"My Identity Was Completely Lost"

A Conversation with Sarah Seltzer

I’m a pretty speedy and efficient person in most areas of my life so it’s been somewhat destabilizing to realize that I’m a slow writer. Part of it is the four kids and the full time-job, for sure. But even when I get the words down, I need a lot of time to sit with them and figure out why I’ve written them, by which I mean what bigger conversations they’re trying to be a part of and then what needs to happen to turn it all into something I’m happy with. This means that I end up spending a lot of time feeling behind or like I should be moving faster and so it brought me great joy to read this profile of the 93-year-old Italian artist Isabella Ducrot. Ducrot only began making art in her fifties (she mostly paints and works with textiles but she also writes) and was mostly unknown outside of Italy until about five years ago. The profile has some great quotes on being close to death (“I am terrified…But happiness is another thing. I think I am helped by the words that come to me—words are more generous with me now”), on writing in the morning (“During the day, I am absolutely normal…but in the morning I write very intelligent things”), and on women and aging (“I think life, for women, begins at sixty…because then we begin to be free”) and all of it made me think about how unhelpful our cultural ideas about youth and our sense that everything has to be happening at the same time are for actually making stuff.  

Lilith Executive Editor Sarah Seltzer’s debut novel, The Singer Sisters, centers on a folk legend who writes a bunch of beautiful and influential songs as a young person and then steps out of the spotlight and the creative rat race once she has children. The book is a lot of things but what I loved most about it was its complex portrayal of a woman making decisions about art and family, a mother who comes to understand that there are seasons of a person’s life and different choices to be made in each of them. Sarah has edited a couple of my essays and when, in the midst of COVID chaos, I saw that she was working on a novel, I started rooting for her and never stopped. I hope you’ll read on for our conversation about the burden of being told as a child that you should be a writer, what COVID lockdowns did for her novel, and the Alanis to Britney shift of the late 1900s.

Photo Credit: Kurt Sneddon

There's a kind of young person who thinks, for much of their young life maybe one day I'll write a novel. Or maybe other people say to them, hey, you should write a novel. But then that person gets busy with all sorts of things like making a living and starting a family and they get to a certain age and realize that if they want to write a novel, they should probably try and write a novel. Does this resonate? Can you talk to me about your journey to writing this book? 

Yeah, so I'm definitely one of those people. I mean, I think that from the moment I read Emily of New Moon and Little Women around the same time in second grade, which is how old my oldest is now, I was like, ‘oh, well, they want to be writers and I really like these books, so I want to be a writer too.’ And I think it is a blessing and a curse when you tell a kid they're really good at something. I did get a lot of feedback from the adults in my life. My poems were really good and my writing was good. I wanted to do other things too, but definitely it became sort of this driving idea, this organizing idea of what my life is going to look like. But I also really loved journalism and so in ninth grade I was going out for the school newspaper and I would say in high school that became sort of the organizer of my social life and my ambition was around journalism. And in college too, I did the college paper. I kept trying to quit and be an activist, like a labor activist, but I kept coming back to journalism. I think I'm just really, really curious about stuff. I feel like that's what makes journalism appealing for me is I need to know things. And I always did some creative writing. In college I studied poetry, actually, and creative nonfiction. But I think fiction was so- I was so haunted by this idea that it was my destiny that I couldn't sit down and take it seriously for a long time. And I would try to write short stories but I wasn't trying in the way that I was trying with my essays or even my poetry.

Yeah, my older kids have all said to me at one point or another, ‘I want to be a writer,’ or ‘I want to write a book,’ because they love books so much and I’m like, the vicious cycle continues.

Yeah, and it took me a long time. I did write a novel in my twenties that was a dry run. And then I think at that point I realized that I needed to take it seriously and go get an MFA. I was freelancing at that point and then I got a halftime job with blogging because that was what people got hired to do way back then, blogging and running a newsletter. And I learned that there were these low residency programs where you could go up to Vermont and write twice a year. And that just really captured my imagination. So I did that, and that's when I started kind of taking it more seriously, I would say. So that was 12 years ago.

You went for fiction?

Yeah, I studied fiction, exactly and realized that, despite having been a reader my whole life, a really good reader of fiction, I didn't really understand how to break it down and write it.

It's amazing how those are two very different things, right?

Totally different.

And did you have a sense of the kind of book you wanted to write at that point?

