How Amy Bloom Paid the Bills While She Wrote the Books
“I’m a big believer in making a living, so I wrote at night or when nobody needed anything from me.”
Amy Bloom is the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as Lucky Us and White Houses, a Financial Times Best Book of 2018. Among other jobs, Bloom has worked as therapist, written catalog copy, and created the Lifetime series State of Mind. Here’s how she made ends meet.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Medium: Your mother and your father were both writers. Growing up, what did that look like to you?
Amy Bloom: It looked like a job. Five or six days a week, my dad [Murray Teigh Bloom] got up, had breakfast, and went to his office in the house, which overlooked the driveway. When I came home from school, he waved to me, and I knew better than to go into the office. I think the rule was “no blood, no knocking.” He wrote about 700 articles in his lifetime, published five books, all nonfiction. He wrote for everybody from the Saturday Evening Post to Esquire to Playboy to many magazines that don’t exist anymore. It was a job like being a plumber was a job. That was a great help to me.
