First Draft Episode #244: Zan Romanoff
MARCH 31, 2020
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Zan Romanoff, journalist and author of A Song to Take the World Apart, and Grace and the Fever, whose newest YA novel, Look, is out now!
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Zan Romanoff journalist and author of A Song to Take the World Apart, and Grace and the Fever, whose newest YA novel Look is out now. Zan gets really honest about the bumpy journey from her second to third book, and we talk about how she's developed a career as a cultural critic that has deepened her relationship to the themes she explores in fiction.
And we talk about our shared experience of reluctantly discovering that the book you're writing is in fact about you. We also get into how Zan is adapting to releasing a book in the shadow of a global pandemic.
Everything Zan and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes @firstdraftpod.com. First Draft participates in affiliate programs. That means when you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com it helps to support the show at no additional cost to you. First Draft is an affiliate of bookshop.org, that means if you buy a book through a link on the website, part of the proceeds benefit First Draft and part of the proceeds benefit independent bookstores.
If you'd like to donate to First Draft either on a onetime or monthly basis, go to paypal.me/firstdraftpod. There's a new way to connect with me and other First Draft listeners, a Facebook community that you can find at facebook.com/FirstDraftPod, and I'll put a link on the website as well. I want that to be a place where we can talk respectfully about the issues that are raised on First Draft episodes, share knowledge within a writing community, and I hope that people can find critique partners and build support systems to encourage them on their writing journey as well. Please go check it out and join the group today.
There's something else I hope to talk about in the Facebook group. I'm so excited because on Thursday I will be announcing a brand new venture within the world of First Draft, a podcast mini series called Track Changes that I hope will be entertaining and informative for everyone wondering just how the heck books get made? Look for the trailer of Track Changes on Thursday. It's going to appear in the very same feed where you find this show and it will have a lot more information about the upcoming project.
Okay. Now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Zan Romanoff.
Sarah Enni: Hi Zan, how are you?
Zan Romanoff: I am okay. I think is the correct answer at this time in history?
Sarah Enni: Yes. So usually we would be face-to-face, not only for recording First Draft but because we are friends and neighbors.
Zan Romanoff: We are, at present, one block away from each other.
Sarah Enni: We are, and we are doing our part for humanity and staying quarantined and alone. This is the first interview that I will do in this new environment, so we'll definitely get to that because, of course, it has impacted the release of Look in many ways.
But, we'll get there. I first want to just make it clear that I have interviewed Zan Romanoff before when her previous book Grace and the Fever came out. So everyone should definitely listen to that episode to get a sense of Zan's background, and how she came to writing, and growing up, and all that wonderful stuff (as well as her Mailbag episode where she answers listener questions (you can watch that episode on First Draft’s IGTV, too)!
That was a great episode cause we talked a lot about fandom and being a teenage girl obsessed with boy bands, and then writing about a teenage girl obsessed with boy bands. So I want to pick up where we left off at that episode, which was when Grace and the Fever came out. Actually, I'm interested in hearing what that experience was like for you. It was a very personal book.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. It's so funny. I feel like people keep saying like, "Oh, you know, last week feels like a million years ago." And so the idea of going all the way back to 2017...
[Both laughing].
Sarah Enni: Imagine, if you will.
Zan Romanoff: Right? It was a different universe and I had such a different mindset about everything and different understanding and different ideas about what my career was gonna be, for better and worse. So I had my first two books came out kind of right on top of one another. A Song to Take the World Apart was the fall of 2016 and then Grace was in the spring of 2017.
So it was a very quick turnaround and it was sort of a whirlwind. And I feel like I didn't really have time to get my feet under me much, especially because there was then also so much chaos happening in the world.
Song came out September, 2016 so sort of immediately after that was the 2016 election. And then it was the holidays and then it was like, "Your book's coming out again." And I was still a baby and did not understand so much about publishing and how it works.
Because there was so little time between the first and the second book, I didn't really have time to absorb any of the lessons I had learned with the first book, or even reflect on the experience and think about like, "Oh, that worked, that didn't. I would want to do this differently next time. I would want to do more of this, less of that." Whatever.
It was kind of just like, "Okay, this is happening again and I just gotta throw everything I have into it." And just like, "Yeah, okay, this is happening again and I'm just gonna do what I know how to do, which is not very much, and hope for the best."
Sarah Enni: No time to process.
Zan Romanoff: No, no time to process.
Sarah Enni: Or to come up with a new strategy.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. Or even think about do I need a new strategy? I mean, I just was kind of running basically. And I will say I was super, super lucky. My dear friend Catie DiSabato (author of The Ghost Network), who's also a wonderful writer, works her day job as a publicist. And she reached out to me and was like, "I love this book so much and I want to help you out." And so she actually did some sort of like pro bono PR work for me.
Sarah Enni: Wow. That's awesome.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. And it really made a huge difference to like how that book got covered in the press. I think cause she also was just closer to the book itself, maybe. And understood some of the more unique aspects of it. Understood music journalists, where people maybe like book publicists aren't as familiar with, who would want to write about it.
So that was really helpful. I had this crazy, crazy time and then Songs out, Grace is out and then there was this long pause cause I was working on stuff and I was writing. I had a draft of a third book in progress. But actually what happened is that I was also working on a 'work for hire' project and I had a noncompete clause in that contract, and so I couldn't submit anything to my publisher while I was working on the draft of this other book that never ended up happening. And for which I got paid very little money.
The IP project took a long time to fall apart and then by the time we were ready to submit the third book, I think in the middle of that process, my agent decided to leave the industry, which was a huge bummer cause I really loved her. And then luckily I got passed onto someone else in her office who I have a great relationship with. Sarah Burns is now my agent and I love her. (Zan’s literary agent — and mine!! Listen to me chat with Sarah about my debut, Tell Me Everything, on this very special episode of First Draft!)
So there was this pause while there was the agent transition happening and then the editor who had bought my first two books declined to buy the third book. And so then we had to figure out a new submission strategy. And what was one thing and another, I went from having two books come out within nine months of each other to, it'll be three years between Grace and Look coming out.
