The voice behind the popular web series “Ask a Mortician” exposes the grisly, hilarious details of working in a crematorium—and argues that everyone needs to be more closely connected to the realities of death.

Your book is often vividly gruesome—and just as often very funny. What do you think is the source of your “gallows humor”?
My parents are both very clever people. I grew up around humor. It just made sense to apply it to conversations about death and mortality. Especially since these heavy topics can often be easier to take in if they’re delivered with a lighter touch.

You write that the day-to-day realities of working in a crematorium “were more savage than I had anticipated.” What surprised you most in your first days at the crematory?
The bodies were savage, in the sense that I had never seen so many corpses in one place. But the real savagery was that the corpses were essentially abandoned. Our funeral home came to pick them up and take them away from their families and store them in a giant freezer. I was the only person there when the bodies were cremated. Most people have no idea they can be much more involved in the death care of the people they love.

Your obsession with death began when you were 8 years old and saw a child plunge from an escalator in a shopping mall. Working in the mortuary seems to have brought some resolution to your obsession. Was writing the book also cathartic in some way?
Absolutely. Part of writing the book was to let other people know that we’re all obsessed with death, to a degree. Death is the human condition, and it’s perfectly OK to be fascinated by it, perfectly OK to want information about what goes on behind the scenes. It’s not morbid, or deviant, or wrong. In a way, writing the book helped me to fully embrace that idea as well.

You’re critical of the modern American funeral industry. But you are also critical of Jessica Mitford’s landmark exposé of funeral home practices, The American Way of Death (1963). What’s your beef with Mitford’s book?
I try to make it clear that I have a great deal of respect for what Mitford did. However, I think she was so focused on subverting the old men of the traditional funeral industry that the book ended up being pro-direct cremation. Direct cremation (cremation with no services of any kind) is the cheapest alternative, but it doesn’t allow for something I believe we need, which is to care for and interact with our dead bodies. To have the body just disappear can hurt the grieving process.

You’re on a kind of mission in Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Why is it so important that people have a closer connection with death?
I am on a mission! I would never claim to be an objective reporter. Death affects everything we do as humans, and we’re much healthier when we understand this. Other than television and film, we never see death any more, it’s not a part of our daily lives. We view this as “progress” but I don’t believe it is. We need the reality of death to remind us that we are not immortal, and our actions have real consequences.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Richard Blanco first became widely known when he was selected to write a poem for Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration in 2012. Blanco, who was working as a civil engineer and writing poetry on the side, had been born in Madrid to Cuban immigrant parents and come to the U.S. as a child, eventually settling with his extended family in Miami. His selection as the inaugural poet marked a number of firsts: He was the first Latino, first immigrant and first openly gay writer chosen for the role.

In an alternately hilarious and moving new memoir, The Prince of los Cocuyos, Blanco looks back on his childhood in Miami: his close family, his domineering grandmother, his struggle to be a "real" American (one who ate Easy Cheese and went to Disney World) and his conflicted feelings about his emerging sexuality.

We caught up with Blanco at the 2014 Southern Festival of Books to find out more his fresh and vivid portrayal of "becoming."

First I’d like to ask about the title of the book. What is the significance of it and why did you choose it?
There are two reasons. “El Cocuyito” is the name of my granduncle’s Cuban grocery store, where I started working when I was 12. And it’s the proverbial village where, as I like to say, I learned to be Cuban, learned to fall in love with my Cuban heritage and really learn about it beyond the nostalgia and beyond the misconceptions I had about where I was from. So the grocery store plays a big role in the book, and the “prince” idea relates to the idea of the village, which raised me in a way. And the cocuyos are fireflies, so of course there’s the magic of that. They’re lightning bugs, and like every kid I used to trap them in jars.

Did your publisher give you any pushback on using Spanish words in the title?
Not at all.  I was very surprised because it’s something I’ve always heard is met with horror—a bilingual title. But they didn’t blink. They loved it. And I knew it was a chance, but I also feel like it’s time. We obviously have text that’s in Spanish and English; this has become commonplace. But it’s interesting how few Latino authors dare to put Spanish in a title. I wanted to take the dare. And cocuyos is just a funky, cool, kooky word and in some ways, the fun part is people trying to pronounce it.

