First Draft Episode #72: Julie Buxbaum
Pretend to be an adult with Julie Buxbaum,New York Times best-selling author of TELL ME THREE THINGS,THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, and AFTER YOU, who chats with me about gathering at the AMPM market, creating myths about yourself, and writing parent hate mail (to your own parents).
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni, today I am talking to Julie Buxbaum, New York Time’s Bestselling Author of Tell Me Three Things as well as Adult Novels The Opposite of Love and After You. . [Birds chirping in the background] Julie is a super smarty-pants lawyer who has lived all over the world and seen a thing or two. But she and her husband found the exact three blocks in Los Angeles that they felt was more home than anywhere. Knowing that, I felt so privileged to get to visit Julie at her adorable house, have coffee, and talk about how writing for kids might be one of the bravest things she’s ever done. So bust out the coffee cake and a hand painted mug and enjoy the conversation.
Sarah Enni: Alright, are you ready?
Julie Buxbaum: I’m ready!
Sarah Enni: Okay, so how are you doing?
Julie Buxbaum: I’m doing well, thank you for having me.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh, thanks for having me over at your house, this is so nice.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s my pleasure and I love that this is a podcast so you can’t see that it’s messy.
Sarah Enni: Not at all, and the listeners should know that I am being served delicious coffee and there is an amazing candle and flowers, this is awesome. So, I like to start these interviews with going way back to the beginning which is where were you born and raised?
Julie Buxbaum: I was born in a hospital in New York City and I was raised in a little town called New City, New York.
Sarah Enni: Were you there the whole time, all through high school?
Julie Buxbaum: I moved there when I was probably about four, maybe three, from Teaneck, New Jersey and then, yes, I was there all through high school. So my whole childhood in New City, New York, this little town that I could not wait to get out of even though it’s a lovely place.
Sarah Enni: I was going to say it sounds like when places are voted the safest place it feels like family and backyards and then like really, really wanting to get the heck out of dodge.
Julie Buxbaum: You know it’s funny, it was family and it was backyards but it’s not at all charming.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Julie Buxbaum: It’s not pretty, well, it’s pretty – I mean there are trees, but it’s not…it doesn’t have a charming downtown area that you’d want to walk to. It’s a little strip-mall-y. I feel that a downtown makes all the difference, you know, a cute little coffee shop that you can hang out at with your friends. We did not have that. Well I am kind of old, so maybe they have one now, but back then, well they didn’t even have a Starbuck’s, well, Starbuck’s didn’t exist, but we didn’t have anything that sort of felt like a gathering place of any sort like a pizza joint, or frozen yogurt, that was big.
Sarah Enni: I was going to say in my high school my friends and I would meet at the Safeway parking lot.
Julie Buxbaum: You want to hear something funny? So, we used to go to this place called AMPUM,
Sarah Enni: AMPUM?
Julie Buxbaum: AM/PM Market.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s the AM/PM Market that’s attached to a gas station and everyone called it The AMPUM. And I would never in high school, just be like, I can’t, I can’t call it The AMPUM. I’m above calling it The AMPUM and my friends were like, “Julie, just get over yourself” that’s what we would do, we would go to AMPUM.
And that’s it, accept where you live and it’s the AMPUM. And in my, I can’t remember if it was in TELL ME THREE THINGS, or the next, I think it was TELL ME THREE THINGS… I was going to have them gather at a 7-11 parking lot and my editor was like, “People don’t really do that! That’s like that seems a little bit not right for this crowd,” and I was like, “Alright, but I went to The AMPUM”!
Sarah Enni: I know kids that hang out in parking lots!
Julie Buxbaum: Where are you supposed to go?
Sarah Enni: Look it, you can’t…there’s no place to go, and in San Jose we had an 11 PM curfew, or something, and there were a lot of restrictions. You are one of several interviews I’ve done lately where people do not immediately go into writing. So, I find this question even more interesting which is how was reading and writing a part of your young life?
Julie Buxbaum: So I have always been a reader, since I was really little. I mean, I spent my entire childhood in a corner with a book. I was super shy and all I wanted to do was read. It was a huge part of my identity forever. I did not identify as a writer though until I was like 29 which is weird, I feel like most people who are writers were [unintelligible] from five on. I always had journals and I always used to take notes and I used to write a lot in my head. So I remember very clearly in high school working on my first sentences in the shower and reworking them and reworking them until they were perfect in my head. Never wrote them down.
Sarah Enni: For sentences for fiction?
Julie Buxbaum: Fiction, sometimes personal essays, but a lot of fiction in my head, but just the first sentence or the first paragraph in my head but never written down which is super weird.
Sarah Enni: That’s so interesting! Almost like meditation a little bit.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, it was something that I really enjoyed doing, which was getting it exactly right and I also did a lot of rewriting conversations in my head. So I’d have a conversation with somebody where I didn’t say the clever thing and I’d go back in my head and say the exact zinger. I was big on zingers in my shower! But I didn’t write much on paper and I went to a school which actually had a really great writing program where a lot of the kids got published in like newspapers and magazines and stuff; short stories for teens. But I was always too scared to submit I never really did it.
And then I went to college and I studied political science, philosophy and economics and I went to law school but while I was in college my best friend was an English Major and I read a lot of the books on her syllabus.
Sarah Enni: Which is hilarious!
Julie Buxbaum: Which is hilarious, I took one English course the entire time and it was required. I took a writing course, required, and I did one English class because I had it as a fifth level requirement but I didn’t take the classes and I don’t know why. I mean, I love to read. I think I was scared. Looking back, there must have been some sort of subconscious fear of really embracing what I loved. But I didn’t.
Sarah Enni: I find it really, interesting because I did the same thing. I did, I liked reading, writing, poetry, all that stuff, but it was never something I thought about as a - I think for me, I was like “Get a Real Job”. So then I studied journalism which was like good enough. I was still writing but I was feeling like the urge to be practical. It sounds like you were really focused on getting a vocation.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, I am still super practical which is a huge part of who I am; it’s this sort of inherent practicality. So, law school seemed like the perfect place and I really, really enjoyed the study of law. My years in law school were amazing. I’m a big nerd and so it was really fun to study some of the greatest legal minds in our country. It was really an amazing experience. The practice of law though was really, really, really boring and miserable but I do remember when I was a lawyer being miserable and thinking to myself that if I had a calling, if I was good at something, that I would just do it. That I would be brave enough to do it but I don’t know what that is.
Like, if I was a musician and I played the piano, then I would go and be a pianist - I would just do it. I have the hutzpah, but there was nothing that I really wanted to do which was a lie to myself because there was something I wanted to do but for whatever reason, I just couldn’t self-identify and it took me a really long time. I was a lawyer for four or five years, maybe four years – totally miserable and I was like, “You know what I really want to do? I just want to write a book.” But, I never said I wanted to be a writer.