So that was just a lot of time for me to have a lot of thoughts of about what the hell I was doing.
Sarah Enni: Right. And I mean, interestingly in that time, I want to hear more about all this, but I mean it's so devastating that that freelance project, because of the way that that was structured and because it took forever to fall apart, the only thing worse than having something fall apart is having it fall apart slowly and in a way that you can't continue to move forward on. Right?
Zan Romanoff: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: But in the meantime, you were doing a lot of writing in nonfiction spaces.
Zan Romanoff: Yes. So in early 2016, right around the time I sold my second book, I did what everyone tells you not to do and I quit my day job. I will say that I didn't do it because I thought that I was so successful or anything. I did it because I was incredibly miserable and very mentally ill. And really needed to reset and also got on an SSRI, which I recommend very highly if you're thinking about it.
So yeah since 2016, it's about four years now, my day job is writing and my night job is writing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. What do we call this writing career?
Zan Romanoff: But it was really helpful. I never thought about that, you're right. That I did feel like even as the book projects were getting delayed, I was like, "Well my name's still out there. People are reading my writing. I'm still amassing an audience." It wasn't sort of like, "Oh my God, it's gonna be three years and no one's heard a word from me."
It was like, "Okay well, luckily when this happens, I'll be able to pick up where I left off. And then hopefully in a better situation." Cause I think I have built more of a reputation and a career for myself in the intervening years.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I would agree with that. And I think the thing that also is of interest to me, first of all, as a huge fan of Zan Romanoff the author, and as Zan Romanoff the cultural critic, I feel like your writing has deepened, right? I think.
We're all getting better, hopefully, all the time. But between Grace and the Fever and Look there's a lot of similarities in what you're looking at and talking about. But I felt like there was this new, even more mature facet to Look.
And I think it's because not only are you talking about social media, construction of femininity, a lot of these things that you explore time and again in your books are also things that you are talking about through the lens of being a cultural critic in nonfiction writing as well.
Zan Romanoff: It is true. Starting to research what I did not know then would be Look, is the thing that led me to the Kardashians, which is one of my literal beats as a nonfiction writer. So if you're talking about social media and construction of femininity, they're the textbook. It's true that my nonfiction writing really supports and informs my fiction.
And there's a whole old Hollywood plot line in Look and totally by coincidence, at one point when I was editing it, a British magazine called The Gentlewoman reached out to me and asked me to interview Karina Longworth who does the You Must Remember This podcast. And she had just written a book about Howard Hughes who, in certain ways, really resembles this character in Look (Zan reviewed Karina’s book, Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood and found inspiration within that for Look).
And so reading this book, I was like, "Oh my god, I didn't even know this was research I should be doing, but thank god this just tumbled onto my doorstep." So there's these incredible coincidences, where things kind of show up and I get to think about something in a new way, or get a new resource. But I will also say, in terms of talking about we're all always hopefully growing and getting better, I think it's really true.
And also I had more time to work on Look than I had with the first two books just because of the way things worked out. And I also feel, in a way, the time that was passing when I was editing, it was really frustrating to me as it was happening. But now I look back and I'm like, "This had so much time to sort of compost in my mind." If you want a weird metaphor.
Sarah Enni: I love that metaphor. That is such a good point. And because you and I are friends outside of First Draft, I know that you had at least one edit that was pretty much strip the paint and start over kind of level.
Zan Romanoff: No, that's the fourth book.
Sarah Enni: Oh, gotcha.
Zan Romanoff: No, Sarah. It's fine. It's funny like there was this long period of not having books in the works because I sold Look and the fourth book, which doesn't have a title yet, at the same time. I've been working on them in parallel for the last year and a half.
Sarah Enni: And that's the other thing that's kind of striking me about your story, and I'm really gratified that you're willing to talk about it. Sometimes I think it's easy to look at a writer's career and be like, "Oh, there was a five year gap here. Hm, I wonder what they were doing?" And it's like, "Well that's not often a choice." I do think it's important to understand that there are so many machinations at work that could cause that kind of a lapse in timeline.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah, and that's the contract thing, man it's fascinating. Because the deal was there was this noncompete or, I don't think it's technically a noncompete, but it was like if I want to submit anything to my publisher, anything new, I have to get permission from the company that I had the IP contract with.
And we just didn't want to get into it with them. We were kind of like, "Well let's just see how this shakes out." I kept being like, "Oh, it should only be another month. It should only be another month."
I was talking to a friend of mine who's also a YA writer and she was saying that she's a contemporary writer and she wanted to do a fantasy novel, but because of her non-compete with her publisher, she can't submit any other YA books, even if they're in a different genre.
She was like, "If I wanted to write adult literary contemporary, that's fine. If I wanna write middle-grade contemporary, that's fine. But YA fantasy? Even though I think it's just as different, it's contractually barred." It just weird how that stuff works. And it's stuff that you don't realize... you don't think to negotiate that, right? You're like, "Yeah, yeah, that's fine."
That's a huge thing that's changed, I will say, is that I definitely used to be a lot more laissez faire, and like, "I feel so blessed to be doing this." A: I was more like, "You're doing me the favor." And B: I didn't know what questions to ask.
And I do think with this book coming out, I'm much more in a position to be like, "This is my job. I've been doing it for awhile." I don't know everything, but I have some understanding, and I'm really grateful for that. Because my book is coming out in this crazy moment that I'm kind of like, "Okay, at least I sort of, as much as anyone does, know what they're doing."
Sarah Enni: Well, I'm so interested in that because, gosh, there's a story that I'll tell you when we're not recording it, but about a conversation I had with another author today where I feel so much more empowered and calm knowing the details of all these things. As opposed to just floating along and being like, "I really only want to focus on the creative." I'm not saying that we shouldn't be talking about focusing on the creative and trying to make space for that, but...
