"It Felt Like I Was Just Not Ever Going to Finish It"

A Conversation with Shannon Sanders

After two full weeks of travel en famille, I finally managed to watch Nightbitch, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the novel by Rachel Yoder. Yoder was an early interviewee of this Substack and remains one of my all-time favorites, so I was curious to see what Heller would do with the book. Interiority is the novel’s particular kingdom and I did feel that the voiceovers taken (as far as I could tell) from the text couldn’t quite pull off what the book did best – picking apart the complexity, and hilarity, of wanting to be a person and a mother all at the same time.

What was more interesting to me were the parts of the movie that weren’t taken from the book but were either added or amplified by Heller. (Please feel free to skip to the interview part of this post if you haven’t seen the movie yet and don’t want to know anything more about it.)

The movie does convey Nightbitch’s overall thesis statement, which is that integration is possible, that the beauty and horror of motherhood can be art; that in fact it already is. But it also tilts that thesis by adding scenes of familial integration – a husband realizing how hard it is to care for a child, alone, for hours on end; a husband finally understanding that it requires a yielding of one’s own personhood to someone who can’t possibly know what to do with it yet; a husband finally grasping that his wife’s creative life necessitates – and is worthy of – his sacrifice (this may or may not be drawn from Heller’s real-life marriage to Booth Jonathan Jorma Taccone). The penultimate scene is a kind of holy family tableau, a harmonious trio in a forest manger. In contrast, the book ends where it began — with mother and boy — but rather than being an impediment to art, the dyad has become the art. In either configuration, there is resolution: art and motherhood can coexist.

But then, right before the closing credits, the movie does something else. The final scene has Nightbitch delivering another baby, a girl. Suddenly, there isn’t resolution but, instead, a question. How will a second child, another ride on the sleepless newborn train, change Nightbitch’s ability to integrate body and mind? What impact will parenting two children who need night-nights, two voices saying “Mama, look!” (often at the same time, in two different directions) have on her hard-won equilibrium? And what will it mean for a daughter to see her mother do what she must to maintain that uneasy balance?

We already know what it means for a daughter to see her mother fail. Book and movie both dwell on Nightbitch’s mother’s lost potential as an opera singer. But in the novel, the driving question of how a woman can be both mother and artist reaches a terminus. Nightbitch has figured out how to honor and stoke both kinds of creative potential — maternal and artistic — a challenge her child, a boy, will never face. Throughout her narration, Nightbitch makes it clear that the parenting challenge she faces is to try and set boundaries in a world that will always encourage her son to do what he needs to do and take what he wants to take. She does not ever imagine him sharing her struggles. The movie’s decision to add a third link to the mother-daughter chain is a quietly provocative one and I’m still thinking about it.

Adaptations are both art and criticism, and I love the idea of Heller honoring the book’s vision of integration and then gently poking at it. Anyone who tries to do these two all-encompassing things in tandem knows that no matter what kind of path you make for yourself, no matter what kind of routines or tricks of incantations make it possible for you to be both parent and artist, a new child, or a new developmental stage for the same child, will inevitably come along and throw it all into turmoil.

And, as I thought about that final scene, I remembered my conversation with Shannon Sanders, the transcript of which was waiting patiently for my kids to go back to school after winter break. Sanders’ debut story collection, Company, won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a Publishers Weekly and Debutiful Best Book of 2023. She began writing the stories included in the collection before she had any kids and by the time the book was published she had three so this is a woman who knows a thing or two about adapting to new circumstances.

The theme of our conversation was that the work is always to find a way to create amid the various cycles of parenting (a cycle is, it occurs to me, a different, more, um, feminine narrative structure than the climactic arc of Aristotle/Freytag/every guide to writing a novel or screenplay). It is always having to figure out the next routine, the next strategy of integration. There’s no one right answer for everyone, and no one right answer that works forever. And doing this again and again takes the kind of perseverance and mental dexterity that being a primary caregiver also demands. So that’s the good news, I guess, that it uses some of the same muscles. I’ve been a long-distance admirer of Sanders for a while and it was a pleasure to finally connect and talk about how she threads the needle with three kids six and under, a full-time job as a lawyer, and a fulfilling writing life.