I still, even when I quit to write my first book, I never said I’m doing this to become a writer. I said I’m going to write this first book because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, that sort of secret thing but it was a fantasy I never really thought I would end up as a writer. I thought I’d do it and then I’d go back and figure out what kind of lawyer I wanted to be. I started researching all these different other kinds of law thinking that I’m going to write this book but then pivot back. And then about two weeks into writing I was like, “Oh, this is how I should spend my …this is it! This is how it’s supposed to feel when you’re doing what you want to do!” and I loved it. And then the Universal Line and the Magical Way allowed me to actually do it.
Sarah Enni: That’s crazy! Okay, before we jump too far ahead I kind of want to hit a few points in between there. You were kind of writing in your mind and journal writing, but then going to college and deciding what to study, I mean?
Julie Buxbaum: I studied - I ended up doing, PPE, Philosophy, Political Science and Economics which is one major but three different things. Partially because you’d have to really decide if you have to cover more ground which I liked, I’m very indecisive and it seemed the obvious choice was to pick three things
Sarah Enni: Wait, where were you going to school?
Julie Buxbaum: I was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia which is an awesome city and PENN was great, I loved it. So I hated economics and I think that’s one of the reasons why I chose to study it because I found it really hard.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Julie Buxbaum: It wasn’t a natural fit, I was like, this is hard then let me do this, like, I’m going to conquer it. It was this thing that I was afraid of and felt that since I was afraid of it and knocked it out, it would be a good idea to major in it. Which, looking back makes no sense. I never said this was going to make sense Sarah!
Sarah Enni: No but this is so interesting to me because you’re scared of Economics, not a great fit, but I feel like I think what you are saying is probably true that you’re also scared of being a writer but you were like (Gasp) it’s almost like the writing was so, clearly, so special.
Julie Buxbaum: I think with writing I was so scared to be bad at it. Economics I knew I was bad at it and I was totally fine with it and I wanted to just be good at it. I wanted to be, like, well I can still get an A even though I suck at it. I wanted to prove something to myself. Writing, though, if I was bad at it, that would have been heartbreaking to me.
And I think that’s why I didn’t do it. I didn’t want the universe to tell me that I wasn’t good. I’m sort of a perfectionist when it comes to my work and stuff, so that would have been really hard for me at the time. Now I can take criticism but back then I didn’t have the self-esteem to know that even if someone tells you this isn’t good doesn’t mean you’re not a writer.
Sarah Enni: Well, the inevitable thing about writing, unlike ECON, is that in writing someone is going to tell you if you’re bad at it. That’s the nature of it.
Julie Buxbaum: It has to happen. You can’t please everyone all the time and you actually don’t want to but as a college student where you’re kind of putting your work out in the world for the first time it’s really terrifying. And, I don’t know how I ended up in law school. I always had talked about being a lawyer. It’s sort of like how you know you get these “myths” about yourself that get created very early. There is a tile at my elementary school in sixth grade, we did these tiles that we made, and they were on the walls and mine is a picture of me in a justice… oh, what’s it called? The justice gown – the Robe-The Judicial Robe.
Sarah Enni: I like the Justice Gown!
Julie Buxbaum: The Justice Gown! And I’m holding a little gavel and we were supposed to paint what you wanted to be when you grew up. And I really wanted to be the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. That was sort of my goal.
Sarah Enni: Wow
Julie Buxbaum: That was in like, sixth grade. That was the dream.
Sarah Enni: Like why? How did that even come about?
Julie Buxbaum: I remember in the 90’s the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Sarah Enni: Um-hum, you remember watching them?
Julie Buxbaum: I remember hearing them on the radio. I don’t know how old I was, I should look it up, and I remember being horrified that he was going to be put on the Supreme Court.
Sarah Enni: As every child should.
Julie Buxbaum: As every child should be. That didn’t turn out so well, so ya, I was right. I wanted to be a justice on the Supreme Court and I knew there had never been a Chief female Justice so I was like, that’s what I can do.
Sarah Enni: Wow
Julie Buxbaum: And that’s what I wanted to do.
Sarah Enni: That’s super interesting
Julie Buxbaum: It’s super dorky
Sarah Enni: It’s kind of dorky; I’m not going to lie about it. I love how you said that, the “Myths” that get created about yourself because that is, I think it’s true for everybody and it’s really, I find, one of the most compelling things about talking to people about their pasts and how they come to things is that we’re really just born these little things that grow and develop naturally. You are a mom, you have kids, and you know that they are born, and the things they are in to and it’s like…why?
Julie Buxbaum: There are also things that people tell you and they stick. And then you will be them and follow them. Like I probably argued a lot when I was a kid and my parents were like, “You should be a lawyer!” And I was like, “DING, DING, DING , DING, DING.” And then I decided in sixth grade I’m going to be a lawyer and I’m a rule follower and it was a direct, easy path and I love when you can succeed by following A to B to C to D and that is the opposite of the writing world.
But in the legal world, it’s incredibly lock-step. You go to law school and then you get your first job and then your first year and second year, and third year and ultimately you make partner. It’s such a direct path especially if you go into the corporate sector, that is comforting to me, I guess. Though I did go to law school hoping to get into public interest law and came out a corporate lawyer, which is a whole other story. Talk about practicality.
But yes, I do think there are these myths. You hear something once, and for whatever reason it sticks and it just builds, it’s like a snowball effect, it just builds and builds and builds. Then you take the LSAT and I did well on the LSAT and then I got into a great law school that I couldn’t say “No” to and it was like, “Oh, I guess I am going to be a lawyer now”, and away you go and away I went…and I became a lawyer.
Sarah Enni: Okay, I do want to talk about that, because you went to Harvard Law School, which is amazing.
Julie Buxbaum: You know what, it was an amazing place. It really was a great, great experience.
Sarah Enni: It makes me happy to hear that because I feel that the school part of it would be my favorite part too. So what kind of law or, what kinds of classes were fascinating to you? What did you love to study?
Julie Buxbaum: I loved it all. I really, really loved it, in a way that I did not anticipate loving it. It was so hard, but in a good way. It was so intellectually stimulating and challenging and I felt so in over my head. And I think everyone starts Harvard that first day thinking they don’t deserve to be there and then as time goes on, you are like, “Oh, but, I’m okay, I’m staying afloat.” There’s a wonderful feeling attached to that. So I loved it, I absolutely loved it.
My favorite class was constitutional law. I took it with Tribe who is just a giant in the legal world and he is brilliant and wonderful and is as amazing as you would imagine. So that was great. There is one thing I really did enjoy about being a lawyer is coming up with the arguments and trying to see it from a different perspective and sort of unlocking when two people are fighting.