Zan Romanoff: Great, and if that's what people want, that's fine. So my third book is with Dial, the first two with Knopf, they're both owned by Penguin Random House. So that's publishing. But when Dial signed me, they were kind of like, "Look, your sales record is not what we would want, and this is gonna be a career rehab moment for you."
And I think that also really changed the way I think about it a little bit. That I can't really afford to just keep being like, "Whatever happens, happens." Like, "I'm an artist." It's like, "Yeah, I'm an artist, but I want to be a working artist. If I want that to happen, I need to be more serious about looking at the business end and understanding how that happens."
Sarah Enni: I really appreciate you sharing that with me cause that's obviously, as you know better than almost anyone, something I'm very interested in. Gonna be talking a lot more about that in the future. So we'll get to specifically talking about Look in just a second, but for this publishing experience, you have a new agent and a new publishing house, and it wasn't necessarily by choice, though it's not a bad thing.
Zan Romanoff: And I should say just quickly, this is not something that gets talked about a ton, but almost everyone who publishes more than a couple of books moves agents, moves houses. It happens. And obviously there's no bad blood between me and my former agent, and there's no bad blood between me and my former publisher. They have to be in love with the project and I think she just wasn't in love with this project. So, it happens.
Sarah Enni: And that's fair. Did it feel new? What was your, like, getting back up to the point of having a new book come out. What was it like?
Zan Romanoff: Well, so definitely the first edit letter and the first round of edits I turned in, I felt very much like I wanted to prove that I was good, you know? With my former editor, we'd worked together on two books. I knew that she knew that I worked hard and hit deadlines and all that stuff. And then it was kind of like, "Oh shit, I'm starting from zero. I gotta you be the new kid again." And because I'm a teacher's pet, I was like, "I've gotta prove what a teacher's pet I am again." [Laughing].
I don't know, it's been fun. I think my editor, Jess Dandino Garrison is fantastic. She's a tough editor. She really, I think, pushed me to a new level in this book, which I really appreciate. I definitely got to a place where I was like, "Okay, we're done." And she was like, "Alright, let's do one more round."
And also in terms of talking about getting better and going on, being pushed in that way felt really good. Because I don't know that I would've had the fortitude or the technical skills to do some of those edits earlier on. But this felt like a good next step in terms of like pushing my writing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, that's incredible. It's really hard to find metrics to measure growth like that, especially when we're talking about being creative.
Zan Romanoff: Right, it's not a metric based pursuit.
Sarah Enni: So I think in some ways having a new editorial eye on something can be one of those moments where you get to reflect and think, "Yeah, no I am a different writer than I used to be. Or better. Or I can do this more now, and it used to scare me." Or that kind of thing.
Zan Romanoff: Totally. She would ask me to do certain things, whatever... just send me a third edit letter where all I'd ever gotten was two. And there was a time when I would've taken this as evidence that I didn't know what I was doing. And instead it was kind of like, "Okay, this person really believes that this can be even better. And I guess that means I gotta push myself to make it even better, even though I'm fricking tired." Like, "Over it!"
Sarah Enni: "Here we go. Let's read it for the 87th time."
Zan Romanoff: Oh my god. Oh my god.
Sarah Enni: Well speaking of a book that you read at least 87 times, let's talk about Look! Do you mind pitching this book for us?
Zan Romanoff: So Look is a book about a girl named Lulu who is a very minor celebrity on a social media platform called Flash. In part because she's a cute, LA private school girl, and in part because her boyfriend is the son of a rock star. So when she accidentally posts a video of herself to Flash cheating on her boyfriend with a girl, she both ruins that relationship and then also accidentally outs herself as bisexual, which she wasn't previously.
And this beautiful, luxurious, very perfect looking life that she's had, falls apart. And the book is about her trying to figure out what parts of that life are worth salvaging and what she wants to put back together. And which parts of it maybe weren't that good for her and she wants to let go of.
Sarah Enni: Yes. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. I really loved it so much.
Zan Romanoff: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: It was really striking to me that Grace and the Fever in some ways sort of felt born out of a Tumbler culture. And about how young women can tell themselves things about themselves, by constructing the stories of other people through fandom. Or through talking about the things that they love and are obsessed with. And this book felt very much like... Obviously Flash is kind of like Snapchat or Instagram and it's a little bit more about telling the story about yourself and whether that is revealing or if it is all artifice. I'm just interested in your thoughts on that.
Zan Romanoff: It's funny, a big part of the genesis of Look is that when I finished writing Grace, one of the sort of finishing touches that I put on it was figuring out what social media platforms everyone was gonna be using. Because like you said, the book is very based in Tumblr fandom and because of that it felt wrong to pretend to call Tumblr something else. This is about a very specific moment in fandom. And so I want to use real names as much as possible. And I don't care if it sounds dated, it's about a moment in history.
And one of the things I had to do, there was a lot of Instagram use in the book and I was like, "Oh no, teens aren't using Instagram, they're using Snapchat." So I went in and turned all the Instagrams into Snapshots and then as it was going to press, Instagram Stories were introduced, and everyone got into Instagram Stories and abandoned Snapchat.
[Laughs] Dammit! But the reason Snapchat hadn't been in the book in the first place is because I didn't use it. I didn't really understand it. So I was like, "Alright, I write about social media in fiction and in my journalism, I should know more about this." And so I went on Snapchat and started following Kylie Jenner because if you're gonna learn about Snapchat, Kylie Jenner's the person.
So, yeah, I got obsessed with Kylie Jenner. I started writing about her and about the Kardashians and about, as you say, the construction of self, especially via images. And especially for young women. And I do also think it's funny, you and I talk about this a lot, that when you're writing a book, you're always kind of like, "Look at me just making up all this fiction that never happened."
And then at a certain point you're like, "Oh, this book's about me, isn't it?" [Both laugh]
And the more I've been talking about it, the more I do think that part of the book is me reacting too... At that point, having been an author and a journalist and something of a public figure for some years at that point, that when I was a teenager was really interested in fandom and fantasy, and fanfiction, and those kinds of constructions.