I usually start by asking people to tell me the story of their journey to the book, and I will add that I love interviewing people who have actual day jobs in addition to writing.

I think that this is probably the classic answer, but I was a very bookish kid. I loved to read as a child and then, in high school, I was the editor in chief of my school's literary magazine, and then I was the features editor for the lit mag in college, and so I just sort of always had a really keen interest in books and how they were put together and how writing itself was done, but no one ever really put in front of me the idea that I could go and study it, for example, and so I just didn't consider that at all. I did do some creative writing classes in college, and I got to have an experience of just being around professors who were publishing, which was really influential I think for me. But I went to law school after college.

Did you go to law school and think, well, maybe eventually I'll figure out a way to write, or was it just going to law school?

I don't think I thought that at the time. I come from a family with a bunch of lawyers in it, and so that was one path that was very obvious to me. And then I had professors in college who were publishing while they were in the classroom also. I had one professor in particular at Spelman College, her name is Sharon Strange and she's a poet and she invited some of her students to go off campus for one of her readings one night at this bar in Atlanta. And I probably took away from that some idea that people with major careers and day jobs could be doing that on the side, but I definitely did not think that there was a path to making that the center of my life at that point. So in law school, of course, you don't have that much time to really do anything that's all that much fun. I've always been a reader and so I was probably doing some reading for fun, but still not thinking about it really at all, even as something I was going to come back to. I think I was thinking of myself as a passionate consumer of fiction probably at that point. I do think that even once you become a writer, you go through periods where you're consuming and you're excited to be reading and you're discovering new things and kind of like feeding your own creativity, and then opposite periods where you then have to go and generate material.

At what point were you like, wait, maybe I can do this and maybe I should try?

You know what it was for me, I had a boyfriend from law school through a few years after law school, and we went through this breakup and it was very life altering. It was for the best and all that stuff, and I'm married to somebody else now and I have the kids, but I had a little bit of extra time because I had been spending a lot of time with him, and I also had just the desire to go and try something out that I thought was going to be enriching for me. And maybe I thought I would also meet people. I don't know why I thought I was going to meet, like, single guys in a writer's workshop. I mean, over the years I ended up meeting a lot of people of all different walks of life and stuff in those workshops, but I just googled amateur creative writing workshops in my area and I came up with The Writer’s Center, which is a DC area nonprofit that has all levels classes and workshops, and they're super awesome. And so I took a class in 2014 and it was literally all levels, people all along the spectrum, some having been published before, some extremely new to it. I was very new to it, but I also felt very comfortable with it because I had that history of being a reader and I guess being in the lit magazine

At this point, you're a lawyer, so you have full-time job. You're just like, I'm going to do this as an extracurricular activity.

That's right. But no kids yet.

Right, that's why you have time for extracurriculars.

Exactly, yeah. And so this was a Wednesday night class, and I just would go over there and I loved it. I mean, I made some friends there. I ended up becoming really good friends with my teacher from that class, and I wrote a story in that class, and I just got into this cycle where I just started registering every time my friend would host a class again. And in doing that, over the first three years or so, I ended up writing eight stories in those workshops, all of which ended up in the book.

That’s kind of amazing.

I'm a very results oriented person, and I found that spending money on a workshop was super motivating in making sure I actually sat down and did something. It was a little bit later when I started to actually just find time to sit and write because I wanted to, and not because I was trying to submit something on a deadline, but that was a really great starting point. So somewhere around that time, I started to send work out just to journals and magazines and stuff, and got the classic wallpaper of rejections, so many rejections, and it was of course disappointing at first, and also very- I guess I just could not figure out how do people do this? Do they just wait until they get an acceptance? I just couldn't figure out what the game was, and it took me a few years to sort of figure that out, but I sent stuff out.

