First Draft Episode #259: Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow
JULY 14, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow are media mavens, co-hosts of the phenomenal CALL YOUR GIRLFRIEND podcast, and debut co-authors of friendship memoir BIG FRIENDSHIP.
Sarah Enni: Today's episode is brought to you by Keep My Heart in San Francisco by Amelia Diane Coombs. Sparks fly when two ex-best friends team up to save a family business in this swoon-worthy and witty debut. Perfect for fans of Jenn Bennett and Sarah Dessen. Keep My Heart in San Francisco is out today from Simon and Schuster.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow co-hosts of the phenomenal Call Your Girlfriend podcast and debut co-authors of Big Friendship out today. Aminatou Sow is a writer, interviewer and cultural commentator who lives in Brooklyn and Ann Friedman is a journalist, essayist, newsletter queen, and media entrepreneur who lives in Los Angeles.
Big Friendship is a friendship memoir that examines and celebrates the power of society's most underappreciated relationship. I loved talking to Aminatou and Ann about their very unique co-writing experience, how they came to this as the subject of their first book together, and the eye-opening experience of stepping into the realm of old, old-school print media.
Everything we talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes. As a reminder, First Draft participates in affiliate programs, specifically bookshop.org. And that means that when you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, it helps to support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you.
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If you're an aspiring writer with questions about the business, or a seasoned vet who still isn't quite sure they understand the nuts and bolts of publishing, be sure you're listening to Track Changes. The podcast series that's been appearing in your First Draft feed over the last few months. This week, we're getting into that mysterious period after the book deal. What really happens behind the scenes at a publisher before you hold your sweet, sweet book in your hot little hands?
I've also created the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday I share more of the information I gathered in researching for this project. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects at FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Ann and Aminatou.
Sarah Enni: First I'm gonna start with welcoming you both, Ann and Amina. I'm so excited to be chatting with you today.
Aminatou Sow: Thank you so much for having us.
Sarah Enni: So excited. So on First Draft, I like to get into some background of the people I'm talking to. So I always like to start by asking my guests where they were born and raised. So whoever wants to jump in, let's get a little bit of bio about each of you.
Aminatou Sow: I'm Aminatou Sow, I was born in Conakry, Guinea in the mid-eighties.
Ann Friedman: I'm Ann Friedman, I was born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa in the slightly earlier eighties [laughs], three years earlier to be precise.
Sarah Enni: Love it. I do want to ask each of you, I think a lot of people know you from the podcast and from your work as speakers and writers now, but I want to ask about when you were young, how was reading and writing a part of your young life?
Aminatou Sow: Oh man, how much time do we have? [Laughs] I would say probably my primary identity of as a young person is that I was a reader. I loved to read. I grew up in a house where both of my parents loved to read. I think the mythology around the reading in my family is that I learned at a young age and I do remember at a very young age loving to decipher text. And so I would read my dad's boring papers from work. There was no reading that was too boring.
But it's also because I split my time between West Africa and Europe and when we lived in West Africa, there was not a lot to do. And so reading was the thing to do. And I think that a lot of just dealing with my boredom was reading. I'd try to convince the library to let me order the adult number of books. The rest of my family had to join the library because I used all of their library cards in order to satisfy my book reading problem. I was always the child that was friends with all the adult librarians. And if I had had my way in elementary school and primary school, I would have eaten all of my lunches in the library. Loved to read.
Sarah Enni: I love that. How about you Ann?
Ann Friedman: I mean, so, so similar on this front, I was an obsessive reader. My parents are both readers now, but when I was growing up, we definitely got the local paper and like a Catholic magazine called the Lagorian, which I don't recommend. But that was it. We did not really have a constant flow of adult books into the house. And so similarly I was fully obsessed with the library. I still credit the Carnegie-Stout Public Library in Dubuque with making me the woman I am today.
Would also check out adult library card size stacks of books. And I was also like a writer from a very young age. It was a thing I did in my free time was write stories by hand when I was really little. And then later, when we got a blue screen IBM, you know one of those, stories on that computer. So it's funny, it has always been a primary, if not the primary thing I've done with my free time, which was considerable in my childhood where I was like a hundred percent an indoor kid.
Sarah Enni: And I so rarely get the chance to talk to other podcasters, which is my favorite thing. But I want to ask if, was there any hint in the past of podcasting or anything like that? Like, is there a memory you have of being young and being like, "Oh! No wonder I ended up talking for a living."
Aminatou Sow: Definitely a podcast did not exist in my childhood, but that said, I come from a family where we listened to the radio a lot. The radio was a huge part of my family life. And we would listen to the news, but we would listen to drama, and we would listen to just every part of the radio experience. So every once in a while I'll remember that and, "Oh yeah!" The radio has always been a big part of my life, even though it never occurred to me that I could make audio myself. But yeah, I miss that. I miss those days. Thank you to the BBC and Voice of America and RFI (Radio France Internationale), for all of their formative radio listening in my life.
Ann Friedman: And I don't have specific memories about listening. I mean, we listened to local radio when I was growing up too, but I really just feel like it's tied more with wanting to be a journalist or wanting to interview people from a very young age. Like when I was, I don't know, somewhere in the 10 to maybe 12 range, I did newsletters for my extended family where I would interview my family members about what was going on with them, and lay it out in the Apple IIe publishing software that was in the school computer lab.
