Podcast appearances and mentions of Stephanie Danler

In Episode 196, Sarah and Catherine of Gilmore Guide to Books catch up on the 12 new releases they shared in the Spring 2025 Book Preview, now that they've read them. They share their reading stats, chat about what worked — and hash out which books didn't work and why.  This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Our Printable Cheatsheet for the 2025 Summer Reading Guide is available to anyone who signs up for either a 7-Day FREE TRIAL of our Patreon Community (sign up here) OR a 30-day FREE TRIAL of our paid Substack Community (sign up here). We offer the same bonus content on both platforms for just $7 per month. Sign-ups for our Free Trials (and access to the Summer Reading Guide Cheatsheet) will close on Friday, May 23. Get the Cheatsheet from Patreon Get the Cheatsheet from Substack Highlights Catherine is rocking a 100% success rate for spring! Sarah had another barbell season with two 5-star books and 3 DNFs with a 50% success rate. Catherine has a mix of darker and lighter books from spring, leaning into what is currently working. Now that Sarah doesn't have to balance reading for the 2025 Summer Reading Guide and the Spring Preview, Sarah hopes her summer reading will fare better. They name the best and worst books picks for spring! Books We Read Before the Preview [3:37] April Sarah's Picks The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett (Apr 29) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [4:04] Spring 2025 Circle Back [5:27] April Sarah's Picks The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [8:38] I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[15:40] The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff (Apr 22) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [21:14] Gold Coast Dilemma by Nana Malone (Apr 29) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [31:27] Catherine's Picks Cat's People by Tanya Guerrero (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [5:32] Heartwood by Amity Gaige (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [12:12] Other Books Mentioned The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh (2022) [8:48]  Talk to Me by John Kenney (2019) [15:58]   About a Boy by Nick Hornby (1998) [17:26] I Could Live Here Forever by Hanna Halperin (2023) [24:24]  May Sarah's Picks Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle (May 20) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [38:57] Catherine's Pick Home of the American Circus by Allison Larkin (May 6) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [18:16] The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North (May 13) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [26:35]  Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding by Lian Dolan (May 20) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [35:23] Storybook Ending by Moira Macdonald (May 27) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[42:02] Other Books Mentioned The Angel Maker by Alex North (2023) [26:44] Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler (2016) [41:02]  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022) [41:08]  Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020) [41:13]  Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune (2021) [41:19]  The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020) [41:23]    

In Ep. 194, Catherine (@GilmoreGuide) and Sarah head back to the year 2017 in the book world with this second annual special retrospective episode!  They share big bookish highlights for that year, including book news, award winners, and what was going on in the world outside of reading. They also talk about how their own 2017 reading shook out, including their favorite 2017 releases.  Plus, a quick run-down of listener-submitted favorites!  This episode is overflowing with great backlist titles to add to your TBR!   This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Highlights The big news that was going on outside the book world. The book stories and trends that dominated 2017. How similar 2017 and 2025 are. The 2017 books that have had staying power.⁠ Was this as dismal a year in books as Sarah remembers? Sarah's and Catherine's personal 2017 reading stats.⁠ Listener-submitted favorites from 2017.⁠ Bookish Time Capsule (2017) [2:12] The World Beyond Books No books mentioned in this segment. The Book Industry Wonder by R. J. Palacio (2012) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [9:59] Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur (2015) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [10:04] A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[10:40] The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [10:44] Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [12:08] My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [12:18] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:03] If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:13] We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [13:23] Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:46] Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:48] The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [13:50] Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (2025) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [14:57] Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [15:03] James by Percival Everett (2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [15:04] Bookish Headlines and Trends Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [20:41] A Promised Land by Barack Obama (2020) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [20:43] The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (2006) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [20:48] My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [23:04] The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring (2023) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [23:31] Big Books and Award Winners of 2017 A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (2012) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:01] Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:06] The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [26:21] Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:27] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [26:48] Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (2022) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [28:09] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [28:39] Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [29:23] Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [29:40] Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [31:31] Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2008) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [32:09] Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [32:51] Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [33:16] Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [33:41] Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [34:32] Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [34:38] Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [35:09] The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [35:52] What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [36:56] Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [37:21] The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [37:45] Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (2016) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [38:04] The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, 3) by N. K. Jemisin (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [38:30]  Our Top Books of 2017 The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [40:46] Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [41:20] Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [41:22] Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:02] If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:16] Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolitio (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:23] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:36] This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [42:38] Trophy Son by Douglas Brunt (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [42:48] White Fur by Jardine Libaire (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [43:05] Final Girls by Riley Sager (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [46:38] Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [46:44] Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [46:46] Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [46:49] The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:10] Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman (1995) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:15] Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:19] The Heirs by Susan Rieger (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:34] The Takedown by Corrie Wang (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [47:53] Feast of Sorrow by Crystal King (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [48:01] Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [48:09] Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) | Amazon | Bookshop.org   [48:17] Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [48:28] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [48:33] Listeners' Top Books of 2017 Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [49:33] Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [49:51] The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:03] The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[50:07] Beartown by Fredrik Backman (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [50:13] Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:15] The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [50:18] The Alice Network by Kate Quinn (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [50:24] This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:25] Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong (2017) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:27]

Welcome to the Spring 2025 Book Preview with Catherine of Gilmore Guide to Books!   Today, Catherine and Sarah share 12 of their most anticipated books releasing in April and May.   This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Announcement Sarah's Bookshelves has joined Substack! Please note, we're not MOVING to Substack, we're simply adding Substack to the places we already put out content. On our FREE Substack feed, Sarah's Bookshelves is offering all the content you already find on the blog, my Instagram account, public podcast, On our PAID feed, we're offering all the content we also offer on Patreon. If you're interested in becoming a paying subscriber on Substack, visit sarahsbookshelveslive.substack.com for all the details and a full list of benefits. If you're already on Substack, please consider following the FREE feed and sharing with your reader friends to help support the show. One of the many benefits to joining as a paying member of either our Patreon or Substack Communities is gaining access to several bonus podcast episode series, including Book Preview Extras! In these episodes, Catherine and Sarah share at least 4 bonus books we are excited about that were not shared in the big show preview episode. Get more details about all the goodies available to all Superstar patrons here and all Substack paid subscribers here! Highlights Catherine and Sarah share some big releases coming this spring (lightning round style). With a theme this season of “change,” Catherine focuses on lighter fiction and thrillers. Sarah's choices are evenly split between debut authors, new to her authors, and repeat authors. Food novels, rom-coms, thrillers (two with a mistaken identity element), and lighter reading are the picks for spring! Sarah has already read one of her picks — and one of Catherine's! And, Catherine has already started reading one of hers. Plus, their #1 picks for the spring. Big Spring Releases [5:15]  The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (May 13) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [5:43] The Dark Maestro by Brendan Slocumb (May 13) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [5:47] Say You'll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [5:56] Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson (May 13) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [6:03] Vera Wong's Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [6:18] The Maid's Secret by Nita Prose (Apr 8) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [6:26] Audition by Katy Kitamura (Apr 8) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [6:29] My Documents by Kevin Ngyuen (Apr 8) | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [6:44] Backlist Titles Mentioned The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb (2022) [5:51] Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb (2023) [5:53] Spring 2025 Book Preview [6:51] April Sarah's Picks The Family Recipe by Carolyn Huynh (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [9:40] I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[14:49] The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff (Apr 22) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [23:15] Gold Coast Dilemma by Nana Malone (Apr 29) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[29:28] The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett (Apr 29) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [33:42] Catherine's Picks Cat's People by Tanya Guerrero (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [12:46] Heartwood by Amity Gaige (Apr 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [18:23] Other Books Mentioned The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh (2022) [9:44]  Talk to Me by John Kenney (2019) [14:53]   About a Boy by Nick Hornby (1998) [16:48] The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (2024) [18:30] The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean (2024) [18:32] Sea Wife by Amity Gaige (2020) [22:47]  The Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner (2024) [24:45]  The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall (2019) [26:18]  Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane (2019) [26:20]  We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange (2021) [26:22]  The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo (2019) [26:25]  Yours, Eventually by Nura Maznavi  (2025) [30:58]  Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett (2022) [33:47]  The Guncle by Steven Rowley (2021) [38:04]  May Sarah's Picks Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle (May 20) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [42:16] Catherine's Pick Home of the American Circus by Allison Larkin (May 6) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [26:48] The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North (May 13) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [31:29]  Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding by Lian Dolan (May 20) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [39:56] Storybook Ending by Moira Macdonald (May 27) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[45:36] Other Books Mentioned The People We Keep by Allison Larkin (2021) [28:23]  The Angel Maker by Alex North (2023) [31:39] Lost and Found in Paris by Lian Dolan (2022) [41:25]   Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (2000) [43:42]   The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (2024) [43:54]  Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler (2016) [44:36]  Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022) [44:40]  Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2020) [44:42]  Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune (2021) [44:45]  The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020) [44:53]   Storybook Ending by Poppy Alexander (2024) [47:32] 

Your local pumpkin patch might be closed for the season, but you can still enjoy crisp, cool evenings and the crunch of fallen leaves with these autumnal reading recommendations. Check out what we talked about: "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen with readalike "Pride and Premeditation: A Jane Austen Murder Mystery" by Tirzah Price. "The Night Country" by Stewart O'Nan with readalike "Dark Tides" by Chris Ewan. "The Chandler Legacies" by Abdi Nazemian with readalike "The Maidens: by Alex Michaelides. "Nine Liars" from the "Truly Devious" series by Maureen Johnson. "Sweetbitter" by Stephanie Danler with readalike "This Tender Land" by William Kent Krueger. "The October Country" by Ray Bradbury with watchalike cartoon miniseries "Over the Garden Wall" from Cartoon Network. Briefly mentioned were the television series "Inspector Morse," "Midsomer Murders," "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," and "The Twilight Zone." To access complete transcripts for all episodes of Not Your Mother's Library, please visit: oakcreeklibrary.org/podcast Check out books, movies, and other materials through the Milwaukee County Federated Library System: countycat.mcfls.org hoopladigital.com wplc.overdrive.com oakcreeklibrary.org

Zanna Roberts Rassi is a New York-based, award-winning fashion and beauty journalist, stylist, television host, and co-founder of Milk Makeup. She is currently the Fashion-Editor-at-Large for Marie Claire, E! News fashion correspondent, NBC Today Show fashion contributor, and Target Stylist. Rassi interviews A-list celebs and is part of the E! Live from the Red Carpet team covering the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Emmy Awards. Her charismatic on-camera presence has made her a sought-after mentor, judge, stylist, and host on such properties as Project Runway All Stars, Glam Masters, E!'s Just 1 Thing, and her mini-series, Commuter Beauty and W2W.In this episode, Nada sits down with Zanna to talk about the multiple hats she has worn throughout her career. Zanna shares how her many roles each fulfilled a different aspect of who she is. She always took any opportunity that came her way. But now that she has entered her middle third, she is learning to edit, prioritizing her family and the people she wants to work with.Be sure to check out Milk's website. Zanna recommends adding a pop of red to your fall looks! She is currently reading Essentialism by Greg McKeown, Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. Follow on Instagram: @zannarassiPlease follow us at @thisislibertyroad on Instagram--that's where we hang out the most and connect with our community. And please rate and review this podcast. It helps to know if these conversations inspire and equip you to consider what's now and what's next. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's book review, we discuss: chemistry vs character"desert eyes"rehab for aneurysmshow we divide our liveslife isn't always bad, but it's always hardHow presences cures time.Why humility is required for seeking helpWhy choice is the antidote to fateDo we apply happiness in hindsight?Why objects are our historySponsor:Is there something interfering with your happiness or is preventing you from achieving your goals? https://betterhelp.com/leo and enjoy 10% off your first month and start talking to mental health professional today!! 1-on-1 Coaching: If you want go from feeling hopeless to hopeful, lonely to connected and like a burden to a blessing, then go to 1-on-1 coaching, go to www.thrivewithleo.com. Let's get to tomorrow, together. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline988Teen Line (Los Angeles)800-852-8336The Trevor Project (LGBTQ Youth Hotline)866-488-7386National Domestic Violence Hotline800-799-SAFE [800-799-7233]Crisis Text LineText "Connect" to 741741 in the USALifeline Chathttps://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/International Suicide Hotlines: http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.htmlhttps://www.nowmattersnow.org/skillshttps://sobermeditations.libsyn.com/ www.suicidesafetyplan.com https://scaa.club/

Announcement In addition to my annual 2023 Summer Reading Guide, I'm once again offering Superstars Patrons ($7/mo) exclusive access to Summer Shelves, featuring even more recommendations for the season. Summer Shelves features BACKLIST summer reading recommendations from 17 former podcast guests, our team members, and — for the first time — 20+ Superstars patrons! The Summer Shelves design is clean, crisp, and unique and you'll receive it in a PDF file format via Patreon. If you'd like to get the Summer Shelves companion guide, you can sign up to be a Superstars patron here. You'll also get access to a monthly bonus podcast series called Double Booked (where Catherine or Susie and I share our own book recommendations in the same format as the big show) and my Rock Your Reading Tracker. Also, one of the many benefits to joining our Patreon Community is that you get access to several bonus podcast episode series, including Book Preview Extras! In these episodes, Catherine and I share at least 4 bonus books we are excited about that we did not share in the big show preview episode. Get more details about all the goodies available to all patrons (Stars and Superstars) and sign up here! Get Summer Shelves Highlights Catherine's picks include 4 repeat authors! Sarah picked some debuts and several repeat authors. With no July picks, August might be the new September and July might be the new December. Sarah continues with a variety of genres and micro genres, but on the lighter side this season. Two books Sarah has already read, loved, and included in her 2023 Summer Reading Guide, including a 5-star book! Plus, their #1 picks for summer! Summer 2023 Book Preview [5:13] June Sarah's Picks: Same Time Next Summer by Annabel Monaghan (June 6) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [5:49] My Murder by Katie Williams (June 6) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [14:58] The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue (June 27) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [20:09] Invisible Son by Kim Johnson (June 27) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [27:39] Catherine's Picks: Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See (June 6) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[11:41] All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby (June 6) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[17:42]  You Can't Stay Here Forever by Katherine Lin (June 13) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [24:46]  Other Books Mentioned: Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan [6:19] The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller [9:10] Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby [19:54] Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler [24:06] Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson [24:28] One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle [26:40] This Is My America by Kim Johnson [27:49] Corrections in Ink by Keri Blakinger [28:59] The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas [29:33] August Sarah's Picks: The Art of Scandal by Regina Black (August 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[33:35]  Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (August 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [41:27] Catherine's Picks: The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin (August 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [29:52] Mobility by Lydia Kiesling (August 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [38:40] Western Alliances by Wilton Barnhardt (August 1) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[43:54]  Other Books Mentioned: Smacked by Eilene Zimmerman [33:06] Nowhere Girl by Cheryl Diamond [33:09] Seven Days in June by Tia Williams [35:24] The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling [38:45] Red Notice by Bill Browder [40:48] Commonwealth by Ann Patchett [42:15] The Dutch House by Ann Patchett [42:18] These Precious Days by Ann Patchett [43:42] Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt [45:25] All That Is Mine I Carry With Me by William Landay [46:56] The Marriage Act by John Marrs [47:49]

For writers like Sweetbitter's Stephanie Danler, getting popular on #BookTok presents a more existential problem.

