Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 21

New agent alert at Writers House

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New literary magazine: Amulet

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Ghostwriting conference returns for a second year

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New service company for self-published authors

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Links of Interest: March 5, 2025

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This Memoir Could Have Been an Email: Telling Your Story With Different Forms of Communication

Photo by Dalila Dalprat

Today’s post is by writer, editor, and book coach Jennifer Landau.

There are 15 pages of tweets in Jenny Lawson’s memoir-in-essays Broken (in the best possible way). The thread starts with Lawson tweeting:

Airport cashier: “Have a safe flight.”

Me: “You too!”

I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN!

What follows are a barrage of tweets from some of her 400,000+ followers offering up their own embarrassing exchanges.

Lawson, who started her career in the early days of blogging, is a profound and silly and profoundly silly writer with a deep connection to her readers. They come to her book for her bizarro email exchanges with scammers called “the Vampire Brotherhood,” and her very NSFW text exchanges with her sister about, among other things, the scent of bearcat urine.

But readers also crave her candor about her physical and mental health struggles. Lawson has multiple autoimmune disorders and depression and anxiety that puts her at risk of suicide. As Lawson phrases it, “It’s hard to live with a brain that wants to kill you.”

Her chapter titled “Things We Do to Quiet the Monster,” includes a detailed diary of her experience with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment designed to improve symptoms of depression and anxiety. She even shares a picture of herself mid-treatment as well as this message to her readers: “I will get better. So will you. Each day more and more people understand the struggle and more treatments become available. One day there will be a cure. And I’ll be here for it.”

Lawson can get away with a lot because she’s a multiple #1 New York Times best-selling author. She can have her fifteen pages of tweets and a wacky list of Shark Tank pitches for products like Pogo Stilts with the tagline “Pogo Stilts: Someone’s Breaking a Leg.”

Her every-type-of communication-short-of-carrier-pigeon approach works because she knows her gifts and her audience. The comic absurdities offer a balm to her reader. The scathing open letter to her health insurance company offers raw honesty that many who fight to get their services covered can relate to. It begins: “Sometimes I think you want me dead.”

Lawson doesn’t just slap together the tweets and emails and texts and call it a day, either. She has passages of deep reflection and a rallying cry that pulses through the memoir. She posits that many of us struggle to treat ourselves with the care that we would show a dog. Dogs need “walks and healthy choices and water and play and sleep and naps and bacon and more naps. And love. I need that, too. And so do you. It’s not just a gift we give ourselves…it’s a duty. I’ll remind you if you remind me.” Lawson may not be all things to all people. But she is everything to her people.

In her memoir Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bess Kalb refers to her book as an oral history. Kalb’s beloved grandmother Bobby is both the primary subject of the memoir and its narrator. She is also dead as the book opens. Bobby lets us know that it’s terrible to be dead because there’s nothing to read and no one to talk to. She complains about her funeral; especially the Jewish tradition of shoveling dirt onto the coffin, which she finds degrading. “What’s next?” she asks. “They make the kids push the embalming fluid into my veins?”

While Kalb’s memoir certainly puts the creative in creative nonfiction, readers who buy into the conceit do so because they have come to know Bobby’s idiosyncratic voice and worldview through the more than thirty phone calls, voicemails, and in-person conversations that Kalb includes in the book. These real-life communications add an air of authenticity that grounds the book and highlights the deep love these two women have for each other. It’s a high-wire act, for sure, but one that had this reader tearing up at a final image of Bobby: young, healthy, and waving from the bow of a boat.

Want to use email, voicemail, and the like in your memoir? Here are a few guidelines.

Tap into the universal

No matter how you bolster your memoir with different forms of communication, you need to tap into something universal to keep your readers engaged.

Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project, offers an algorithm to keep writers focused on issues that transcend their own experience:

Memoir is about X (something universal) as illustrated by Y (something deeply personal) to be told in a Z (a certain format such as a long-form essay, op-ed, or book).

For example: Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is about:

X: The struggle to accept the loss of a loved oneY: As illustrated by Kalb’s desire to remain in conversation with her grandmother even after her death.Z: In the form of a memoir.Accept the anachronistic

When Lawson published her book tweets were still tweets, not X’s or posts or whatever they are called now. A year from now Bluesky’s skeets may dominate. Or TikTok might be banned—and then unbanned—again. All you can do is be clear about what form of communication you are using—and why.

Don’t use those voicemails or texts as a crutch …

If you can’t figure out how to explain an event or a choice you made, avoid tossing in some voicemail transcript instead. It will come off as a cheat and undermine your credibility going forward.

… or as a cudgel

I’ll start with a caveat: If you are writing about an abusive relationship, the legal, ethical, and safety concerns are beyond the scope of what I’m discussing. I’m talking about including a fistful of emails that show your crummy ex-boyfriend behaving in depressingly similar crummy ways (although there might be legal concerns there, too). Not only will your readers get bored, but they will also be looking for your part in things. It takes two to untangle as they say, and your audience wants a warts-and-all narrator they can relate to and trust.

