common. One was a Kundalini yoga cult, that was a legitimate cult where everybody wore white, and blah blah blah. And was sucked dry of their house and home and everyone they ever knew. And then the other was CrossFit. And it's like, "What do these two things have in common?" Almost everything! [Both laugh] Except for the consequences, and I go into that in depth.
But yeah, as this book is taking shape, I'm so overwhelmed. Cause the book could six million pages long.
Sarah Enni: So this leads me to my question about your research. I'm fascinated by this. The fact that you're needing to head out on your own and create a lot of this data for yourself, that's overwhelming. How are you approaching this?
Amanda Montell: Yes. Oh definitely. Well I hired a virtual assistant. I hired an assistant who's helping me a little bit with transcriptions, and email reach-outs, and various research. Basically I start with just finding articles from reputed secondary sources and reading about different cults in the New YorkTimes, or whatever. And academic articles if I come across them. But the crazy thing is that no one writes about the language of cults.
And so you basically just have to watch documentaries, YouTube, podcasts, read articles, and conduct your own interviews with scholars of the cults that you're focusing on. And former members of the cults that you're focusing on. I'm conducting probably ten interviews for per chapter. And then, basically, just zeroing in on the parts of the secondary sources that specifically address language. And then asking your primary sources, your interviewees, about the language in particular, and build your argument from there.
Sarah Enni: That is bringing to mind, is it qualitative research? Is that how we refer to this kind of thing?
Amanda Montell: Yeah, yeah, that's totally what I'm doing. I'm taking a bunch of different, seemingly disparate pieces of information or sources or whatever, and I'm extracting what's useful for my argument. Which is that language is low key, and nobody ever talks about this. The primary thing that cult leaders of different levels use to build our egality and control us.
Sarah Enni: There was also this... I was just reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks. A throwback, '85, but there was a fascinating article in there. One of his case studies was about two autistic patients who watched, I believe it was Reagan at that time, the president give a speech. And one of them was like, "Oh, he's lying."
I'll send you the thing. I'll find it, and isolate it, and send it to you. But he was saying, since we are empathetic, we're using all these parts of our brains that his patients didn't have access to. They were not moved by it, and they were not misled by it. And they were able to see right through it. I'll find it and send it to you. It's really an eye-opener to talk about.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, that's connecting to a lot of emotionally loaded language and things like that. Yeah [pauses] fascinating. I have to make a note in my phone because I think that... I'm so motivated when I'm writing by what I think the audience will be interested in, because I am my own audience, and have a lot in common with my audience. And so writing for me and writing for my audience is very similar. But I don't want to just write according to the first idea that I had. Or what I, and only I, think is interesting. Some people really do write for themselves and it ends up amazing.
But I really want feedback. Almost like I'm making a consumer product for public consumption. And if it's not useful to you, then I need to go back to the shop and figure it out. I think of it as less like an art, and more like a craft. I'm like whittling a cabinet. And if this feature of the cabinet is not useful to you, then I don't want to include it. And I know that's not how everybody writes, but I talk a lot about this book to people because I want to see what they resonate with.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting to consider, also the utility of the book. You're talking about Wordslut being a book, like a text, that you imagine people equipping themselves to then navigate the rest of their lives in a more... that you're giving them ways to confidently move forward. To me, it feels like the most insidious thing about cult language is how everywhere it is. To me, I think a lot more people could benefit from being... to know what to look for.
Amanda Montell: Yes, definitely. I know I mentioned brainwashing and how that's a controversial topic. And really, spoiler, there really is no such thing as brainwashing. You don't fork your brain over to someone. You believe and subscribe to what you want to believe and subscribe to. But if all of a sudden you hear yourself using an emotionally loaded vocabulary, and are unable to talk to anyone who doesn't also know it. That's a clue that maybe that job that you're at, that puts the "cult" in company culture, or whatever spiritual wellness guru that you're seeing, maybe has something sinister underneath of it.
Sarah Enni: And it's isolating you. We talked about this a little bit, but the "cult" that Kirsten Hubbard and I created for Burning Man... I think what we came down on was this concept of eliminating the individual. That's the kind of language that we got really fascinated by. Like, "Forget all your problems. We're your family now. We're all you need." That kind of stuff, which was just so... you understand where that craving comes from. Like, "Put down all your individual angst and just give up your name."
Amanda Montell: Totally! And also, thinking is hard.
Sarah Enni: Thinking is really hard.
Amanda Montell: Making decisions is hard. If someone is gonna come to you and be like, "Don't think. Don't make decisions. Trust me." And they seem so trustworthy. And they're telling you everything you want to hear. And they're telling you a story that feels really familiar to you. You're like, "Yes." And you give it all up.
And yeah, I mean I can easily see why someone would be lured into something like that. And I can also easily see why someone would stay. It's like why do you stay in a bad relationship? Why do you stay at a shitty job? It's all the same things.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah [sighs], so I'm not helping you.