Sarah Enni: That is a very empathetic way of thinking about an argument
Julie Buxbaum: It was fun to come up with interesting ways to tackle a legal issue. That was sort of fun. But, in reality, you had to match the law to your argument, right? So even if you came up with this amazing argument, if there wasn’t a law to support you then, you were shit out of luck.
Sarah Enni: You were sunk.
Julie Buxbaum: So, it was such a small portion of what I did. Mostly what I did was procedural crap to block someone from going forward; everything was stalling which was really boring and annoying and going through boxes and boxes of documents and reading hundreds and hundreds of really boring documents, and I didn’t stay long enough to get far enough in my career for it to get interesting.
Sarah Enni: The other thing that strikes me about how you’re talking about law school experience it seems like maybe as a young adult you were really looking to, I don’t want to call it self-esteem, but building up the sense that you could achieve something or reassuring yourself that you had the capacity to do these scary big things.
Julie Buxbaum: I still have that problem. I am definitely someone who needs outside validation to feel good about what I am doing which is really hard when you’re a writer. It’s kind of like in free fall. There aren’t that many times when people pat you on the back and say you’re doing a good job.
Sarah Enni: Sometimes even editors don’t say that when they buy your book!
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, it’s very rare where you really get a moment of pure victory and when you’re in the legal world or when you’re in law school where just even getting in was a victory there’s constant validation; you’re grades or whatever it is and so yes, I am someone that definitely seeks that. I’m trying so hard to outgrow it; I really am because it’s not a healthy way to live. It should come from within not from without. But yes, you nailed me on the head very quickly.
Sarah Enni: It’s hard because I relate to it. Gold stars are my favorite thing but it’s just, knowing that about your self doesn’t mean that that impulse stops, so it’s hard.
Julie Buxbaum: And we don’t need permission from other people to do things we want to do. And yet I do. I sometimes feel like I seek permission to even continue having this career even though I’ve had this career for ten years. I still have these moments of like should I keep doing this, is this the right choice for me because no one is saying, there’s not a constant gold star and that’s really hard.
Sarah Enni: That’s a very nebulous state so that’s difficult to be in all the time. So, you leave school and I can imagine that would be really upsetting to leave an environment that you ended up liking so much more than you even thought you would and then go into that profession and then be really disappointed by it.
Julie Buxbaum: I set myself up. I’ll be honest. I loved law school but then I went and did something that I hadn’t intended- I went and took a job for money. I went straight into the corporate world when I had said from day one that I wanted to be a public interest lawyer. And I was going to follow my heart and be passionate and then they dangled a big salary in front of me and I took it. So I completely and totally set myself up.
I could have had a completely different life and I may have been really happy, actually, had I gone into public interest , I may never have even become a writer had I gone an been a public interest lawyer and felt fulfilled by the work I was doing. Because my biggest problem being a corporate lawyer was I felt that not only was I not making the world a better place, and in some cases making the world a worst place. There was nothing satisfying about it. I felt completely and totally unfulfilled. I was bored out of my mind and I didn’t feel like I was exercising any important skills. I wasn’t bettering myself, I wasn’t bettering the world, and it was just a wash.
Sarah Enni: Everyone goes through this in their twenties where like reality is settling in and it’s very difficult for anyone regardless of career or circumstance but that’s a really tough one to be so intellectually stimulated and excited and then a ninety degree turn to like, this is not right and a panic, like what do you do when you’re just not happy?
Julie Buxbaum: I’m eternally fascinated by the question of like you’re adult expectations hitting up against reality in our adult life, because we all have these fantasies of what it means to be an adult. Some good and some bad and then when you get there, you’ve arrived and it’s nothing like you anticipated- how do you reconcile that? How do you do all of the things that seem terrifying and sort of not so pleasant because you have to? You have to pay your bills and pay the rent and live a stable existence. Well, I guess you don’t have to, but I was brought up to believe that’s what I wanted. So there is something really disconcerting when you find out that there is a price to be paid for all of that.
Sarah Enni: I would love for you to talk about just how you dealt with that and how your writing came out of that?
Julie Buxbaum: My first book is actually a lot about that, it’s a coming of age story about a girl who is in her late twenties who is a lawyer and is miserable. I mean, it’s about more than that, but underneath it all she’s at a law firm very much like the one I was at and she’s very unhappy. So, I sort of wrote my way out of it. So I was miserable as a lawyer and I really thought about what it is I want to do and I really wanted to write a book so it turns out the one thing I want to do before I die is write one book.
Sarah Enni: So you did have that in your head?
Julie Buxbaum: I guess I did. When I told everyone I was quitting to write a book, most people, after saying, “You are out of your fucking mind!” Said, “Well, you always talked about it, so, I guess it makes sense.” And then I was like, “Really?” I didn’t know I had always talked about it, but I guess I had.
Sarah Enni: The myths that you don’t know you’re creating about yourself.
Julie Buxbaum: Exactly! I was really lucky in a sense that it was in a time of my life when I could do it. I didn’t have any commitments. I didn’t have a mortgage or kids. My husband and I weren’t married. We were renting a tiny apartment. So it was like and I had made this money as a lawyer so I was able to take some time away, I was really lucky that I could take this big jump.
People always ask me, “Should I quit my job and write my first book?” And I will always say, just because it worked out beautifully for me and I was so, so wonderfully lucky I could never, in good conscious, tell anyone else to do it. It was the stupidest decision I ever made and it turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my life but it was also, by far, the stupidest and it was part of my New Year’s Resolution. It was the only New Year’s Resolution I’ve ever kept in my entire life.
Sarah Enni: Not the only one you’ve made, but…
Julie Buxbaum: Oh my gosh, I make one every year but I never keep it, but that’s the one I kept and I quit my job on January 1st or January 2nd and I started working the next day when I got off work, I think it was like two days later. I started writing and I was completely and totally keeping the New Year’s Resolution and I did it.
Sarah Enni: Was the resolution to finish a book, or was it to just start writing, or?
Julie Buxbaum: It was to quit my job and write my first book. And then figure out my life. That was sort of like a three step thing: Quit Job, Write book, Figure out Life. And you know what? I bet I have a list somewhere written down somewhere still that says those three things. That’s exactly it, I had a “To Do List” for the year, and that was it.
Sarah Enni: That’s amazing
Julie Buxbaum: And I followed it, I did it, I did!
Sarah Enni: That’s crazy!
Julie Buxbaum: It’s so rare that I actually would do it, but it did that one time
Sarah Enni: The compulsion then to quit and give yourself time to write pre-dated an idea of what to write?
Julie Buxbaum: So, during the fall, so I quit on January 1st, so during that fall I took a story workshop for a weekend at UCLA Extension.
