Vulnerable Strength: An Interview with Amy Rose Spiegel

School of Doodle: Can you introduce yourself?

Amy Rose Spiegel: My name is Amy Rose Spiegel and I’ve been writing and being published since I was about 19; that would make it seven years. I started out writing for Rookie, which is a teenage girls’ site. My writing has always been a mix of a lot of things: music journalism, I write about politics, and I write about sex. The last topic was the one that made it into this book, Action, with the helpful subtitle a Book about Sex. I published that in May.

SOD: Congrats, that’s amazing. I was reading one of your articles, and you said something about how you wanted to become the next Truman Capote and publish something at 19. Can you talk about having really high expectations?

ARS: My idea of what my career might look like when I was a teenager went along the guidelines that I had seen other writers present to me, especially the more ambitious and younger ones. Truman Capote was chief among those. So he started working at the New Yorker when he was 19, in the mail room. He wrote his first novel, A Summer Crossing, essentially while taking care of the correspondence for this magazine. I thought, “Oh God. I’ve got to get there, this is what I’ve got to do, and the timeline along which I have to do it.” Nineteen came and went for me, and I clearly had not published a novel.

I realized that by imposing that kind of timeline on my work, I wasn’t actually thinking about the work itself at all, I was just thinking about how my career as a writer might look.

I prioritized that as something looming in my mind, when that would have been better used actually writing. That’s how you write a book by the way, by actually writing.

SOD: Do you think you’ve changed a lot since you became a writer?

ARS: Yes. I think that I would probably have changed a lot more if I had not started publishing. Although it’s hard to weigh those things. I think that being a writer who started becoming published and then continued to, helped me feel more like myself in a lot of ways. I don’t know that I would have felt discouraged if that hadn’t been the case, but my work would look different, not necessarily better or worse. Having readers, whom I feel very close to, has informed my work more than anything else. Seeing what people care about and love and are curious about makes me more curious too.

SOD: Do you ever write in a certain way, worried that your target audience won’t understand what you’re trying to say? Like something so subtle that was meaningful to you, but you don’t think other people will catch it, but still put it in?

ARS: That’s what I’m most interested in developing. I’m interested in developing the thoughts that I’m genuinely having. When I get nervous is when I sometimes catch myself talking in Amy Rose Vernacular or in Amy Rose Style and imitating something that people might think I am, which is false and unhelpful. When I have a thought that I feel I haven’t really worked on before, I love to try my best try my best to explain that. Rather than toeing the party line of what I’ve built for myself otherwise. Does that make sense? Do you feel the way you asked me in your question?

SOD: Yeah definitely. It’s hard for me to understand what other people actually get from my writing. If I say some kind of subtle joke that I think is funny, it’s like, “Did anyone else think that was funny?” or “Did anyone else even get that?” Does it make sense to be so subtle that it’s only funny for yourself?

ARS: I understand, and I used to have a lot of nerves, a feeling of anxiousness surrounding that. I interviewed Morrissey when I was 21. I asked him, “In a world that can feel a little bit less than gentle, how do you assure yourself that there is kindness and people might be understanding you, and that you’re holding out a hand for people to hold and vice versa?” He said, “If I feel this way, others surely must. That’s the only thing that sustains me.”

SOD: Wow, that’s such great confidence.

ARS: Isn’t that great? That’s a person that reaches tons of people. I think you have a great responsibility to be your own subtle jokester.

SOD: Do you have an average day or routines that make you happy?

ARS: Yes, I have routines that make me happy that are sometimes a little bit different from my average day. The routines that make me happiest are working all day on business related things, maybe pitching, writing more functional easy pieces. Then at midnight the world falls away and I’m able to write all night until about 6am. That is what I like the best. I have the inverse of when writers talk about only being able to write in the morning. I need to be alone to write. My boyfriend knows that if he comes into the kitchen and I’m writing, it’s just a silence zone; I might as well be wearing a sign with a hushing symbol on it.

SOD: I was reading the part of Action where you said, do stuff by yourself, go nice places by yourself. That’s something I’m just starting to discover, like just driving around in the fog. What are your places?

ARS: I live in New York City, and there’s a park in New York City, in Queens, called Corona Park. They have this huge steel model of the globe, it’s called the Unisphere, and that is where the 1964 World’s Fair was held. They still have a little bit of the fairgrounds. I love to go there.

I take a lot of walks by myself and that is very important to me. Every Sunday, I go on a loping slow walk around the neighborhood without my phone or anything, just walk around in a weird idea-storm.

I love airports. I would live in an airport if I could. But that’s being alone among people, which I love.

SOD: It is interesting being alone with people. Going to concerts by myself, I kinda like that too. You don’t have to worry about “Oh, what’s the person doing next to me or whatever.” It’s just like being in a sea of people.

ARS: You’re right on the money with that, really. When I was writing this book and editing Rookie, and it was just a constant stream of work, I would go and run out and catch a set very quickly by myself at whatever place at a show I wanted to go to, and then just keep working. That was hugely helpful.

SOD: Reading your work, what really comes across to me is that you are a really vulnerable person, but that you are really strong because of it. How did you become that way?

ARS: Very many years of having my sisters make fun of me for being too sensitive growing up. Feeling like I was constantly this open aperture for all of my feelings and everybody else’s, and just absorbing. Having that be seen as maybe not the best quality to have, but then realizing, as a writer, it is actually a vocational thing sometimes. It makes you more observant, not only of the entire world but of yourself. Self awareness is an important part of what you do and what I do, not to the point that it obsesses you. I also can’t help it; this is just an inborn thing. So I had to figure out how to work with it.

SOD: That’s actually really weird, this past week, I’ve just been like, “Wow. I’m a sensitive person in the world and it’s kind of great and it kind of sucks. Like, Hi world. Just take my heart.”

ARS: Well, I think the alternative, at least for me as someone who shares that with you, is not as appealing. I am happy to leave little shards of myself everywhere I go.

SOD: That’s so great.

ARS: I think I’m better off this way. As if there’s another way for me to be.

SOD: I had this crisis, and I was like, “Oh my god, nothing matters. If we can find all these patterns, does it even matter?” Do you care about patterns?

ARS: I do, and I care about the fact that you just mentioned the anxiety of nothing matters. My friend Victor Vazquez, who’s a rapper named Kool A.D., put it best once when he wrote, “If you’re a depressed nihilist, you’re doing it wrong.” Nihilism is really just the freedom to go forth, like, do it, pet a cat, drink some water, listen to Thin Lizzy. It doesn’t matter. It’s good. I felt so sane. But it terms of patterns, yes. When I was 16, a playwright friend let me read his new screenplays and scripts. A line that stuck out to me in one of them was,“When coincidence is God.” When I feel that kind of matching up in the world, it makes me feel like something holy is happening.

SOD: School of Doodle’s motto is ‘Be Loud,’ which everyone can interpret in their own way. When you hear that, what does it mean to you?

ARS: It means a lot. It has a lot to do with what we talked about before about not self-denying. When you are sensitive or you think something is funny, and it’s a joke that only you might think is funny. It’s very important to not only accept those parts of yourself, but to make them the most predominant ones. As long as you are respectful of other people, you really can’t go wrong.