But at this point, you're motivated. You're not just doing this as a ‘this is what I do after work sometimes and it's feeding my soul.’ You're like, ‘I want to be in it.’ Because there’s a difference between those two mindsets.

I'm a really competitive person, and so I started to feel like this is a goal. I know that I can do this because I see that other people are doing this. I just have to figure it out also.

So how did you crack it?

I continued to send stuff out and then eventually I started to do better research and figure out some publications that were better matches for my stuff. I sent something to Glimmer Train, and I ended up placing in a contest. I got an honorable mention – they give lots of those, and I think it's nice. It's a really good way to help boost people in the community, or they did before they closed. But that really gave me a big jolt of confidence, I think, and I started to put that on my cover letters and whatever. I don't know that that made a difference, but it made me more excited to continue sending things out. And then I eventually placed a story in Puerto Del Sol's Black Voices series, and that story came out in 2019 and it won a PEN prize for emerging writers, for individual short stories. They give out 12 of those per year.

That's a big boost.

I always think about that as being the turning point between doing it and trying to figure out how I was going to do it, and then things sort of starting to happen.

And by that time, do you have a kid?

Yeah, I had my first kid in 2018, and I found that with one baby, it was tough to write, but with a toddler it was easier. He slept through the night and I just sort of found my ability to do things after he went to bed again, which was really hard for a long time.

So does that mean you wrote most of the stories that ended up in the book before kids? What was the breakdown? I’m wondering how becoming a parent changed the process and the content.

I wrote about seven of them altogether, and then I started to write stories when my oldest son was really little, so I wrote a couple right around the time that I was becoming a parent, and you can kind of tell from the stories. I definitely was very interested in questions about how do we choose whether or not to enter parenthood? What happens to our relationships when we become parents, and what does it say about somebody who is prioritizing parenthood?

Right, there’s one story about a woman who is partnered but isn't sure she wants kids, and then there's one about a single woman who wants to become a parent, and those felt like stories that came out of that stage of deciding when to start having kids, being pregnant, and all that.

Yeah, there's those two, and then there's one other one about a grandmother who's reconciling how she's going to deal with her son's new family that he's kind of leaving her out of.

Oh, I loved that one. I mean, I loved all of them, but I really liked her voice.

Those three are the ones that I wrote in the year before and then after I had my son. So those are all definitely kind of like my, ‘oh, what is parenting going to do to my life’ stories, I think. And in terms of process, humongous changes, definitely. I used to write stories in these marathon sprints. I would just sort of spend a lot of time planning and sort of outlining what the beats would be of the stories and getting all of my ideas really fleshed out before I ever got to the page. And then, usually in a sitting or two, I could get a draft out and then I would take it to workshop, and then I would iron out whatever needed to be cleaned up. After I had my oldest son, I started having to do it in spurts at night, and so if I could get a few hundred words down, that was great. I would try to do that a few nights in a row to maintain some momentum, but way less of that really immersive, being in the story feeling. And so that changed things a lot. I would say I had to really adapt to that because I was very used to being able to think about nothing but the story in all of my free time. And then as soon as I had a chance to get to the computer, try to stay with it until it was finished,

And then you decided to have another kid, which turned into three kids total because you had twins in the middle of a pandemic. I was in my three year old’s classroom the other day for parent teacher conferences and they have everybody's birthdays up on the wall, and I got to do this weird thing where I do the math and see who else decided to get pregnant in the first few months of the pandemic. And I’m pretty sure you’re in that club too. Pre-vaccine, giving birth in a mask.