And so, I truly am so one note where I'm like, "Oh yeah, I do all the things that I did for fun when I was a kid, but professionally." Which is not the same thing as doing it in a recorded format the way a podcast is. But the answer is I've always liked talking to people and interviewing people.
Sarah Enni: That it's amazing. I love that story. I also made a family newsletter, but there was only one edition. But it was like me and my typewriter and it had some like mystery format to it. It was so weird. My grandma found it the other day and I was like, "All right, well, we ended up doing something." So, I'm gonna kind of lead us up to Big Friendship, but I want to start by just having you guys kind of share the brief story of how you came to be friends.
Aminatou Sow: We were set up by a friend, essentially, another friend. Our friend Dayo (They talked to Dayo about their friendship origin story on a recent episode of Call Your Girlfriend), who we are both still very, very, very, very close to her, which is probably the thing that makes me the happiest about all of this. Is with someone that I had very recently met in Washington DC, and the first time that we hung out, she said to me, "You have to meet my friend Ann." And within a couple of weeks of that meeting, she very intentionally invited Ann and I to watch a television show at her house in the era of appointment television.
And so there were other people there, but I showed up with the intention of meeting this other person that I was supposed to be meeting, and it worked out! We're still friends. And it's really funny to think about now because there was just so much intention at the beginning of it. I think that it's fair to say that because we were both living in DC and we were part of this larger scene of people, we would have probably eventually met at some point in our years there. And who knows what kind of relationship we would have had from that. But the fact that we were such an intentional set-up by someone that we both liked so much is what made the stakes a little bit higher and makes the story a little more fun to tell.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love that. And you talk a lot about that in Big Friendship and you kind of get into more details about your personal lives at the time and what drew you to each other. It was really fun, and you say this in your book too, I love hearing about how other friendships came to be and how those two people discovered each other. So that was a really fun part of reading the book.
But to lead up to that a little bit more, and we're not gonna do preamble the whole time, I promise. But I also want to establish the concept of "shine theory" (and the original article that popularized the term, published in The Cut) and also the phenomenon of "shine theory" to kind of lead us to Big Friendship. So if you don't mind kind of defining it, and talking about how it came to be and how it proliferated.
Ann Friedman: Yeah. "Shine theory" is a practice of mutual investment where two people are basically like, "Hey, we are gonna help each other be our best selves individually, not for any personal gain, but just because I want you to get where you want to go. And I want to help you get there." And recognizing that this more collective attitude is more productive over the long haul and more satisfying, and more fun, than a competition model where everyone from strangers to your closest friends is someone who you are competing against rather than trying to rise with.
And it's a concept that's really born of our own friendship and the assurances we have long made to each other that, "I don't shine if you don't shine." And so that's where the term "shine theory" comes from. And it has been a public concept, I guess is the right term for it, beyond just the scope of our friendship, since 2013. And I think that for us, we didn't, I mean, it was a helpful framework, but I don't think we really anticipated how putting a term to that practice would be received by lots of other people who were also excited to put a term, or to put a label on this thing that they had been practicing with their friends.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, and that's so helpful. And I loved reading the book about how you sort of took control of "shine theory" as it took off in popular consciousness. I know people were trying to use it for all sorts of things that maybe were not in-line with the intent of "shine theory". One thing that just strikes me overall that I'm so impressed by and interested in with you two, is how you're both with "shine theory" and with the book, putting words and thoughts to a lot of cultural concepts or interpersonal concepts, that a lot of people can recognize. But there's not as much language for it anymore, which is what brings me to Big Friendship.
And before we get any further, I would just love for you guys to define Big Friendship and then we'll talk about the book and fewer definitions. But I think that's a really important thing to establish.
Aminatou Sow: I'm happy to read the definition of Big Friendship because I have it right here, but I was like, "Maybe that'll be clearer."
Sarah Enni: Perfect.
Aminatou Sow: So exciting to have it.
Ann Friedman: To reference our book? Oh my God. [Laughs] Literally crack it open.
Sarah Enni: There it is! The real book!
[Sound of book being opened and pages turning]
Aminatou Sow: The satisfaction millions of authors have felt before me. "Big Friendship is a bond of great strength, force, and significance that transcends life phases, geography, and emotional shifts. It is large in dimension affecting most aspects of each person's life. It is full of meaning and resonance. A Big Friendship is reciprocal with both parties feeling worthy of each other and willing to give of themselves in generous ways. A Big Friendship is active, hardy and almost always a Big Friendship is mature. It's advanced age commands respect and predicts it's ability to last far into the future."
You are correct that so much of the project of this book is about finding labels and giving definition to a lot of just very big and significant emotional feelings that people have that are clearly not universal to us. I think that part of why "shine theory" as a concept resonated so much is not because we invented it. It's precisely because it's something that has been around that so many other people do. And that doesn't necessarily get the recognition and the naming that it deserves.
And we felt that that was true of the kind of friendship that we were trying to talk about as well. We are, you know, there is a world in which we call each other best friends. We are besties, we are BFF. All of those are words that mean things. But I think that to us, at the point of our lives that we're in, there's something about it that just felt not true to our adult selves and to the maturity and the thoughtfulness that we are trying to bring to our relationships.