Sarah Enni: Where you living in LA at the time?
Julie Buxbaum: I was living in LA at the time and I sort of created a character in my head then but I didn’t know where the story was going to go. I didn’t know anything, other than this one character and then when I quit, then I started really developing her and creating an arc and writing a book for real.
Sarah Enni: Okay.
Julie Buxbaum: I guess the seeds were planted maybe a few months before I quit.
Sarah Enni: So you were, and I’m only harping on it because I think it’s so funny, that you were taking classes, creative writing classes in your free time. I mean, by that point, did you know that you were gearing up to?
Julie Buxbaum: Actually, it was only like a two day workshop.
Sarah Enni: Right.
Julie Buxbaum: I had no idea where the impulse came to sign up for that story workshop. I guess I knew. I guess there was part of me that was gearing up but there was probably a six month period of time.
Sarah Enni: I just really love stories like this because we can be so blind to ourselves and I like hearing where it ended up working out the best possible way but there are so many times when I talk to people and they are like, “Well, I mean, I didn’t know I wanted to do this but, I mean, I had just helped my friend write a 500 page book for the last seven years. “ And it’s like, “Wait. What are you talking about? You were doing this the whole time!” But we just don’t piece the puzzles together in real time, it seems like.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s weird in looking back and applying for law school, I spent so much time on my essay. So much more time on the essay than any other part of the application than anything else the essay was what was important to me.
That tells you everything you need to know. Clearly words were my thing and I just didn’t know it. And then looking back when I was a kid when I was angry my parents, I was never one of those people who could articulate speaking out loud, as you can tell from this interview, but, I would write it down. I would write these long, angry letters then when I was pissed off about something.
Sarah Enni: You wrote hate mail to your dad!
Julie Buxbaum: I wrote hate mail! Thank god we didn’t have email back then cause I would sit and I would write for hours on my laptop and I would write out these long letters, all the ways they had wronged me and I would slip it under their door and I’d go in my room and shut the door and hide in the closet until someone came. But I couldn’t talk it out I had to write it out. I just was not able to articulate my feelings.
Sarah Enni: So you were kind of developing this character, which is you?
Julie Buxbaum: No, so we have a lot of things in common. This is the character in THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, which is my first book. We have a lot of things in common. We both lost our moms young, we both worked in corporate law. That’s about it. She was, I mean, I know it looks like those are big important things but I am not diminishing those things, I definitely used my own experiences to inform those things but she’s much crazier than I am. Much, much, much more, what’s the word? Not unadjusted; badly adjusted? Misadjusted? What’s the word?
Sarah Enni: Maladjusted?
Julie Buxbaum: Maladjusted! Thank you, maladjusted; just a little crazier and wackier than I am.
Sarah Enni: I do want to talk about, I haven’t read the adult books but I have read about them and the reviews of them and it seems to me like very, very, very explicitly talking a lot about mother and daughter issues. Did that, I am wondering if that came first? You lost your mom young but were you thinking that you wanted to deal with that in books, or did it just happen?
Julie Buxbaum: It just happened. So, it’s funny how with writing years later you look back and you’re like, “Oh, that’s what’s going on in my head.” So, my first book, dead mom; second book, kill the mom; third book, TELL ME THREE THINGS, kill the mom. My fourth book which comes out next April, I was like, “I am NOT killing any more moms!” This is getting embarrassing. Clearly, I need to call my therapist and work through this, and enough. Page two…I kill the dad.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Julie Buxbaum: So the next, next book no parents are dying whatsoever! All the parents have to stay alive.
Sarah Enni: Sure, sure, sure.
Julie Buxbaum: Okay, I’m setting up this thing, like now it’s embarrassing. Clearly, it was a huge experience in my childhood. Completely formative; changed who I was in every way possible. And it’s something I’ve worked through and am still working through and I work through on the page, so with THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE, it was looking at how it formed me as an adult. And when I say adult, I mean that second coming-of-age, when you are about to turn thirty which I think is a very distinct period of time in your life sort of like how we were talking before, how it’s sort of that time when your adult expectations are being matched with reality and sort of shift around.
Sarah Enni: Mismatched.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, exactly. In TELL ME THREE THINGS though, I wrote TELL ME THREE THINGS twenty four years after my mom died which is a long time and it took me that long to feel comfortable to go back and actually look at what it was like when I was 16, which is very different than the experience of being 29. And dealing with a mother loss at the age of 14 versus being 16 and thinking back to a mother loss at 14. Cause that’s when you are in it, that’s the [unintelligible] of grief and those were really horrible, horrible years for me and so to go back and kind of unpack those, it took me a really long time to have the courage.
So yes, I’ve written a ton about grief, I’ve written a lot of personal essays about grief because I feel like I have a lot to say but TELL ME THREE THINGS was the first time I felt comfortable going back and being a teenager and stepping into that mind again. I didn’t feel ready to do it until now. The funny thing about the book is that it is actually a really happy book; it’s not a sad book. At least I think it’s not a sad book but it’s marrying this sadness of first loss with the pure euphoria of first love and sort of balancing it out hopefully, because I didn’t want to just write another, you know, wa-wa dead mom book.
Sarah Enni: Well, and, maybe having the promise of… I love at your event you said, “It’s not a spoiler alert that there’s a happy ending there’s like waffles on the cover.”
Julie Buxbaum: There are waffles in the shape of hearts. I think we know where this is going and it’s not going to be a book about a pedophile.
Sarah Enni: Which is great so I love that you don’t mind us talking about that it’s a happy ending book, but maybe you needed that to be able to go back because, and though I do want to talk about THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE and AFTER YOU, it’s always fascinating to me when people have something that’s huge and formative in their young life that it feels like it’s sort of this gravitational pull. Maybe you were dancing around writing a Young Adult story? Did you feel like when you were writing for younger; did that feel like the right voice?
Julie Buxbaum: So, for my entire adult life I felt like I was pretending to be a grown up and I wasn’t actually a grown up and only very recently did I sort of look around and I was like “Alright, I am married. I have two kids. I have a mortgage. I have been writing for a long, well not long, but a novel writing career. I am as grown up as I am going to get. The jig is up, come on, you’re a grown up!” And once that realization sort of hit, and it was devastating, it was really devastating.
I was sort of like “Oh, but I can write about being a teenager. I can go back and sort of when the whole world was wide open and I didn’t know what the future held.” Because, let’s be honest, In order for my life to change right now, something terrible would have to happen. In order for it to change it has to be bad, not good and so I kind of missed that feeling of not knowing my life’s questions, I mean, not knowing the answers to my life’s questions which is why I wanted to write a YA and then once I decided to write YA, the idea of revisiting sort of that period became an obvious choice for me.