So at that point I was writing very serious short stories about- I mean, they were funny too, but they were all about loss. I lost a friend, a friend of my brother's, very tragically right after college. I wrote about other stuff, too, but I think that was the emotional hole that was calling to me while I was getting my MFA. And I tried to turn them into a collection and then I tried to turn them into a novel. And then I got pregnant with kid number one. And then about a year and a half into parenthood, I just started this book from scratch. And I took a manuscript generating class, which was really fun. And it was a completely different feeling. It was like, this is for me, this is for fun. This is a passion project rather than something that I felt like I had to do to prove that I was a serious writer.

Can you talk a little more about that contrast, between the more institutional face of fiction, the MFA, and those more community-based programs that hire MFAs but don’t give them out?

Yeah, so the MFA, I mean, you're surrounded by such good writers. I think that you listen to people reading and they're just reading the most lyrical- you listen to the poets, their stuff makes you cry. And people at my MFA, there was a lot of experimental writing and hybrid writing, and it was so inspiring to listen to and to be around. And you're reading James Joyce short stories and Flannery O'Connor with an eye to sort of how they did it. And so of course, I think when you're there, you're aiming to sound a little bit more like everything you're hearing, you can't help it. That was good and important. And when I got to the community-based class, the Sackett Street class, it was just different because everyone's goal was just to get their work done. And so everyone was doing really different things. There were people doing more literary novels and more commercial novels, and I think maybe there was a memoir or two in the class. It was completely different. There wasn't so much of that melting pot, like fermenting thing that you have at the MFA where everyone's reading great literature and listening to each other. It was much more like a group of people with a common goal. And so both are really valuable, I think. And I also think that if you read my short stories and then you read the novel, you wouldn't think they were that different. They're both dialogue heavy and-

The DNA is the same

The DNA is the same and it just felt like what animated them was different. One was trying to make a statement about life and the other was having fun with my characters.

So you had the idea for the novel and then decided to do the manuscript generator as a way to get it done?

Yeah, so I got the idea around 2010. There was a Leonard Cohen movie that came out, there was Pete Seeger's 90th birthday party, there was Kate McGarrigle’s memorial concert. And I had a lot of free time and cable was still a thing so I was watching- there's this cable channel called Palladia that was just concert films all the time. So I was watching a lot just sort of in the background while I was working and doing my freelancing, A lot of Woodstock over and over again, a lot of concerts over and over again. And in the Leonard Cohen movie, several folk dynasties that show up. There's Teddy Thompson whose parents are Richard and Linda Thompson, and there's the Wainwright McGarrigle family. At some point at one of those shows, I don't remember which one, I was like, oh wow, what would make a great novel is a family of folk singers who all put their feelings about each other in their songs and also are communicating by singing folk standards, but the way they're singing it is an emotional back and forth between them that maybe we don't understand as the audience, but we feel like we're part of something. And clearly there were all these old friends at the Pete Seeger conference, old friends and comrades were coming out and singing together. So there was such interpersonal stuff happening in these folk shows that I kind of put it in my back pocket. I was like, well, I'm surprised someone hasn't written this book yet.

I love that. Like the Little Red Hen, then I will do it myself.

Totally. And then I remember at some point when my oldest was a baby, writing down one page of notes to myself about it, and then not going back to it.

So you have this idea before you have kids.

Yes. I had the idea before I had kids, still working on the MFA stories. And also I was at the late Great Flavorwire website, which was a writing job. So I was just really busy with that, and I was working really hard there, and that was taking up most of my writing energy. So that was what I was doing with myself when I got pregnant. And then by the time I really started working on the book in earnest, I was at Kveller where I was editing, not writing, and I was sort of consumed by parenthood because I had a new baby and I was now working at a parenting website and my identity was completely lost. And I don't think that I understood that that was going to happen because I was just, you know, lean in, take a job.

We can do it all.

We do everything. And then editing content about parenting, being a parent all happening so fast. And at Flavorwire, I had been going to movie screenings and discussions and q and a, it was very intellectual and heady. So just all that felt suddenly gone and I think it in some ways was good because that sense of loss fueled the novel.

Yeah, can I say that it was a relief to read a story about a creative woman who wants to make art but doesn't, or she does, but then she doesn't for a long time, and it's not this absolutely terrible thing? Can you talk about creating Judie’s complex relationship to art and parenting?

I think some of the more anguished passages where she wants to create art and she can't probably I wrote in or I made more intense during Covid.