And really the thoughtfulness and the care with which we are trying to live our lives as people who just know a little better and different than we did when we met, say, in our mid to late twenties. And so much of the project of friendship in general and the project of intimate relationships is coming to a joint understanding and a joint truth and reality and vocabulary about what you mean to each other and what you are trying to do together.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And so I wanted to ask, because I can only imagine you must have had interest in a "shine theory" book. I'm sure you were approached by a lot of people about writing a book around that time, or in general, over the course of shortly after the "shine theory" phenomenon took off, or you put it on the internet. You started the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, which I think is probably how a lot of people know you both. But this is not a "shine theory" book necessarily, nor is this a Call Your Girlfriend book. So I'm interested in how the book of Big Friendship came to be.
Ann Friedman: Wow, Sarah, if we only had you in marketing meetings early on just saying, "This is not a "shine theory" book, this is not a podcast book." Wow. Yeah, it is definitely its own project. And I do think that working together in these other ways is what planted the idea of working on a book together. But then once we started talking about like, "What is the book that the two of us are uniquely suited to write? And what is the book that we really want to read?" It became really clear that that was not just a "shine theory" book or was not like the Call Your Girlfriend guide to blah, blah, blah, or whatever.
We were not actually interested in making that the focus of this project. And when we thought about our own lives and collaborations and the book that we wanted to read at various points of our lives, this book is that. I don't want to say we backed into it, but it just became clear that the specific thing people were proposing when they asked about a "shine theory" book was not aligned with where we were most interested or challenged.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I love what you came to, and as a listener of Call Your Girlfriend and a fan of both your work, it feels obvious to me. But I think someone maybe outside might have been waiting for the "shine theory" book, but this was so great. And kind of tying into what we're saying, putting a name to things that are maybe under recognized, or where a thorough vocabulary doesn't really exist.
You did kind of not only write your own story, but you brought in experts to talk about these things. I'd like to, sorry, this is a fumbling way to ask about how you decided to structure the book? And what were the early conversations about like, "What is this book gonna look like?" And how did you come to what it looks like today with third person and experts weighing in and all that great stuff?
Aminatou Sow: Ah! Sarah, where have you been this entire writing process? Thank you for asking that. I think that there are some things that we went into the book knowing that we wanted it to be, and then there are other things that the book ended up becoming. And I think that very early on, we were both dead set on the idea of we were writing a memoir. Because we understand the power of specificity. We knew that in order to tell a story that was compelling, and also that was true to us and the thing that we were trying to explore, is that we had to tell our own story. And it's true that we are two women, but we were really worried about the fact that the book would be received as a female friendship story, or it's like a raw-raw cheerleading, friendships between women are amazing.
And that was something that we really thought about a lot because we understood that the minute that we made that choice, we would have to fight off having a lipstick, or a piece of cake, or a stiletto on the book cover, to be crass about it.
Ann Friedman: Or literally the podcast logo, right?
Aminatou Sow: Or literally the podcast logo, because yes, we make our podcast together, but this is not a book about our podcast. And so that was something that was really top of mind. And figuring out, and walking that tight line, was something that was always at the forefront. I think too, that Ann and I are people who have been friends for over a decade, but at this point we've also been in a public dialogue about a lot of these topics for more than half of our friendship. And the truth is that this is really how we talk. There was always a digression that is a point of research or like an interview that we read or one of us will always interject with, "Oh, this makes me think about XYZ." And truly, this is why Ann Friedman is my friend... I love her brain and I love how her brain works.
Ann Friedman: Mutual! It's mutual.
Aminatou Sow: Who? What? So I think even if we had tried to write a book that did not have this research or interjection or whatever aside, it would have been impossible because that is not the way that we are in dialogue with each other. And so I'm honestly really happy that that is there. That is the thing that is probably the most true to how the podcast sounds. That is one way that that is represented in the book. And I think that it's also true to say that that is truly how our friendship is. That is how we talk to each other. And can you tell we are people who are not good at just talking about our feelings all of the time?
We really have to dig into the other experts part of this. And so that was one consideration. And then the other thing that was also true was that we knew really early on that in order to tell the story the way that we wanted to, we had to tell it in one voice, because part of what we were trying to address was really this gap in storytelling, almost. Where there are amazing novels about the complexity of friendship. Amazing, amazing, amazing novels. I do not need to add to that canon. The work is being done and the work is amazing. There is really, really good nonfiction about being a friend, or the complexity of a particular friendship. What we couldn't find was a book that addressed two people simultaneously discussing the relationship that they were in, because that is really where we were struggling.
And so that was the gap that we found. And in order to tell that story on a storytelling level, we had to tell it together because we were trying to arrive at joint truths and joint conclusions and figure that out. And on a personal level, it was also reassuring to tell the story together, because we are on the same page about the story that we are telling. And so, we tell the story in this joint "we" voice. The places that we digress are the places that you need a little more detail. We refer to each other as Ann and Aminatou, and I think it's fair to say we're really happy with how that came out. It does require a bit of, you know, mental juggling for the reader. I think that that is true and we were really aware of that. But it would have been impossible to do the book the way that we wanted to, and to talk about friendship in the way that we wanted to, without taking that risk.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a lot of discussion when two people collaborate on any creative task, it's not one person's voice and another person's voice, it's like a third thing when they're all together. So I can only speak for myself as a reader, but I did not find it difficult. I was totally just picturing you guys in a room coming together with one thing. So I felt like it was really, really great.