Yeah, so I have a six-year-old and then 3-year-old twins. At that point, we knew we wanted to have two kids. We wanted a sibling for my older son, and I think we were still in that phase of thinking that things were going to change a lot more dramatically a lot sooner than they did. It’s hard to get back into exactly that mind space, I think. But we knew we wanted our son to have a sibling, and it was maybe even more important because we were so isolated then and we were feeling like we had to do it at some point and we wanted certain spacing, and so it just seemed the other option would be to really try to wait out whatever big change was coming, which then didn't come for such a long time. But yeah, I mean birth in a mask, all that stuff.

And you were still doing your job, of course. Where were you in terms of the collection by the time you had the twins?

So I won the PEN prize and, through that experience, I caught the attention of an agent. She reached out and contacted me, which was extremely exciting. I don't think I would've been thinking I was ready to query or anything like that for a long time, or even really known how to do it. She was really fantastic right away, and she kind of said, ‘are you working on anything else? Is there a novel in progress? If not, what's the status of this manuscript?’ And people had always said like, ‘oh, you're writing linked stories. Is this a book that's coming together?’ And I had always said, no, it's just stories. I like sending out stories. But with this agent asking that question, I started to see it differently. And I ended up signing with her over that summer and then of course got pregnant with twins, and I had told her, I'm going to finish this by the end of the summer. I'm going to have 12 stories for you by the end of the summer. Fast forward to a year after I said I was going to have it to her. Now I have twins, but I have finished the 12th story.

That means you were writing with two newborns, a toddler, and a full-time job in a pandemic. Where's your congressional medal of honor? Who's in charge of those?

I would settle for just a bottle of champagne. But the one good thing that happened was that a lot of workshops started to become virtual. And so all these things that I hadn't been able to do before that were in different cities, I got to do. I got to take a class over summer 2020 with Danielle Evans, a short story writer who I really love. I got to take another Brooklyn-based workshop that summer after my son went to sleep for the night. I knew I was going to have twins and so I was like, I really had better get things going.

It's a real motivator, pregnancy.

And just knowing how hard it becomes to write when you've got a newborn. And so that's what I really did. I didn't do much of the writing of this book when the babies were babies, I did most of it before they were born. And then it was not until a few months after they were born that I was able to really get back and start cleaning things up. I published an essay with Lit Hub because my husband actually gave me this stack of coupons for writing time.

Oh, I remember seeing that.

They were three months old, and it was supposed to be like ‘cash this in for one hour of writing time,’ and it was really generous of him. But then there were all these issues. I was nursing and I could still see them, I could still hear them. There was really nowhere to go still. And so it was really tough. It was existentially difficult. I would say it was a very hugely tough period. But because I had this agent who I had promised the stories to a year ago, I was again really determined that I was going to finish them at some point.

There was someone waiting on the other end as opposed to just trying to motivate yourself in the void.

There was a reason to do it. There was a structure for doing it because she said eight stories is great, I would love for this to be a few more. I had a general sense of how long a collection should be, how many more stories I would want to have that had not yet been published individually. By this point, I had had most, if not all, of the eight stories published. I had promised her my collection by, I think, August 2020. Finally, in August 2021, I sent it to her.

Given the challenges, it seems like actually a very reasonable and kind of short period of time to me, but I am sure it must have felt much more stressful.

I mean, I can see it that way now. At the time, because every day was so tedious and so difficult, I just remember feeling like, boy, I wish I had time to write. I wish I had mental clarity to write. I wish I had time really to do anything, take a shower, but it would be just so great to be able to escape that way. And I was so close, and I felt like also, as we talked about, I had those stories that were about the early days of parenthood or that had been generated during that time, and I didn't want to lose that sort of head space I was in.

Yeah, it’s hard because just when you have this great material, you lose the time and the wherewithal. I want to talk about the book itself, because I love linked stories and I think families, particularly extended families, are always generating lots of great fun material. At what point did you realize this is all about this one family?

The fun thing about being in a workshop with a lot of the same repeat characters showing up in the workshop itself, is that I started to develop these relationships with my workshop buddies where I wanted to give them something else to read about the same people.