And then as I had gotten older, was constructing myself essentially as a fictional character via Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat and Tik Tok and whatever. And it's interesting to me, Looks not out yet, and I know I'm not supposed to be reading Goodreads reviews but I am. And not just Goodreads like trade reviews, and I just feel like people understand this book a lot better.
It seems like there's just a level on which they kind of get it that they didn't necessarily get Grace. And it's funny to me, cause to me the books are about totally the same thing. Which is about how do you form a self amid the various kinds of cultural pressures. But I think it is true that a lot of people don't have that experience via such an intense engagement with celebrity narrative. But we are all having it with social media.
Sarah Enni: Yeah that is fascinating to me. I do see definitely Look really hitting people where they live. And it seems like people are really understanding we're all grappling with this construction of self, and portrayal of self, and self as fiction, and self as reality at the same time. But that is so interesting. I also was a teenage girl obsessed with boys and celebrity boys, and all that stuff. So Grace was like, I completely understood that, but maybe yeah, that level of fan engagement is not universal I guess.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah, I mean, who knows? Obviously not me. But I think there's just a layer of... there's something there that people had more trouble approaching. And I feel when they talk about Look, I'm just like, "Yes, exactly!"
Sarah Enni: Okay. This is my other way of getting into it. I was just listening to your NPR interview where you were reflecting on the 'decade of celebrities' is how they phrased it, and your writing about the Kardashians. But you talked about it in that interview about people have a really hard time admitting that they're as fascinated by celebrities as they are, and that they engage with them as much as they do.
Like hating Kylie Jenner takes as much energy as liking Kylie Jenner. Do you know what I mean?
Zan Romanoff: I certainly do.
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: I don't know. I guess this is part of why I love reading your writing so much. These questions are so fascinating to me too. But I'm just intrigued by that difference you're noticing between the two books. That's really interesting. You mentioned not wanting to back away from using Tumbler and embracing that as a capital M 'Moment' in fandom, which it was. But in Look, you do not use actual names. What was the decision making behind that?
Zan Romanoff: I think in part it was the experience with Look of watching the Instagram to Snapchat to Instagram Story transition where I was like, "You're gonna get it wrong.... you're not gonna get it wrong... but it will date the book inevitably. And so unless there's a really strong reason that it needs to be that thing, why not just give it a little bit of room to breathe?"
And it's funny, I've seen people now in reviews saying like, "Oh, Flash is a mix of Snapchat and Tik Tok." And I'm like, "Listen, I appreciate it. It's a very generous read. Tik Tok didn't exist when I wrote the book, so it kind of isn't, but great." If it feels right for that then great.
And I do think also part of the point of Grace was about specific ways that Tumblr as a platform has shaped fandom. Whereas in Look, it's more about the ability to show people pictures of ourselves is really the point of the book. It doesn't matter whether it's happening on Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, Flash, whatever.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and I thought Flash was a great name for a social media app.
Zan Romanoff: I gotta tell you, I don't always love puns or titles, or stuff like that. But coming up with fake app names turns out to be really fun.
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] Like a new party trick.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. They have a car sharing app called Ryde with a Y [laughing].
Sarah Enni: That's right. That was so good. Oh my God, I love that. I want to talk about the fact that this is a queer love story. I don't want to spoil it, so I'm gonna try to kind of talk about it without doing that. But there is an element of love triangle to it. But in the end, it is a story of a girl falling in love with another girl.
So since we are friends, I know that you identify as straight, but you set out writing this beautiful queer love story with a main character who is Bi, I'm just interested in how you approached that and what was important to you in telling an LGBTQ story.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. The real answer to this is that it started out as a craft challenge to myself. I was like, "Okay, I've written two books and I want to write a third." And especially because the first two, in certain ways, were very, very similar. They're about girls who are obsessed with a guy in a band.
And actually also in both books, there is a queer male character who's hiding his sexuality. And so I was like, "Okay, well let's be thoughtful when we plan the third book and do some new things."
So I was like, "I've written two straight romances. It would be interesting, and a good challenge for me, to write something else." And then I also was a little frustrated with the idea that people would read my books and think that I thought queerness was an exclusively male phenomenon, and be something that was a secret or a subplot. That just didn't sit right with me.
And also because I was like, "Well, clearly I have an interest in queerness. It keeps popping up in the sidelines of these books. Maybe it's time to really think that all the way through and get clear on what it is I'm trying to do here." So that was kind of the initial thinking that it's all very, like I said, clinical and crafty. And also, this was in spring of 2016, I forget what all was going on exactly.
Sarah Enni: God, were we ever that young?
Zan Romanoff: Right. But I'm pretty sure the #ownvoices hashtag did not exist. And I wasn't thinking in that way. So one of the other interesting things that happened, again having so much time with the book, was that my thinking around that and the ways I was being asked to think about it, really changed. Which I'm really, really grateful for. So, it was like, "Okay, can I write this to my satisfaction is one question."
And then there was a point at which I had to turn it over to sensitivity readers, all of whom are friends of mine. And that was pretty terrifying, you know, and I think a really good experience because if you're writing about a marginalized group you're not a part of, to be reminded like, "Hey, they're gonna be reading this. And hopefully you're not a fucking sociopath who wants to rip people."
But especially those people, were some of my closest friends. And I was like, "I will be devastated if I hurt them." But I think that was good. I'm glad that I had that specific sense of responsibility. And that was also why I chose to make Lulu bisexual specifically is because I have a lot of friends who are bisexual women, and who are sort of like Lulu, sort of like femme bisexual. Who had times in their life when they were teenagers, where they were kind of deciding like, "Do I want to pass?" You know, "How queer do I want to, quote unquote, let myself be?"
And I felt like that was an experience that, I don't want to say I knew or understood, but that I had a lot of organic interaction with. It was something that I could ask people for reads on very easily. And also I talked to those friends a lot about how few bisexual characters there are in fiction. Especially for young adults, how few bisexual women there are. So it felt like, "Okay, if I can pull this off, here's an opportunity to tell a story that we don't have much of."