Once a married waitress in her late 20s, my dear friend and best selling author put everything on the line in order to go to grad school. The result? Her smash hit novel, Sweetbitter, and a career as a writer. We talk slumber parties, the beginning of our friendship (which involves DMs and my therapist) as well as the writing process, privilege and likability. A Sony Music Entertainment, Somethin' Else, and Bitch Era Media production.  Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts   To bring your brand to life on this podcast, email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Graydon Carter joins Ashley and Mike to discuss AIR MAIL's first-ever special issue, devoted entirely to downtown New York. In addition, James Wolcott takes us on a tour of CBGB, the Mudd Club, and some of the other notorious (and now gone) rock clubs from the 70s and 80s. And speaking of music: Chris Black reports on Electric Lady, the Greenwich Village recording studio started by Jimi Hendrix, while Stephanie Danler shares her memories of seeing a pre-fame Lady Gaga in 2006 at Pianos. All this and more make this week's show one you won't want to miss.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Stephanie Danler's debut novel, Sweetbitter, is the coming-of-age story of a young New York transplant who lands a job at one of the city's top restaurants. Danler talks with editor-at-large Christine Muhlke about her real-life experiences as a waitress in NYC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Now celebrating its fifth season, Storybound is a radio theater program designed for the podcast age. Hosted by 2021 KCRW Radio Race winner Jude Brewer, Storybound presents the voices of today's best writers reading accomplished works of fiction and non-fiction. You'll also hear original music specially composed for the respective text. Needless to say, it's an immersive storytelling experience. The episode we're sharing today features Stephanie Danler reading from her Stray, a memoir about what happens after you've achieved success without fully processing your past. It's a bracing, honest, and sometimes painful book, and on Storybound, you hear it straight from Stephanie.  If you enjoy what you hear, make sure to follow Storybound (for free) wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cette semaine, il y a le festival Marseille Series Stories qui s'intéresse aux adaptations de livres, et c'était l'occasion de proposer une reco du weekend sur ce thème avec des titres à foison. Ces trois séries sont disponibles sur Starzplay et n'oublions pas que la saison 2 de Power Book II: Ghost sort samedi. Sweetbitter Sweetbitter c'est avant tout l'histoire d'une jeune femme qui sort à peine de l'adolescence et qui se cherche. Basée sur le livre de Stephanie Danler, la dramédie de Starz suit Tess, arrivée à New York en débarquant de sa province natale. Notre ingénue a encore du mal à s'habituer à la grande ville, et surtout elle est en manque de sous. Elle réussit par un certain miracle à décrocher un job de serveuse dans un restaurant huppé de la ville. Dans son nouveau monde qui commence à la porte d'entrée et qui finit aux poubelles derrière le restaurant, ses collègues vont être les seules personnes qu'elle côtoie. Ce qui veut dire qu'elle va tomber amoureuse, connaître la jalousie et la rivalité, mais qu'elle va aussi voir sa vie évoluer. https://youtu.be/cpU7r1bVHng Il y a une simplicité dans la série qu'on savoure comme un petit plat. Le monde a des limites, et Tess n'essaye pas vraiment de les dépasser car elle n'a pas compris cerner ces limites. Le spectateur parfois se sent à l'étroit et voudrait en voir un peu plus, mais la série s'en contente. C'est le défaut et la qualité de Sweetbitter qui réussit parfaitement à naviguer dans son monde avec une belle photographie et une approche sincère de la vie newyorkaise difficile, mais qui manque d'ambition. Le cast est parfois sous-exploité, notamment Caitlin FitzGerald (qui l'était déjà dans Masters of Sex), mais tous ont des moments de fulgurances très enthousiasmants. Ella Purnell (actuellement dans Yellowjackets) en provinciale naïve a gagné en maturité et s'est approprié un rôle sur mesure. La série a été annulée au bout de deux saisons mais demeure toujours agréable à visionner, entre douceur et amertume et surtout, on ne reste pas indifférent à cette envie de s'en sortir dans une grande ville. Brave New World Adaptée du roman culte Le meilleur des mondes d'Aldous Huxley, cette dystopie de Sky par David Wiener (Homecoming) remet au goût du jour la dystopie que tout le monde connaît. Dans une société où tout est contrôlé y compris les émotions, ce n'est pas simple de penser par soi-même. Les vies de Lenina (Jessica Brown Findlay) et Bernard (Harry Lloyd) vont être bouleversées quand une personne externe au système va débarquer. John le sauvage (Alden Ehrenreich) ne s'intègre pas si bien que ça, et surtout il va secouer tous les aprioris de tout le monde. https://youtu.be/qq5J2DIF7ls Le parallèle de ce que décrit Aldous Huxley et le monde d'aujourd'hui aurait pu être une comparaison très intéressante, malheureusement la mini-série en neuf épisodes ne s'aventure pas si loin. Il s'agit d'une adaptation assez libre, avec une emphase sur la perception de l'art qui est vraiment originale. Brave New World se veut provocateur, jusqu'en oublier de passer du temps à développer ses personnages. Mais il y a quelque chose de malsain et de fascinant dans la série, ressentis partagés à la lecture du livre également. Il est difficile de résister aux scènes d'orgies et de violence et c'est l'aspect dystopique qui maintient en haleine. Si l'approfondissement philosophique et politique pourrait être plus poussé, on peut toujours compter sur le format sériel qui reste un bon divertissement solide. Castle Rock On finit sur une sorte d'adaptation mais pas vraiment. Castle Rock n'est pas adaptée d'un titre spécifique du prolifique Stephen King mais est largement inspirée de son œuvre. En effet, Castle Rock est une ville fictive inventée par le maître de l'horreur quelque part dans le Maine. Elle sert de cadre à Dead Zone, mais aussi à Bazaar. Créée par Dustin Thomason et Sam Shaw (le duo derrière Manhattan) et produite par JJ Abrams en association avec Stephen King, Castle Rock se voit promu en pièce principale pour une série. Les deux saisons sont distinctes l'une de l'autre, le lien étant la ville uniquement. La première tourne autour de protagonistes campés par Bill Skarsgård, Melanie Lynksey ou encore Sissy Spacek, tandis que la deux s'arrête sur Lizzy Caplan, Paul Sparks ou encore Tim Robbins. https://youtu.be/b7TYOzh3Gzk Des personnages des romans de Stephen King vont et viennent ainsi que moult références à son œuvre. Qu'on adhère ou qu'on n'adhère pas à l'auteur, une chose est sûre : il maîtrise l'ambiance horrifique. Les histoires en elles-mêmes sont très bien ficelées et comme souvent avec l'épouvante, on flirte parfois avec le fantastique… ou est-ce la folie ? En tout cas si vous aimez le genre, Castle Rock ne vous décevra pas.

Join us as best-selling author (Sweetbitter, Stray) Stephanie Danler and her sister Christina Mannatt are interviewed together for the very first time. Danler calls her interview on Sisters Cracking Up, "The best podcast I've ever done." Danler's memoir, Stray, is one of grave childhood dysfunction which includes a drug-addicted father who abandons their family when Danler was three, and a secretly alcoholic mother who was eventually disabled by a brain aneurysm before Danler reached true adulthood. But the story behind the story is the beautiful, complex, unconditional love between herself and her sister, Christina Mannatt. Although their trauma binds them in ways only known to them, they have cobbled together lives of meaning and sense -- with each other at the center. Danler calls her relationship with her sister, the "defining relationship" of her life. Listen in as these two deeply-bonded sisters discuss a shared traumatic history and their relationship which has helped heal them both.  

Bestselling memoirist Stephanie Danler celebrates the paperback release of her most recent work Stray with author Kara Preiss and actor Emma Roberts, co-founders of the literary website Belletrist.  The trio talk about writing as a way to survive a troubled home life, the challenges, regrets, and requirements of memoir, and the fascinating taboos around money for artists and writers. (Recorded April 29, 2021)

This week on the podcast, Angela speaks with Stephanie Danler, author of the best seller Sweetbitter and her new memoir Stray. Stephanie tells Angela about confronting her past, the dangers of magical thinking, and the value of gentleness. Stray is available now and you can purchase it via the link on our website, LitUpPodcast.com. Lit Up is a podcast from Sugar23. It's hosted by Angela Ledgerwood and produced by Liam Billingham. Mike Mayer and Michael Sugar are the executive producers. This week's episode was edited by Rebecca Seidel. The theme music is by Andrey Radovsky.

This week on the podcast, Angela speaks with Stephanie Danler, author of the best seller Sweetbitter and her new memoir Stray. Stephanie tells Angela about confronting her past, the dangers of magical thinking, and the value of gentleness. Stray is available now and you can purchase it via the link on our website, LitUpPodcast.com. Lit Up is a podcast from Sugar23. It's hosted by Angela Ledgerwood and produced by Liam Billingham. Mike Mayer and Michael Sugar are the executive producers. This week's episode was edited by Rebecca Seidel. The theme music is by Andrey Radovsky.

In this week's episode, Lou talks about Stephanie Danler's 'Sweetbitter'.

We welcome internationally bestselling author, Stephanie Danler, to discuss Stray, her memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of her attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. ** We start by discussing how Stray was not the most obvious follow-up to her bestselling novel, Sweetbitter, and how she knew this was what she needed to write next (even though she didn’t want to). (01:40) ** We discuss a powerful passage from Stray in which Stephanie touches on her impulse to destroy and how she continually fights her self-destructive impulses. (04:45) ** Stephanie shares how motherhood has been about shedding identities and made her question who she is, and also how the expectations of motherhood differed wildly from her own experiences. (10:30)  ** We then discuss how motherhood is the craziest, most awe-inspiring thing we’ve ever done, but also how we need to leave more space for discussions around the challenges, shock and confusion of motherhood. (13:45)  ** In writing Stray, Stephanie wrote from her wounds, those hot spots of shame and pain. We absolutely loved hearing Stephanie’s advice on how to find those places and write from them. (23:05) **  Stephanie excels at distilling people into two types: this one is people who trust the world and people who don't. In the beginning she wasn't sure if the Love Interest would last, but a passage in Stray reveals the answer as to how she keeps moving forward in her relationship. (26:35) ** We discuss one of our favorite topics -- the unlikeable female protagonist -- and get Stephanie’s take on whether we’ve made any progress since Tess in Sweetbitter. (31:51) ** Of course we discuss astrology with Stephanie … the three of us making a fire sign trifecta of Sagittarius, Aries and Leo! Stephanie shares what it’s like to live in a house full of fire signs! (37:45) ** Stephanie reads a passage from Stray about her Southern California mysticism and we discuss whether she still embraces that skepticism. (41:15) ** Stephanie reads a portion of Frank O’Hara’s poem “Mayakovsky” and tells us why she chose to open her memoir with this particular piece of poetry, as well as the role poetry has played in her writing life. (44:05) ** Stephanie shares the books she's reading and gives us an update on the various projects she is working on right now.  Follow us on Instagram and Facebook @popfictionwomen and on Twitter @pop_women. To do a full deep dive, check out our website at http://www.popfictionwomen.com (www.popfictionwomen.com). Stay Complicated! We’ve launched a platform at patreon.com/popfictionwomen to keep making the podcast you love -- and to make it even better. Support this podcast

Writing advice from Stephanie Danler, author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter and the memoir Stray. * To listen to Stephanie's full interview with host Zibby Owens on the podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books, click here: https://bit.ly/3d3XoOt * To read (or re-read!) this writing advice, click here: https://bit.ly/3d262Ne * Want to buy STRAY? Click here: https://bit.ly/3mwuAkP * Feel inspired to write? Submit your work to Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a Medium publication. Guidelines here: https://bit.ly/3w1aQdi * Love what you hear? Subscribe! Give us a 5-star rating! Leave a comment!  * And please follow us on Instagram @momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks!

In this episode, Abby and Julie pick the brain of book publishing/publicity phenom Jordan Rodman. Jordan has fearlessly taken FIFTY books all the way to the NYT bestseller list. If anyone knows this business inside and out, it's her. By the time we're in midlife, we all have a book in us. Jordan provides the inside scoop on what it takes to get to the top of the pile, while Abby muses about her upcoming novel which never seems to get written. Prior to joining Avid Reader Press, Jordan Rodman spent five years at Alfred A. Knopf, Pantheon, and Schocken books at Penguin Random House where she developed and executed large-scale publicity campaigns for many authors including Dave Eggers, Lisa Taddeo, Stephanie Danler, Gary Taubes, Lidia Bastianich, Nathan Englander, Mike Finkel, Masha Gessen, Judy Blume, and Joan Nathan. At Avid Reader Press, Jordan oversees and executes national publicity campaigns and works to innovatively pitch and secure key media coverage and awareness across all titles. She liaises with authors, agents, booksellers, bloggers, editors, reporters, and publishers to promote books far and wide. Jordan is also on the Artistic Board of The Moth, an organization dedicating to promoting the art of storytelling.    

Stephanie Danler reads a second excerpt from her memoir "Stray" (the first can be found here) with sound design and music composition from Tim Karplus. Stephanie Danler is a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. Her memoir, Stray, was just published by Knopf on May 5, 2020. She is the author of the international bestseller, Sweetbitter, and the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter series on Starz. Her work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, and The Paris Review Daily. Her nonfiction received an Honorable Mention in Best American Essays 2018, and her criticism won the 2019 Robert B. Heilman award from the Sewanee Review. She is based in Los Angeles, California. Tim Karplus has been working as a professional musical jack-of-all-trades in Portland, Oregon for the last 9 years. When he's not playing guitar, bass, drums or keyboards with noted Portland acts such as Haley Johnsen, The Weather Machine, and Anna Tivel, Tim can be found teaching music lessons, writing songs, and producing recordings at various studios in the greater Portland area. Currently, Tim is working on a solo record while sound-mixing for the Storybound podcast. This episode is brought to you by: Audible. Visit Audible.com/Storybound or text Storybound to "500-500" for a free audiobook. Storybound is hosted by Jude Brewer and brought to you by The Podglomerate and Lit Hub Radio. Let us know what you think of the show on Instagram and Twitter @storyboundpod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: a YouTube rabbit hole and setting down the books for Netflix Current Reads: A selection of hits and misses, all of which we’re ready to discuss with nuance Deep Dive: The Books We Are Jealous That You Get to Read for the First Time. Ah, nostalgia. Book Presses: righting another wrong in the press list, and cozy comfort for when the world is too much As per usual, time-stamped show notes are below with references to every book and resource we mentioned in this episode. If you’d like to listen first and not spoil the surprise, don’t scroll down!  *Please note that all book titles linked below are Amazon affiliate links. Your cost is the same, but a small portion of your purchase will come back to us to help offset the costs of the show. Thanks for your support!*   . . . . . Book of the Month - ad: 2:03 - Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman 2:15 - Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman 2:56 - Leave the World Behind by Ruman Alam 3:02 - All Things Murderful with Meredith on Patreon 3:33 - Ties that Tether by Jane Igharo 3:55 - The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab 4:52 - Use our link and the code CURRENTLYREADING to get your first book for just $9.99! Bookish Moments: 8:02 - Winter in Narnia ASMR room 8:30 - Mr. Tumnus’ House ASMR room 8:34 - The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis 9:32 - Interior Design Masters on Netflix 9:58 - Hoarders on Netflix 10:07 - The Home Edit on Netflix Current Reads: 10:38 - Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore (Meredith) 11:06 - Listener Press Episode at the end of Season 2 14:18 - The Night Swim by Megan Goldin (Kaytee) 14:44 - Kaytee thinks January LaVoy is her BFF because of her interview with her 17:26 - The Boys Club by Erica Katz (Meredith) 17:33 - Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler 17:34 - The Firm by John Grisham 20:55 - Long Walk to FREEDOM by Nelson Mandela (you guys, I said WATER? What the heck??) (Kaytee) 24:19 - Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Meredith) 28:52 - The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner (Kaytee) 31:00 - As Bright as Heaven by Susan Meissner 31:45 - The study about Millennials and Gen Z and the Holocaust Deep Dive - Books We Are Jealous You Get to Read for the First Time: 33:10 - Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend 33:15 - The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis 33:23 - Winterhouse by Ben Guterson 33:27 - The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall 33:29 - Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery 34:38 - The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley 35:08 - Harry Potter by JK Rowling 35:59 - A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman 36:01 - This Is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel 36:03 - The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall 38:13 - Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn 38:17 - I Let You Go by Claire Mackintosh Books We Want to Press Into Your Hands: 39:38 - A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer (Meredith) 43:50 - A Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindburgh (Kaytee) 43:58 - Episode 34 of Season 1 Connect With Us: Meredith is @meredith.reads on Instagram Kaytee is @notesonbookmarks on Instagram Mindy is @gratefulforgrace on Instagram Mary is @maryreadsandsips on Instagram currentlyreadingpodcast.com @currentlyreadingpodcast on Instagram currentlyreadingpodcast@gmail.com

After a disappointing hospital birth experience author and screenwriter Stephanie Danler planned a home birth for baby number two. In this episode Stephanie returns together with her midwife Jessica Diggs to share her second labor and delivery experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each zodiac season we plan on picking a book, movie, or TV show to enjoy that really embodies the energy of the sign we are under. In this episode, we discuss why our book choice, Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler, fit Libra season perfectly and surprisingly! We also discuss french fries, #witchtok drama, and #konmarie procrastination. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/starsonthebrain)

Author and screenwriter Stephanie Danler, expecting her 2nd baby any day now, talks about the emotions of childbirth, her plan for homebirth, and the anxiety of preparing or birth during a pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we also talk about:How Katie got her start in podcasting and landed where she is todayHuman Design and how we both thrive as ProjectorsHow she copes with anxiety and what she’s learned about it through her podcastHow to navigate feeling like a “master of none” as a highly creative personMore about her newest podcast and what she’s grateful for these daysPaying attention to what we spend the most time doing effortlesslyThe importance behind human connection especially in relation to creativityKatie’s thoughts behind working full-time while building something on the sideKnowing when it’s time to start outsourcing personal projectsThe advice she’d give to her younger self Katie Dalebout WebsiteInstagram: @katiedalebout  // @letitoutttPodcasts: Let It Out // SpiralingKits: kits home // write kit // let [a podcast] out  // get 20% off using code JESS20 at checkout! Lastly, be sure to connect with Jess on Instagram @jessameltzer and to subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes if you haven’t already! New episodes released every other Tuesday. 