That’s so fun.

Yeah, it was a very fun process for me, especially at the beginning, before it became complicated. But the first story in the book is also one of the first stories that I wrote chronologically. It's called “The Good Men,” and it's about a mother whose two sons kind of paternalistically come to make a change in her life for her without her permission. And I wrote that and I was really interested in that mother character, but I felt like she hadn't gotten a real good- I felt like the reader didn't know her well because they had only seen her through the eyes of her sons. So I really wanted to revisit her, but through a perspective that knew her differently. And so I then wrote a story from the perspective of one of her sisters, and that story became the title story in the book, “Company.” It's toward the end. And then when I wrote that story, it kind of set out this family tree that I then became interested in and thought, well, I'll just keep writing about these people because I want to find out more about each of them. And so really, almost every person on the family tree ends up having at least one story that they are central to.

I love the family tree. And I’m thinking about the challenge of writing about extended families in, say, a a novel where you’re trying to tell one big story. There’s that worry that it's too many people for readers to keep track of. And linked stories seemed to me such a wonderful way to capture a big, kind of enmeshed family.

Yeah, and it's especially fun because one of my things that I'm interested in exploring is differences in perspective on the same event, differences in empathy between generations. And then also, I like mysteries, so I like the idea of getting more information by talking to a different witness or whatever. And I do think that it's easier. I will say in a year of having this book on Goodreads and stuff, people do still say, oh, this is so many people to keep track of.

But there’s a family tree! I mean, just flip the page.

I agree.

I guess that’s too much for people.

And a lot of people, they only relate to books as novels or not. And so a lot of people refer to the stories as chapters. They think they're going to turn the page and get more of the same narrative.

Well, I mean, you can't really solve for that. Part of the pleasure, for me, of reading the book was wondering, who am I going to get next? I love that you compare it to a mystery and I love thinking about families in that way. I don't see a lot of writing that really captures the complexities of extended families, the way everybody has different relationships with each other, some closer, maybe some not so close. And how everyone has an opinion on any given thing. As I was reading it was clear to me that you understood how extended families work. Does your extended family ever get in the way of your writing? Either logistically or in your head when you're writing, worrying about, you know, what is aunt so-and-so going to say about this? Because also everyone likes to see themselves in fiction even if it’s not about them at all.

Yeah, mostly that last thing. I would say that is a big- that's at least something I have to consider because there are people who will read your writing and, no matter what disclaimers you give them, they will insist that they have found themselves in a character. And in some ways, they're not wrong because of course, writers do process material from life and they turn it into fiction, but at the same time, all the characters are composites and stuff.

Yeah, I think people don't understand the composite part of it, and that's where the art is. And so does that get in the way when you are actually trying to do the writing?

It sometimes can, yeah. I mean, there are four characters in this book that are closely patterned after real people in my life, and then everybody else is not. But there's a character that is designed after my mom, and she knows that, and she actually appreciates the character, and it's her favorite story in the book. But then she still sees herself in other mother characters, and she sees herself in advice that they give each other. And maybe that's because sometimes it is borrowed from things I remember from childhood and stuff. But I do think that it would be great if everybody understood that that's what the art form is, and that if I wanted to make a commentary on things that I had experienced in being mothered by her, I would just write a memoir, which I don't want to do. And I try not to let it get in the way at this point. Because first of all, among so many other things, there's such a long runway between putting something on the page and ever having it inside the covers of a book that most things that I write, people in my life are not going to see unless I tell them that I really want them to, or unless they seek it out. And I guess the other thing I'll say about that is that I do think I have a responsibility to be cautious in the way that I represent what I'm really about and stuff, and what my family actually has modeled for me. But again, that's why I choose fiction as my self-expression as opposed to memoir.