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I absolutely hear what you're saying and I think for you and I both, there's queerness in Tell Me Everything as well. And there's queerness in the book I'm currently writing and I identify as straight as this white woman. So it is worth interrogating deeply how you want to portray those stories and how you investigate that yourself as a writer. Getting empathetic and involved in your characters.
And I had that same experience of asking a friend to read it and then getting very great, gracious, wonderful notes back and being horrified at even what was truly like a minor thing that she was suggesting was changed. But I was like, "Oh my God, I'm terrible. I've been wrong this whole time." And it's like, "Okay, no." But we all do need to be honest with ourselves about it and that we're not gonna get it right. You know what I mean?
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. The notes that I got were so lovely and generous. It was just that I was surprised and I wish that everyone who talks about sensitivity readers in the abstract could have the experience of being sensitivity read. It's so different than I think people imagine. It wasn't like anyone was writing me scolding emails or telling me what to do. I wasn't being censored. It was like my close friends being like, "Hey, you miss some pertinent details here." Or like, "Here's my perspective." So I had, in the first draft of the book... the draft they read like did not have the word bisexual in it, I don't think. Certainly not to describe Lulu.
Because I, at that point, was sort of like, "Oh, I don't like labels. Teens don't like labels. She's gonna be a no labels girl." And they were like, "Yeah, yeah, that's totally fine. But the word bisexual gets alighted a lot. Like it just doesn't get said often enough. And even if she ultimately rejects it, it needs to be mentioned as an option."
And I was like, "Oh yeah." I just totally wouldn't have thought of that. It was such a useful perspective. I mean like any good edit, right? It was like, "Oh, you didn't see around this corner and I'm telling you what I think is here and you decide how to deal with it." And I'm just hugely, wildly grateful for all of their input cause it arguably made the book better.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And I think the other thing that's really fascinating in what you were able to play with in the narrative is, teen girls [chuckles] I mean, it kind of doesn't matter what you do as a teen girl, it's often framed that you're doing it for attention.
Zan Romanoff: Always.
Sarah Enni: And of course that applies to how teen girls use social media. And as you explore and really interrogate in this book, it applies to how teenage girls are exploring their own sexuality. Can you kind of talk about how that's portrayed? It's a pretty major plot point and then emotional point throughout Look.
Zan Romanoff: This has come up in some reviews of it that I've seen. It's something people seem to be misunderstanding and maybe I didn't write it clearly enough. So Lulu at the beginning of the book understands like that she is attracted to both men and women. That's not a surprise to her. And she talks about how even before she accidentally outed herself, she would kiss girls at parties.
And for her, that's a really safe way to explore that desire, right? It's like, "Oh ha ha, it's just a joke. Everyone around me thinks I'm doing it for attention, but for me this is a way to try something out without having to commit to it." You know, "I don't have to say I'm bisexual." It's like, "Oh I just kiss girls." And everyone's like, "Oh yeah, it's cause you're an attention whore."
And she's like, "Mmm, not exactly." But she's like, "That's fine. That's a misreading of me that I can live with because I don't care. I know that I'm not that way. Whereas people seeing and judging this intimate, vulnerable part of myself, like I'm not totally ready for yet." One of the big things to me of the book, and of everything I write, is that social media is not capital G Good or capital B Bad. It's a tool.
We can use it in wonderful and terrible ways. And all the ways that we explore our sexuality, especially as young women, we're growing up in a really warped, fucked up world, and we're just doing the best we can. You know? And so yeah, the world tells you people looking at you is sexy. You know, you try that out. You're kind of like, "Okay, is it? Does it make me feel sexy? Does that work for me? Does it not work for me?"
And I think also it's not even about good or bad. I think part of it for me is, representation gets used so often, that I almost don't even want to invoke it. But I think I just wanted to write something that felt honest to me about making your way through the world in like a young CIS female body that people are telling you is attractive and all the ways you're trying to figure out what to do about that, without any judgment or moral. Just like here's some things that happen. Because to me, if I'm allowed to write it then maybe I was allowed to do it.
Sarah Enni: Right. That's interesting. How or has this much writing and thinking about social media and the construction of femininity, changed your relationship to your own social media and your own construction of your own femininity?
Zan Romanoff: [Sighs] Ugh. I am on social media less and less. Again, not cause I think it's bad or anything, just cause I'm increasingly not that interested in it. And I think in part it's like you do something every day for like four or five or, I mean, I've been on Twitter for seven years now. It just stops being that fun at a certain point.
And I think that I'm very lucky in certain ways that my job involves social media. Part of being an author is having an Instagram account. And so I can kind of separate myself more and more clearly where I'm like, "Zan author needs to do X thing. Zan person is just off right now. Zan person is not gonna document this." You know?
Sarah Enni: Yeah. That is really powerful. And it is funny for me, I do have moments every once in a while where I think about friends of mine who don't have, as you say, our jobs are... we're not calling ourselves public figures by being like, "We're famous." It's like we have public facing jobs where we need to interact as capitol A author Zan and Sarah. And when I look at my friends who don't have jobs like that and see how they use social media, every once in a while it really hits me how different we are living internet lives.
Zan Romanoff: So a friend of a friend of mine teaches a class at a university for college, an intro photo class for college students. It's the kind of thing that non-art majors take. I forget where she wrote about this, but she talks about how one of the assignments she gives is to have the kids look at a celebrity's Instagram and write about what they're trying to achieve, what the celebrity is trying to achieve with a specific photo.
And she said she gets these essays that are like, "Emilia Clarke is fun to hang out with. I know this because she posted a picture of herself drinking rose on a balcony. And I like drinking rose on balconies." Like that's very relatable. And she's like, "No, the point of this exercises is Emilia Clarke wants to be perceived as fun to hang out with."
There's this genuine, and I understand it cause we all fall for it in various ways, but if you don't do it every day, it's so easy to forget how much image construction goes into social media posting. Usually I have to think about it because I am always like, "If I do this, I might get a call from my publisher."