Stephanie Danler on Money Anxiety, Setting Boundaries That Work, and Overcoming Childhood Dysfunction

In this week's episode we cover the light and frivolous topics of time, food and death. Joy! Camilla and Elle chat about what they've been watching and listening to over the last week, from TV and music to festivals and questionable fashion choices. Camilla tries to guess the plot of In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan based on the cover alone, becoming oddly insistent it's all about acid. Your hosts also discuss visceral and greedy writing about food, gravity and the empowering nature of an unlikeable female narrator. The books discussed this week include I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell; Supper Club by Lara Williams; Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler and everything Carlo Rovelli has ever written. Follow us on Instagram @prosebeforehoespodcast or Twitter @prose_hoes_pod.

Stephanie Danler reads an excerpt from her memoir "Stray" with sound design and music composition from Naomi LaViolette. Stephanie Danler is a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. Her memoir, Stray, was just published by Knopf on May 5, 2020. She is the author of the international bestseller, Sweetbitter, and the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter series on Starz. Her work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, and The Paris Review Daily. Her nonfiction received an Honorable Mention in Best American Essays 2018, and her criticism won the 2019 Robert B. Heilman award from the Sewanee Review. She is based in Los Angeles, California. Naomi LaViolette’s original music has received great reviews and critical acclaim from media including Oregon Music News, The Oregonian, The Portland Tribune, Willamette Week, The Inessa Blog, KATU’s AM Northwest, KINK.fm, and KMHD.fm. She is praised for her songwriting and balanced combination of chops and lyricism.  This episode is brought to you by: W.W. Norton, publisher of The Journeys of Trees by Zach St. George. Get you copy wherever books are sold. Get 15-percent off you order of Raycon earbuds at buyraycon.com/storybound. Storybound is hosted by Jude Brewer and brought to you by The Podglomerate and Lit Hub Radio. Let us know what you think of the show on Instagram and Twitter @storyboundpod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Sweetbitter" author Stephanie Danler joins Lisa Birnbach to talk about her new Memoir "Stray", Surviving her early life. Family, Neglect, Love and Life, it's all so complicated! Lisa’s 5 things: 1. Family, 2. Extended family, 3. Early voting, 4. Her kitchen scale, 5. Cured of shopping via Instagram disease.Stephanie Danler’s 5 Things: 1. Poetry, 2. Meditation, 3. Marcella Hazan 4. Sequoia National Park, 5. Her Meyer lemon tree

Throughout the country, the restriction-weary public is directing its frustrations at public health officials, leading some to resign or retire. In San Diego, Dr. Wilma Wooten was verbally attacked at the county Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday and her home address was given out. Plus, criminal justice reform is now entering the San Diego mayor’s race. Candidates Todd Gloria and Barbara Bry are receiving mixed reviews from advocates. Also, the pandemic could affect the mental health of Latino teens and their political views for decades to come. In addition, Black health care workers are feeling the dual toll of the pandemic and disturbing acts of police brutality. And, it is unknown when the virus first made an appearance in San Diego, which leads some to speculate that they contracted coronavirus before it became widespread, but do they have the antibodies to prove it? Finally, Stephanie Danler’s new memoir about her parents’ struggle with addiction and her own struggle to overcome that legacy.

Tess Taylor’s previous book of poetry, Work & Days, was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Now, with her extraordinary new collection, Rift Zone, Taylor presents her most powerful and timely work yet. Rift Zone shows a critically acclaimed poet—known to many as the on-air Poetry Reviewer for NPR’s “All Things Considered”—at work on a one-of-a-kind endeavor, mapping a California and a country at the brink. Addressing issues of gun violence, homelessness, and climate change, Taylor reveals the fault lines, literal and figurative, in her Northern California hometown and our country as a whole. At the same time, Rift Zone is a deeply intimate and tender book about parenting, specifically about becoming a parent in a fraught time. Taylor is in conversation with novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Stephanie Danler. _______________________________________________ Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

Novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, reader, mother, daughter. Stephanie Danler’s title isn’t singular, and perhaps that is what makes her such a compelling storyteller. If you’ve read Stephanie’s work, you might already be aware of her gift for writing about the human experience in a way that captures your heart, and sometimes breaks it, due to her gorgeous prose and knack for capturing so many truths about what it means to exist in the world today. Her breakout novel-turned-television show, Sweetbitter, is the embodiment of this. And although it was a runaway success, Stephanie eventually slowed down and looked inward when she realized that another prominent piece of writing she had been working on needed to be told, too. It wasn’t just any story, it was her story, and it recently came to life in her newly-debuted memoir, Stray. In this interview, Stephanie spoke more about the impetus for writing Stray (and shared a small excerpt from the book), how her relationship with pace has changed, and her thoughts on slow content in our age of digital creativity. This episode also opens with a story contributed by Alessandra Angelini of The Workshop.

Ingrid and Cristina discuss their current ins and outs then reflect on the conversation from earlier in the week with Stephanie Danler about her new memoir Stray. Here's what comes up: the discomfort of receiving a compliment, the creativity of getting dressed in isolation, quarantine dreams, and rewriting the question "why is this happening to me?" Make sure you listen to Ingrid’s interview with Stephanie Danler from earlier in the week: Should I Stay or Should I Stray? https://apple.co/2LOXNG8 Sign up to get the One Step Wellness newsletter in your inbox https://mailchi.mp/e22639d0757e/onestepwellness FOLLOW FOR MORE Follow One Step on Instagram @onesteppodcast Follow Ingrid on Instagram @ingridnilsen YouTube Ingrid Nilsen https://bit.ly/2J51PJE Twitter @ingridnilsen CREDITS Producer Cristina Cleveland @cristinacleveland Sound Engineer Teng Chen @tengfoodpanda

Stephanie Danler is a novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter. She is the author of the international bestseller, Sweetbitter, and the creator and executive producer of the Sweetbitter TV series on Starz. The book and series were based on her own experience being swept up by the intoxication of the New York City restaurant scene in her twenties. Danler's work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Vogue, The New York Times, and The Paris Review. Her new memoir, Stray, (https://amzn.to/361FOpf) is a powerful reflection on the relationships, addictions, moments of awakening, revelation, and connection that defined her earlier life and shaped the person, the partner, the mother, and the writer she would become.You can find Stephanie Danler at: Website : http://www.stephaniedanler.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/smdanler/Check out our offerings & partners: LinkedIn Learning: Check out the free LinkedIn Learning courses and share them with your teams. Visit LinkedInLearning.com/GLP to explore dozens of free courses.

This week Ingrid talks to Stephanie Danler, the bestselling author of Sweetbitter and creator of the Sweetbitter series on Starz. Stephanie’s new memoir Stray comes out this week. Get ready for: the easiest way to set a boundary, the family you create in the absence of family, proposal culture, the challenge of staying when your impulse is to stray, and how to live with boundaries and and still let the world in. You can pre-order Stray now: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/252466/stray-by-stephanie-danler/ Click to get the One Step Wellness newsletter in your inbox https://bit.ly/2SCyTxg FOLLOW FOR MORE Follow One Step on Instagram @onesteppodcast Follow Ingrid on Instagram @ingridnilsen YouTube Ingrid Nilsen Twitter @ingridnilsen CREDITS Producer Cristina Cleveland @cristinacleveland Sound Engineer Teng Chen @tengfoodpanda

How do you transcend a childhood marred by addiction and go on to pursue the life that is calling to you? This week, Katy sits down with bestselling author Stephanie Danler to talk about her forthcoming memoir Stray, but also to discuss what it takes to make the hard decisions that will allow you to claim the kind of life you know you want. Danler examines her overwhelming desire to wander the world and spend time in places where she can be anonymous, as well as what it took to face her fears and put down roots. Stray is a "memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman's attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival." Find Stephanie on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Pre-order your copy of Stray here. --------------------------------------- ADVERTISE WITH US: Reach expats, future expats, and travelers all over the world. Send us an email to get the conversation started. BECOME A PATRON: Pledge your monthly support of The Bittersweet Life and receive awesome prizes in return for your generosity! Visit our Patreon site to find out more. TIP YOUR PODCASTER: Say thanks with a one-time donation to the podcast hosts you know and love. Click here to send financial support via PayPal. (You can also find a Donate button on the desktop version of our website.) The show needs your support to continue. SUBSCRIBE: Subscribe to the podcast to make sure you never miss an episode. Click here to find us on a variety of podcast apps. WRITE A REVIEW: Leave us a rating and a written review on iTunes so more listeners can find us. JOIN THE CONVERSATION: If you have a question or a topic you want us to address, send us an email here. You can also connect to us through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Tag #thebittersweetlife with your expat story for a chance to be featured! NEW TO THE SHOW? Don't be afraid to start with Episode 1: OUTSET BOOK: Want to read Tiffany's book, Midnight in the Piazza? Learn more here or order on Amazon. TOUR ROME: If you're traveling to Rome, don't miss the chance to tour the city with Tiffany as your guide! 

Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould It’s the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City’s East Village with the hopes of recording her first album. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she’s just beginning to book gigs when she falls hard for Dylan, a troubled but magnetic musician whose star is on the rise. Their time together is stormy and short-lived— Dylan dies a few months into their relationship—but will reverberate for therest of Laura’s life. Flash forward fourteen years: Laura’s daughter, Marie, is asking questions about the father she never knew, questions that Laura does not want to answer. Laura has built a quiet life that bears littleresemblance to the one she envisioned when she left Ohio all those years ago, and she’s taken pains to close the door on what was and what might have been. But Marie won’t let her, and when she attempts to track down Dylan’s family, both mother and daughter are forced to confront the heartbreak at the root of their relationship. Funny, wise, and utterly immersive, Emily Gould's Perfect Tunes explores the fault lines between parents and children, and asks whether dreams deferred can ever be reclaimed. The Knockout Queen by Rufie Thorpe  Bunny Lampert is the princess of North Shore⁠--beautiful, tall, blond, with a rich real-estate-developer father and a swimming pool in her backyard. Michael⁠--with a ponytail down his back and a septum piercing⁠--lives with his aunt in the cramped stucco cottage next door. When Bunny catches Michael smoking in her yard, he discovers that her life is not as perfect as it seems. At six foot three, Bunny towers over their classmates. Even as she dreams of standing out and competing in the Olympics, she is desperate to fit in, to seem normal, and to get a boyfriend, all while hiding her father's escalating alcoholism. Michael has secrets of his own. At home and at school Michael pretends to be straight, but at night he tries to understand himself by meeting men online for anonymous encounters that both thrill and scare him. When Michael falls in love for the first time, a vicious strain of gossip circulates and a terrible, brutal act becomes the defining feature of both his and Bunny's futures⁠--and of their friendship. With storytelling as intoxicating as it is intelligent, Rufi Thorpe has created a tragic and unflinching portrait of identity, a fascinating examination of our struggles to exist in our bodies, and an excruciatingly beautiful story of two humans aching for connection. Gould and Thorpe are in conversation with Stephanie Danler, the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter. _______________________________________________ Produced by Maddie Gobbo & Michael Kowaleski Theme: "I Love All My Friends," a new, unreleased demo by Fragile Gang.

I’m obsessed with Stephanie Danler’s brilliance. She's the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter and the executive producer of the Sweetbitter series on Start (which Kyle and I started watching last weekend - so good!). Her latest book, Stray: A Memoir, is set to release in May of 2020 so you can pre-order it now. This forceful and emotional book explores Stephanie’s life as a child raised by an addicts and alcoholics, the damage she inherited, and the journey to move forward towards a different way of life. This book has gotten me out of my own head more than almost anything else lately because it’s just so immersive and beautifully written. Stephanie and I discussed her choice to start this book when her son was five months old, why she had to move several time zones away in order to find the focus to create, and the hardship of writing about such deeply rooted traumas. Stephanie shares her extremely stressful coronavirus experience and the idea that we are all grasping for the illusion of control at this moment in time. I loved Stephanie’s advice to just finish what you start and so much more. I couldn’t wait for her pub day to share this given all of our talk about what’s going on RIGHT NOW. I promise it will help you through.

On this episode of the podcast, I discuss what there is to learn about writing and life from the novel Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler. I talk about: Finding beauty in the mundane Using our own life experiences to inform our writing Breaking all the rules (in writing and life) Reading for our writing For a full list of resources and links mention in this episodes, read the full show notes here. Find me on Instagram or contact me here. If you want to add to the conversation or discuss the podcast online use #wordsafterall

In which editor Adam Ross interviews bestselling author Stephanie Danler about her upcoming memoir Stray. In this episode, Danler discusses the differences between writing fiction and memoir and gives the listener a behind-the-scenes look into how a book gets refined in its final stages of editing

Tess is 21 when she packs up her things in her car and moves from Ohio to New York City. Knowing nothing and no one she stumbles her way into a job at a semi-prestigious restaurant as a back waitress. The servers and staff are exceptionally tight-knit and take their jobs extremely seriously and Tess does as well. Tess is also drawn to Jake, one of the bartenders, and Simone, a senior server who takes Tess under her wing and begins to train her palate and teach her about wines so that she might one day be able to become a server. Initially disliked by the staff they soon warm up to Tess and she joins them in their hedonistic lifestyle. Nevertheless she longs to be included in Simone and Jake's more exclusive circle and comes to learn that they are both from Connecticut, knew each other before the restaurant, and that Simone treats him like family. Tess aggressively pursues Jake but he refrains from sleeping with her which Tess comes to realize is because of Simone. When Simone walks in on Tess licking Jake after he cut himself Simone says she will speak to Jake and he finally begins sleeping with Tess. Tess is initially happy to be involved with Jake and with Simone. Gradually her closeness to the two turns to bitterness after she discovers that they have matching tattoos neither one will talk about and that Simone raised Jake from the time he was eight. She also loses respect for Simone after realizing that at 37 she is chained to the restaurant. Hers is a specialty whose skills will transfer nowhere, and her beauty is quickly fading. When the restaurant is closed by the health inspectors Tess goes upstairs to the general manager's office and accidentally discovers that Simone and Jake have planned a one month vacation to France for his birthday without telling her. She gets black out drunk and tries to confront Simone and Jake but they fail to respond to her. The next time she sees them she confronts Simone, mocking her for being irrelevant. She also tries to convince Jake that his relationship with Simone is unhealthy and asks him to quit for her but though he admits he is tempted he ultimately rejects her. Feeling defeated Tess goes to speak to the general manager, Howard, to convince him to give her one of the prestigious server jobs even though she knows that Simone will try to block her promotion. Howard has sex with her in return for the promotion however it turns out to be a transfer to one of their sister restaurants which Tess refuses. She tells Simone that she instead will try to work at a wine shop and Simone encourages the move.

Stephanie Danler: „Magusmõrkjas“. Postimehe romaanisarja kolmanda raamatu menuromaanis avab Stephanie Danler hämmastava täpsusega adrenaliinirohket restoranimaailma ning kirjeldab New Yorgi noorte elu selle talumatus ilus, jõhkruses ja hapruses. Loeb Kristi Aule.

We get to recommend some great books with female lead characters, relatable story lines and realistic development, plus compare them to their on-screen counterparts. We also discuss the success of female authors, and the rise of women-written books being adapted into successful movies and shows.   In this episode, Allegra celebrates three women-led books: Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, and Big Little Lies  by Liane Moriaty, and gets into the strengths and drawbacks of their TV or movie adaptations. Misty shares her take on Orange is the New Black  by Piper Kerman, and compares it to the popular Netflix show.  We also talk about both the rising success of female authors, and an industry that's still trying to hold them down. We also get to revel in Reese Witherspoon's support of women-written books through both her production company that focuses on adapting those into shows and movies (including Gone Girl, Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, Where the Crawdads Sing, and lots more), and through her book club. We also do a quick call out to a show that was much better than the books: True Blood. Profess-Hers is a podcast written and presented by Misty, a History professor, and Allegra, an English professor, both of whom are here for having a serious, fun conversation about looking at literature, history, current events, pop culture, and media through a feminist lens. Written by Allegra Hanna and Misty Wilson-Mehrtens. Find the Profess-Hers Podcast on Twitter and Instagram @Professhers.

Stephanie Danler packed up and headed to New York City with a dream of becoming a writer. But before she could put pen to paper, she embarked on an ultimately successful career in the restaurant industry — not knowing at the time that this would inspire her breakout novel, Sweetbitter, which would in turn form the basis of an acclaimed Starz TV series. Listen in on this week's episode of UnStyled to hear about Stephanie’s journey — and how, contending with absent parents, a deteriorating marriage and now, motherhood, Stephanie has always turned to the one constant in her life: writing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this episode, Sommelier Extraordinaire and avid TV watcher, Jason Booth, puts on his critical pants and does a thorough review of the new Starz television show 'Sweetbitter' based on the Stephanie Danler novel of the same name. The novel is called 'Sweetbitter', not 'Of the Same Name', though if there were a novel called that, my intense hope would be for it to be made into a TV show for the sheer fun of the double entendre. On this episode, I use the all of the meanings for all of the words (segue) to roll right over the idiocy included therein. Nothing is sharper than a clever tongue (other than an eyelid papercut) Enjoy the savagery of my Hotcake Hot Takes.  And check out our sponsor: WineAccess.com/Homies for a 20 percent discount on holiday wine gift purchases. Strømpebukser!