Your stories are also funny and I think that’s part of what made them feel kind of effortless. They read like they were written by a person who just loved writing them. But another word that I was thinking of when I was reading them was quiet in the way that the industry, people use that word, which means not like a big hook or a flashy premise, just good, smart stories, which feels like a harder thing to do right now. Was that a challenge for you when you were looking to have the book published? It feels to me like that's the kind of writing you do, and I want to get into what you're working on right now, but is that a challenge for you?

Yeah, as far as their being quiet, I mean, the kind of story that I'm drawn to is one where there might not be that much plot movement but there is interesting subtext to be sort of the engine of the story. I mean, I really love the idea that there are these layers to conversations people are having, and interactions. The hook is that all of these stories have to do with having company over. So there's a guest and a host, and that means that everybody has to be stressed out about how they're going to perform in whatever way. And that itself is kind of a quiet concern in general, but it does mean it's got very long historical implications and stuff too. And I got lucky because, again, my agent is a champion of short stories, and she was never pushing me to turn them into anything else. Unlike all the conversations that you have in workshop and with other agents and stuff who might say, well, could this be the start of a novel? Are you working on something else that's a novel? I never got that pressure from her. I published it with Graywolf Press, and they also were extremely bullish on what a short story collection could do and who would enjoy it and how they could market it and stuff. And of course, they're huge champions of literary writing, and so they did not need for there to be a splashy hook for it to be- I don’t if it's right to say that it's not upmarket, but I guess they didn't need it to be something that was going to scream.

And so what’s next? I know that's the worst question for a mom with a six-year-old and two three-year- olds who is also a full-time lawyer.

It hasn’t been officially announced but I did just sell a novel.

On top of everything else! How did you find the time?

I did always have the idea that I wanted to write novels as well. I love novels too, just as much as I love short stories. I feel like they're so apples and oranges that I tend to resent when people want you to turn one into the other or demand that you consider one when you're working on the other. But I do think that they are both really wonderful art forms. And so I was working with Tony Tulathimutte in his class over the summer of 2020, before I had the twins. I had a chance to turn in a couple of things, and then also I booked an editing session with Tony for after the workshop was over. And I figured that was a good time to jumpstart a beginning of a novel. And so I started to draft something around that time, and I had to really crunch to get something out because, again, I was up against a deadline working with no childcare, had a toddler at home, but I got the beginning of it written in 2020.

But that means you're writing stories and the novel at the same time.

Yeah, again, before I had three kids, my time was so much more flexible. And then also most people were not out doing things, and we certainly weren't out doing things at that point. So I got that beginning of the novel written then, and it was a pretty good chunk, and I felt pretty good about it, but it was rough. I rushed and then I didn't have any ability to work on it at all for the next two years. I just couldn't because first I had the twins, and then I was trying to finish Company and make sure that it was ready for publication and stuff, and we went through the edits for it and all that. And then of course, you're promoting a book. And so it was really tough to focus on writing anything for a while.

Right, I mean, how many times can you bifurcate a brain?

Yeah, exactly. I got stuck at the end of the first section of my novel draft because I knew I had to do this big jump back in time, and I sort of just stalled out there until I had an idea for how I could transition. And then what happened was for the next several months after all three of the kids were asleep at night, I would just literally just write at least 500 words, sometimes 1000 words, every night.

I’m pretty sure that's the only way to do it with kids, though I’m open to being convinced otherwise. That's why I do all these interviews.

And I just had to do it consistently. I had to do it every single night. And then I would give myself breaks only if I got more than my word count the night before. And I had to do it that way because, again, my writing process is way more about being immersed and ideally writing things in one sitting. The closer I could get to doing that, the more successful. I had to play the same music. I had to be sitting in the same place. I had to really try to pretend that this was one really long writing session. And I don't know if we can come back to talking about things that are hard for writer parents in a world full of people who are writing without kids but I went through all these periods of sadness about not being able to do a residency or take a workshop when I wanted to, because I knew that those things would've really helped me get through the final crunch stage of finishing the draft. But of course I just couldn't.