Sarah Enni: I mean, I don’t think it’s obvious.
Julie Buxbaum: I think, It just sort of felt like a place I hadn’t yet explored and had a lot to think about, and wanted to think about and sort of was like, I tend to, as I said, I do things that are hard for me and so it was a hard thing to do and so I was like, “Let me do it”. Usually the hardest things in life are worth doing. So that was one of the reasons. I also feel like the idea of marrying first love and first loss was a natural one because I feel like only recently have I come to the realization that when you have a big loss in your life, when you have any sort of grief, that’s going to live alongside the best moments forever and that’s okay.
It’s okay that at all of my life’s big moments; the birth of my children, which were the happiest moments of my life, there’s always this part of me that’s grieving and saying “Oh, I wish my mom was here.” And it’s okay to feel joy and sadness at the same time. That’s what life is about. And that’s okay. It took me a really long time not to feel like it tipped the balance in any way when that happened and let one thing ruin the other. I am allowed to feel sad and still feel happy and it doesn’t take away from the joy that there is this sadness that lives alongside.
With any sort of bad emotion there’s this really, it’s really hard to either, I find that you either indulge it or push it away and there’s something to be said for just experiencing it instead of resisting OR overindulging and making it all about that. And with grief you make it all about that, then your life becomes a miserable existence and if you push it away too much that also, then you’re numbing yourself during the joyous moments. And so, there’s this sort of middle ground that’s pretty much impossible to cultivate but I’ve tried to at least and that is what I was hoping for in the book was to marry that high and low.
Sarah Enni: Yes. I think in therapy language they talk about anxiety in this way where it’s like you acknowledge the anxiety and you recognize that it sort of lives within you all of the time and then if you can think of it as this thing that is there then you can sort of live around it in a way that enables you to have a fuller existence. But not denying that it’s there because that makes you feel even more out of the loop.
Julie Buxbaum: And it’s instead of assigning it to bad necessarily. It’s just a feeling.
Sarah Enni: Yes, and it’s just there and it’s yours to incorporate. And the sadness and happiness living together I think is uniquely appropriate for young adult fiction. I feel like, at least for me, that’s something I really like to mine out of it because young adults are getting to their first end of something and also the beginning. It’s inherently hopeful because they are young people, but they are also dealing with, as you know more than anyone, young people deal with real shit.
Julie Buxbaum: Exactly, you’re not immune just because you’re young. And also it’s a time when your emotions, things are turned up a little bit, and so it’s important to recognize they’re real feeling s and sometimes they’re not about something as big as a mom dying. Sometimes it’s as small as a breakup, or I shouldn’t say small, but sometimes it’s a breakup or it’s a bad grade or whatever it is you feel and they’re real feelings and they are legitimate feelings and what I love about young adult literature is that we weigh all that stuff, it’s all in there it’s not just the big stuff. Jessie in TELL ME THREE THINGS, a girl makes a rude comment to her. She feels that it’s no smaller for her even though her mom died. Those are both legitimately real things that hurt her.
Sarah Enni: Right, right, right. Okay. I do want to talk a little bit about the adult fiction because I think there’s a lost book in there too so things like that so I want to get to those as well. So, let’s back up just a minute to the experience of writing THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE and how that went, because you set yourself a goal, you set out to write the book, how long did the writing of your first book take you?
Julie Buxbaum: I had a draft within four months, but just a first draft. And then I had a clean draft in about month seven or eight? And then an agent very shortly thereafter and then a two book deal with Random House shortly after that. It was, the stars aligned in a way that does not happen in the universe. It was like magic. Stars aligned and so much luck and things having, coming together in such a perfect … I got really lucky.
Sarah Enni: Well, I don’t like the word luck though.
Julie Buxbaum: I’m super proud of the book. I love the book. But there are plenty of beautiful books that just don’t land in exactly the right hands at the right time and my book landed in exactly the right hands at the right time and got handed off to the right people too. So I found the perfect agent who found the perfect editor for the book who really understood what I was trying to do who had also lost her mom young. Totally got the book a hundred percent and so who is also a wonderful, amazing editor and person and so I just got handed into the, like, passed to the right hands every way you could possibly imagine.
Sarah Enni: Which is amazing, I like that!
Julie Buxbaum: Really Lucky. Really amazing and it encouraged me to have a career.
Sarah Enni: You worked really hard for your career
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, absolutely, and you need to have the book, right? It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have the book. But I do feel like the universe came together in a wonderful, in such a wonderful way that like, did I use up all of my luck in one year? Did I just spend it all at once?
Sarah Enni: Right, right, right! Did you get the feeling, that’s pretty quick, especially for a first book when you’re still figuring out not only the book but how to write a book? Do you feel like there was some element, like it was all pent up and just waiting to kind of like starburst?
Julie Buxbaum: Maybe. I mean, writing that first book was the easiest book I’ve written. I mean, first of all, there’s enthusiasm and excitement not to be in a law firm. So that was a huge motivation. I also was so much more focused. I did not have two children. So I was sitting down every day, eight hours a day, and writing for most of that time. Now, the thought of writing eight hours a day, that never happens! I just can’t even imagine. I don’t have that focus anymore.
And so yes, it spilled out of me in a way that has not happened since. Though, TELL ME THREE THINGS came pretty fast too. It was interesting, it happened really fast and then now I’ve had a long time since, and now it feels earned. But back then it did not, if that makes sense? I had been working at this for a long time so TELL ME THREE THINGS is my first book in six years so I kind of feel like a veteran now, even though I am totally new to the YA world, but it sort of came really fast in the beginning and then it slowed down and now it’s sort of this long…it ebbs and flows.
Sarah Enni: Well, yes, and shifting and changing what you even want to do. Super interesting. So, you had the first book and then it sold in a two book deal, and I can imagine the first book felt really special too because it was not you, but there is a lot of you in there. Did you have an idea for the second book already?
Julie Buxbaum: No, so I had a two book deal with a blind second book. And then I spent a good year, I think, coming up with ideas. It took a really long time to come up with an idea that my editor and I were both happy with that I was going to write. And then I wrote that second book which is AFTER YOU and then after that I signed another contract with Random House for the third adult book and that is the book that broke me.
Sarah Enni: And, sadly, I want to hear all about it.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, of course you do! Took a really happy story….no, you know what? I actually am happy it happened because I do think there is something to be said for this career being hard fought. So, I wrote this book and I spent two years of my life on it. Two years after my daughter was born so I went to a coffee shop every day, left her with my mother-in-law, I’d make it home and went and worked on this book, I was writing it.