I do want to ask about that, on one of your most recent podcasts, Ann you kind of slipped into third person in talking about the book, which I loved. Cause it was like, "This is now like how we talk about Big Friendship." But the task of writing one voice, and Big Friendship is about your powerful friendship together, but also about how this friendship, one of the most pivotal ones in both of your lives, came almost to the brink of dissolution. Which as someone, I've had my two same best friends since I was 15, so I completely relate to this book on a hundred different levels.
But you talk about how you consciously and with intention set about repairing that friendship, which did include seeking out the help of a therapist. When I was reading this book and thinking about the task of choosing every word in third person, together, to explain your friendship, I was like, "That is therapy." To me, that seemed like those conversations that you must have had to come to this narrative, is a whole other kind of therapy. So, I mean, I'm obsessed with it. I want to hear all about how this worked and how you kind of came together to decide on the narrative.
Ann Friedman: Well, I do think that in some cases, the first person plural, this is what we think about friendship. Or this is what the experts we talked to told us. That felt very natural when we were writing some of those more ideas-driven sections. I recall those being some of the easiest ones to write. And I think where it was harder is when Aminatou mentioned the specificity right? Of wanting to be able to show how this works in real time, as opposed to just talk in lofty ways about friendship.
And in order to do that, explaining different situations in our friendship, where we had to really figure out what was my experience, what was her experience and what was a shared experience? That was much, much harder. And in some cases, we would separately write about something and then realize we had both expressed the same thing and then realized we could just put it in a "we".
We were both feeling lonely. We were both feeling frustrated. We were both feeling like icky, but we didn't know why, or whatever, to describe this period of difficulty in particular. And then there were other times where it really was not a parallel experience and we realized we had to be third person singular instead of first person plural. And I also think that like, it's hard, I'm sure you have people tell you all the time that they could have continued revising the book for months and months and months, and it would be a different thing.
And I'm happy with where it netted out. And I also think that you can just kind of see the like edit and edit and edit that could come through to be like, "Okay, what can be a we, what can be a we, what has to be separated out?" You know, the work of muddling through that could be like decades and decades and decades [laughs]. It's just such a thorny question of perspective.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And a fascinating one. Not a ton of books are tackled the exact way that this was. I mean, I'd love to just hear about the actual physical writing process. Like you said, I think some of it was written separately and then you brought it together and discussed it, or was one person sitting at a laptop. I mean, as I said, no detail is too small. I'm super interested in how this kind of actually came about.
Aminatou Sow: Wow, this is giving me insight into the fact that one of us could have just dictated to the other and typewriting this. What?
Ann Friedman: No! That could not have happened. No, that is a false fantasy!
Aminatou Sow: “And please take note of my words.” [Laughs] So much of writing this book, honestly, was carving out, you know, we live on separate... opposite sides of the continent. And so, so much of it was carving out some time to be in person where we would essentially have these really intense writers' retreats where we lived together, and we would eat every single meal together. And only write. Which honestly, it was a really, really, really intense situation because making time to be together for both of us means leaving our normal lives behind to go into this hole to write. And so it meant that every hour that could be given to writing had to be given to writing.
There was not a lot of tourism, which makes me a little sad now that I say it. But it was just a lot of writing. And a lot of it was that we would start the day sitting down outlining. Let's say we had to outline a chapter, or it was a brand new fresh writing day, we would outline together, which involves a lot of just talking, which you are correct is therapy. And a lot of just like, "Okay, what is this chapter going to look like? What are the stories that we are trying to get to? What are the points that we are trying to make?" And outlining, reverse outlining, and really just talking it through for a really long time. I was really surprised by that. About how much that conversation about outlining was so intentional and in a lot of ways was very emotional.
There are times where it's really easy and it's like, "Great!" Like, "We're telling this anecdote." And then other times it's, "Oh!" Like, "What is your philosophy around this really important thing?" And I'm really happy that I actually, I feel like I learned so much about Ann even in that process, even though we had already been to therapy together. So that is a 10 out of 10 would recommend writing a book with someone that you are in a healthy relationship with.
So we would outline together and then we would go to separate places in the house, or the room, or whatever that we were in, to write to that outline. Sometimes we would give each other like, "You have till the rest of the day." It was a timestamp. And then other times it was a word count. It really depended on what the schedule was and what we were contending with. And then we would get back together, after that time, read out loud to each other what we had written, which was a really fun experience because a lot of times we would use the same example or the same anecdote to illustrate a point, which is always really fun.
And other times you would learn a detail that you just didn't know from someone's perspective, and also having to reconcile that. Or there were times where we would write about the same incident, something that could be a contradictory position, and realizing that, "Oh, no, you experienced this in this very different way. And I experienced this in this very different way. And now we have the task of what's the truth?" I'm thinking about that Oprah GIF where she's like, "What is the truth?" The dog GIF.