Stephanie Dandler and Angie sit down to discuss her novel Sweetbitter See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stephanie Dandler and Angie sit down to discuss her novel Sweetbitter

Hello! Apologies for missing last week, this is a little minisode wrapping up the EPIC TALE OF SEASON ONE OF SWEETBITTER (available to stream on Starz). Buy the book, Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler wherever quality books are sold, then watch the show, then listen to this!

Hello! Join us as we discuss episodes 3 and 4 of Sweetbitter, the scintillating, titillating, deeply frustrating story of Tess, a 22 year old innocent who moves to NYC and gets a job as a backwaiter at an intimidatingly swanky restaurant. This Starz Original Series is based off the bestselling book by Stephanie Danler, and we enjoy both the original and the adaptation TREMENDOUSLY. Watch and play along, or just listen and be a bit lost but still enjoying yourself!

Stephanie Danler drops by the Damn Library for a second go around, this time to talk the Sweetbitter television adaptation she created, now on Starz. We discuss the Disneyland of production, why writers' rooms are great, and how she doesn't really live in Los Angeles like her house would imply. Plus we got into Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, and its satellite stories, and the forgotten voids of the 80s. Christopher and Drew also overpromise on tote bags.   contribute! https://patreon.com/smdb for drink recipes, book lists, and more, visit: somanydamnbooks.com music: Disaster Magic - Get Raining (https://soundcloud.com/disaster-magic) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey hey! First the news: JBF media winners (0:28), Bob Dylan's whiskey line (2:08), WH Correspondents Dinner (3:45), SF Chronicle's top 100 list (5:26), & McDonalds' stock is up (9:45). Next, 10 Q's for Stephanie Danler & actress Caitlin FitzGerald on "Sweetbitter," the new Starz series based on Danler's bestselling novel (11:58), their hospitality backgrounds (17:42, 27:18, 34:30), wine (19:13), season 2 (28:34) & filming in NYC (31:21). To close, comedian Ian Abramson on the best day of his life (38:06).

This week, Jeff and Rebecca finish up holiday recommendation requests and share some long-overdue listener feedback.   This episode is sponsored by: Casper Reckless: The Petrified Flesh by Cornelia Funke OwlCrate Jr.   Books recommended in this episode: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Young Incarceration Nations Who Thought This Would Be a Good Idea? by Alyssa Mastromonaco Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hours Bookstore by Robin Sloan Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, Alibis by André Aciman Unbound by Steph Jagger Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole The Force by Don Winslow   IQ by Joe Ide What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky Children of the New World The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss  Sorceror to the Crown by Zen Cho Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series Roomies by Christina Lauren Beverly Jenkins The Wars of the Roses series by Conn Iggulen How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian

Bestselling author and #FBF2016 speaker Stephanie "Sweetbitter" Danler is in the HRN house! We're big fans of her debut novel — coming soon to a Starz channel near you in TV form — but we also can't get enough of her poetry, essay and fiction picks on Instagram. (Peep @smdanler for her #recommendedreading.) Listen in as we dish book stuff, TV stuff, that LA-to-NY life, and more. Recommended Reading with Food Book Fair is powered by Simplecast

We've been having some technical difficulties, so really belatedly (the event discussed in this episode took place on August 7!) we talk Nicole's bookish outing and Gayle's deep dive into the HBO version of Big Little Lies. Nicole tries to persuade Gayle to read the book, but warns her away from Truly, Madly, Guilty. Lots of reading updates, and you'll hear about the two books we've read that make us cranky and difficult to be around.   http://amzn.to/2w1Rfg4 (Modern Lovers) by Emma Straub http://amzn.to/2ga9Lxd (Sweetbitter) by Stephanie Danler http://amzn.to/2xgBYH5 (Chelsea Girls) by Eileen Myles http://amzn.to/2w2e3MY (The Husband's Secret) by Lianne Moriarty What Ali Support this podcast

This talk took place on June 8, 2016 at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica and is part of the Live Talks Los Angeles series. This event is part of our Newer Voices Series where we feature debut authors and authors with one or two books whose writing we’d like to draw more attention to. Free tickets are available 7-10 days before the event.  We encourage purchasing advance tickets that include the book and a reserved section seat. — “And Our Fiction Special Tonight Is…,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2014 — “Stephanie Danler talks about her much-buzzed-about debut novel,” Time Out New York, Mar, 15, 2015 — “Restaurant Toil Serves O.C. Novelist Well,” Orange County Register, Jan. 7, 2015 Stephanie Danler is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. Sweetbitter is her debut novel. “Stephanie Danler arrives on the literary scene with a fully-fledged, original voice that’s wry, watchful and wise beyond its years—acutely attuned to the pleasures of the senses and to the desperate stratagems of self-invention among young urban seekers. Sweetbitter is a stunning debut novel, one that seems destined to help define a generation.” —Jay McInerney You will develop a palate. A palate is a spot on your tongue where you remember. Where you assign words to the textures of taste. Eating becomes a discipline, language-obsessed. You will never simply eat food again. These are the words that introduce us to Tess, the twenty-two-year-old narrator of Sweetbitter—and you will never again read a debut coming-of-age novel as stunning as this one. Shot from a mundane, provincial past, Tess comes to New York in the stifling summer of 2006. Alone, knowing no one, living in a rented room in Williamsburg, she manages to land a job as a “backwaiter” at a celebrated downtown Manhattan restaurant. This begins the year we spend with Tess as she starts to navigate the chaotic, enchanting, punishing, and privileged life she has chosen, as well as the remorseless and luminous city around her. What follows is her education: in oysters, Champagne, the appellations of Burgundy, friendship, cocaine, lust, love, and dive bars. As her appetites awaken—for food and wine, but also for knowledge, experience, and belonging—we see her helplessly drawn into a darkly alluring love triangle. With an orphan’s ardor she latches onto Simone, a senior server at the restaurant who has lived in ways Tess only dreams of, and against the warnings of coworkers she falls under the spell of Jake, the elusive, tatted up, achingly beautiful bartender. These two and their enigmatic connection to each other will prove to be Tess’s most exhilarating and painful lesson of all. Stephanie Danler intimately defines the crucial transition from girl to woman, from living in a place that feels like nowhere to living in a place that feels like the center of the universe. She deftly conjures the nonstop and purely adrenalized world of the restaurant—conversations interrupted, phrases overheard, relationships only partially revealed. And she evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, the fragility and brutality of being young in New York with heart-stopping accuracy. A lush novel of the senses—of taste and hunger, seeing and understanding, love and desire—Sweetbitter is ultimately about the power of what remains after disillusionment, and the transformation and wisdom that come from our experiences, sweet and bitter.     

In Stephanie Danler’s novel Sweetbitter, it takes Tess, a 22-year-old waitress new to Manhattan, about three months to master the art of balancing three plates on one arm. In the same amount of time, Tess adapts to a life of champagne and cocaine-addled adventures. In this episode, Stephanie dishes about how her own experiences—working as a back-waiter, bartender, and restaurant manager in New York City—informed the novel. Plus: What’s your favorite comfort food in the age of Trump?

Stephanie Danler, author of last year’s hot novel Sweetbitter (which is out in paperback today), talks to Daniel Ford about how her restaurant jobs inspired her debut novel, her serendipitous publishing journey, and why it’s imperative that aspiring authors finish what they start.

Zach chats with best-selling author Stephanie Danler about her novel "Sweetbitter," how she learned about wine, the power of sense memory, and why restaurants now need to have HR departments.

Listen to our first live radio event! We taped this show in front of an audience at Hedley & Bennett headquarters near downtown Los Angeles. Editorial icon Ruth Reichl and Chef Nancy Silverton of the Mozza restaurant group talk friendship, food, and feminism with host Kerry Diamond. Author Stephanie Danler reads a steamy excerpt from her bestselling novel Sweetbitter, and Hedley & Bennett founder Ellen Bennett shares her pep talk titled "The Art of the Hustle."

This week on Milk Street Radio, we get up close and personal with Nigella Lawson. “You know the whole guilt thing I never quite get,” says Lawson. “One of the things I’m asked most often when I’m interviewed is, ‘What is your guilty pleasure?’ And I get rather prissy and I always say to everyone, ‘Look, if you feel guilty about pleasure, you don’t deserve to have pleasure.” Also on today’s show, we make a quick Tuesday night meal with Lidia Bastianich and bring you a revolutionary approach to foolproof pie dough. Plus, we talk to Stephanie Danler, author of the novel “Sweetbitter,” and Christopher Kimball and Sara Moulton take your calls. Originally aired 11/13/16.

Martha Frankel’s guests this week are Stephanie Danler, Elaine Khosrova, Richard Blanco and Susan Strecker.   This week's sponsors: Hudson Valley Writers Resist, Fruition Chocolate and Bistro To Go.

This week we get up close and personal with Nigella Lawson; plus quick Tuesday night meals with Lidia Bastianich; a revolutionary approach to foolproof pie dough; we’ll talk to Stephanie Danler, author of the novel Sweetbitter; and we take your calls with Sara Moulton.