Sarah Enni: Well, yes. And the answer is yes, you would. That is so fascinating and I would have a thousand questions for that professor. My version of this is when I was studying journalism in college, one of our first classes was this really curmudgeonly old working reporter who was like forced to teach this class for some reason, which I love. One of his first assignments for us was to bring in whatever part of the newspaper that we liked the most. It was just like bring in part of the paper and then talk about it basically.
And this one student came in and brought a section of the paper and she was like, "Oh, I just really love how this is laid out. And I just thought it was so clear." And he was like, "That is an advertising section that was folded into the newspaper and made to look like a newspaper, so that you would look at real estate listings." And in my head, I don't think it struck everyone in the class that way, but in my head I was like, "If I was that girl, I would have pulled myself apart in the vacuum of space." It was so devastating.
And looking back now it's just, in my opinion, to live in this world and to think deeply about your own life you have to fucking think about marketing cause we're swimming in it.
Zan Romanoff: No, I feel like that's like the number one challenge of 21st century media literacy. It's understanding the difference between the op-ed pages and the reporting.
Sarah Enni: Yes! This girl had been accepted into a competitive journalism program and she couldn't tell! It was crazy. Anyway, I hope that girl has a wonderful job and is living a beautiful life. But that moment will forever live in my brain.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. The lessons people teach us when they don't know they're teaching us lessons, is something else.
Sarah Enni: They really stick. That's so funny Zan. Okay, well obviously you and I can talk about journalism forever. The last thing I do want to touch on this in Look because this really struck, this is another thing that I'm just like, "I don't know." This made me think and I want to hear where you were coming from in writing about it.
But Lulu and many of the characters in Look, go to a private school in Los Angeles. And there is an interaction, and I apologize for not having the paragraph on hand, but there was an interaction in the book where Lulu was sort of being interrogated by another character who was sort of saying like, "You live this abnormal lifestyle. You go to private school, you have a fancy life, you live in a big house." And Lulu has this kind of reaction like, "But that's like my life."
Zan Romanoff: "Isn't that a kind of normal, if that's what's normal for me?"
Sarah Enni: Yes! Thank you for doing my job for me!
Zan Romanoff: I agonized over that scene.
Sarah Enni: Oh my God. Tell me about it. Cause it really stuck with me. I I want to hear what your thinking was.
Zan Romanoff: I'm glad to hear you say that. And it's funny. Actually, there was a period of time where I wanted to take it out. And our dear friend Brandy Colbert (author of The Voting Booth, The Only Black Girls in Town, and many more books (listen to her First Draft episodes here and here), who was reading the book as a sensitivity reader for the Black rep in the book, and also cause she's a great reader, specifically pointed it out.
She was like, "I love this scene and I think it's really great." And I was like, "Thank God. Thank you for telling me cause I almost just took it out."
So, I always forget this part of the story. Another big part of the inspiration for the book cause I had been circling something about Snapchat, and reality television, and sex tapes. Like, "Something, something, something" stewing in my head. And then the key that turned the lock was this really terrible article in LA Weekly about an heiress. She's the heiress of the Mulholland fortune, and the journalist is like, "My wild night with this..." It was just terrible.
And there'd just been a big piece in New York Magazine called The Prom Queen of Instagram. Just a bunch of shitty stuff being written about rich teenagers, basically being like, "These people are monsters."
And I was like, "Look, some of them are monsters, do not get me wrong." But I went to private school and I grew up with these people and I was like, "Some of them are really shitty. But some of them are just teenagers growing up in a really fucked up culture and who don't understand how weird their lives are because like they don't have any basis for comparison." Like all of us, you know, they're growing up in a hot house. And some of them will hopefully grow out of it.
And also, I think the people who are having that experience are having more complicated thoughts than you're giving them credit for. And I was like, "Of all the things in the world I'm not qualified to write about, I'm very qualified to write about the interior experience of being a privileged teen at an LA private school."
So that was kind of the beginning of that. And I wanted to talk about that in the book. I wanted to find a moment where these people could say to each other, where someone could say to Lulu like, "You don't understand how weird your life is." And she could say, "Of course I don't. No one understands how weird their life is."
And I think also people imagine that everyone who goes to these schools is exactly as wealthy as everyone else, and there's this kind of unbroken gilded surface. And it's like, "Oh my God, there's so much jockeying and comparison." And like, "Oh, he has this. She has that." I knew when I turned 16 and everyone started getting cars, the parking lot became a very visual... you could see what people's parents thought was appropriate to give their 16 year old child.
And there's a lot of self consciousness about it and also how easy it is, when you grow up in that atmosphere, to be like, "Well because I don't have as much as these people do..." You forget that in comparison, cause you're just around people who are so wealthy all the time that you just lose all sense of perspective. I remember telling someone a story about being like, "Oh yeah I, as it happens, had the shittiest car in the senior lot." Just someone and they're like, "Yeah, your parents bought you a car. Shut the fuck up."
[Laughs] Reality check. Thank you. Okay,
Sarah Enni: Well and then what came to mind for me, I mean this is a great metaphor, right? Then in this LA private school parking lot environment, then if you're a kid that could afford to buy a Ferrari but you choose to drive a beat up Civic, that also is a choice and says something.
And is this other way of experiencing engaging with privilege. It's like Mark Zuckerberg always wears his hoodie and people are like, "Oh he's so down to earth." And it's like, "No he's not." It's more of what we're saying it's cause Mark Zuckerberg wants to appear to be down to earth.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. And it's cause Mark Zuckerberg has so much power, that any of his choices is acceptable. He gets to decide. It's funny, people give Silicon Valley the credit for the power hoodie, but the power hoodie's been an LA move, certainly my whole life is people being like, "I don't have to dress up for you cause you're so unimportant and I just don't care."
It is also very weird, going to those private schools, you are inducted very early into these kind of adult languages of power and these adult worlds of power. Where it does feel like all of your friends are connected to the grown up world and if you aren't, you're a failure. Or, not a failure, you're just behind. I mean literally my high school classmates, it was like like, "That kid's dad owns the Dodgers. That girl is in People's 50 Most Beautiful issue with her mom."