Yeah, there’s one moment that just nailed something so real, which is that Judie, a former folk sensation, is taking her kids to school and she's watching them watch a butterfly. And she hadn't wanted to write songs for a while but now something stirs inside of her and she does want to write a song, but then a mom stops her and wants to talk to her about this or that, and by the time she gets home, it's totally gone. And I was like, I bet I know where that came from but it’s this passage that conveys how fragile it all is and how easily the domestic overwhelms the artistic.

And just the every day, particularly if you're not particularly gifted at the every day, which I'm not. It's a huge effort for me. I don't know if anyone is, but it feels to me like other moms have it more together.

Yeah, that's what they want you to think.

The logistics are so overwhelming. And I tried to put that in about how the logistics of being a parent and just like an adult can be so overwhelming. And it's not just that you don't have time to write or be creative, but that you're drowning in checkbooks and trips to the grocery store and one domestic disaster after another. Right now we have to get a new fridge and a new bed for my little guy, and I'm like, when am I going to find even two hours?

Yeah, it’s time for my youngest to be in a bed which means people switching rooms and the kids keep asking about it but I am at the point in my life where I understand how much time that's going to take and what that means for everything else. Anyway, you're saying that a lot of the parts about creativity were COVID fueled.

I really didn't get a chance to work on the book a lot during COVID. Partly because I had a second baby. And so when I finally came back to it, I was very fired up. And I think I put a lot of those scenes in, or I just sort of touched them up to make them more intense of just the sort of anguish of losing that creative spark. But it was also really important for me to say that there are so many ways to measure a life, and that fame and creativity are not the only ways, and that relationships- not to give anything away, but part of what Judie has to do is repair a bunch of relationships in her life. And she does work on that, and she is repairing her relationships by the end. And that's in some ways, as important or important in a different way than her songwriting. And also sort of a third thread there is also the way her creativity is coming into their lives, even when they're not realizing it, even when she's not on stage performing. She's helping the other creative people in her family, including her kids and her sister and her husband with their creativity and their songs, and she's there.

Yeah, I felt that there was this very moving argument for the creative capacities of motherhood, and not always in the way we’re used to thinking about it. We're used to pushing back on this notion of women as the creative helpers, right? We're so past the Dorothy Wordsworth of it all, the Vera Nabokov. You know what I mean? You can write your own books. You don't have to just help the man write his books or whatever. But I thought what this novel did so beautifully was to present this idea that someone's creative output has tendrils and it impacts not only her family but so many other people who are trying to make things. It's a different type of motherhood. Being an artistic mother to someone is a real thing and I found that very powerful because everyone's talking about how she gave it up, but it's still there, especially in the interplay between Judie and her daughter Emma, who is trying to have a career in music in the 90s. And as someone who grew up with the music of the ‘60s and ‘90s in constant conversation, at least in my own head, I loved the combination of those two eras and bringing them up against each other. Where did that happen in the process? Did you always know it was going to be both?

I think it was pretty natural. I think growing up in the ‘90s, what was so crazy about it, and I'm sensing that you relate, was that I was discovering the sixties at the same time as the culture at large was also rediscovering the ‘60s because of the rule of nostalgia or whatever. All of a sudden there are bell bottoms everywhere at Urban Outfitters, and you have Jewel and Sarah McLaughlin and Jakob Dylan, and all these artists who were really deliberately throwing back to Joni Mitchell and Crosby Stills and Nash and all that late ‘60s, early ‘70s folk rock. It was really that brief period, I guess it was like ‘96 to ‘98 where that kind of rock was really, really popular, which was when I was in middle school. So really important in terms of my listening and the Indigo Girls and stuff that was less mainstream too, and Ani DiFranco, it just felt like everyone was kind of on that same page where everyone was into Bob Dylan.

I actually didn’t even notice that there was a revival because my whole life had been about Bob Dylan, and I'm just like, well, of course everybody’s dad worships Bob Dylan and everyone has a brother named Jakob with a K for that reason. I don't know. But I loved your focus on the women artists. I don’t know if you've read Allison Yarrow’s ‘90s Bitch, but the whole Emma storyline was really evocative of the way the women of my era were kind of seen as trash, or they were making all these mistakes, or they were saying the wrong thing, or they didn't look right.

They were so cut down.

And now obviously as an adult, I can look back and I understand what that was about but at the time, I think it felt, or it was cast as ‘look how far we've fallen.’ You know what I mean? This is the kind of music we used to have, and this is what we have now.