Literary scholar, publishing consultant, and co-author of the critically acclaimed book The Bestseller Code, Jodie Archer dropped by to chat with me about her journey, the coming revolution in publishing, and the insecurities that all writers face. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting. Start getting more from your site today! Before earning her PhD from Stanford, Ms. Archer studied English at Cambridge, worked in both journalism and TV, and became an acquisitions editor for Penguin UK publishing. While at Stanford Jodie taught nonfiction and memoir writing, and researched both contemporary fiction and bestsellers. Upon completion of her doctoral work she was recruited by Apple where she was the lead in research on books. Her book, The Bestseller Code, is based on her doctoral research with professor Matt Jockers, an algorithm that they tested over four years and refined by text mining over 20,000 contemporary novels. The Guardian proclaimed that their book “… may revolutionize the publishing industry,” in part because their algorithm was able to predict bestselling books 80% of the time, based on a theme, plot, character and many other big data points. If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews. In Part One of this file Jodie Archer and I discuss: How a word nerd helped program a computer to predict bestsellers with a high degree of accuracy Why all writers of fiction should read The Bestseller Code How to turn years of research into an entertaining and educational non-fiction book The power of deadlines for beating procrastination Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Audible is Offering a Free Audiobook Download with a 30-day Trial: Grab Your Free Audiobook Here – audibletrial.com/rainmaker How the Author of The Bestseller Code Jodie Archer Writes: Part Two How Critically Acclaimed Literary Scholar Jonathan Gottschall Writes: Part One How Andy Weir (Bestselling Author of ‘The Martian’) Writes: Part One How ‘Sweetbitter’ Author Stephanie Danler Writes: Part One The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel – Jodie Archer & Matt Jockers ArcherJockers.com Jodie Archer on Good Reads Jodie Archer on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How the Author of The Bestseller Code Jodie Archer Writes: Part One Voiceover: Rainmaker FM Kelton Reid:Welcome back to The Writer Files. I’m your host, Kelton Reid, here to take you on yet another tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of renowned writers. Literary scholar, publishing consultant, and co-author of the critically acclaimed book, The Bestseller Code, Jodie Archer dropped by this week to chat with me about her journey becoming a revolution in publishing, and the insecurities that all writers face. Before earning her PhD from Stanford, Ms Archer studied English at Cambridge, worked in both journalism and TV, and became an acquisitions editor for Penguin UK Publishing. While at Stanford, Jodie taught nonfiction and memoir writing and researched both contemporary fiction and bestsellers. Upon completion of her doctoral work she was recruited by Apple, where she was the lead in research on books. Her book, The Bestseller Code, is based on her doctoral research with Professor Matthew Jockers, an algorithm that they tested over four years and refined by text mining over 20,000 contemporary novels. The Guardian proclaimed that their book may revolutionize the publishing industry in part because their algorithm was able to predict bestselling books eighty percent of the time based on theme, plot, character, and many other big data points. In part one of this file Jodie and I discuss how a word nerd helped program a computer to predict bestsellers with a high degree of accuracy, why all writers of fiction should read The Bestseller Code, how to turn years of research into an entertaining and educational nonfiction book, and the power of deadlines for beating procrastination. If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please click subscribe to automatically see new interviews as soon as they’re published. This episode of The Writer Files is brought to you by Audible. I ll have more on their special offer later in the show but if you love audiobooks or you’ve always wanted to give them a try, you can check out over 180,000 titles right now at Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. We are rolling today with a very special guest. Jodie Archer has joined The Writer Files. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat with me about this fantastic new book, The Bestseller Code, and a little bit about your process as a writer. Jodie Archer: Thank you for having me. You’re very welcome. The Makings of a Destined Writer Kelton Reid: I am just utterly fascinated by the book. I did want to, before we get into chatting about The Bestseller Code a little bit, to just maybe do a little background for listeners who might not know your story, maybe just a little bit of your origins as, you know, I mean I know you’ve done a lot of stuff. You’ve had a background in journalism as well as publishing. I think you’re considered a literary scholar, so there’s a lot to unpack there, but maybe you could just give us the CliffsNotes of where you’ve been. Jodie Archer: Yeah. I’ll try. I did my first degree in English in the UK, and got into writing and journalism there, and also edited some anthologies of writings and got into the editing side. And straight from university there I went to Penguin where I did this fast tour around the publishing house in what they call the graduate trainee scheme. And so it was actually really beneficial both from the publishing perspective and the writing perspective now, because they trained me in marketing and sales and publicity and all those different things. I eventually settled into being an editor for Penguin. Then after a while I just went with this inner hunch that had kept surfacing in me that I wanted to go and do a PhD in the US. It had always felt like that kind of too much self-indulgent kind of thing, you know, move across the world and just go and study for another six, seven years. I did do it. I got a scholarship at Stanford that seemed to be the sign, and I went and moved to California and that’s where I started studying for the work that’s in The Bestseller Code about the bestseller, and I met Matt Jockers who is my co-author. We went from there really. After that I moved to Apple and researched books for them, and then I went back to writing. It’s been, so far, a career that’s been circling the book and engaging with the book from lots of different angles. So it’s nice to settle down and just write for a while. Kelton Reid: It’s fascinating to me that you had all these incarnations and writing is clearly a love of yours. You’re kind of the ultimate word nerd, as it were. Jodie Archer: That would be fair, maybe. Kelton Reid: Did you have an aha moment when you knew you were going to be a writer? Jodie Archer: I think about this, and I think it’s probably, in hindsight, something that wanted to come to me as a child, but I kind of ignored it. I was a total reading nerd as a kid, and would pretty much hide in a cupboard with a book if it meant that I could get out of doing anything other than reading, but I was always scared of my pen and didn’t think I could ever write a story as good as a Roald Dahl or a Enid Blyton, or anyone I was reading as a child. I remember, actually, when I was thirteen I lied to my mum and said I was going out with a friend, and I actually went to see a psychic. She really wouldn’t have liked it until I was maybe sixteen, you know, getting involved and seeing a psychic. There was this local psychic, and I crept in and I said, “Will you give me a reading?” She was like, “Sure.” The most powerful memory I had, you know, she told me two things. One was that I would not marry this guy I was madly in love with at age thirteen, but I’d stay his friend, and he’s still my friend and I didn’t marry him. The other thing that she said was that I’m meant to be a writer, and at the time I wanted to be a lawyer because I liked to argue at that time. I thought being a writer was just a silly pipe dream, but she insisted that that was my calling, and it kind of stuck with me and I fought with it for twenty years, and then finally … How a Word Nerd Helped Program a Computer to Predict Bestsellers with a High Degree of Accuracy Kelton Reid: It panned out. Let’s talk a little bit about this fantastic new book of yours, co-authored by Matthew Jockers, The Bestseller Code. It’s I mean the cover says, “What a groundbreaking algorithm can teach us about books, stories, and reading.” It’s entirely fascinating to me, this work, and the subject obviously is pretty interesting, but it wasn’t what I was expecting as I was reading it. I was just kind of blown away by a lot of the insights in there. It’s an analysis of what makes readers tick, what makes writers tick, but it’s not this dry … I was expecting the idea of big data and looking at the book business and the publishing world being a little bit drier subject, but it’s a really fantastic read. It’s a lot of fun. Jodie Archer: Thank you. A lot of people have told me who are reading it, it’s just been out this week here in the US, “Oh, it wasn’t what I was expecting.” They haven’t really clarified what the expectation was, but I’m glad with your way of putting it. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed reading it. It was certainly very, very fun for us to write, and I think I’ve found that even though, yes, we’d done a lot of research for the algorithm and before we put pen to paper we had completed that research and would have been able to talk about it then, as we were writing our history as readers and writers came much more into the fore. We spent lots of times around books where I haven’t been working with algorithms, and I haven’t been working alongside a pro text miner, and so my experience of books has been very traditional like any editor or like any lover of books, or a journalist, or someone like yourself who obviously enjoys books. It was nice to bring that part of me to the page as well, and I hope that’s what’s made a little bit chatty. I hope the book is kind of chatty rather than dry. Kelton Reid: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s entertaining. It’s definitely educational. I love that literary scholar, Jonathan Gottschall, who, actually, I love his book, The Storytelling Animal, blurbed your book and said that he was just absolutely blown away by it. There’s a lot to unpack there for sure, and with your love of everything literary and also now adding in the big data piece. Basically what you all created was this algorithm, right, the bestseller-ometer. Jodie Archer: That’s its current nickname, yeah. Actually, I mean my co-author Matt Jockers is the text mining expert, and so what that means is that he brought that training background in how we can make computers read in a kind of a way that approximates different aspects of how humans read or what we notice when we’re reading. And together we sat and talked about how do we, as human readers, process style, how do we process plot, how do we process emotion in literature, and how do we look at words and the words that trigger that, and then we kind of modeled that with code. It was fascinating to me, because that whole side of literary analysis was very, very new to me, and I was kind of suspicious at first. I’ll admit when I came to it, like many people I felt, “Well, what are computers doing in the space of novels and subjective literary criticism?” or even the other methods of literary critical training that I’d been involved in in my PhD work. But, I was interested and I think Matt is the real deal, and so I listened and we tried it out, and we were just kind of flabbergasted by the results and we brought our different backgrounds together and that’s what created this really fun quest that we’ve been on that created this book. Why All Writers of Fiction Should Read The Bestseller Code Kelton Reid: Yeah. I mean, I think all writers of narrative, I mean of fiction of a longer length should read this. Not necessarily for the reasons that you talk about in the book, obviously you have to have a love of writing and a love of what you’re doing, but there’s just so much in there. There’s so many great little tidbits, great quotes, great factoids, but it is just really compelling, and kudos on the work. It’s a lot of fun. I’m loving it. Jodie Archer: Thank you. Kelton Reid: We will be right back after a very short break. Thanks so much for listening to The Writer Files. This episode of The Writer Files is brought to you by Audible, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles to choose from. Audible seamlessly delivers the world’s both fiction and nonfiction to your iPhone, Android, Kindle or computer. For Rainmaker FM listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook download with a 30-day trial to give you the opportunity to check them out. Grab your free audiobook right now by visiting Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. I just hopped over there to grab Stephen King’s epic novel 11/22/63, about an English teacher who goes back in time to prevent the assassination of JFK. You can download your pick or any other audiobook free by heading over to Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. To download your free audiobook today, go to Audibletrial.com/Rainmaker. What Jodie is Working on Right Now Kelton Reid: Brings me to the question of what could you possibly be working on now? How do you follow this up? Are you working on more nonfiction or are you turning now to fiction? Jodie Archer: Kind of a bit of both. I think I would like to write another book of essays about books and the book world that are maybe a bit personal and a bit combining advice for writers. Because I’ve been in the writing world for so long and in very, very different roles, that I’ve kind of taken for granted some wisdoms that writers ask me, and like, “Oh, my God. I didn’t know that. Will you write about it?” I may do another book about the book world, but I’m also working on a couple of fiction projects, and I think I’ll settle into one of those, probably the end of this year and into the new year. Kelton Reid: Cool, cool. It seems like you could do just about anything, especially now with all of your wisdom, that you couldn’t help be successful. I hope … Jodie Archer: It’s a lot of pressure. Kelton Reid: I know. Jodie Archer: People say if you write a novel now, you’re going to have to come up with a good pen name, because the pressure is going to be on. When I’m working on fiction I try to kind of … I would say I try to ignore some of the insights we have. And I only mean that in the sense I don’t try and write by every rule or idea that comes to me from the book we’ve just written, but it is in the back of my mind. I do go back and check myself, and find I plot better now, having written that book, and think better about how to use theme. How to Turn Years of Research into an Entertaining and Educational Non-Fiction Book Kelton Reid: Yeah. We’ve had a handful of those writers mentioned. I’m thinking of Andy Weir was on this show, author of The Martian, who was great to talk to. Stephanie Danler, most recently, author of Sweet Bitter came on to talk about some of her processes. You’re in good company, and I appreciate you chatting with me about the book, and so I definitely will encourage listeners to seek out The Bestseller Code. Man, it’s awesome. Moving onto your process. Let’s talk a little bit about your productivity. Just with the different types of reading and writing you’ve done, if you want to go back to kind of the process of writing this book in particular, how much research were you doing? This is years of research, right? Jodie Archer: Yeah. For this book I mean it’s just building the algorithm and then validating it and checking it, and rebuilding. It took a lot of time. I spent the last three or four years at Stanford that I was doing my PhD mostly involved in this project with Matt, and wrote a PhD thesis on, and the first findings of this study, which is much more academic because you’re writing there for a PhD committee, obviously. My intention was always to write a trade book because I was just really intrigued by the results that we saw, you know, as a non-tech person, that were being shown to me, given this added tool of the computer, and the patterns that it was showing me about readers and writing. I knew I wanted to turn it into a book for the trade that other readers and writers might enjoy and learn from. That happened some time after I’d graduated, and we totally redid the experiment and started writing a trade book. The research had pretty much been done by the time we started, otherwise, yeah. It’s a long project, but the writing we did fairly quickly actually, in about four months. The Power of Deadlines for Beating Procrastination Kelton Reid: Wow, that’s amazing. During that process were you then sitting down every day to write and putting in chunks or were you doing word counts? Jodie Archer: We had this issue of being co-authors, and that’s a really different experience than writing on your own. I was writing from Colorado, and Matt is in Nebraska, and so we had pretty much daily Skype conversations and we wrote in Google Docs together. Because we were under a tight deadline, our publisher moved our submission date forward by about four or five months, just suddenly, to hit this fall for publication. There’s nothing like that to get the word counts there. I think every day we would just write, but we basically had to draft each chapter in about a week, and then took ten to twelve days in total per chapter, so we were writing pretty quickly. I think it suits me to be under that kind of pressure. It avoids procrastination. Kelton Reid: Absolutely. I’m sure that helped. Did you find that you had a most productive time of day for your writing or a place, like an office or a coffee shop? Jodie Archer: Yeah. I like to think I can write in coffee shops, and I know now that if I take myself to a coffee shop to write I don’t really intend to write that day. I just intend to get a few clever words down I’m pleased with, and then four words and give myself a pat on the back, and then drink too much coffee and go home. If I really want to produce, I have to be at home, and I have a study at home. I have to start in the morning, as much as I would like to avoid it. If I get on a good speed in the morning, then I’ll probably write all day through to about dinner time, and that’s the way it works best for me. Kelton Reid: Are you someone who can write with headphones on or do you prefer silence while you’re writing? Jodie Archer: I don’t like headphones. I don’t like the feeling of them in my ears, but I do sometimes have classical music or any music without not too quick of a beat, because I’m kind of thinking slowly. I don’t like words in music when I’m writing, so I like sort of a soft, just music without words or silence. Kelton Reid: Yeah. I think I know the answer to this next one because you addressed it actually in your Goodreads Q&A there, but do you believe in writer’s block? Jodie Archer: You know, I think Sometimes I say yes, and sometimes no actually, so I don’t know what I said in Goodreads, but I think that I’ve heard some really successful writers like Nora Roberts in interview and at conferences say she really doesn’t believe in it. She thinks it’s just an excuse, and I find that I don’t quite fully believe in it, because I think discipline with writing does help overcome it, and she’s probably fully overcome it. She’s written so many books. I find I encounter it if I kind of get three or four ways to open a chapter coming through all at the same time, and it kind of jams my mind, and I can’t pick which way to go, and so I nearly always walk, go outside, and move my body, and that tends to release it. I used to suffer what I thought was writer’s block much more than I do now, and I think it was just fear of the pen, insecurity, all those things, the idea of people reading what you have to say. I had those when I was much younger, and I think that’s pretty normal, but practice helps. Kelton Reid: Absolutely. You’re in good company, I think. Many a famous writer has used walking and exercise for breaking through. It’s part of that incubation phase. Jodie Archer: The problem is then you get this idea when you’re halfway up a mountain in Colorado, and you haven’t got a pen. You see me like running down the mountain not very elegantly trying to get back to my computer before the sentence leaves, and inevitably it disappears just as I get through the threshold. That’s happened to me a lot. Kelton Reid: That’s funny. Well, you should always carry a notebook. I think you taught us that also. That was one of the things somebody mentioned in your book. Then what about the smartphone? Isn’t the voice to text thing now something all-pervasive on the smart phone? Jodie Archer: It is. I’ve never got into it. I’m only just getting used to Siri, and that kind of thing. I’m more old-fashioned with my notes. I tend to, everywhere I go, I have, I try to have a notebook with me, and then the days that I forget is where the inspiration comes. But I’m a pen and paper girl more than a smartphone for taking notes down, I think. Kelton Reid: Yeah. Interesting. Thanks so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files podcast please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes, or to just leave a comment or a question, you can drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers, talk to you next week.

Before kicking off the next season of the show, we wanted to share with you some highlights from our previous seasons. I don’t want to shortchange the most recent interviews with inspiring guests including Jay McInerney (’80s defining author of Bright Lights, Big City), Stephanie Danler (the bestselling author of Sweetbitter), the co-founder of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, or How Neuroscientist Michael Grybko Defined Writer’s Block for us. But I do want to dig into the archives with you and pull out a few of my favorites from a handful of the other 40 authors The Writer Files has cross-examined to learn how they keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer’s block. You’ll find links to the these shows in the show notes and past episodes are easy to find in the archives of your favorite podcast app, in iTunes, or at WriterFiles.fm. If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, click subscribe in iTunes, to automatically see new interviews. In this “Best of” Volume One, we’ll hear from a handful of past guests, including: Advice Columnist and Critic Heather Havrilesky on Social Media and Managed Procrastination NYTimes Bestselling Author of ‘The Martian’ Andy Weir on Productivity vs Laziness Bestselling Debut Novelist Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney on Beating Fear and Procrastination Bestselling Thriller Author Mark Dawson on How to Publish Over a Million Words in a Year And Bestselling Author Ann Handley on the Only Reason to Write a Book Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Audible is Offering a Free Audiobook Download with a 30-day Trial: Grab Your Free Audiobook Here – audibletrial.com/rainmaker How Advice Columnist and Author Heather Havrilesky Writes: Part Two How Andy Weir (Bestselling Author of ‘The Martian’) Writes: Part One How Bestselling Debut Novelist Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney Writes: Part Two How Bestselling Thriller Author Mark Dawson Writes: Part One How Bestselling Author Ann Handley Writes Kelton Reid on Twitter

Stephanie Danler is a writer based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School and is the author of the newly released novel Sweetbitter. She's written essays for Travel + Leisure, Lit Hub, Vogue and The Paris Review. She sat down to speak with us about the mechanics of writing, working in New York restaurants, taking big risks, the art of the publishing business, and how things really feel.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The bestselling author of 11 books, including the eighties defining Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney, took a break to chat with me about his new book, the writing process, and some timeless tips from his mentor, Raymond Carver. Vanity Fair called Mr. McInerney “Our modern-day Fitzgerald,” and his most recent book — Bright, Precious Days — is described as “… a sexy, vibrant, cross-generational New York story — a literary and commercial triumph of the highest order.” The author is a renowned short story writer, screenwriter, and actor, who has lived in New York for three decades and rubbed elbows with a laundry list of literary lions, including his mentors Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. In addition to fiction, Jay writes a highly regarded wine column for Town & Country magazine, and has written several essay collections on wine. The author most recently joined the Prince Street podcast as a culinary and arts correspondent and has interviewed director Francis Ford Coppola, author Stephanie Danler, and celebrity chefs including Eric Ripert, to name a few. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please subscribe in iTunes to automatically see new interviews, and help other writers find us. If you missed the first half you can find it right here. In Part Two of the file Jay McInerney and I discuss: The Author’s Astute Anatomical Analogy for Writer’s Block How a Short Story Became a Series of Bestselling Novels Why Writers Need to Stretch the Boundaries of Their Genres The Big City as Creative Muse Some Timeless Advice from Raymond Carver on the Importance of Discipline Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes JayMcInerney.com Bright, Precious Days: A novel – Jay McInerney Prince Street Podcast Jay McInerney: why Gatsby is so great Jay McInerney on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Bestselling Author Jay McInerney Writes: Part Two Kelton Reid: The Writer Files is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, air-tight security, instant updates, and much more. If you re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 177,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/studiopress right now. That s Rainmaker.FM/studiopress. These are The Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and beyond. I m your host, Kelton Reid, writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Each week we ll discover how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer s block. We return with the best-selling author of eleven books, including the 80s-defining Bright Lights, Big City. Jay McInerney, who took a break this week to chat with me about his new book, the writing process, and some timeless tips from his mentor Raymond Carver. Vanity Fair called McInerney “Our modern-day F. Scott Fitzgerald” and his most recent book Bright, Precious Days is described as a sexy, vibrant, cross-generational New York story, a literary and commercial triumph of the highest order. The author is a renowned short story writer, screenwriter and actor, who’s lived in New York for three decades, and has rubbed elbows with a laundry list of literary lions, including his mentors Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. In addition to fiction, Jay writes a highly regarded wine column for Town & Country Magazine, and has also written several essay collections on wine. The author recently joined the Prince Street Podcast, as a culinary and arts correspondent, where he’s interviewed director Francis Ford Coppola, author Stephanie Danler, and celebrity chefs, including Eric Ripert, to name a few. Join us for this two part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please click “subscribe” to see new shows and help other writers find us. If you missed the first half of this show, you can find it on iTunes and in the show notes. A quick note that the show will take a short break for Labor Day, and we’ll return with more interviews with great writers very soon. In part two of the file, Jay and I discuss the author’s astute, anatomical analogy for writer’s block, how a short story became a series of bestselling novels, why writers need to stretch the boundaries of their genres, the big city as creative muse, and some timeless advice from Raymond Carver on the importance of discipline. There’s some really, really great contemporary blues, men and women, taking up the mantle now. Do you find yourself seeking out any … No names are popping into my mind, but I know that they come through New York at times. Jay McInerney: It’s true, although … I don’t know. I’m just sort of stuck with the classic, sort of, Chicago and Mississippi guys, at the moment. The Author’s Astute Anatomical Analogy for Writer’s Block Kelton Reid: Absolutely. One thing we talk about on this show quite often is writer’s block. Do you have an opinion? Jay McInerney: It’s terrible. It’s like talking about impotence. Kelton Reid: Right. No one wants to talk about it. Is it a thing? Is it real? Jay McInerney: Yeah. Well, you know, it has been for me. It’s funny because once I wrote Bright Lights, Big City, I felt like I had broken the curse, and that I would never have that problem again. For many years, I didn’t really seem to have a problem. I seemed to go from one project to the next, and in a relatively smooth fashion. But then around 1999, 2000, I just experienced this terrible writer’s block. I just couldn’t write fiction. I couldn’t get started on anything new. It was a real struggle for me, and it was a terrible feeling, because that’s what I do. That’s who I am. I’m somebody who writes fiction, who writes novels. I think it’s something that most writers deal with at one time or another, except for maybe Joyce Carol Oates. Kelton Reid: Right. Have you ever … Sure, sure. Have you talked with other writers … You’ve rubbed elbows with a who’s who of literary giants. Has anyone ever spoken about it with you, or is it just something that’s like, “Hmm, no. Let’s not talk about it.” Jay McInerney: You know, it’s funny, but I feel it really is something that writers don’t want to talk about at all, the same way men don’t want to talk about impotence. It’s kind of an embarrassing subject. It’s kind of like saying, “I can’t do the thing that allegedly defines me.” It just calls your whole identity into question. It’s very frustrating, day after day, to not be able to produce anything. It makes for some bad days and nights with the people that one lives with. Kelton Reid: Well, let’s not talk about it anymore. Just sweep that one under the rug. Jay McInerney: I’m happy to say that I haven’t felt that in quite a while now, and I’m already working on some short stories, which is about all I can do right now, because I have a fair amount of promotion to do for this book. But for some reason, I feel like the next one is going to come to me before too long. How a Short Story Became a Series of Bestselling Novels Kelton Reid: Yeah. The latest, I mean the series that incorporates the lives of the Calloways, started as a short story. Is that right? It started as a short story Smoke I believe? Jay McInerney: Yeah. Actually, the first thing I wrote after Bright Lights, Big City was a short story called Smoke. It was published in The Atlantic, and it had this couple … I don t know, I just sort of created this couple. The couple was kind of based on there were two or three couples in New York, at that time, that I kind of idealized a little bit. These people were smart and good looking, and threw glamorous cocktail parties, and seemed to have it all together in a way that the rest of us, perhaps, didn’t. Of course, as it turns out, all of those couples broke up before too long. But I wanted to explore this idea of “the perfect couple,” because, of course, there is no such thing. Russell and Corrine were kind of … I thought of them as representative figures of the time, in a way. Some people would call them yuppies. They were very well educated. They went to Brown University together, got married shortly after they got out of college, went to New York to pursue their fortunes. And also as somebody who was on his second marriage by that time, I was intrigued to explore the idea of monogamy. Also Russell was kind of an alter-ego, for me, because if I hadn’t been a novelist, I’m pretty sure that what I would’ve done is I would’ve become an editor. He was living the life that I might have lived. Kelton Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Like an alternate universe. Jay McInerney: Yeah. What Philip Roth called The Counterlife. Kelton Reid: We will be right back after a very short break. Thanks so much for listening to The Writer Files. Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer. For now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us: Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps them pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers people like you more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by “Which session should I go to?” And, “Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything the speakers have been awesome but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. Why Writers Need to Stretch the Boundaries of Their Genres Kelton Reid: Well I know that you’re a busy man, and you’ve got places to be, and people to see, so I’d love to pick your brain about creativity a little bit. Certainly … Creativity is at the core of what you do. You intertwine fiction, wine, writing, food, all the senses. Do you have a definition of creativity floating around out there, somewhere? Jay McInerney: I think, specifically, in my case … That is to say, in the case of my life as a novelist, that I think … What I look for, what I hope for, in my own work, and what I look for in other people’s work, is reinventing the tradition, and stretching, taking a form … In this case, let’s say the novel or the short story, and applying your own imagination to it in such a way, that it becomes something that it never was before. It becomes … That you stretch, that you stretch the boundaries of the genre, just a little bit. None of us has ever really completely reinvented the novel, or the … Except possibly James Joyce. But that’s the goal, to deploy imagination in a way that something new under the sun has been created. The Big City as Creative Muse Kelton Reid: Absolutely. Do you personally have a creative muse, at the moment, outside of promoting your baby? Jay McInerney: Well, honestly, I’m speaking to you from my apartment in Greenwich Village, in New York City, and I feel like the city is my muse. I feel like every day, I walk out there, and I fully expect to see something that I’ve never seen before, and to hear something I’ve never heard before. I don’t know. Just today I was walking back from lunch, and somebody was saying, “Man. Can you believe those neo-Nazis in Chipotle?” I didn’t hear the rest of that conversation, but I don’t know. I’m always picking up fragments on the street, and insights, and weird juxtapositions … New York continues to inspire me. I guess really that’s my muse. I occasionally write about other settings, but I always come back to this city. Specifically, my city is Manhattan. Kelton Reid: Yeah. Jay McInerney: There are many wonderful younger writers who are coming out of Brooklyn, who live in Brooklyn. They’ve made it sort of the new mecca of urban literature. Kelton Reid: For sure. Jay McInerney: For me, it’s Manhattan. I moved here in 1980, and I will probably die here. Kelton Reid: Awesome, awesome. Jay McInerney: I’ll continue to write about it. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. All right, I’m going to give you one fun one before we wrap. If you could choose one author from any era, for an all-expense paid dinner to your favorite spot, who would you take, and where would you take them? Jay McInerney: Huh, let’s see. Well, I don’t know. I think it’d like to take Jane Austen. I think she would be a dazzling conversationalist. There’s any number of New York restaurants that I might take her to, but if I were taking her to a place to show her New York, and its great social panorama, I would probably take her to Balthazar. Kelton Reid: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jay McInerney: Which has, in the last twenty years or so, become one of the great New York institutions. If it turned out that she was a foodie, I would take her to Le Bernardin, the three star Michelin restaurant operated by my friend Eric Ripert up in Midtown. Some Timeless Advice from Raymond Carver on the Importance of Discipline Kelton Reid: For sure. It’s funny, because you chatted with him on your show, on your podcast interview, and he was kind of riffing with you about writing and writing rituals, so I will encourage listeners to find that one on the Prince Street Podcast. I’ll link to it. Finally, do you have any advice for your fellow scribes on how to just keep going, keep the cursor moving, keep the ink flowing? Jay McInerney: Well, I would just go back to what Raymond Carver said to me when I started to study with him. He had already gathered, from visiting me in New York City, which is where we first met, that I was living a fairly undisciplined and irregular life. He told me “You’ve got to do it every day. You’ve got to write every day. When you don’t write, you go backwards. Even if you don’t write, you have to be there, at your desk. You have to be in place. You have to be waiting. Even if nothing comes out of it. You have to be ready for inspiration, and you have to be ready for the muse. You have to keep pushing those words around, until suddenly, you see some kind of flash of light, or you hear some kind of music, that makes you realize that you’ve started down the right path.” Kelton Reid: Yeah. I love that. Lock, stock, and barrel. The latest, from Jay McInerney is Bright, Precious Days, out now. You can find everywhere reputable books are sold. It’s a fantastic read. Congratulations on the latest, and best of luck with all of your future work. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Jay McInerney: Thanks, Kelton. It was great to talk to you. Kelton Reid: Thanks again. Jay McInerney: All right. Take care. Kelton Reid: Thanks so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files Podcast please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes or to just leave a comment or a question you can drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.