So yeah, there was a lot of that. And then after that, we would sit down and literally have to knit together these passages that we would have written. And we would take turns taking the lead on that. Sometimes one of us would be the lead on the knit-together. And then the other person would come in for a cleanup, or vice versa and switch that around. I think that at every step of the process, and in every single draft of the book of which there ended up being three, like three significant drafts, we had to figure out a process for that phase and figure out a process that worked for both of us.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. The dreaded, "It doesn't work anymore. And we have to reinvent the wheel." Which every writer can relate to, I think. Those conversations, I'm interested in that revision process. It sounds like, or I would imagine, that those conversations about what your perspective was on it, did that ever lead to a change of what was in the book?
This is not the cleanest question. Those conversations about what you each wrote and what your perspective was, did you then have to think, "Well actually, based on this conversation, we should include these other things in the book." Or, I mean, how did that kind of back and forth go?
Ann Friedman: I mean, definitely. I think there were many points where we had to ask like, "Oh, does this deserve more space?" Both of us had a ton to say about this." Or, "The assignment was about X, but we both wrote like 2000 words about Y. That's coming from somewhere and maybe we should redo the chapter angle, or make a new chapter that addresses that then actually go back and address the writing assignment of X." You know? So definitely. And I think that happened both in conversation and when we were writing separately, like coming to that realization that we had maybe something different or better to say about it.
And also, in terms of the big rewrites, the first draft was really a lot more about how do we make friends in the first half, and the second half about how do we keep them? How do we get through hard moments and challenges, and time constraints? And the first half of the book was kind of universally panned by early readers. Like, wouldn't you say?
Aminatou Sow: Epically pannned.
Ann Friedman: Epically panned. Where everyone would be like, "The first parts are just kind of plodding, but you really pick up in the middle of the book and the end is great." And we heard that again and again. And so we re-did it, we re-did it, and then it was better. But like... sorry, I'm rambling... re-did it to focus on keeping each other close and not making friends. And I think that that was a little bit better. And people were still saying that the early chapters were kind of clunky, that was still the feedback from people who hadn't read it.
Aminatou Sow: Every one was like, "Loved chapter four. Loved chapter four."
Ann Friedman: Yeah. It was like one to three, where people would just kind of be like, "Yeah, I can't quite put my finger on it." And we got some very good advice kind of near the very end, right before our last writing retreat when we were gonna do a final revise, that we should go through the early chapters and separate the narrative parts that are about our story from the bigger ideas points, and then look at what we really have on both fronts, and see what we're really saying.
And so we spent the last week when we were supposed to be polishing, ripping up the first four chapters of the book with that strategy and putting them back together again. Because that had just continued to be a problem where everyone was like, "The book doesn't get good until chapter four." Which, not a great place to be in, you know, it's like, "If you're gonna get bad somewhere, let it be at the end after people have already gotten into it."
So I think that that last week, in particular, which I don't know that we could've gotten there any faster, we kind of had to have this process of like rethinking the subtitle, and not just defining Big Friendship, but what are we trying to say? What part of this process are we intervening at? Yeah. And then having some really good external feedback. I don't think that we could have come to the book, as it is today, just the two of us locked in a room. You need other smart brains to really offer you that perspective.
Sarah Enni: I mean, because I'm also a writing masochist, I'm like, "This all sounds like an intellectual exercise that's excruciating, but also amazing. And like the fun part of getting to the end of any kind of massive creative project like this. And you talk in the book about how you bring in experts and people who have researched friendship, but you also note that there was sort of a lack of discussion and research.
It sounds like the conversation about deep friendships and all the ways that they can kind of go wrong and all the ways that they can come back together, was most intellectually stimulating to both of you. And I wonder if that maybe had to do with the fact that it is under researched and there's not as much out there. So it was kind of room for you guys to create your own definitions and bring your own thoughts to it.
Aminatou Sow: I think that we both understand that things that are important are things that are researched. And so not finding research on something that we both know to be very important was something that we really had to interrogate. And to be clear, there is research about friendship out there. What we found was that it was not necessarily relevant to this experience that we had of being adult friends who were really trying to hang on to our friendship for a long time. A lot of these studies are, "Oh, here's like 17 people in a boarding school in Hong Kong." Or, "Here's what college students are reporting about friendship." Which I too loved my college experience. I don't think that it is fair to say that it tells you anything more about your friendships, then it does, you know, it's about specifically those college friendships.
And there was a lot of stuff about children learning to be friends and not really anything about this complexity of, "Okay, how are adult humans being friends? How are adult humans dealing with the intimacy and complexity of what this relationship means?" And just over and over and over, we couldn't find it. And what we were finding was really interesting because it was from linguists, it was from communication professors. It was from psychologists who had these very specific practices.
It was not something where you could just go to Google, or go to LexisNexis and just pull up and it felt like it was readily available. And I think that that in itself, figuring that out in itself was also very stimulating because it really helped explain the conundrum that we were in. Speaking just for myself, I think that so much of repairing this relationship and also just thinking about it so much, I had still really internalize that, "Oh yeah, my relationships are in a bad place because I am a bad person." Or, "I have this inability to hold onto friendships and I have an inability to form bonds with people."