And it was just like, "You're never gonna matter. You just don't have access to that kind of power." But you learn to speak that language. And I just wanted to write about that process of being that close to that kind of power, but knowing that you can't touch it. At one point I think she says, Lulu says it's a land she grew up in and she could speak its language, she knows it's customs, but she's not a native, she wasn't born there. And she can get kicked out at any moment. And that's certainly how I felt going to private school.
Sarah Enni: Well, it felt very lived in and it felt very interesting and in my other interpretation of it was, and not to wax too hard on this, but my other thinking about it was, I think it was Cass that says, "It's a Lulu..." The normal quote. It just made me think about how we, like you're saying, the kind of demonization of these young, wealthy teens and asking them to, and this is a generalization again, but asking them to answer for how unusual or unique their life is when it's like... I'm struggling to get at what I really mean.
It just made me think about the fact that like 90% of Americans think they're middle-class. As much as Americans like to think that we're obsessed with exceptionalism, we're also obsessed with normalcy and being exactly the same as everyone else. And thinking that there's some average, which there's not.
So you know, this like John Hughes-zation of the teenage landscape in the late eighties and nineties... that also isn't normal and is silencing so many, quote unquote, extraordinary experiences. Who's to say that any experience is normal? That's really what it brought up for me too.
Zan Romanoff: Everyone has their way that they grew up that is normal for them, or just is what they understand. And an adult is way less excusable. You should, when you're old enough, move out of your parents' house and have a lot of experiences. And it's funny, I went to a pretty fancy private college, but there I met lots of people who had not gone to private high school.
And that was a really important moment for me in starting to expand my understanding again of what's, quote unquote, normal. But I think there's so many people who know me from that period of life who've watched me grow and mature. And my understanding of the world changed.
I'm grateful that they didn't just write me off as being like, "This girl is stupid." And they were like, "Oh, this girl, like all of us, has a limited experience." Like, "Let me open my world to her, and she'll open her world to me, and we'll understand each other better."
And I should say just quickly, it's not like I think that defending the interior lives of rich teens, is a social justice crusade, like it's the most important thing anyone can be doing in fiction at this moment. I feel like rich people are either fetishized or vilified and I find both of those modes very frustrating. And so I kind of wanted to be like, "Look, if we're gonna be this fucking obsessed with rich people, could we at least write something accurate about what their lives are like?"
Sarah Enni: Yes. Okay. Exactly. And that was the fascination for me of it. And this isn't the same thing, but when I have people on the show who have for example, won the Prince or won the National Book Award, the first thing I want to ask them is like, "Are you okay?" Once you reach a level of, quote unquote success, or there's some external validation that makes certain types of people think that you're never gonna have problems again. To me that's fascinating. We really abandoned people in moments like that. And I think it's important to talk about.
Zan Romanoff: Yeah. And again, it's hard to talk about this because the way that rich people are dehumanized usually doesn't come with attendant, like physical violence. The way that say when people of color are demonized, it does. So I'm not trying to draw a comparison here.
Sarah Enni: That's not what we're doing.
Zan Romanoff: And the world is full of people and so we take shortcuts and we'd kind of do to humanize each other in all these small ways where it's just like, "Yeah, well that person doesn't have problems, or they're not real problems." And rich people's problems are more solvable. But then it's also useful to hopefully engage with these kinds of narratives and be reminded that, it helps disabuse you of the notion that if you were just to get rich, it would solve all of your problems. Because it would not. It certainly would solve some of them, but not all of them.
Sarah Enni: Yes, absolutely. That's part of it too, is just being like, let's just use an exercise of empathy to disabuse ourselves of like, "Oh, the goal is to become a millionaire." Like, "No, actually I think if I killed myself and sacrificed my health and my mental well-being to become a millionaire, then I could have a million dollars and be truly fucking miserable."
Zan Romanoff: And actually, it's sort of the same, I don't know, it feels not unrelated actually to the act of looking at people's Instagrams and seeing this tiny slice of their lives and being like, "Well their life is this way." Whether positive or negative. A thing that social media can do is just provide us these really short slices that seem to stand in for a whole, and make us believe that other people's lives are simple or comprehensible.
And that's the thing that I appreciate about writing long form fiction is being like, "It's not, it's just not." And that's, I think, the message of all of my books and I hope for every single character is like, "It's complicated. It's complicated, it's just complicated."
Sarah Enni: Okay, so we kind of talked about your editing experience and getting Look going. And I guess I would like to hear it in your words, what's going on with the publication process right now Zan?
Zan Romanoff: [Heavy sigh] So the book is gonna come out on March 31st and I went on a writing retreat and I left on the eighth. And I remember when I left kind of having the sense that corona virus was getting serious and maybe it was gonna affect my book tour. And by day three of the writing retreat I'd canceled all my events.
Sarah Enni: Wow, yeah.
Zan Romanoff: So, we're still in the middle of it. This is my third book. Some writers don't like doing events. They don't like doing appearances. I am not that writer. I love coming out of my cave, putting on lipstick and being like, "Please can we talk about this thing I've been working on for years." So I'd gone to my publisher and been like, "Look, I've always done events in LA and New York for the launches of my books. I really want to do a couple more for this."
So the plan was to have me do a launch in LA. I was gonna go to Yale where I went to school to do a launch with a professor and some students, and then a party in New York, a reading in Boston, two readings in D.C., some school visits. It was gonna be much, much bigger than anything... I mean, it's comparatively pretty small, but much bigger than anything else I've done.
And I was really excited about it. I was gonna see all these friends. And then I was going to come home and do LA Times Festival of Books, YallWest and Pasadena LitFest. And I was like, "Okay, this is gonna be really bonkers." Like I have just this sort of crazy event schedule. I'd bought dresses, I was like, "It's happening."
And then, [sing] Dum-de-de-dum! You know how the story ends. And so all those things got canceled and it's been interesting. I know YallWest was the first domino to fall. And when I got that email, I kind of saw the writing on the wall and I was like, "Yeah, none of this is gonna happen. We can keep pretending, but it's just not."