The bestselling author of 11 books, including the eighties defining Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney, took a break to chat with me about his new book, the writing process, and some timeless tips from his mentor, Raymond Carver. Vanity Fair called Mr. McInerney “Our modern-day Fitzgerald,” and his most recent book — Bright, Precious Days — is described as “… a sexy, vibrant, cross-generational New York story — a literary and commercial triumph of the highest order.” The author is a renowned short story writer, screenwriter, and actor, who has lived in New York for three decades and rubbed elbows with a laundry list of literary lions, including his mentors Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. In addition to fiction, Jay writes a highly regarded wine column for Town & Country magazine, and has written several essay collections on wine. The author most recently joined the Prince Street podcast as a culinary and arts correspondent and has interviewed director Francis Ford Coppola, author Stephanie Danler, and celebrity chefs including Eric Ripert, to name a few. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please subscribe in iTunes to automatically get new interviews, and help other writers find us. In Part One of the file Jay McInerney and I discuss: Why It’s Not a Bad Thing to Be Compared to Your Betters How to Incorporate Your Passions into Your Writing Why You Need to Sit at Your Desk Every Day and Listen to the Voices in Your Head The Author’s Process of Discovery at the Level of Language How the Right Soundtrack Can Inspire Your Writing Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes How Bestselling Author Jay McInerney Writes: Part Two JayMcInerney.com Bright, Precious Days: A novel – Jay McInerney Prince Street Podcast Jay McInerney: why Gatsby is so great Book Excerpt: Jay McInerney on Joy Division’s Heyday Jay McInerney on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Bestselling Author Jay McInerney Writes: Part One Kelton Reid: The Writer Files is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, air-tight security, instant updates, and much more. If you re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 177,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/studiopress right now. That s Rainmaker.FM/studiopress. These are The Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and beyond. I m your host, Kelton Reid, writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Each week we ll discover how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer s block. The best selling author of eleven books, including the ’80s defining Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney took a break this week to chat with me about his new book, the writing process, and some timeless tips from his mentor Raymond Carver. Vanity Fair called McInerney “Our modern-day F. Scott Fitzgerald.” His most recent work Bright, Precious Days is a novel that’s described as “…a sexy, vibrant, cross-generational New York story a literary and commercial triumph of the highest order.” The author is a renown short story writer, screenwriter and actor, who’s lived in New York for three decades and rubbed elbows with a laundry list of literary lions including his mentors Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. In addition to fiction Jay writes a highly regarded wine column for Town & Country Magazine and has written several essay collections on wine. The author recently recently joined the Prince Street podcast as a culinary and arts correspondent and has interviewed director Francis Ford Coppola, author Stephanie Danler and celebrity chefs including Eric Ripert, to name a few. Join us for this two part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show please click “subscribe” to automatically see new shows and help other writers to find us. In part one of the file Jay and I discuss why it’s not a bad thing to be compared to your betters, how to incorporate your passions into your writing, why you need to sit at your desk every day and listen to the voices in your head, the author’s process of discovery at the level of language, and how the right soundtrack can inspire your writing. We are rolling today on The Writer Files with an especially special guest, that sounds terrible as an intro, but Jay McInerney is here, the esteemed author of eleven books now it would seem. Best selling author, short story master, screenwriter I guess you could put on your resume as well. Jay McInerney: Yeah, yeah. Done a few of those. Kelton Reid: Wine columnist and now podcast interviewer I understand. Jay McInerney: Yeah, I’ve been participating in a podcast called Live From Prince Street, which is supposed to be food and wine centric, although actually I’ve ended up interviewing Francis Ford Coppola, Stephanie Danler the novelist. Veered more in the direction of the arts than food and wine. Kelton Reid: It’s really cool to hear, actually I’m a big fan of the show, at least your McInerney minute there when you are rapping with, it seems like it’s like some of your friends, some of your peers from both the culinary and the arts world, which is really fantastic to hear. Jay McInerney: Yeah, it’s nice. It’s a nice medium. Why It s Not a Bad Thing to Be Compared to Your Betters Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. I’ll put that in the show notes so that listeners can seek that out as well, but we’re really here to talk about your latest, which just arrived yesterday as of this recording. The new one, which is Bright, Precious Days, is getting a lot of buzz, a lot of amazing, amazing press. Do you find it intimidating at all that Vanity Fair has compared you to one of your, I think, favorite authors? Do you know who I’m talking about? Jay McInerney: Yeah. I think you’re talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kelton Reid: Yeah. Jay McInerney: Yeah, that freaked me out a little bit. In fact that comparison came up quite a bit when I published Bright Lights, Big City, probably because, I guess because I was relatively young, because the book was wildly successful, and somewhat in the manner of Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side Of Paradise. It was about young people going wild essentially, and I don’t know, I guess we’re both Irish-American writers. It was funny because I was not that much of a Fitzgerald fan at the time. In college I really gravitated toward Hemingway, potentially for The Sun Also Rises. Then I started to really re-read Fitzgerald and found that I really did love his work, and yet it was a comparison that was a little hard to live up to. Not many people write a novel as great as The Great Gatsby. It s a little, you know, you don’t want to necessarily compare yourself to your betters. On the other hand I am a great admirer and I actually think that he did somewhat influence my later work. How to Incorporate Your Passions into Your Writing Kelton Reid: That’s really cool. Our modern day Fitzgerald, a title that you are kind of in awe of. It’s really cool to see the response to the latest one. It’s amazing to me that you’ve had this career and you’ve done so many different things, that seemingly incorporate your passions, which between the wine and the culinary world, incorporating into this New York world, which obviously you paint very vividly. It’s really cool to see. Actually you mentioned Stephanie Danler who I also had on the show recently, and of course she’s a huge fan of yours as well. She kind of pays homage to you actually in the first paragraph of her latest, which is amazing. I found it interesting that she’s almost a different point of view of that same time frame, 2006/2008 in Manhattan. Anyway, great stuff. The newest one, Bright, Precious Days, just came out, a really amazing read. I’d love to dig in your process a little bit. I know you’ve had some amazing mentors in your past, Raymond Carver coming to mind as one of the antecedents of your writing career. As you look back on bigger projects like your latest, I’m not talking about your wine columns, how much time per day do you think you’re taking to research or read or remember that time in history, that world? Jay McInerney: I don’t do that much conscious research, that is to say I tend to write about relatively contemporary history and specifically New York history. This book is set in the … As you mentioned, the year is 2006, 7, 8. These years form the center of the book. I was in New York for that period and I guess mentally I’m always taking notes, and then I would research specific things. One of the characters in the book is a retired private equity guy, and that’s not a world that I spend much time in or thinking about. I research somewhat in terms of specific professions, things that fall outside of my ken, but most of this work is just drawn from my experience living in New York. Which is not to say that this latest novel is particularly autobiographical. There’s no figure that really represents me and my specific experience, but all of the characters are drawn from the world around me that I’m observing every day. Kelton Reid: We will be right back after a very short break. Thanks so much for listening to The Writer Files. Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer. For now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us: Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps them pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers people like you more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by “Which session should I go to?” And, “Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything the speakers have been awesome but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. Why You Need to Sit at Your Desk Every Day and Listen to the Voices in Your Head Kelton Reid: It seems a little bit different than the wine writing and the culinary writing that you do because that seems incredibly detailed in its research when you’re talking about something specific as like how rosé came to be so popular. Ok, so before you … when you’re working on a novel, before you get started do you have some pre-game rituals, some warm ups? Jay McInerney: I’m always, especially when I’m between novels, I’m always hoping that something springs into my brain, springs forth from my brain, I’m not sure which. It’s a process that, you have to be ready, I think, for inspiration. One of the things that Raymond Carver taught me was that you need be sitting at your desk virtually every day. You need to be in front of your, at that time it was a typewriter but now, in front of your computer, and you have to be trying. If you aren’t there, you aren’t trying, the muse is less likely to visit you if you’re just taking your dry cleaning downstairs or trying to flag a taxi. It’s about showing up every day and it’s about trying and it’s about being ready for the muse. Some days I sit down and I can’t seem to really get anywhere, but I have to keep doing it until something occurs to me, a sentence, a voice, a memory that sparks a flight of imagination. Frankly I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I’m going to be pretty busy talking about this book for a little while. I’m hoping that I’m going to hear a voice, or even overhear an anecdote at the dinner table that sort of sets my mind. The Author s Process of Discovery at the Level of Language Kelton Reid: That’s cool. Are you a morning writer? Are you an evening writer? Jay McInerney: Yeah, I’m not a morning person but for some reason I find that when I wake up I need to have copious amounts of coffee and then immediately get in front of the computer. Somehow if I don t get going, if I’m not doing it by noon I just feel like the day’s getting away from me, I get discouraged and I don’t seem to be able to start up. I sit down about 9:30 in the morning and I try to stay there until I get really hungry. Obviously when I’m in the middle of a novel, this process is a little easier and I am often aware of what I’m going to be doing for three or four hours because I’m in the middle of a chapter or story. Other times I’m struggling to figure out the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next turn of events. It’s always great once you’re in the middle and you know to some extent where you’re going. I seldom know more than a chapter or two ahead where I’m going. I think that there are those writers who outline and who know what they’re doing in advance but for me it’s always a process of discovery. I think a lot of the interesting stuff happens at the level of language. I can never I’ve never sat down with an entire book in my head, beginning, middle, and end. I’m always kind of improvising. Kelton Reid: Right. Yeah I’ve heard you talk about this before, improvisation over planning. I think it’s another author called it kind of writing into the dark, which I like that idea a lot. Jay McInerney: Yeah, it’s good. How the Right Soundtrack Can Inspire Your Writing Kelton Reid: You’ve written about at least your process while you were writing Bright Lights, Big City, one of my favorites, honestly. I always thought of a soundtrack while I was reading it, that ’80s sound. I read that piece that you did where you’re talking about Joy Division which I loved so much. Do you still like to crank up the stereo to inspire yourself? Jay McInerney: Yeah I do. You’re right, Bright Lights, Big City really did have a pretty distinct period soundtrack, some of which I actually put into the novel like the Talking Heads and, I don’t know, The Cure, I guess, and bands that were contemporary. With this novel I was listening mostly to jazz and blues. Blues has been a really big passion of mine for many, many years. In fact Bright Lights, Big City comes from a Jimmy Reed song. Kelton Reid: That’s right. Jay McInerney: Lately I’ve done something I never thought I would do, which is I’ve got interested in jazz, or at least I’m a fledgling in jazz. Somebody gave me a set of these Blue Note reissues, right about the time that I was starting to write this book. I found Miles Davis, John Coltrane, I found it kind of conducive to the tone of this particular book. Along with my usuals, like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and Skip James, the blues guys. Kelton Reid: Absolutely. Thanks so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files Podcast please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes or to just leave a comment or a question you can drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers, talk to you next week.