And maybe some of that is true, but it's also true that there's not a lot of social support for friendships in general. And maybe if there was, then people would not be left to trying to figure it out in the dark of, "How do I go about telling my friends that they mean something to me? How do I go about repairing a friendship? How do I go about dealing with a conflict? How do I go about communicating my needs and my wants, and also making space for all of this?" All of those things are just intrinsically tied into so much of what we were thinking about when we were writing the book.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And the end result, I think at least for me as a reader, is I was like, "Well, now I have to buy this for my other friends so that we can have this shared language." To be like, "Okay, what does stretch mean?" Like, "That's what I'm talking about here." You know, the shorthand that is so helpful in, like you say, these complicated relationships where no one has the time and it's like, "Okay, great, these shortcuts are like a lifesaver."
I want to ask about, in particular in the book, you do speak about the fact that your friendship is an interracial one. And on a recent episode of the podcast Amina you said, "I'm having a lot of revelations about my friendships with white women lately." And I'm not gonna ask about specifics about what you were talking about, but I do think your experience is likely one that's shared by millions of Black Americans right now. And I'd love to hear you talk about how you guys worked through conversations about race and racism, and what you might have to say for people who are having those difficult conversations right now. Just a real softball.
Ann Friedman: Well, I do think that we feel very strongly about it belonging in a book about big, important, long-term, hardy friendship, for a reason. It is something that has been, I don't want to say easy for us to ignore, but definitely in earlier years of our friendship was not something that was at the fore and not something that we discussed in terms of how it played out in our relationship and our dynamic.
And really, I learned so much through the conversations that we had for that chapter about Aminatou's experience in our friendship, on this issue in particular, where I think that something about the act of writing a book where we had this, I don't want to use the word excuse, but like the whole project was about looking backward and being like, "What was that incident really about?" Like, "What was that moment really about?" For both of us, together or differently, really illuminated the ways that race and racism are very much active in our friendship, the way that they are active everywhere in this world.
So I think that I am happy that it's there. I have a lot of gratitude for the way that Aminatou has showed up in those conversations with me throughout our friendship, and in particular as it came to this writing process. I know that writing that chapter required something very different of her, than it required of me. On a level of even just exposing pain, I guess I want to say.
We kind of made strategic decisions all along about how personal we each wanted to be about how we were affected, or how we are emotionally dealing with something. And I really just acknowledge that, us writing about interracial friendship in a frank way involves one of us being like, "Oh, let me like talk about how bad it feels that I hurt people close to me." Which is a really different thing than, "Let me actually explain the pain and trauma of being on the receiving end of this and what it's been like to hold it." I have a lot of feelings about that chapter.
And I also am ultimately not just grateful to Aminatou that we were able to create it as it exists in the book now, but I really hope that it kind of functions in the way the rest of the book does, which is to say it is instructive or there is some language for people who didn't have language about these friendships before.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, absolutely. Amina did you want to add anything to that?
Aminatou Sow: Yeah, I agree with a lot of what Ann said. I think that it required two very different things from both of us. And I think that wanting to share it, for me, was really rooted in this place of so much of writing about race, especially right now, is really this exercise in highlighting the trauma that Black people have. And I think that it was important for me that the incident that we chose was not this big life defining huge revelation. Because I think that for a lot of very well meaning white people, meaning people who read books and consider themselves fairly liberal and open-minded, they think that racism is something that is only happening in Alabama and that it's not present in their lives.
And so much of explaining that actually if you have Black people in your life [pauses] if you don't have Black people in your life, that's something you should probably be thinking about and interrogating on your own. If you do have Black people in your life, you should not be so naive to believe that the only big deals are when someone is killed and it is running in the loop on CNN. Or that talking about race as it happens out in the world.
Ann and I were very adept at that. We were great at talking about race and racism and talking about the politics of it all as it happens in the world, or as it happens to other people. A thing that I also had to realize, even being the Black friend in the friendship, is that we were not good at talking about it as it related to both of us. And those things are very different. And so I hope that people really do pick up on that.
It doesn't have to be a huge incident to make the point that if you are in a relationship with Black people, race is definitely happening all of the time, on every single level of your friendship. And if you think that it's not, that's probably a bigger problem to come back to. In friendships, we all make choices and those choices are, for as much as you think that your friendship is insulated from politics and from culture, every single choice that we make and do not make is actually very political. And so much of sharing that story was really getting to that point.
Sarah Enni: I mean, it was a really powerful chapter. And I do think, as you say, that's lending itself to a lot of people's experience that I think they will be... I was grateful to read it and to, again, feel like, "Oh, I can share this with people. We can talk about it." It can open up conversations. I mean, that's like the power of any kind of book like this. So thank you for speaking to that. And I do want to ask about, in an episode of Call Your Girlfriend, you guys talked a little bit about the experience of meeting with publishers and kind of getting started on this journey.
And how many of your meetings were sort of disappointingly white. I'm obviously entrenched in publishing. I'm doing this mini series right now explaining publishing and doing a lot of talking about PublishingPaidMe, and advances, and racial inequities, so it was really of interest to me. I just would love to hear about that experience in particular, but also just your experience of being on that [side]. Book publishing is different than broader media. So anything you'd like to share about the experience of getting this book together, I'd love to hear about.
Ann Friedman: How many meetings did we? I'm trying to remember, actually how many...
