The Footnote with Joanna Rakoff
An index revealing all the minute details of how your favorite authors work
The Footnote is a brand-new column from Moms Don’t Have Time to Write in which prominent writers give us the lowdown on their work habits — no matter how messy or mundane.
This week’s installment features Joanna Rakoff, author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction. Rakoff’s books have been translated into twenty languages and she has written frequently for The New York Times, Vogue, Marie Claire, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters.
Follow the link to visit Rakoff’s author page, and listen to her episode of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.
Early riser or night owl?
Early riser. I wrote both my first two books before my kids woke up!
Writing on an empty stomach or a full breakfast before you sit down at the desk?
You know, it varies. My dream writing day involves waking up before everyone else and sitting down with my coffee to write for an hour.
But most days that doesn’t happen, and I’ve done a million things for my kids and husband before I start work, so I need to eat a full breakfast before sitting down to work. (Because I’ve been up for hours and if I don’t eat I’ll just go back to bed!)
Long-hand or computer?
Long-hand, usually, at least when I’m first starting out. Even for a review, or an essay, I’ll start out writing on legal pads, then, once I have an idea of the shape of the piece, I’ll open my laptop.
With books, I go back and forth. When I’m stuck, I take out the legal pad!
Silence is golden or music for inspiration?
I can do both! When I’m feeling anxious about getting started — for the day or on a new project — music really helps me calm down and also work more energetically. But I can only listen to music I know very well or the lyrics distract me.
(While writing My Salinger Year, I listened to a lot of M. Ward, Elliott Smith, and Okkervil River. With A Fortunate Age, a lot of Wilco, Guided by Voices, and Belle & Sebastian! And with this new book, a lot of Taylor Swift. I guess I need comfort music?)
Favorite magazine/literary journal?
In terms of a literary magazine: I love The Paris Review, of course, and actually feel like it’s entering into a new golden age, as their online component is fantastic.
But it’s interesting: When I was first starting out as a writer, in the early aughts, not that many magazines ran personal essays. Essays were thought of as a high literary form. So, sure, Vogue and Elle ran a couple every month, as did The New Yorker, Harpers, and The Atlantic, but that was kind of it.
The rise of the Internet changed all that. So, in recent years, I’ve read profoundly moving, and interesting, and gorgeously written essays on The Cut, Cup of Jo, Bustle, Romper, and so many others. (Including, of course, Moms Don’t Have Time to Write!)
Avoid or devour reviews of your own work?
I don’t read any reviews of my work or even interviews with me. I’ve never even looked at the Amazon pages for my books.
Frequency of checking Amazon ranking?
I’ve never checked it! I honestly believe that writers should not spend their time thinking about sales or reviews.
If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?
An actor. As a kid, I started out believing that acting was my, let’s say, calling. In college, my first theater professor — Paul Moser — told me that I was talented but not pretty enough or thin enough to make it. And I was so young and so impressionable that I believed him and just gave up.
For years and years and years, I’d go to the theater — or the movies — and think about how I would have interpreted this role or that one.
If you could be any other author, who would you be? Why?
Oh gosh, it’s a toss-up between a few very different writers! I love and admire Diane Johnson’s tightly drawn comedies of manner; and I would so love to be able to write in this vein, sophisticated, wise, witty, deeply controlled.
But I also love the sprawling, earnest, expansive novels of Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith, and revel in the freedom these writers feel to go down whatever paths their minds take them.
How many cups of coffee or tea per day?
I drink just one cup of coffee each morning. But it’s a very strong cup of coffee! Made in a Moka pot. So, espresso really!
Favorite snack/meal while writing?
This is embarrassing — and my family loves to mock this habit — but I eat whole heads of romaine lettuce while writing. I also — and this is equally embarrassing — eat a lot of Panera cobb salads, minus the blue cheese, purely because it’s the closest salad purveyor to my office. And then I eat a truly appalling amount of almonds, strawberries, and dried mango.
And I’m addicted to what my husband calls “brown goop”: it’s this powder, from Sakara, that you mix with water to form a kind of healthy hot chocolate. It doesn’t have caffeine, but it somehow gives me energy at moments when I’m feeling low.
Trick for avoiding writer’s block?
Getting enough sleep. Taking a short run. Reading. Also, repeating, “sometimes done is better than good” over and over and over.
Last charge you’ll admit to on your credit card?
A beautiful, timeless, perfect dress from Rebecca Jean, an independent designer in Chatham, the adorable, Nantucket-like town on the Cape. It’s a summer dress, with a structured, 1950s-ish top, in an equally 1950s-ish plaid, which sort of looks like something Betty Draper wore on the first season of Mad Men, and I have been wearing it every day for a week.
Book you’ve pretended to have read but haven’t?
Moby Dick. UGH. I can’t get through it.
Word you always misspell?