And, I wrote it. And its fine. It’s a totally competent book. It lives in a drawer now though because who wants to put out a totally competent book? You want a book that people are going to be like, “You HAVE to read this. This is the best book I’ve ever read!” And it wasn’t that book. And I just felt like, after two years, there was no way it was ever going to be that book; at least then. I mean, there might a possibility of returning to it one day with a fresh brain and being able to see why it wasn’t spectacular but it just wasn’t great. Like, it was fine and I think was even publishable but I was at a point in my career that it didn’t make sense to put out something that was publishable. I was trying to grow readers, not lose them.
Sarah Enni: Okay. I have like three ways I want to go with this.
Julie Buxbaum: Okay.
Sarah Enni: One is; what was it about just generally? Do you mind?
Julie Buxbaum: It’s funny I remember the elevator pitch anymore it’s been so long. Two time-lines, one is set in the 1950’s and one is set present day; two women who are unexpectedly connected in time.
Sarah Enni: Okay, so it was different.
Julie Buxbaum: It was different.
Sarah Enni: And I can see that taking two years that would be complicated.
Julie Buxbaum: It was definitely more ambitious than what I had written before mostly because there were two different perspectives and both women, which I think is harder than doing, um…
Sarah Enni: Oh, for voice and stuff?
Julie Buxbaum: For voice, I had to make sure the voices were distinct. One was set in the 1950’s and one was set in present day. I had to make sure that the voices were distinct and they were clear for the time period and the historical element was challenging. But I don’t think that’s where I went wrong actually. It was more technically challenging but that’s not why the book didn’t work. The book didn’t work because it just didn’t sing.
Sarah Enni: I hope you don’t mind, I would love to just like hear you talk about why you think that is? I think it…like what is it about some books have magic and some don’t.
Julie Buxbaum: I don’t know, I was talking to a friend about this. I just had lunch with a friend who is a writer and I was saying I want to give the advice, “Write the book that you’ve always wanted to write from your heart and that’s the book that’s going to make your career!”
Sarah Enni: Right.
Julie Buxbaum: But that was the book that was the book from my heart that I felt I had to write and it just didn’t work. I thought I had something to say and for whatever reason… I think looking back actually the reason, my agent died while I was writing that book. So ask my husband and he will say that it’s because I didn’t have sort of agent oversight during that period of time. I don’t agree. That’s his version. I think my version is I wrote it the two years after my daughter was born and the adjustment to motherhood was a really tough one for me. I was living in London. It was dark and rainy. I was away from family. I definitely had some post-partum depression issues and I think those two were just tough years and I think I write better when I’m happy. And that book was written when I was sad. And I think it might be as simple as that. It just doesn’t have the magic of happiness in it. There is no joy in the pages.
Sarah Enni: Okay, first of all…whoa, you’re agent died?
Julie Buxbaum: Yes.
Sarah Enni: Oh my god. Hang on; we’ll come back to that, because that’s crazy. Your agent died…bullet point. I think that’s really interesting to think about. Like that that book then just sort of became the project that got you out of the house instead of being something that you were fearlessly drawn to in that other way.
Julie Buxbaum: It just wasn’t written in joy. I enjoyed the act of writing it, and I enjoyed the escape of writing it and I need to write to be happy, I’m miserable when I’m not writing. So, I needed to do it but it felt very conflicted. I felt guilty going, which is crazy looking back, I mean, I had this certain new mom guilt that is just deeply ingrained in my subconscious and I wish I didn’t have it because I don’t believe in it but how you believe and how you act are totally different things, right?
Sarah Enni: Totally.
Julie Buxbaum: I wonder if I went back to it now, happy, if I could infuse that joy into the characters because I feel like that’s what I do best and maybe there is a chance for it maybe it’s not as.. Maybe it won’t live forever in a drawer. But I did put it in a drawer and it was an incredibly painful decision, incredibly, because it was a choice. It was sort of like, either I can keep editing this and get it to a point where they’ll want to publish it, or, I put this away and I say sorry, this is not the book.
Sarah Enni: First of all, I don’t want to be insensitive to this, I’m really sorry that your agent died because it sounds like she was amazing for you.
Julie Buxbaum: She was amazing. She was an amazing person and an amazing agent, just the best, the best. Her name was Elaine Koster and she had this tiny literary agency called the Elaine Koster Literary Agency that had these enormous books. She represented Khaled Hosseini from the “Kite Runner” and she was just known to discover…sorry, that’s my alarm! That’s the door alarm announcing that the door is being opened… she was just this powerhouse, had this tiny literary agency that was a powerhouse in New York. She was amazing in every way and just a wonderful, wonderful person. She died of metastatic breast cancer.
Sarah Enni: Whoa, okay, so it was like unexpected? I mean it was like… she was younger
Julie Buxbaum: So, she was in her sixties, so she was young, but she was sick for a very long time but didn’t tell anybody except for her immediate family. No one knew in the industry. And so she kept it a secret forever, for years. And when she died it was completely and totally unexpected to all of us. So it was incredibly heartbreaking, incredibly. I mean it would have been incredibly heartbreaking anyway, but it was a huge shock.
Sarah Enni: It’s profound to have someone die in your life in any way but that was someone who was guiding you, and like a mentor type of figure.
Julie Buxbaum: There is no doubt I owed my entire career to Elaine; my entire career. The fact that I’m a writer right now is one hundred percent because of Elaine because she found my first book and championed it in a way that I never dreamed possible. One hundred percent owed my career! On top of that I loved her as a person. But yes, she was absolutely wonderful and I feel so lucky that I got to work with her.
Sarah Enni: But, how did that, I really hope this…you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, but I do think it’s something that’s like helpful for people who are professionals. How do you deal with that? When something like that happens, I mean, functionally, for your career, how did you move on from that?
Julie Buxbaum: I didn’t for a while; I just put my head back down and just kept writing, writing a book that went nowhere basically. And you know what? It’s interesting, I said I wrote this book in a place that I wasn’t happy and that was probably a huge part of it for some reason I divorced that in my head but it’s actually a huge part of it.
Sarah Enni: And its funny your husband looking at it from the point of view of thinking that you didn’t have agent oversight over it, but you didn’t have, like, agent love for it.
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, love for it and also just grieving her as well. I was really heartbroken about her death, unrelated to my career just on a personal level. So I guess it’s not even… the agent oversight is such a small part of it, it was more about having her in my life and knowing that she…ya, just having her. So, I guess it was just a tough time all around; a really shitty time.
Sarah Enni: And I don’t want to harp on this terrible time too much but I do think it’s really inspiring given that you were able to come out of it and everything. And one thing that I really do want to talk about with that time, is that you are saying about making a choice; a career choice.
Because, I don’t know, I like talking to women who are willing and [unintelligible] to take this on as a business and think about their writing as a career and make choices like that because it’s so tempting to talk about it in touch-feely ways and a lot of times that means we set ourselves up to be taken advantage of or we don’t assert control in ways we can and should.