The instant national bestselling author of the acclaimed debut novel Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler, stopped by the show to chat with me about her not-so-overnight success as a rising literary star. Ms. Danler signed a six-figure deal with Knopf for her first book, the coming-of-age story of a young woman transplanted into New York City’s upscale, cutthroat restaurant world. Bestselling author Jay McInerney called Sweetbitter “… a stunning debut novel, one that seems destined to help define a generation,” and the book has been compared to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Before returning to her love of writing, and earning an MFA in Fiction from The New School in NY, Ms. Danler spent much of her life working in the food and wine industry. Stephanie has also written essays for The Paris Review, Vogue, Literary Hub, and Travel + Leisure. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please subscribe in iTunes to automatically see new interviews, and help other writers find us. If you missed the first half you can find it right here. In Part Two of the file Stephanie Danler and I discuss: The Dichotomy of Procrastination and Deadlines Why Relationships Are Important to Writers On the Deconstruction and Sanctity of Creativity How Great Writers Leave ‘Blood on the Page’ Some Great Advice on Why You Just Need to Finish Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes How ‘Sweetbitter’ Author Stephanie Danler Writes: Part One Sweetbitter: A novel – Stephanie Danler StephanieDanler.com with Links to Essays by Stephanie Danler This is Water – David Foster Wallace Stephanie Danler on Instagram Stephanie Danler on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Sweetbitter Author Stephanie Danler Writes: Part Two Kelton Reid: The Writer Files is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins built on the Genesis Framework. StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, air-tight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 177,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/studiopress right now. That’s Rainmaker.FM/studiopress. These are The Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and beyond. I’m your host, Kelton Reid, writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Each week we’ll discover how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer’s block. The instant national best-selling author of the acclaimed debut novel Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler, stopped by the show this week to chat with me about her not-so-overnight success as a rising literary star. Ms. Danler signed a six figure deal with Knapf for her first book, the coming of age story of a the young woman transplanted into New York City’s upscale, cut-throat restaurant world. Best-selling author Jay McInerny called Sweetbitter a stunning debut novel, one that seems destined to help define a generation. The book has been compared to Anthony Bourdain‘s Kitchen Confidential. Before returning to her love of writing and earning an MFA in fiction from The New School in New York, Ms. Danler spent much of her life working in the food and wine industry. Stephanie has also written essays for The Paris Review, Vogue, Literary Hub, and Travel + Leisure. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please click “subscribe” to automatically see new interviews with your favorite authors and help other writers to find us. If you missed the first half of this show, you can find it at WriterFiles.FM and in the show notes. In part two of the file, Stephanie and I discuss the dichotomy of procrastination and deadlines, why relationships are important to writers, on the deconstruction and sanctity of creativity, how great writers leave blood on the page, and some sound advice on why you just need to finish. Let’s talk about your work flow a little bit. Are you working on a Mac or a PC there? Stephanie Danler: Oh, a MacBook. I had this ancient one that was so heavy that I used to lug around the world, and this one is so light and fancy. I adore it. Kelton Reid: They get lighter by the day, don’t they? Stephanie Danler: I’m very happy about that. Kelton Reid: Are you a Microsoft Word, or a Scrivener disciple? Stephanie Danler: What’s Scrivener? I have no idea. Microsoft Word. I’m not, like, a software person. Kelton Reid: I just assume that there are two camps, and the Scrivener’s like a new … It’s a newer software that incorporates a lot of kind of organizational tools that a lot of writers are using now. But you sound like a classic, dyed in the wool Microsoft Word-er. Stephanie Danler: Yeah, and lots of notebooks. Not structured or an outline person, or an organized person at all. The Dichotomy of Procrastination and Deadlines Kelton Reid: Do you have any best practices, kind of going back to block and whatnot, for beating procrastination? Stephanie Danler: I mean, no, on procrastination. I don’t know how to beat that. I would welcome any tips that you have. I should listen to the other podcasts. Kelton Reid: I think a lot of writers lean into it because it’s part of their creative process. Stephanie Danler: I think that deadlines are incredible, extremely helpful, and I think adrenaline is extremely helpful. Maybe that’s because I worked in restaurants for so long that it feels very familiar to me. For beating block, I think there’s just reading. I think that when you’re feeling bored or uninspired by your own mind, I think it’s time to visit someone else’s mind. I was just recently rereading Susan Sontag’s journals, and she’s admonishing herself. She’s like, “You will not read anymore. You are procrastinating.” I was like, “Okay. I could just be so lucky to procrastinate like Susan Sontag. I’ll take the reading.” Why Relationships Are Important to Writers Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. For sure. So Campari and soda, a glass of wine. How else does Stephanie Danler unplug at the end of a long writing day? Stephanie Danler: There’s definitely a beverage involved, and I think that it really does signal that you’ve exited the work day in a way. I like to be outside. It’s part of the reason that I moved to Southern California, even though I’d barely been here. But I think it’s important to actually be in nature as much as possible. You miss that in the city, by just contact with the world. I need to talk to people. It’s a very intense experience to sit alone with your many voices all day, trying to decide which to listen to. I think that calling someone and getting out of your own head and your own problems is the reminder that, “Oh, I’m just a human. I’m just a regular human being in the world, and I’m going to go to sleep, and this doesn’t matter so much.” It does. It’s art, and it’s what I’ve dedicated my life to, but there’s also just living, and being a good friend, and a good partner, and making meals. That’s equally as important. On the Deconstruction and Sanctity of Creativity Kelton Reid: For sure. Well, I’d love to dig into your creativity if you have time. Stephanie Danler: Yeah. That’s like, the vaguest word. It’s like one of those catch-alls, and it’s like a branding tool now, that I don’t even know what it means. But yes, ask away. Kelton Reid: How do you personally define creativity? Stephanie Danler: As I was just being so cynical about creativity, I was thinking also about how sacred it really is. When I think about real creativity, I think about that moment when you’ve been staring at the same material, or the same words, or the same landscape, or building, or face, and you feel like you know it. You feel like everything about it is staid and formulaic, and it’s dead. Then these synapses connect, and it’s new. Then I think about Ezra Pound’s slogan, “Make it new.” I think that that’s creativity. There is no new material. There’s only new ways of perceiving, and that is where original, exciting thought comes from. Kelton Reid: When do you personally feel the most creative? You may have already answered this, but can you nail it down? Stephanie Danler: Yeah. I think that it’s really important to remember how much of writing takes place away from the desk and off the page. I find that I’m very creative where I’m having those synapses firing, where I’m seeing connections, when I’m in transit. Whether I’m driving, or walking, or riding the subway, those are extremely fertile times for thought, because you can wander. That’s all writing, for me. That’s all work. I’m not always even in a rush to write those things down. I kind of observe the thoughts, and if they’re important, and if they’re going to add to whatever dialogue I’m having, they’ll come back to me at the desk. I think in transit is a really lovely time. Kelton Reid: Do you have a creative muse right now? Stephanie Danler: I have been walking a lot since I’ve been back, and I live in Laurel Canyon, so I’m surrounded by trails. I used to walk a lot in New York as well. I used to walk the bridge. I found that to give me a really great mental space. I’m always reading poets, and I read poetry first thing in the morning, and that is such a huge part of my practice. They, whoever they are, never fail to make me excited about language again, which, excitement is one step away from inspiration. Usually that works. How Great Writers Leave ‘Blood on the Page’ Kelton Reid: Very nice. In your estimation, what makes a writer great? Stephanie Danler: That’s a huge question. I really value honesty. Not just honesty, but sincerity in writing. I find, in a lot of modern or postmodern fiction, I feel this distance from the reader, this lack of sincerity, where I’m supposed to be appreciating how clever something is, but the writer hasn’t actually left any blood on the page, so to speak. There isn’t this authenticity, and I’m drawn towards writers in which I can really feel their pulse right behind the page. I don’t know whether that’s lived experience, and there are plenty of fiction writers who make everything up that can give you that feeling, but that’s a mark of talent. Kelton Reid: Completely. Do you have a couple of favorites right now that you’re just kind of stuck on? Sitting on your bedside table? Stephanie Danler: I have such an insane stack on my bedside table. I am so bored of hearing myself praise Maggie Nelson, because I do it all the time, but Maggie Nelson is a critic, essayist, poet. She most recently put out The Argonauts, which is a masterpiece. Then, we have her book of poetry. It’s really a poetic essay called Bluets. At this point, I’ve read everything that she’s written, and she does not care about genre. She does not care about the rules, and I find it so inspiring. Kelton Reid: That’s awesome. Do you have a best-loved quote floating there somewhere over your desk, like so many authors? Stephanie Danler: Yeah. I have a bunch. I actually have a bunch of poems. But my real quotes are on my body. I have some tattoos that are quotes that I carry with me. I have, “This is Water,” from David Foster Wallace, which was a speech he gave at my university, Kenyon College, which has now turned into, like, a manifesto of sorts. What else do I have? I have Clarice Lispector, the last line of her book The Passion According to G.H., is, “And so I adore it,” which is really just an affirmation, after you’ve gone through this novel of destruction, really. It’s really allegorical and very Kafkaesque, even though I hate it when people call things Kafkaesque. That’s the easiest way for me to put it. After you’ve gotten to the bottom of this hole, where there’s no meaning, it ends with this kind of cry, “And so I adore it.” I think of that one often. Kelton Reid: Very cool. I’ve got a couple of fun ones for you, to wrap it up. We will be right back after a very short break. Thanks so much for listening to The Writer Files. Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail, as it gets closer. For now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us: Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps them pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree one of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by Which session should I go to? and, Am I missing something? Attendee 6:The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with those people who are putting it on and the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Kelton Reid: Are you a paper or an e-book lover? Stephanie Danler: I don’t have an e-book thing. I can’t do it. I can’t even talk about it. Kelton Reid: Should we cut this? Stephanie Danler: It makes traveling so difficult. No. I love that people read, and my friends have their Kindles, and they love their Kindles, and it’s made them more voracious readers, and I’m so happy about that, but that’s repulsive. I can’t. You have no sense of weight or where you are in a book, and you can’t dog-ear the pages, and you can’t write in them. It’s just, no, no, no. Not for me. Kelton Reid: Well, I believe that you can make marginalia in some Kindles now, but of course it doesn’t look the same years and years down the road when somebody else opens the book. Stephanie Danler: There’s something about reading, even on a computer screen, where you have no idea of where you are in the novel. I love reading a passage and knowing that I’m one-third of the way in, and that sense of expectation that it builds. The way you engage with it knowing that you’re five pages away from the ending, you’re just lost on the screen in cyberspace. It’s terrible. Kelton Reid: It sounds like an alternate dimension. Stephanie Danler: You don’t have to cut this. I really believe in everything I’m saying. I’m very comfortable with this. Kelton Reid: We’ll leave it all in. It’s great. It’s good stuff. Do you have kind of a favorite literary character of all time? Stephanie Danler: That’s such a fun one. I love Henry James‘ women. I love Isabelle Archer from Portrait of a Lady, followed closely by Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors. One is like, the young, intelligent, optimistic heroine of the novel, and then Madame de Vionnet is the older, manipulative, cynical, slightly toxic character. Obviously, if you have read my book, I’ve drawn from both of those. I love his women. Kelton Reid: If you could choose an author from any era for an all expense paid dinner to your favorite restaurant in the world, who would you take, and where would you take them? Stephanie Danler: I would take this writer M.F.K. Fisher. She wrote in the mid-20th century. She’s ostensibly a cookery writer, but she’s one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century. She’s incredible. She basically writes personal essays that are centered around food, but at the end you’re crying and you don’t know why. She’s incredibly powerful and very dark and funny. M.F.K. Fisher and I … Where would I take her? She lived in France for so long. I would love to take her to Spain. I’ve been to Spain. I was a Spanish wine buyer for a moment, and I’ve traveled extensively throughout that country, and I think she would be shocked by the quality of food in places like San Sebastian and Barcelona. Yeah, I would take M.F.K. Fisher on a tapeo, a tapas crawl. Kelton Reid: Nice, nice. Love that idea. Actually, it’s making me very hungry and thirsty thinking about that. Do you have any writer s fetishes? I know a lot of writers have collections and rare artifacts of the trade, and many don’t. Do you have anything that kind of hangs around or follows you around the world? Stephanie Danler: I mean, I have my notebooks, and I’ve been writing in them forever. I have my ridiculous library, but I think that every writer has a ridiculous library. My collection of old magazines and old Paris Reviews and old Kenyon Reviews, those are kind of special and idiosyncratic. I have a small collection of The Partisan Review, which was really powerful in the 40s and 50s. It was more powerful intellectually than The New Yorker at the time. Those are so special. You have Jean-Paul Sartre writing for The Partisan Review next to Robert Lowell. Those are incredible. Kelton Reid: Going back to the notebook really quick, what kind of notebook is it? Stephanie Danler: They’re Moleskine notebooks. Black. Kelton Reid: Aha. Stephanie Danler: “Aha.” I know. So boring. I keep a small one for personal, private, nonsensical writing. Then, I keep a larger one for thoughts pertaining to work. If anyone ever tries to sell you the small notebook, you don’t want that. You want the big notebook. Some Great Advice on Why You Just Need to Finish Kelton Reid: Can you offer advice to your fellow scribes, fellow writers, on how to keep the ink flowing, how to keep the cursor moving? Stephanie Danler: I think I go back to reading. I think you need to be reading as much as you’re writing, if not more. I also often tell fellow writers that you have to finish. I remember a professor told me that at The New School, Darryl Pinckney. He said, “You need to finish your projects.” I was like, “Well, duh. Of course, I’m trying to finish.” His point is that so many of us start things. There’s so much energy in, “I have written the opening sentences of the great American novel.” But we never finishing it is an entirely different beast. I think another facet of that is not to be too precious about it because writers do not realize that your first draft is almost meaningless. It doesn’t matter how good it is, how bad it is. You’re going to revise it 1,000 times, and until you write the last sentence, you have no idea what you’re looking at. Whether it is the great American novel, or whether it has to be burned. Get to the end. Kelton Reid: Well, Sweetbitter is a great novel. Congratulations. I love this blurb by Jay McInerney, who, that’s impressive alone, said, “A stunning debut, destined to help define a generation.” It really captures that fast paced, kind of late night, sexy subculture of the restaurant world, but it’s so much more. It’s incredibly well written, and I encourage the listeners to seek it out. I’m sure they can’t miss it at this point because it’s kind of everywhere. Congrats on that. I did have a question about kind of, any of your peers from that period, if you are still in touch with them, did they have any thoughts on kind of how you captured the world? Stephanie Danler: Yeah. I am, as you probably know, having worked in restaurants, your restaurant family, you see them around forever. I’ve had so many different restaurant families, and they’ve all shown up at one event or another. Even when I was in Portland, Oregon, where I knew no one, someone showed up who I used to work with who was living there. Everyone’s been so gracious and supportive, and the notes that I receive are so kind, and I think it’s because it’s fiction. I think that probably everyone I’ve ever worked with picked up the book and was like, “Oh, I bet I’m in here.” They’re not. I think that it makes it easier for them to read, and also, so many times, they’re like, “This took me back. This is like a love letter to our lives in that moment.” That is exactly what I wanted. It really is a deeply nostalgic work, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was in the process of leaving New York, and Union Square Café was closing, and it really is a tribute to that moment of youth, and that moment in New York City. Kelton Reid: That s cool. Stephanie Danler: Yeah, they have been so lovely. Kelton Reid: That’s awesome to hear. Well, congratulations on all of the successes, and we look forward to more. Hope you come back and talk with us again. Where can writers and listeners connect with you out there? Stephanie Danler: I am very active on Instagram, which seems strange for a writer, because I cannot Tweet. I don’t understand anything about it. But there’s an incredible book loving community on Instagram, where people are sharing writers and recommendations, and I post a lot of poetry that I’m reading, and try to give it as much visibility as possible, and yeah. People seem to like reading it on Instagram, so that’s where I am. Kelton Reid: Neat, neat. Very cool. All right, Stephanie. Well, thanks again, and it has been a true pleasure chatting with you about writing. Stephanie Danler: Thank you so much. Kelton Reid: Thanks so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy The Writer Files podcast, please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes, or to just leave a comment or a question, you can drop by WriterFiles.FM, and you can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.