It’s quite ironic. “Embarrassing.” I can never remember how many Rs!
Go-to outfit for a day of writing at home?
I am not a person who wears pajamas or sweats. I have to get dressed for the day or I just feel weird and wretched. In the summer, I’m a dress person. I have a huge wardrobe of summer dresses. In the winter, I wear a lot of wool trousers or jeans and turtlenecks and jumpsuits.
When it’s warm-ish, I wear Everlane day heels every single day — I own them in maybe ten colors — and when it’s cold I wear №6 shearling clogs every single day. I guess I have a uniform? Sort of?
Edits: love or hate doing them?
I love them. Maybe because I was a magazine writer for a long time? I love working with an editor to get work in shape.
Largest number of rejections you’ve gotten for a book or essay before it was sold?
Please don’t hate me but…1. My books have all had multiple bidders and I’ve had the luxury of choosing the editor and house I liked best. (Which is actually a bit nerve-wracking.) And I’ve never written an essay on spec. Maybe, again, because I started off in the world of magazines and newspapers! I’ve only written essays under contract for a specific publication.
Years ago, however, I did send off the first chapter of my new novel — a contemporary gloss on The Age of Innocence — which works as a standalone story, to One Story, using their general submission email, rather than having my agent submit it. This was before My Salinger Year came out, but after A Fortunate Age, and I kind of assumed whoever received the submission would recognize my name. But they did not. And they sent me a standard rejection letter without, from what I gathered, having read the story.
Number of unsold manuscripts in a drawer?
Zero
Career goal you still haven’t hit?
Publishing a story in The New Yorker. Writing a long, narrative-reported piece for The New York Times Magazine.
Places on your travel wishlist?
Oh gosh. Everywhere. I’ve not traveled very widely. Italy. Greece. Spain. Japan. I’d love to return to places I visited as a child, with my parents, like Hawaii and New Mexico.
Number of times you check your word count when writing?
When I’m working on a book: zero.
When I’m writing a review or a magazine essay: Every so often. Because I need to know roughly how many words I have left to get across my idea. Often when I’m writing an eight-hundred-word review, I finish the lede, then realize I only have four hundred words left! So before I finish the review, I need to condense my lede, or the whole review won’t work.
Where do you get your news?
The New York Times. Boring but true. Also, my very politically-inclined sixteen-year-old son, who follows the news very closely, and looks at every single media outlet, including Fox News.
Favorite place to write?
Anywhere I’m completely alone. I don’t like writing in cafes or libraries and I’m not good at working with my kids at my feet.
Also, this is very specific but: I love to write in hotel rooms in walkable towns; to write all afternoon, then take a walk through town, looking in shop windows and people watching, then look over what I’ve written over a solo dinner.
Last book you couldn’t put down?
Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing. This astonishing, brilliant memoir investigates her sexual assault, at the hands of two classmates, as a sophomore at St. Paul’s School, placing it in the context of a brutal culture of misogyny. And yet it reads like a novel.
Someone whose book recommendations you respect?
Claire Dederer. Claire is my close friend, but before we knew each other — and before she published her two genius memoirs, Poser and Love & Trouble — she was the book critic I most admired. We have very similar taste and when she recommends a book, I know I’ll love it. She was the person who told me to read Lidia Yuknavitch.
I hope no one finds out that….
I never, ever sit down at my desk and say, “I’m going to write 1000 words today!” I know that’s quite in vogue right now — to maximize one’s productivity and follow a set daily structure — but that’s not at all how I work. I just can’t. (I do set goals, but they’re more along the lines of, “I’ll figure out this scene today.”) And I’ve felt, recently, that a lot of fellow writers — including some close friends — think of me as somehow lesser for not working in this manner.
My secret dream is to….
Adapt my first novel, A Fortunate Age, into a series! As in, adapt it myself, with a producer to show me the ropes. I wrote the screenplay for My Salinger Year and it made me hunger to do more of this sort of work. And as I worked, with the director, on the My Salinger Year film, I gradually began to wish we were working on a series, rather than a film. So many characters, and plot lines, had to be cut or simplified for the film, whereas if we’d turned it into a series, we would have had so much more freedom.
A Fortunate Age is a big, sprawling novel, about a group of college friends who arrive in New York in 1998, with pretty huge ambitions as artists and intellectuals, determined to live unconventional lives, lives very different from their parents. But the vast economic changes of the late 1990s send them all in very different directions. A lot happens, and there are a lot of parallels to the current era, and it’s already taking shape in my head.
Also, to own a house on the Cape.
Most useless skill I have is….
I always know what time it is. Without looking at a clock. It’s become a kind of party trick for my husband. He’ll say, “what time is it?” And I’ll say, “5:30!” And it will be 5:27.
https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/joanna-rakoff-my-salinger-year?rq=rakoff