Julie Buxbaum: Especially as a mom, there’s a huge … first of all, the outside world sometimes looks at it as a hobby as opposed to a career; which is really tough. And also, you have to really guard your time as a writer and that’s a tough thing to do for something that other people consider a hobby. I have chosen to one hundred percent commit to my career. It’s my full time job.
I have childcare to make sure I can write and it’s a huge financial commitment to do it that way, but it’s an investment that’s necessary for me for my career. I look at it as one hundred percent business expense when I have a sitter pick up my kids from school every day. I one hundred percent agree with you about sort of committing to it and making sure you treat it like a career. It’s definitely a privilege to be able to treat it as a career. I think I am incredibly lucky that I don’t have to have another full-time job and I write because of that every day and I appreciate that every day.
Sarah Enni: And, you’ve also worked your butt off and now are in the position where you can say, “I want to position myself”, I mean, that’s kind of why I am thinking you are able to sort of pivot and think like when you are talking about TELL ME THREE THINGS that was a choice to move into the Young Adult market and do a different thing. I’d love to hear how you thought about that?
Julie Buxbaum: I wish I could say it was a business choice. I wish I had the foresight to be like well, “Okay, well, let me do a Young Adult because it’s a burgeoning market!” No, none of that’s true; I wish it were true I’d feel really good about my view. It was one hundred percent, I put that book in a drawer and I was broken. I did a little television writing in the middle to sort of like as a pallet cleanser and I had this idea for a YA novel and I felt that I could do it and I didn’t feel like that with my other adult novel.
And also, I was fascinated by the idea, as we said before, of going back and sort of exploring this time that felt joyous again. I mean, and also horrible, but joyous. And the act of writing felt joyous. And that was important. That’s what brought me to YA. I was excited to write the book. It’s passion, right? Which is such a weird thing alongside business but it is. And I wish I could make decisions about what I write for business reasons but I am just not that kind of writer, it doesn’t flow naturally for me.
Sarah Enni: I love that looking at YA brought you joy. What was your familiarity with YA when you were looking at that?
Julie Buxbaum: Well, I had read, I have been a YA reader forever, well not forever because it’s sort of a semi-new genre but since it sort of has resurrected, or taken off, I have been a huge YA reader. I loved it and I enjoyed reading it. I think it in some ways it’s voice is, well voice is really important in the adult world too, but some of the YA literature has such wonderful distinct voice and I love that and that’s what I like to do.
And so that’s one of the other things that attracted me, but really, it’s the writing about sixteen year olds…I mean writing about those years which are so complex and so interesting and not knowing where you’re going to go especially coming from this place feeling ridiculously settled. We had moved around a ton so this was the first time I was actually settled someplace. It gives me the adventure that I don’t get to have otherwise.
Sarah Enni: That’s huge! The adventure in the sense that like anything could happen and the…
Julie Buxbaum: And firsts are so magical right? First kiss, I love writing about first kisses. That moment, I don’t get to have first kisses anymore! I miss first kisses, I really do! It’s so fun to write about that and then I’m also a huge romantic comedy person, I ‘m a huge romantic so I love all those magical moments and I feel like YA is particularly rife with them.
Sarah Enni: How did, okay so you were thinking about that time, that age. What were the other germs that brought the idea together? How did it develop?
Julie Buxbaum: I definitely wanted to write about a girl who had lost her mother relatively recently and I also wanted to write about first love so in TELL ME THREE THINGS It is about a girl who recently lost her mom, her dad very quickly remarries a woman he met on the internet, moves out to California, and she starts at this super fancy pants private school. She’s in way over her head and on her first day she receives this anonymous email from someone who calls himself “Somebody/Nobody” offering to help her navigate her new school.
I say that all by the way of a background because I once received an anonymous email, and that’s what inspired the book. It was this weird, totally weird, magical thing that happened – again, another magical thing that again happened to me and when something that weird and magical happens in real life, you have to borrow it, how could you not? The universe handed me a plot – that never happens, right? So I had to take the plot that the universe handed to me and it was such a happy thing and so to marry this really sad thing with this really remarkably happy thing was a natural fit for me and that’s where it came from.
Sarah Enni: Well, tell me about this email?
Julie Buxbaum: I had graduated from law school and I was working at this law firm and I was miserable and I was feeling horrible about myself and I’d gained weight I was feeling gross and tired and sort of at a low self-esteem wise and out of nowhere, I received an anonymous email from someone who was a secret admirer from law school who was basically like, “I always noticed you in law school and I never said hello,” I think he said he had a girlfriend or something, “And always wanted to say Hi and now I live in a different city but just thought you should know what I think about you sometime.”
That’s it! Just a very small, very sweet…I had never in my entire life thought of myself as someone anyone would ever have noticed from across the room and that’s what he said, he said it was from across the room or something like that. In a million years that it is not who I thought of myself as and to have someone actually say that out loud just changed everything. It came at exactly the moment I needed it. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, swears it was not him. Swears it was not him! I really, really hope it was not him. If it was, he has to go to his grave with it because I will kill him.
Sarah Enni: That’s really neat, and really interesting.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s so weird. It’s so weird, and every once in a while I wonder if he would google me and find out that I wrote a book about it?
Sarah Enni: Right, totally.
Julie Buxbaum: It’s totally within reason, I guess? I don’t know. I assume he went on with his life and hasn’t thought about me since but you never know.
Sarah Enni: Those little acts of kindness can be like…
Julie Buxbaum: It was an act of kindness, exactly; it’s a little act of kindness. He was giving me a gift.
Sarah Enni: Yes, because especially the way it was phrased, it seems it was really respectful and just really sweet.
Julie Buxbaum: And not asking for anything. He didn’t want to meet. There was no expectation whatsoever in the email.
Sarah Enni: Yes. That’s huge. I was an undergrad and was sitting across a study hall coffee shop and writing a paper and this guy left a little note while he was walking out and it just said, “You’re really cute”, and a smiley face. And I still have that thing.
Julie Buxbaum: Wow! It’s exactly…it’s a little gift. Someone noticing you and making you feel so wonderful.
Sarah Enni: And seen and acknowledged. Anyway, that’s a really great seed of inspiration. It does seem like you had just had a really hard time with this book that was not full of joy and then you want to write this book that has elements of joy but you’re also willingly diving into super, super, tough, real grief stuff and remembering that vividly. Was looking at it this way a way of finding some peace in it? Or, how did you feel about that?
Julie Buxbaum: I think so. I was also in a happier place. So yes, I put the book in a drawer and that was heartbreaking but I had also moved from London to New York and then New York to LA and I had my son around that time and it was a very different experience than when I had my daughter. It was sort of like how it is supposed to be when you have a baby, and felt really wonderful and happy even though he was a terrible, terrible baby.