Yeah, the closed doors. That's how I used to feel about getting an MFA.

And I mean, I have eventually come around to the feeling that you don't need to do those things, but the way that they are talked about definitely is meant to suggest that they're more than just a path to getting work finished, they are the best way to get work finished for a lot of people. And so anytime I wasn't writing, I felt like if I were just at MacDowell, this would be done. But of course, that was not possible.

It will be possible someday, but yeah.

Yeah, sure. There's a writer named Jacinda Townsend who said on Twitter one time, she was like, I don't get it, if you don't have kids, why can't you write at home? And if you do have kids, how can you get to a residency? And I kind of feel- although I understand why people want to do residencies for all sorts of reasons, I do feel that way too. I think that if I had more flexibility in my daily life, I wouldn't have had that much FOMO about being away someplace else.

I actually think having kids teaches you how to do work wherever, whenever. So I actually believe people without children do need to remove themselves from their lives, that they need a different place where they can really focus. But the really focusing ship has unfortunately sailed for us. We’re never getting on that boat. We have to develop the skill of focusing while people are running around and throwing Magnatiles at our heads.

Yeah, literally that, right?

You have to develop that muscle or you're kind of done.

And I think she was being a little bit snide when she said that, but I agree with you ultimately that I think whatever the conditions that you're dealing with are, you have to deal with the best and worst of them. So for that period of several months, I wasn't watching any TV. I wasn't really doing any reading at all, which is a big a difference for me from other periods of life. And I wasn't doing really anything social. I was telling people, including my husband, I can't watch a movie right now. I have this much time to do some writing and I'm going to be sleepy soon. And one day I was finished. I had 120-plus thousand words, and I got to type The End, and I was super excited. And I could not believe that that happened in those tiny little chunks of time because for such a number of months and years, it felt like I was just not ever going to finish it.

But you kind of have to have this delusional mania of, I can do this and I'm going to do it every single day. It’s an insane thing for a person to do, and yet it feels like you have no other choice.

Yeah. It's really hard to even explain to anyone else why you would be doing it if you didn't have to, because for the most part, nobody is asking you to do it.

No, in fact, usually the opposite.

Right, I mean almost everybody will say, of course, we would love to read a novel. Everybody wants to read everybody's creative output. But then you've got your parents saying, well, can't you get away to do this thing? Your kids saying, can't you get away to help me with lunch and dinner and breakfast and everything in between? And other people around you who support you in theory, but then also don't really want you to have the time that it would take.

Yeah, and then there’s the internal critique, too. I'm always like, well, this is my kids' childhoods, and I don't want to be absent from it or feel like I wish I was in a room by myself writing. Do you have that push-pull?

Oh yeah. That's part of why I'm a nighttime writer, because I don't want to do it at a time when it's going to take away from time spent with them either. And I feel like, as a mom who works outside of the home, there is already so much that I am borrowing from them that I don't want to add to it with things that are sort of more optional. And so with touring with Company and stuff, I've been on a few different trips and I have lots of examples of doing things in a logistical way that would make no sense if not for kids, like taking a red eye and then taking the next day's red eye so that I only miss one dinner time or sleeping on a train that was parked in Philadelphia for three hours so that I didn't have to call and have somebody come and pick me up but still be there in time for them to have breakfast and just all of these crazy things that really are the result of it has to fit into the margins without interfering any further with them.

But that's harder on you. Do you ever feel frayed, burning that candle at both ends, as they say?

Oh, yes. Oh, a hundred percent. I think that that's the necessary trade-off. I mean, I feel very lucky that I get to also have writing be part of my life when it's not my central career. And so I think that if I'm going to fit it in, then the trade-off has to be that the person that it costs is going to be me. So I don't ideally want it to take away from anybody else or from my work that has where I get my healthcare from. And so yeah, that's the only choice, really.

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