Aminatou Sow: We had 17 meetings. If I remember that. Of those 17 meetings, we only met one editor who was Black. There was only one imprint that was led by... there was only one Black editor who was interested in buying our book. And of those meetings, most people came with a couple of people from their office. Very few of them were one-to-one meetings, it was just not us just meeting publishers. And I remember that in the entire cycle of meetings, we only met one Black person who was not at the editor level. And I believe it was at Dey Street.
And that was, frankly, very shocking to me because I come from the world of technology where at least everyone would know to bring a Black person as window dressing. I'm not saying that they mean it intentionally, but it would be a signal that, "Oh, yes, we take this..." There are no Black people in publishing. That's not surprising to me, I know that. What was surprising to me is that there was no window dressing to be had, at all. Which spoke to a deeper, more sinister and deeper dysfunction.
I will say that my experience of publishing is that it is a very painfully white space. And I have a lot of pain tied into the fact that this is... I love books. I am so proud to have written a book. I am so deeply disappointed and pained that it is a space where people who look like me are not reflected. That has been my overwhelming experience of publishing.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing that. It's getting long overdue spotlight on it, of course. But yeah, hearing you guys talk about it on Call Your Girlfriend I was like, "Aha!" And now we're talking about it a lot more broadly, which is fantastic. Those meetings, 17 meetings of people asking you about what kind of book you wanted to put together, did you feel like they understood what you wanted to do? Or did they have, I mean, I don't want to ask you to share sensitive information, but I am curious. Were people assuming they knew what you wanted to write about? Were they there to just meet with you? How did that go?
Ann Friedman: I mean, there were a range of conversations that we had. Ultimately, I felt like it was a pretty good exercise in us doing a version of what we're doing now. In talking publicly and being able to bounce off each other in terms of what we were feeling at that point about what we wanted this book to be. I will say that one thing that sticks out in my mind, and one reason why Simon and Schuster is our publisher, is because they are one of the few meetings we had where they were like, "Oh yes, this is an ideas book." And we can talk about what it means to follow through on that assessment of a book. But I think we had been very concerned that someone would be like, "It's a cute book, about a cute podcast, for cute girls, who are cute friends."
You know that that is where it would be placed, even though this book is talking about big social issues and citing research and talking about adult problems in thorny difficult ways. And so I think that invoking that was something that was a positive to us where we were like, "Yeah, like we want to be able to both center our experiences as women, and also sell this book to people who listen to our podcasts." Like, "Yeah, we want to do those things, but we also really want to be taken seriously as authors who are doing something intellectual and trying to make a contribution."
And so that was one of those lines, I think, that it became clear what side of it people were on in many of those meetings. I don't know. Do you have other memories of that time? I'm like, it feels so long... it was so long ago.
Aminatou Sow: It was really long ago, but no, I agree with you. I think that the thing that was really interesting to me at the time is that you write a book proposal, you send it around, people read the proposal and are obviously reacting to it. And some of those conversations where people would come in, I was like, "Are we talking about the same book at all?" You know? And so the understanding that, "Oh yeah, at least if you were writing a nonfiction book, that publishers are so... my generous way of saying this is that they're very attentive to the platform marketing possibilities of it.
Where they're like, "Oh yeah, these girls have a podcast. The podcast. The podcast." The podcast kept coming up in so many conversations, which I understand, we host a podcast, but it was funny to feel that we were more ambitious in our reach of who would read this book than publishers were. We're like, "Wow, if the universe of people that you want to read this book is the people who listen to Call Your Girlfriend, then this book will not travel very far.
So that, to me, was really interesting and Ann and I are not people who come from publishing at all. We have friends who have published a lot of books, but really I did not know the ins-and-outs of this world until we went down this road. And I have to say that I'm so happy that my first foray in it was with someone else. I do not know how people do this alone. I don't know how people write books alone. I don't know how they sell books alone. I don't know how you just have to deal with your publisher alone when it comes to, "How are we positioning this book? How are we selling it? What's going on the cover it?" I just do not know how people do that alone. And I was really happy to have a co-pilot who really gets it with me.
Sarah Enni: I love that.
Ann Friedman: Ah, I feel the same way!
Sarah Enni: I love it. Okay, well, we're coming up on time here. So I want to ask about two things. We'll see if maybe we can mesh them together. But I like to wrap up with advice and I would love any advice that you might have for people who are looking to co-write a book. But I also am interested in whether, you know, you kind of mentioned in a recent show, the idea of a friendship memoir maybe taking off and this becoming something that's a little bit more like understood, or a fledgling genre, maybe. So, I'd love to hear if you have advice for people who would want to tackle that as a genre as well.
Ann Friedman: Well, when we set out to write, we both reached out to people we knew who had co-written books, to ask about some of these things. Like we didn't know how we were gonna solve the pronoun problem at the beginning. We didn't have the process we eventually landed on. And I think in retrospect, we really started creating that process when we were writing the book proposal, because that's the thing that has to get done before anything else. And those conversations with other co-authors predated that, and I'm not sure how much they actually informed the process we ultimately landed on.
And so I don't actually know what I would say to someone who was about to co-write a book as co-equals the way we did. Not as like researcher and writer, or ghostwriter and name, or whatever. I will say that understanding a little bit of what both of you need in order to feel good in the process, you kind of have to know. Like for myself, the reason why this could never have worked with one of us talking over the other's shoulder is because I'm so much better in the written word than I am talking off the cuff. Especially when it's something complicated I have to organize, that would not have worked for me.