Amanda Montell: No, no. I wrote something down that I think I'm gonna go back to later.
Sarah Enni: And I love that this is part... I think this is fascinating. It's when people in the editing process of a movie, they do the screenings, and they get data from their potential audience and they make changes accordingly. So I'd love to hear that it's pop-socio, or a socio-linguistics.
Amanda Montell: This one isn't really socio-linguistics it's more sociology. The language part of it is very top level. We're not going into the nerdy, nitty-gritty of it really. It's really a book about influence, and human behavior.
Sarah Enni: Ugh! I want you to go to Silicon Valley and just...
Amanda Montell: I know! Well, now I really think I'm gonna replace that... because the last chapter in the book I'm planning on bringing it home and being like, "Cults are everywhere." And I can kind of talk much more briefly about a bunch of different things instead of focusing a whole chapter on a certain category of cult. But I think I should do something on "culty-y" corporations like WeWork and Theranos and stuff.
Sarah Enni: Dude, they're everywhere. The fact that Google has to say, "Don't be evil." [Laughs] It's like, "What are we...? How can you get more Orwellian?"
Amanda Montell: I know. My brother works at Google. I can interview him.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! Oh my gosh. So fascinating. I love this. Are you working with the same editor?
Amanda Montell: Yes, I'm working with the whole same team, which makes it nice.
Sarah Enni: And since you do have all of these additional challenges associated with it, are they helping you at every step? Are you checking in?
Amanda Montell: No. I'm literally like, "I'll talk to you next year."
Sarah Enni: That's so funny.
Amanda Montell: But I like working like that. I like figuring it out myself.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well I am so excited about it. Um, okay, you just must come back when this book comes out. I will be so excited to read it and talk about it.
Amanda Montell: You know it! 2021. Summer of 2021.
Sarah Enni: Ugh! I can't wait. God willing, it'll be here before we know it and we'll have a whole different environment. And it'll be great.
Amanda Montell: Oh my god, scary.
Sarah Enni: But I do like to wrap up with advice and since you are one of the first nonfiction writers that I've had on the podcast, I just love to hear about approaching that kind of writing. Especially when you are pulling from a lot of dry, science-based reporting, and then trying to turn it into something.
Amanda Montell: I would say, as a nonfiction writer, trust what interests you. Don't try too hard to tell too many stories at once. You're never gonna be able to communicate every angle of a story. You gotta kind of, just like anything in writing, kill your darlings. Focus on what you think is interesting. Approach it from as many angles as it makes sense to, but don't be afraid that you're not gonna be able to represent it perfectly, because you never will.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's fascinating. It's like learning to see your work as a part of, lexicon is not the right word, but a body of work.
Amanda Montell: Yes. Yes cause you want so badly to tell the whole entire story yourself. I'm advising myself in this moment. I need to remember this. You want to tell the entire story but you can't. Especially with something like the book that I'm writing right now, where it's really the first of it's kind. And that was the case with Wordslut too. I want to tell the whole entire story but you can't.
So you just kind of have to trust that you're writing the book, you're the best filter, the best curator, of the information. And just kill your darlings, man. It's hard.
Sarah Enni: Well that's great advice for all kinds of writers honestly. This has been so fun Amanda. Thank you for coming over and hanging.
Amanda Montell: Thank you for having me.
Sarah Enni: See you again soon.
Amanda Montell: Thank you for this sparkling water. I've been trying not to burp into your microphone.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Listen, we're both in the same boat.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Amanda. Follow her on Instagram @Amanda_Montell and follow me on both Twitter and Instagram @SarahEnni and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). For links to everything that was discussed in this episode, please check out the show notes which are available @firstdraftpod.com. And I know from the recent listener survey, that a lot of you like to go buy a book, or watch a TV show, after you hear it mentioned on the podcast. And I love that.
I just want to let you know that if you do go shopping online for those books or the TV shows or movies or whatever, you can go to the FirstDraftPod.com website and if you click the link on those things, it'll swing you right through to Amazon. And then if you purchase something through that link, part of the proceeds goes back to First Draft Pod and that's just a little thing that can help keep the podcast free. So I would really appreciate it. No pressure to buy from Amazon, obviously. I get that that's an issue. But if you're gonna be shopping there anyway, that's a little way to benefit the show.
If you have any writing or creativity questions that you would like me and a future guest to answer in an upcoming episode, please leave those questions at a voicemail box I set up for the show at 818-533-1998. I hope you caught the recent mailbag episode with me and Zan Romanov where we did just that. We answer listener questions. It was so fun and I really want to keep doing that and keep connecting with you, amazing listeners. So once again, leave those questions. I want to hear all of them. That number is 818-533-1998.
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Hayley Hershman produced this episode. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud, and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And, as ever, thanks to you pop-science, socio-linguistic wunderkinds for listening.
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