He didn’t sleep and he cried, he was such a pain in the ass. He’s a wonderful little person but a pain in the ass. So, it was coming from a happy place and a place of strength. I felt like I was where I wanted to be in my life at least personally, maybe not so much professionally after putting that book in a drawer. I felt stronger and able to go back and look and yes, it was really hard but I was coming from a place where I was able to do it. I felt ready. I don’t think I would have done it if I wasn’t in a happy place.
Sarah Enni: You were also a mom now. Was it really different to think about the way your mom…
Julie Buxbaum: The loss? Yes, every experience, now, I mean since then, has been colored by the fact that I lost my mother. I think it’s a lens in which I view the world. So I am totally obsessed, it so sad, I’m totally obsessed with my husband or I dying and imagining my kids not growing up with a parent. That’s a huge fear of mine because of it. And I know exactly where it comes from. Just because you know where something comes from doesn’t mean it’s easier to get rid of, as you were saying.
Now, as a mom, I think about what that must have meant to her letting go of me? I had never thought about it from that perspective. I had always thought about letting go of her. So that changed, I mean, it’s a new thing for her to miss. Like, my kids don’t have a grandmother on that side and that’s really heartbreaking to me and that was something I needed to process.
I have processed a lot of it through writing. I have written a lot, well not a lot but a few, personal essays about grief and mother loss because I feel like writing is the way…same as when I was five years old or ten years old and writing to my parents because I was angry. It’s the way I process and so when I am trying to understand feelings about something I will sit down and write an essay about it. There were years there that needed sifting through and I was finally in a strong enough place that I could do it. It’s amazing that it took so long, but you know, that’s how grief works.
Sarah Enni: That’s incredible. It really kind of speaks to the fact that this book does have the magic. It was the right time and being able to approach it from this place of a more peaceful mind and then getting to have kissing! That’s really great. So you did know that you wanted to write a love story, a kissy love story?
Julie Buxbaum: I love swoons. I love happy endings. I love first kisses, first love and all of that stuff.
Sarah Enni: It’s the best.
Julie Buxbaum: It is the best and I think it’s important. I think people are very quick to dismiss, just because something has that warmth and first love to dismiss it as having, is being of lesser quality especially because it appeals to girls and women which I find incredibly frustrating because it doesn’t make it any lesser just because it deals with love. Our lives are full of love. That’s what life is about, so…
Sarah Enni: And, if it’s a heterosexual love story, there’s a guy there too! Who is also falling in love and kissing for the first time. It frustrates me. I’m like, hello? We’re not experiencing this on our own!
Julie Buxbaum: There’s something about anything that interests young women that is automatically discounted in this culture and I find it incredibly frustrating.
Sarah Enni: And lame!
Julie Buxbaum: And lame, and upsetting and yeah. It exists in the women’s fiction world too, the same sort of prejudice when you write about the women’s fear. If a man writes a book about war then it has literary merit, but if a woman writes a book about a family it’s not considered important. If a man writes a book about family they’re saying something new. You can apply the same argument to YA. You see it again, and again, and again. It’s just really depressing.
Sarah Enni: I think it gets more frustrating because we‘ve been talking about this for so long, and then every once in a while you’re confronted with people not knowing, or understanding, that that’s what’s happening and you’re like, “Ah, really?” For some people this is a new conversation and that’s exhausting. How can we not all see that this is what’s going on? But, it’s getting better, hopefully.
But, I love that too because I think there is an element of bravery in just being like, “I want to tell a really good love story.” I’m glad that writing YA was such a good experience for you. Do you feel like this is a home base? Do you feel like you want to settle in?
Julie Buxbaum: Yes, so, I have a YA coming out next spring 2017 which was actually a real joy to write. Maybe my favorite book I’ve written which you would think would make me excited about it coming out…it makes me terrified! I don’t want to expose it to a big bad new world.
Sarah Enni: True, these precious months where it’s still exciting but not out!
Julie Buxbaum: I know, no one to tell me it sucks yet because I really love it and I’m working on the next idea right now for the third YA. It’s what I want to write.
Sarah Enni: I would love to hear your advice for new writers and then maybe if you have any advice for people writing with kids in particular.
Julie Buxbaum: I think that the number one piece of advice I would give is to read everything you can possibly get your hands on. But I think not only read as a reader but read as a writer and read critically. So, if you read something particularly wonderful, ask yourself why it’s wonderful. What did they do right and learn from it. Yes, it sometimes robs you of some of the pleasure of reading and it makes reading work, but if you want to be a writer reading is work. I think that’s a huge, huge part of it.
If I know as a writer that it’s a huge thing, obviously it took me a really long time to do it, but once that switch was flipped it made a huge difference in giving myself permission to write. So I think giving yourself permission to be a writer is really important and then alongside of it, giving yourself permission of sitting your ass in the chair and writing.
There are so many people who have the flip side of the problem – identifying as a writer but not actually writing. I think it’s really important to sit down and write and be bad at it, that’s okay, but you have to keep writing. You’re not going to be a writer until you write.
Writing with kids? Lauren Brock gave this amazing answer in the New Yorker on-line about how she is always asked about balancing work and motherhood and how the question itself expects women to talk about how hard it is and how to go through this dance like, “the balance is so difficult, and woe is me” and how it shouldn’t be that way. Yes, being a parent is hard but that’s just life and her answer was brilliant.
Sarah Enni: I’ll look into it.
Julie Buxbaum: And I wish I could just give you her answer. The truth is, as much as I believe that day to day I’m to get mixed up in the minutia of being a mom and the writing life and I haven’t quite figured out how to do it and make it seamless, it doesn’t feel as easy as I would like it to be and as I believe it should be, but one bleeds into the other.
I think that balance is one of those overrated things. It doesn’t really exist that it’s not real and some days I am a much better mother than I am on other days and some days I’m a better writer than I am other days. But, at the end of the day, my kids are loved and they are fine and I have to remember that and my work is important too and sort of carve out both and feel confident about the decisions and making work a priority is not something that I have to be apologetic about. But, it’s obviously easier said than done.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
Julie Buxbaum: Thank you for having me. This was so fun!
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Julie. Follow her on Twitter @juliebux and follow the show @FirstDraftPod and me @sarahenni. You can also find the show on Facebook and on Instagram you can get a sneak peek at future guests. But, for show notes from this episode and every episode, as well as my favorite quotes and other interesting links, visit www.firstdraftpod.com
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Thanks to @hashbrown for the theme song and to Collin Keith and Maurene Goo for the logos and, as ever, thanks to you somebody nobodies for listening.