And I was very, very lucky to be in Northern California on this writing retreat in this incredibly beautiful space in Humboldt County. And I talked to the woman who was hosting me there and she was like, "Just go outside for a minute." And I took my book and sat on a swing under an Apple tree, and these little Apple blossoms like falling on me, and I just sat in the sun and cried.
Sarah Enni: Ooh yeah.
Zan Romanoff: And it was very hard. It was very frustrating to just watch this thing that I had been looking forward to for three years, just kind of dissolve in my hands. And also it is hard to feel that sorry for yourself when you're sitting in the sun under an Apple tree and little Apple blossoms are falling on you. It's like, "Man, you're so lucky." And I'm glad I had that revelation early.
I'm glad that at that moment I let myself grieve and mourn a little bit and be like, "Yeah, this has been the dream and the plan and this is exactly how I pictured it, and it's just not gonna happen that way. And that sucks." It sucks to work really hard on something and want to celebrate and be in community with people and not get that chance.
But I've been so gratified by the way that people have rallied around bookstores, authors, we'll see how it all shakes out. It's just been pretty amazing. And like I said earlier, I also am so grateful not to be a debut right now because I do just have more resources, I know more people, people are just reaching out to me about stuff because they know me and they know that I'm looking for things.
So this has been a little bit fun actually, I got my author copies of the book. You get like 30 hardcovers or 25 or whatever. It's a zillion books you don't need. And people need a little pick me up. So I've been driving around LA dropping hardcovers on my friend's porches, which has been really fun. And just a way, again, create some connection and some community at this isolated moment, to remind people how special they are to me and also get to kind of like just do something out in the world.
And then I'm also gonna be doing a bunch of digital events. I'm doing a thing called Quarantine Book Club that our friend Kayla Kagan hooked me up with. I'm doing Bellatrist's which is Emma Roberts book club doing an online book tour on their Instagram, that they invited me to be a part of on the day the book comes out. I'm just gonna go live on Instagram and read from the book. I don't know.
You know, there's a lot, I mean, thank God for social media. There's a lot of good digital opportunity. There are podcasts. I mean truly. It's funny, I've gotten a lot of sympathy I think because a book launch, it's such a clear thing to have canceled, you know, people understand that. And it's just not that dire. I can pay my rent and I have a safe place to live and food to eat. It's hard to want a lot more than that right now.
But also The book's still gonna come out. I can still find these ways to celebrate and whenever it is medically advisable, I definitely am gonna throw a big ass party. I've appreciated so much. We talked about this little bit, like my friends continuing to release podcasts and being able to buy books and watch TV. That helps me feel less like an asshole for doing self promotion during a global pandemic. Cause other people's books have done so much for me. Hopefully my book will do that for someone else.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I think that's a really great way to think about it. Cause yeah, First Draft is like chugging right along. It's like, "Well I'm all booked through June. So we're just moving forward."
Zan Romanoff: Also Sarah, think about how many people are locked in there houses right now being like, "I guess I'm gonna write a novel." Like they need help.
Sarah Enni: It's true. It's true. We're ready for you. Welcome.
Zan Romanoff: Yes. And you do need help. Not cause you're bad, because it's hard.
Sarah Enni: It's hard. It's really hard. Well, as you know, we like to wrap up with advice.
Zan Romanoff: I do. As a regular listener, I do know.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that. And you know, since we're here, since we're talking about it, what advice do you have for other people who have books coming out this spring and maybe in particular, any advice that you might give to a debut author this year? This season I mean.
Zan Romanoff: I do think you can take some pressure off of yourself because there is no normal at this point and there's kind of no expectations, frankly. If worse comes to worse and your book bombs and no one buys it, it sucks. I know it sucks cause trust me, no one bought my first book. But everyone's gonna look at that sales track and be like, "Well it happened during coronavirus. That's not that author's fault."
So any expectations you had about what was gonna happen. If you can take them off I think better for you. And then just like reach out to everyone you can as much as you can. Like I said, Kayla Kagan who's an author friend of ours, reached out to me about doing this Quarantine Book Club, and some other friends of ours and I are gonna do Instagram Live stuff.
So it helps to have a network. But if you don't like, Bellatrist was doing this book club thing and I was like, "Hey, could I do it?" They're like, "Yeah, okay, sounds good." So just trying stuff. I think now is the moment to be weird and creative because all the old ways of doing things have ground to a total halt. So if you have a strange idea, see if it works.
I do think a problem for me with the first two books was that I felt disempowered, not because of anything anyone else did, but because I was sort of like, "Other people are the professionals and I should wait for their advice, and they should tell me what to do cause I don't know anything." And now I'm like, "No one knows what's happening. No one knows what's going on. And so at least my ideas are as good as anyone else's."
Would it be like advisable, under other circumstances, to do a random ass Instagram Live from my bedroom? Probably not, but like, can it hurt? No. Will it be fun for me? Yes. So am I doing it? Yes.
Sarah Enni: Yay! That is what I'm seeing is just... get creative. Just let these restrictions that are in place right now. What's that cliche? The necessity of whatever?
Zan Romanoff: Necessity is the mother of invention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just have fun. You know? I think that's also one of the biggest things that I've learned, in general, in publishing. Is if you're not gonna enjoy it, so little is guaranteed, that if there's something that you really don't want to do or don't think you'll enjoy or like doesn't feel like you, you probably just don't have to do it. You know? And if something seems fun and natural and like you'll enjoy it, do that instead. Cause no one knows what's gonna work. So as long as you're throwing shit at the wall, it may as well be shit you like.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I think that's a perfect, perfect way to wrap this conversation. Well, I really loved Look, it's such a beautiful book and I'm excited for it too. I'm looking at it on my counter right now. And I'm so happy for it to be in the world. And thanks for joining me Zan.
Zan Romanoff: Thank you so much Sarah. A pleasure as always.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Zan. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @Zanopticon and follow me on both at Sarah Enni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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