Yeah, I mean, part of that must've been just because the singers were all so popular and Lilith Fair was such a phenomenon, and it was a backlash that we weren't even aware it was happening. And then, I mean, I love Britney and the Spice Girls, but it was a pretty shocking transition that from Alanis being the girl in what, ’95? And then within a few years it was the Spice Girls and Britney everywhere. I mean, that's a huge shift, and I think that really did impact me. Again, I was always happy to dance to those songs at Sweet Sixteens or whatever. I didn't have anything against them, but it was momentous, and now we’re kind of back and in some ways even better with all these- there's amazing stuff happening with women in rock and roll, but it took a long time.

And these women are so confident. It's amazing to see. I am so happy for my daughters and I'm happy for myself that I get to be a parent of this era of daughters because obviously there are people who don't speak nicely about Taylor Swift but Taylor Swift doesn't care, or she's too rich to care, and she's going to write a song about you, and it's not the same. They don't seem to be as vulnerable, I guess. So that's interesting to me. I'm watching my oldest discover music now, and it's very, very different in a lot of significant ways. So in terms of actually writing this book, how did you get it out?

It was like three years of writing, but spread out over five years. There was a two year break in the middle because my husband also had a health thing and there was being pregnant with baby number two and COVID.

Did you ever feel like, there's no way to make this work, I can't do this?

Yeah, I was convinced. You remember what it was like during the height of lockdown? I mean, I remember thinking to myself, I'm never going to write again. There was one day during COVID where I went into the office and locked the door and downloaded Scrivener and moved the document onto Scrivener and did some rearranging so that it started with the ‘90s, and that was the one day of work I did in a really long period of time. And I missed it, I had been really excited about it. I mean, I had been working on it for two years, and I knew that I needed to do another vigorous round of revisions or two. You know, I wouldn't ever say that any of that stuff that happened was a blessing because it was horrible, but I do think coming to the book with fresh eyes after two years did make it easier to chop it up and rearrange it, and I was also just so happy to be able to work on it. So it wasn't like a chore, like I must work on the novel. It was like, yay, I get to work on the novel. That was an unexpected benefit of the long break. So it was like two years, then two years of COVID, then another year. Then I got my agent, and then we worked on it for six months, and then I worked on it again with my editor. So overall, it's been the better part of a decade. Seven years total from conception to publication.

That’s a lot, but also normal.

There's been almost two years between selling it and publishing it too.

But then it's a thing that's happening, which is a different state of being. But to get to the point of selling it, you have to have a tremendous amount of faith in yourself, especially through COVID and having babies and all that stuff. I wanted to ask you about genre, what kind of genre were you writing into and did that change at all as you moved toward publication?

I think when I started it, I was calling it The Singers, not The Singer Sisters, and I was maybe going for more of a big family epic and maybe a little more literary. And I had different points of view and some were first person and there was a section that was a sort of journalism piece about the family, and I ended up making it The Singer Sisters and sticking to a tight third person perspective of the women in the family. And so it did kind of move towards what you would call women's fiction or something a little more commercial as I was editing it. But I also felt that that was true to the book and what the book needed.

it seems to me like so much contemporary fiction right now is in first person, and I love third person so much.

I like third person. I'm a Jane Austen fanatic, so I love how she goes in and out of her character's perspectives in third person. Some people have found it really enjoyable, and then some people are like, where's the first person? But that was always sort of how I was going to do it. And the commercial versus literary stuff is really tricky. I think as I get to know other authors and I see that there's no- titles are so important. So my book is going to get compared a lot organically, not even by my publisher, to Daisy Jones and the Six, which is a very commercial book, which I love.

How do you see the distinction between the two books?

I just think that it's an incredibly quick read and you understand why the characters do what they do. I think maybe that's the distinction, whereas a slightly more upmarket or literary book, there's more mystery. It's a little more enigmatic and sometimes the language is more elevated. I'm not going to make that claim for my book. But yeah, that there's more left up to the reader, I think. I love Taylor Jenkins Reid, and I love Emily Henry. I love that stuff. But yeah, it's really comfortable to read because the discomfort comes from the emotional stuff that's happening to the characters and the journey you're on. Whereas I think when you're reading Elena Ferrante or something, you really have to do some work yourself to figure out what's going on with the characters, why they're acting the way they're acting,

And your sense of it can shift over time too.