The instant national bestselling author of the acclaimed debut novel Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler, stopped by the show to chat with me about her not-so-overnight success as a rising literary star. Ms. Danler signed a six-figure deal with Knopf for her first book, the coming-of-age story of a young woman transplanted into New York City’s upscale, cutthroat restaurant world. Bestselling author Jay McInerney called Sweetbitter “… a stunning debut novel, one that seems destined to help define a generation,” and the book has been compared to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Before returning to her love of writing, and earning an MFA in Fiction from The New School in NY, Ms. Danler spent much of her life working in the food and wine industry. Stephanie has also written essays for The Paris Review, Vogue, Literary Hub, and Travel + Leisure. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, please subscribe in iTunes to automatically see new interviews, and help other writers find us. In Part One of the file Stephanie Danler and I discuss: Why You Should Write What You Know and Love The Unglamorous Yet Rewarding Work of Promoting a New Book Why Cultural Artifacts Are Great for Research An Author’s Careful Balance of Daily Beverage Consumption Why the Old Rules of Productivity Shouldn’t Apply to Writers Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes How ‘Sweetbitter’ Author Stephanie Danler Writes: Part Two Sweetbitter: A novel – Stephanie Danler StephanieDanler.com with Links to Essays by Stephanie Danler One Writer on Loving and Letting Go of Her Drug-Dependent Father – Stephanie Danler for Vogue Stephanie Danler on Instagram Stephanie Danler on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter The Transcript How Sweetbitter Author Stephanie Danler Writes: Part One Kelton Reid: The Writer Files is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins built on a the genesis framework. StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, air-tight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 177,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/studiopress right now. That’s Rainmaker.FM/studiopress. These are the Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and beyond. I’m your host, Kelton Reid, writer, podcaster, and media file. Each week we’ll discover how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer’s block. The instant national best-selling author of the acclaimed debut novel Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler, stopped by the show to chat with me this week about her not so overnight success as a rising literary star. Ms. Danler signed a six-figure deal with Knopf for her first book, the coming of age story of a young woman transplanted into New York City’s upscale, cut-throat restaurant world. Best-selling author Jay McInerney called Sweetbitter a stunning debut novel, one that seems destined to help define a generation. The book has been compared to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Before returning to her love of writing and earning an MFA in fiction from the New School in New York, Ms. Danler spent much of her life working in the food and wine industry. Stephanie has also written essays for The Paris Review, Vogue, Literary Hub, and Travel + Leisure. Join us for this two-part interview, and if you’re a fan of the show, do click “subscribe” to automatically see new interviews and to help other writers find us. In part one of this file, Stephanie and I discuss why you should write what you know and love, the unglamorous yet rewarding work of promoting a new book, why cultural artifacts are great for research, an author’s careful balance of daily beverage consumption, and why the old rules of productivity shouldn’t apply to writers. We’re rolling with author Stephanie Danler. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to rap with us about your process. Stephanie Danler: Of course. Thank you for having me. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. I am a big fan of this new book, Sweetbitter. I have to say it’s my new favorite. I don’t say that very often. I know it might sound like maybe I say that to every author, but I loved and hated it. I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’ve waited tables for many, many years of my life, and it’s giving me flashbacks. Stephanie Danler: I hear that all the time. I hear the PTSD that people start to sweat a little bit, especially in some of the more intense service scenes, which I imagine are really boring for a lot of readers. They’re like, “I get it. She carries three plates. This is not that difficult.” But for people in the industry, that kind of crush and intensity of service, I still get PTSD, and I didn’t stop waiting tables that long ago. Kelton Reid: Yeah, it’s amazing that it’s been years for me as well, but I still kind of get those waiting tables dreams where I have a nightmare, which is totally kind of like a PTSD response. Of course, it’s a stress response, but it’s … Stephanie Danler: What’s yours? Everyone has a different one. Kelton Reid: Yeah, oh yeah. It’s like the restaurant fills up, and you’re the only server, and you can’t do anything right, and everyone’s speaking a different language. You just want to get one coffee to a table, and you can’t span this football field sized restaurant. How about that? Stephanie Danler: That’s a great one. Kelton Reid: What’s yours? Stephanie Danler: God, mine is so specific, and it’s that I go into the wine room to pull a bottle of wine, and none of the bottles have labels on them. They’re all just black. I’m digging through this endless pile of glass, and I’m sweating the whole time. Kelton Reid: Oh my. Yeah. Okay, cool. It’s definitely something that waiters get, but you waited tables in a very specific type of restaurant, like a fine dining place. The book is amazing, the language and the prose really, really captures that setting, so kudos on the success of the book. I understand it’s doing very well, getting a lot of great buzz. Stephanie Danler: Thank you. Yeah. Totally has surpassed any of my wildest expectations. I’m ready to go home now, but not quite yet. Kelton Reid: Are you still in New York City, or are you… Stephanie Danler: No. I just got back to LA where I am currently camped out. Technically this is home, but I’m still working for Sweetbitter, constantly. Why You Should Write What You Know and Love Kelton Reid: Okay, yeah. Cool, cool. That’s exciting. Maybe for listeners who aren’t familiar with your story, can you give us kind of a little bit of your origin from maybe just from waiting tables in New York City, or being a back waiter in New York City to best-selling novelist? Stephanie Danler: That is such a clean trajectory. I wish that it went like that. I moved to New York City at the same age as my protagonist in the novel. She moves when she’s 22 in 2006. That is in fact when I moved to the city and the age that I was. Unlike my protagonist, I’d been working in restaurants my entire life. I started when I was 15 years old, and I never had another job. I knew when I got to New York that I needed to find restaurant work quickly and that that was what would support me while I wrote because I did move to become a writer. I had just finished undergrad, and I had two parts of a very bad novel that I thought was going to be a great novel. I think the most autobiographical part of Sweetbitter is the experience of falling head over heels in love with an industry, and it giving you a life that is very full and that is not a means to an end, but is immensely gratifying in and of itself. That’s what I found when I got to New York. And so, after my first job, which was at a landmark restaurant that’s no longer there, Union Square Café. Danny Meyer’s first restaurant. After that, I went to wine school. I helped open wine stores. I was the beverage director for a small restaurant group. I was the general manager. I helped open new businesses. I was a food and wine professional and very attached to that identity. It wasn’t until I was almost 30 that I remembered why I had moved to New York City. At that point, I had this idea. I wanted to tell a coming of age novel that subverted the genre in a few ways. First by being about a woman, and second by being not about age 14 or age 18, but about this extended adolescence that we’re experiencing now in our 20s where we’re not married. We’re not supposed to have careers yet, and we have this period where we’re actually just supposed to be figuring out how to be. I married that with what I knew, which is 15 years in the restaurant industry. I had this expertise, and I had this world that was so rich. I went back to graduate school, and I was getting my MFA, and the first thing I wrote was the first sentence of Sweetbitter. Two years later I had the first draft finished. Kelton Reid: That’s cool. That’s really, really cool. Stephanie Danler: Yeah, and there was a lot of messy, awful stuff in the middle of that, so it wasn’t so clean. I do love that story, waitress turns into best-selling author. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. It’s a good one. Stephanie Danler: I just woke up one day, and poof, there was a book. Kelton Reid: I noticed that you quoted Sappho in the opening there. Is that where the title comes from? Stephanie Danler: Yeah. Sappho famously was the first writer to call love bittersweet, but there’s a more recent translation by the poet Anne Carson, in which she looks at the word in Greek and says, “No, it’s actually sweet bitter.” That’s also the order in which we experience love, the sweet first, and then the bitter. Kelton Reid: That’s cool. Stephanie Danler: I love Anne Carson, so I just went with that. Kelton Reid: Very cool. The world is so ripe for that subculture. I love how you’re kind of going through the palate, the flavors, the everything, the appetite of that world. It’s an amazing read, so kudos on that. Where else can we find your writing out there? I know you’ve written for some kind of bigger name publications. Have you done travel writing? Is that right? Stephanie Danler: Yeah, I do. I have two other types of writing going on. I occasionally, with much angst, write personal essays. It’s not my natural habitat, but I also have had a really great run with Travel + Leisure. I have an incredible editor there, Jesse Ashlock. We’ve done three pieces together now. I’ve always been travelling. It’s a huge part of my life, and it’s what I’ve spent all my money on, and what I always will spend all my money on. It has turned out that I get to write about it. It’s not always that glamorous, but it’s incredibly rewarding. Then the personal essays have found homes on The Paris Review website, Vogue, and Lit Hub, Literary Hub, all sites that I’m so honored to be on. The Vogue thing was insane. No one thinks they’re going to be in Vogue. It’s so weird. I’ve never even read Vogue. Kelton Reid: That’s crazy. Stephanie Danler: Again, I had a genius editor who pulled out this personal essay for me. I think I get more feedback about that essay which talks about drug addiction and developing boundaries with addicts. I get more feedback on that than anything I’ve written, including Sweetbitter. Kelton Reid: Wow. Yeah, all great stuff. I’ll link to those. You also have a personal website, which I’ll link to. That’s StephanieDanler.com. We’ll put that in the show notes for listeners also. What are you working on right now? Stephanie Danler: I am working on this podcast, and then I am working for Sweetbitter. I do have two essays that are close. Then there’s that dreaded second novel that Knopf is waiting for, which I will turn my attention to shortly, but I just got back from touring. I think I need a little bit of mental space. Kelton Reid: We will be right back after a very short break. Thanks so much for listening to the Writer Files. Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer. For now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us: Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps them pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by Which session should I go to? and, Am I missing something? Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on, and the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Why Cultural Artifacts Are Great for Research Kelton Reid: We’ll look forward to hearing more about that as it develops. I’d love to just kind of dig into your process a little bit and learn a little bit more about your creative and writing process. Stephanie Danler: Yeah. Kelton Reid: Let’s talk about productivity a little bit. When you were working on the book, how much time were you kind of putting into research? I know that you did a lot of personal research over those years as a server and industry worker. Did you find yourself doing a lot of research while you were writing the book? Stephanie Danler: It’s interesting. People ask me often whether I had to research the industry or the food and the wine. Those things were so second nature to me, but what I could not remember was 2006, probably because I was drunk and working at the restaurant, but also I was 22, and it was a decade ago. I keep notebooks, but my notebooks are, “I woke up sad today. I woke up happy today.” They’re useless. I found myself very grateful for my hoarding tendencies and all of these old New Yorkers and New York magazines, and a collection of old Gourmet magazines, which is now out of print, but was the most beautiful food magazine in the world. I have a storage unit full of these print magazines. All of the information is online, but what you don’t get is the ads and the feel of what was happening in 2006; what restaurants were opening, what menus looked like, what songs were popular. Those were so helpful in jogging my memory. Kelton Reid: That’s cool. Stephanie Danler: That counts as research, I think. An Author s Careful Balance of Daily Beverage Consumption Kelton Reid: For sure. Before you actually sit down to get going, do you have any pre-game rituals to kind of get you into the mood? Stephanie Danler: Yes. I’m big on beverages, like multiple, multiple beverages. There is usually a cup of coffee that is lukewarm and anyone else would think is disgusting, but I drink it all day. Then there’s tea, and there’s water. Then at some point, there’s a Campari soda. Then at some point, there’s a white wine. I think the beverages are twofold because you need to be hydrated while you write, right? Everyone knows that. But you get to get up from the desk every 20 to 30 minutes to refill something or fidget with something. I find that very valuable. Kelton Reid: Oh, for sure. Yeah, taking breaks is important. Staying caffeinated, also important, up to a point. Stephanie Danler: Yeah, such a delicate art with caffeination, being caffeinated. Caffeination, I made that up. Why the Old Rules of Productivity Shouldn t Apply to Writers Kelton Reid: When you’re working on a bigger piece, or even an essay, are you working on it every day? Are you scheduling or blocking out times or word counts? Stephanie Danler: I think that when I am lucky, I’m obsessed by a project enough that I’m working on it every day. I’m not a fantastic multi-tasker. I really do need to focus in on one project. I very rarely am juggling two pieces of writing at the same time. I do block off whole days. I find that I cannot dip in and dip out. Maybe that also goes back to being a bad multi-tasker. My social self and my writing self are so far away from each other. Like, even just to talk to you today, it means that I can’t write. I’m in a different head space. Maybe later today, if a shift occurs. I have to block off whole days. That means, no, I cannot go to lunch. No, I cannot go get a drink. No, I cannot work out. No, I cannot go to the market. You just really have to put strict boundaries around that time. I do. Kelton Reid: Yeah, so that gets you into the flow. It sounds like you’re working big stretches, in marathon stretches. Stephanie Danler: Yeah, that is how I work. Yeah. Kelton Reid: Cool. Do you find that you’re getting more stuff done in the mornings, or are you kind of just whatever time of day? Stephanie Danler: Yeah, mornings are hard, because I do get up early, and I read. I have a handwriting journal practice that I’ve had for my entire life, but really there are so many emails. There’s the business of life, and that always feels most pressing in the morning. I find that I have a productive period around 10am after that stuff has fallen away, or I have a better sense of my day. Then around 4pm, anything leading up to a meal, I am like, “I’ll write for two hours, and then I get to eat.” Kelton Reid: Yeah, absolutely. Do you like to work with headphones on, or are you somebody who prefers silence? Stephanie Danler: I like music. I have a hard time with music that has words, though. I think when you’re dealing with words, and I have worked in silence before and found it very productive, but it’s also a little frightening, especially if you’re working for ten hours with no noise. That is a little intense for me. There’s something about music where I feel like I’m in touch with the world still. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. I find it interesting, actually, that kind of in the restaurant on a busy night, there’s a sound that kind of a busy restaurant makes that’s almost like brown noise or something where all conversations just kind of melt into one thing. Then you’ve got that soundtrack underneath that’s like an ambient soundtrack or something like that. Do you have memories of some of those tracks that would come on at the restaurant during a service night? Stephanie Danler: Oh my God, of course. Don’t you? Kelton Reid: Yeah, totally. It’s really interesting. I’ve tried to make playlists that incorporate songs from different eras of different restaurants to kind of remember those times. Stephanie Danler: The last job I had was at a restaurant called Buvette, and “Slippin’ and a Slidin ” by Little Richard would come on at midnight when things were beginning to break apart, when people had gotten too drunk, and we got this late night rush that we weren’t expecting. Everyone’s so tired and hungry. I would always look at the bartender and just shake my head, because that song was like, “We’re doomed.” Kelton Reid: That’s awesome. When you hear it now, you kind of… Stephanie Danler: I have not listened to that song since I left that restaurant. Kelton Reid: You can’t. Stephanie Danler: No, I would never. Is Writer s Block a Thing? Kelton Reid: Gotcha, gotcha. Let’s hear your thoughts on writer’s block. Do you believe in it? Is it a thing? Have you ever experienced it? Stephanie Danler: Oh God, it’s like one of the most powerful myths about writing. Every writer is asked about it, and it’s been endlessly discussed, but what’s interesting … I don’t think writer’s block exists. I think that the way that we measure productivity is not applicable to writing. Usually, you have active time equal to your production to the amount of money you’re getting paid. None of those rules apply. This idea that you’re blocked makes an assumption that there is another way that you should be working, that there are goals that you have to hit. However, I have had the experience of having so much energy for a piece and diving into it, and running into literally a wall, a mental wall, and being like, “Oh, what is this doing here? I’m just going to bang my head against it, and I’m sure it will disappear.” Then finally saying, “I have to walk away.” That’s what I think of when I think of writer’s block, but it’s actually something else, which is some wiser, less egotistical self that is also me looking down and saying, “This isn’t working. Walk away.” That’s your instinct. That’s not really a block. Kelton Reid: Yeah, yeah. I like that summation. Thanks so much for joining me for this half of a tour through the writer’s process. If you enjoy the Writer Files Podcast, please subscribe to the show and leave us a rating or review on iTunes to help other writers find us. For more episodes or to just leave a comment or a question, you can drop by WriterFiles.FM. You can always chat with me on Twitter @KeltonReid. Cheers. Talk to you next week.

Summer is the perfect time to get outside and experience all that Lake Superior has to offer.  Some prefer to take a quick dip in the lake from the sandy beaches of Duluth's Park Point or watch a stunning sunset in the Apostle Islands. While others get super ambitious and take a road trip driving around the world's largest freshwater lake. Duluth News Tribune reporter Lisa Kazcke (pronounced "cats ski") recently completed the Lake Superior Circle Tour, driving a total of 1,536 miles in eight days around the big lake through Minnesota, Canada, Michigan and Wisconsin. Kazcke shares her highlights from the trip, including the giant goose in Wawa, Ontario, the Soo Locks, and eating poutine for the first time. Have you been wanting to complete the Lake Superior Circle Tour? Have you already checked this trip off your bucket list? Let us know at podcast@duluthnews.com What we are into this week: the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, Little League Baseball, "Sweetbitter" by Stephanie Danler and salad dressings. 

Lori talks with Stephanie Danler about the unique world of love and sex behind the "employees only" doors of restaurants. Danler is a a former restaurant work and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. She is the author of the new novel, Sweetbitter. 

Stephanie Danler, the author of the novel of the summer, Sweetbitter, talks about umami, developing an appetite, and the challenges of writing about food and sex well. Read the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/28NHF21

Stephanie Danler's debut novel, Sweetbitter, is the coming-of-age story of a young New York transplant who lands a job at one of the city's top restaurants. Danler talks with editor-at-large Christine Muhlke about her real-life experiences as a waitress in NYC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephanie Danler, author of the highly recommended Sweetbitter, joins the guys in the Damn Library for a chat about anything and everything. Food, identity, sex - you name it, they talk about it. TWO cocktails are imbibed and Maggie Nelson's exceptional Bluets is unanimously praised. 15 seconds of a song: "The Clearest Blue" - CHVRCHES Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Adam Hochschild talks about Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Stephanie Danler discusses her debut novel, “Sweetbitter”; Jojo Moyes talks about the film adaptation of her novel “Me Before You”; and Gregory Cowles and Parul Sehgal talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.

Tune in for a special bonus episode of Eat Your Words, with an exclusive panel discussion from the recent Food Book Fair. How does one write a convincing, veiled-enough, but-believable-enough work of fiction inspired by a real place, people, and time when the subject is something as personal as food and the dining experience? And why are readers — whether they have worked in restaurants or not — so interested in the behind-the-scenes goings on at restaurants? featuring: Stephanie Danler, author of "Sweetbitter" Jessica Tom, author of "Food Whore" Helen Ellis, author of "American Housewife" Cathy Erway, moderator, host of Heritage Radio Network's "Eat Your Words" and author of "The Food of Taiwan" and "The Art of Eating In"