And if Amina had been like, "I wanna write this whole book, one of us is talking and the other transcribing." I don't know what I would've done, you know? And so I think that some of it is just specific to the people in the collaboration. And I'm excited to read all books that may appear in the friendship memoir genre, be they written in the singular voice, or be they written in traded off chapters, or as a published dialogue, or however it happens. I don't know. Do you have good advice? I'm curious.
Aminatou Sow: Who is Sarah or me?
Ann Friedman: You! The person who's co-written a book.
Aminatou Sow: Listen, I'm like Sarah, "Please give me your advice for my next book."
Ann Friedman: I'm curious about your answer to this, that's all.
Aminatou Sow: Yeah. You know, I agree with you. I would say do not go into writing a book with someone who's working style you don't understand. And I say that at the same time as I will say, you have to work with someone who you can start a new process with. Like, I think that you cannot go into a collaboration thinking that, "Oh, we're going to do it their way. Are we going to do it my way." That's not what's going to happen. What is going to happen is you are going to find a middle ground, but it's going to be a little painful, but that it's going to be a weird Frankenstein of things where both people feel happy to contribute.
I also think the only way that I could have written this book with Ann, for example, is that I am very clear on what she wants out of the writing process. And I'm very clear what she wants out of her career and what her goals are. There was nothing about that that was ambiguous to me. And I think that where I see a lot of collaborations not go well, is that those needs and wants are not articulated at the beginning. It's just like, "Say what you want, say what you need and also require for the other person to tell you what they want and need." And I think that the security that comes from that really is the baseline that a lot of trust is just founded on. And so, yeah, I think that that's not sexy advice, but I think just really knowing what both of you want out of it is what's really important.
And I also think that, we had a real leg up in this, in that we have run a business together, essentially. And so I think that going into writing a book and knowing that it is a business venture, whether you're doing it alone or you're doing it with someone else, is something that anyone who wants to be an author should just know straight off the bat. And in a lot of ways, for as much as we didn't know anything about publishing going in, everything else that has been a behind-the-scenes conversation about marketing, or about publishing, or about you name it, we were actually at a real advantage for, because we run a business together. So, no one's gonna railroad us with their bad ideas because we know what we're doing.
Ann Friedman: A united front.
Aminatou Sow: Right. And the advice I wish someone had given me, frankly, when I was thinking of writing a book, I wish someone had just explicitly told me like, "Oh yeah, after you write a book, you are also responsible for selling it." Which are two very, very, very, very different skill sets. And for as much as writing the book did not come naturally to me, and that is the skill set I had to learn, the selling of the book itself in some ways has been so much easier because that's something that I understand.
But I think that any author that has a romantic notion of you just turn a manuscript in and then, you know, someone binds the pages together and it's in stores. I was like, "Please destroy that romantic notion immediately." You're going to do a lot of not sexy, not creative brain kind of work.
And back to your question about the friendship canon, I am really excited for people to write more about the complications of friendship. Because when I think about all of the ways that I understand this, is so much of it comes from comparing, like mapping out the feelings that I have about friendship to the feelings about the work and the things that I see happening around, like marriage is definitely a topic that is, I would say, overexposed at this point in literature. But there is a real depth and heft there that I want to see happen in friendship as well.
Because I think that if we can move away from this idea that friendship is just cute and it's easy, or it's just this thing that women just do so much easier together. Which, let me tell you, is not true. And also is just not even real to the way that, yeah, I was like applying the gender binary to friendship is just a scam. And it's a scam in life for all of it. But I do think that bringing in that heft and that texture and the depth is something that I hope will free a lot of people to talk about their own friendships and really help model the fact that everyone, in the absence of real support, we are just all muddling our way through how to be better people to the people in our lives.
And so I was like, "This is really just a drop in the bucket". And so for anyone who picks up this book or doesn't pick up this book because they're like, "That's not my experience." I would love to read those stories. You know? This is not a definitive exploration of friendship. It's not even a definitive exploration of our friendship. So I'm just really, really, really excited to have a conversation with people. And I would love for our book to be in conversation with other books that explore this.
Sarah Enni: Yes, I would love that too. It would be an amazing end cap at Barnes and Noble, all of the friendship memoirs. Oh my gosh! I was so looking forward to reading your book and having this conversation. I love the book a ton, and you guys have been so fun to talk to. Thank you for giving me so much time, and good luck with the book. This will come out on the day, so it'll come out next Tuesday. Thank you again so much and have a fantastic rest of your week. Good luck next week!
Ann Friedman: Thanks Sarah.
Aminatou Sow: Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. And thank you.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Ann and Aminatou. Find information for Ann @annfriedman.com and follow Aminatou @Aminatou on Twitter and Instagram and find more information about both of them and Big Friendship @bigfriendship.com. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram @Sarah Enni and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
This show was brought to you by Keep My Heart in San Francisco, by Amelia Diane Coombs out from Simon and Schuster today.
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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds; Creator of Sex and the City Candace Bushnell; YouTube empresario and author Hank Green; Actors, comedians and screenwriters Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham; author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast Linda Holmes; Bestselling authors and co-hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish and co-host of the Sciptnotes podcast; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.
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