Totally. I mean, I've been thinking that I need to reread the whole Ferrante series I think I read them before I had kids,

Oh yeah, you need to,

Or maybe I had one baby, I don't remember. But yeah, I’ve got to go back and I'm sure I would get something completely different out of them. I love genre fiction, I love romance novels. It's nothing against it, it's just that the goals are different, I think, and readers expect certain things. So it's something that I think authors in all genres deal with, which is your book is being compared to another book, but it’s not- it’s your own book.

They're all precious snowflakes and we need to consider them on their own terms but those are the realities of the marketplace. Were you always on the same page with your publisher in terms of where this book was nesting, genre-wise?

Yeah, definitely. It's been really smooth with my publisher and I think my editor, my agent and I, we're all moms- this doesn't have to be this way at all, but we all happen to be sort of the same demographic, at least age-wise, within 10 years of each other. And music all means something to us in different ways, but so we can email and be like, look, Sarah McLaughlin's on tour, perfect timing for the book.

That's so great, and lucky.

They understand. And so that's all been totally fine. The book is coming out in England the same day, and it's definitely being marketed more commercially there, but I think that's just how they market.

Oh, that's so interesting.

They market books differently there, and it's really emphasizing that it's a pleasure read and a summer book, even using the same blurbs, picking out different words.

I feel like you do interiority so well in this book, and that to me always feels way more literary.

Yeah, I mean, I think I definitely gravitate towards characters like thinking and talking more than doing. A book of just character being around with a cup of coffee.

For me it’s just minds having conversations with each other. They don’t even need to drink anything. Their mouths are only for the conversations they have after they think a lot.

Yeah, I think it's interesting. That's maybe something that the MFA was good at teaching me was on a short story or even a level of a scene. You want to be always kind of going back and forth between summary and scene. And so I think that was important and something that just stuck with me as I was writing on a larger level, like interiority action, interiority, going back and forth. And I just liked having passages where my characters- a sort of favorite passage for me is Emma just walking around in the middle of the night in Providence because she's missed her ride to Boston, and I don't even know where that came from, but she's stomping around in her combat boots, getting blisters and thinking about stuff, and then there's the long scenes of her mom up in New Hampshire by herself in the winter time. Both of those scenes were early scenes that I wrote. So I think part of that was getting to know the characters myself. It was just giving myself a chance to let them think and kind of walk around by themselves.

I don't always interview writers who have jobs aside from writing the book that they've just written so I wanted to talk to you about that because we've covered the parenting and the domestic balance, but that's another spinning plate in the air, right?

Yeah, it is. I really like my job. There's a social element to it, especially now that we're back in the office where it's really nice to be around other people talking about ideas. And I think it's important for me- aside from the fact that it's a great magazine and I'm proud of it, and it's given me connection to so many amazing, smart Jewish feminists, including you, and my boss, who's a role model for me and all that. I also just think on a very basic level, it's good for me to have somewhere to go. It helps balance things out in the house that I have an office that I go to and people that I'm accountable to that are not just my kids, and it is a much more flexible job than my husband's. He works for a huge magazine that comes out every two weeks, and mine comes out every three months.

But that can be hard because the more flexible person usually ends up doing more.

Right, you're doing more of the dentist appointments. I mean, having two kids – I don't know how you do it – we have to split up a lot. Having a second kid really is an equalizer in a way that nothing else is because someone has to bring kid number two to school on the day the kid number one is off. There's always sort of two demands. It does mean that I am doing of the running around and picking up, but there's enough structure that I don't feel like I'm completely at everyone's beck and call, but it's hard. Like anyone who's working and parenting in any capacity, I always feel like I'm letting somebody down. On the days where I come into the office and I buckle down, I always feel guilty because I didn't pick up anything for dinner or whatever and left the house a complete mess in the morning. But on the days where I have to leave work early to go to a performance or something, I also feel bad. And then I always feel bad that I'm not writing. I was just at my old MFA program talking to the current students and one of the things I said, which I’ll have to put to the test when we get to 2025, there's no writing routine that works for every era of life. So now that the book is out, I'm going to have to find a whole new way of fitting it in.

Yeah, that new routine for different stages is such a thing. When I was writing my dissertation I had to rotate coffee shops because at a certain point each one would lose whatever it originally had that made me productive. It’s dumb things like that that keep it all going.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And right now my writing days are Fridays, which is not great because there's always some work stuff or household stuff that’s hanging over from the rest of the week. And I'm also just tired. So I think if I get serious about writing another book or going back to short stories, I'll have to probably put a bloc of weekend time in somewhere or a weeknight, and I have no idea how that's going to work, but if I want it, that's what I'm going to have to do.

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