Have fun!

Did you come across a Post-It note from a former neighbor you’ve lost touch with? A nearly illegible family tree your brother sketched during his genealogy phase? A Build-A-Bear bear that plays your now adult son saying, “I love you, Mommy,” in his very prepubescent voice? As long as these things are a natural fit and not simply shoehorned into your memoir because they’re cool, have at it!

Sometimes It IS About the Research

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author, book coach and historian Christina Larocco.

Nearly a decade ago, I worked as a consultant on a project to digitize manuscript collections related to the women’s rights movement in the Philadelphia region, where I live. It was a great job: I spent the summer of 2016 going from archive to archive, devouring the writing of activists both well-known, like Lucretia Mott and Alice Paul, and less so, like Martha Schofield.

Schofield was born in 1839 to a family of devout Quaker abolitionists whose family farm was a stop on the Underground Railroad. She attended women’s rights conventions with her mother as early as 1854, and in her thirties and beyond she devoted herself to the woman suffrage movement. During the Civil War, she volunteered at a local hospital, which took in hundreds of United States soldiers wounded at Gettysburg and elsewhere. From 1865 until her death in 1916, she taught freed people in South Carolina and tried to stem the tide of racial terrorism across the nation.

When the project was over, I recommended that Schofield’s letters and diaries be digitized. Part of this was selfish: I had fallen in love with and started to write a book about her, and I wanted to be able to continue my research at home in my pajamas. But the reason I fell in love with her was that her papers were so different from anything I had come across in my twenty years as a women’s historian, then or since. It didn’t seem like an ethical dilemma.

Guides to women’s paper collections often issue a version of this disclaimer: “scant information about her personal life.” The first generation of women’s historians was understandably focused on highlighting extraordinary women’s accomplishments, disentangling them from home, family, and the personal or private to show what they had done in the public realms of politics, science, and the arts. For generations, it was only women whose lives adhered to male models of achievement whose papers were deemed worthy of collecting. At the same time, many public women—or their descendants, who were concerned with propriety—purged their records of anything personal.

Schofield, however, wrote about her thoughts and feelings constantly. It was this access to her inner life, not her impressive resume, that made me want to write about her.

Now, part of me worries that digitizing her papers has diluted their power, precisely in the area that first attracted me to them.

Here’s an example: one of the challenges I faced in writing about Schofield was figuring out how to characterize her relationship with Robert K. Scott, a Civil War general, assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Reconstruction governor of South Carolina. He and Martha first met in 1866, as he traveled through the state. Late in life, Schofield confessed in both a poem and a letter to her niece that she had loved him. But you wouldn’t know it based on her extant writing from the time—she rarely referred to him by name, and she never identified him as more than a friend.

She did leave behind clues to these deeper feelings, though—ironically, more in her attempts to hide them than anywhere else. As forthcoming as Schofield was, she had a habit of destroying materials she didn’t want people to see. In 1862, she destroyed a group of letters from school friends. In 1865, she dropped her letters to John Bunting, her first love, into the Atlantic Ocean. “Destroy this unread,” she wrote years later into her diary from 1868–1869, when her best friend’s engagement led her to contemplate death.

In other words, if she destroyed it, it’s probably pretty juicy.

So it’s significant that her writing about Scott is rife with redactions. She tore out the page of her diary immediately preceding her first mention of Scott. Sections from pages covering April 1866, when Scott spent days traveling just to visit her and the two declared their love, and June and July 1866, including the day of Scott’s birthday, are neatly excised, as if cut out with scissors. Sometimes she cut out only his name, still evident through context clues.

I know these events happened because she wrote about them later. But I know how much they meant to her because she removed the evidence.

For that reason, I’m glad I first read her diaries in physical form, where I noticed the alterations immediately. They’re much less apparent, much easier to miss completely, in digital form. How can you determine that pages have been removed when only the pages themselves are digitized? How can you even begin to figure out what was on those missing pages if you don’t know they existed?

So, was it wrong to advocate for these papers to be digitized?

Of course not. In-person research presents significant barriers to access, and physical archives aren’t complete either. But it’s worth remembering that documents are objects with their own material lives, often not reproducible by technology.

Writer, book coach, and historian Christina Larocco’s latest book, Crosshatch: Martha Schofield, the Forgotten Feminist (1839–1916), is now available for preorder. This March, she’s giving away 31 free writing strategy sessions to nonfiction writers who love to gather information but sometimes get stuck in research rabbit holes. Grab your free session here.

AI & the Slush Pile: Lots of Experimenting but No Implementation (Yet)

Of all the potential uses for AI in the publishing industry, submissions management is one area where help is merited and AI use could—if one is optimistic—see potential improvement for everyone. But its use remains controversial.

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Entangled launches two new YA imprints

The home of Rebecca Yarros has announced Mischief Books and Mayhem Books.

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Tip from a reader: Metalabel for collaborations

The platform enables Substack writers who want to collaborate on creating themed collected writings in a more polished print or ebook form.

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