On a related question, I noticed that you mostly don’t translate the Spanish words that you use in the memoir. What was your thinking behind that?
It’s really annoying to translate everything that someone says in Spanish. When you use Spanish in a text, it’s not just for meaning but for sound. But I always try to set it up contextually, so that you’re never lost, or translate it in context, which is the real challenge of writing in that way. I don’t have a choice because my family and my community—I don’t hear them in English, I hear them in Spanish. And so the compromise is to have some English and some Spanish.

Why did you decide to write a memoir, to translate your experiences “not into poetry but into prose”?
I actually started this project about four years ago. Part of it, at first, was just creative curiosity and wanting to see how it is that prose worked. And I was also driven by a sense that every genre has its limitations—its strengths and its weaknesses. There were so many stories that I still wanted to tell and unpack from the poetry. And you can’t really do that kind of broad characterization in a poem—characters like my mother and my grandmother. My poems are narrative so they’re story-like, but of course, even that has its limitations.

Part of what I learned is that poetry is super-compressed; it’s about the emotional core of people in a situation. And writing in prose is more about storytelling, and that’s fun too. I always had to be cautious about not going down the poetry wormhole, and going on for three pages describing the sofa. It was interesting to challenge myself to adhere to a narrative, to try to construct a narrative out of pieces of memory. And that was fascinating. I also learned by contrast more of what poetry is all about—by working in another genre.

Was there anything in your personal life that you struggled with whether to reveal?
Yes and no. Part of it is that I’m insulated by language. A lot of the elders in my community and in my family have a working knowledge of English but they wouldn’t read a whole book of mine in English. For that matter, they wouldn’t read a whole book of poetry. So I’ve always had a little bit of a barrier, a little bit of a cushion, so to speak.

I don’t know if I could have written this book if my grandmother were still alive. I think everything happens the way it’s supposed to happen. But then again, the book is not about family scandal or gossip. Part of why I like to tell stories is to, in a sense, revere and honor my community. And so there’s always a tone of love and honesty in my work, even though the memoir gets a little more dangerous (laughter).

You mentioned your grandmother, who is such a big part of your story. You write that this book let you “hate her, understand her, forgive her, and thank her.” How do you think she would react to your characterization of her, and would she understand you better if she were able to read it?
I think she would understand more of what I was going through. As an adult, you sometimes treat children as adults and you don’t realize that the words coming out of your mouth are 10 times more significant when you’re 7 years old than when you’re 17 or 27.

Part of what I hope the book will do is to let people like my grandmother or parents of gay teenagers understand the psychology of what a gay youth goes through—it’s a very subtle and slow process and you can’t come out until you’re ready to come out. There’s a series of all sorts of negotiations and translations of yourself that you need to go through. And I think my grandmother would understand that a hell of a lot better.

But also, by analyzing it, I now better understand where she was coming from. It’s a different brand of homophobia we’re dealing with, at least in my particular Cuban culture, and I think, perhaps, Latin American culture in general. The idea is not that being gay is an evil thing and you’re going to hell, the crime is really about being effeminate. So what my grandmother was trying to do was to say, “I know who you are, but here’s what we’re going to do.” Because in an odd, twisted way, she was experienced in that generation and culture, and she was preparing me: Be what you need to be, but … pass. The idea was that you behaved like a man regardless of what your sexuality was. You know, machismo, it’s a more important layer than all the rest.

You’re often asked about poets who have influenced you. Now that you’re a memoirist, I’d like to find out if there are memoirs that you especially admire.
Obviously, I read Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana. I thought it was wonderful, of course, but it was another layer of the story. It gave me something to build off of, so to speak. His experience of actually having memories of Cuba was different from my own, because I wasn’t born there. But I feel like I do have [memories of Cuba] at times, because the photographs become so real.

And then, Augusten Burroughs. At one time, as a working title, I would call my book Running with Mangoes. And he ended up doing a blurb for my book, and I think that’s what convinced him. Certainly it’s not the same story, but it has that bizarre, kooky, what-am-I-doing-here kind of feeling. And having come out the other end a much better person for it—I think it shared that. It resonated emotionally with me as well.

And there’s also Richard Hoffman’s memoir, Half the House. The inspiration comes from many sources.

You’ve been promoting The Prince of los Cocuyos for a couple of weeks now. Is there anything you’ve found especially gratifying or surprising about the way readers are reacting to the book?
I’m finding little pieces of the memoir that I never thought would be such a connecting point, like the Easy Cheese. At a reading in Brookline, a man brought me a gift. As soon as I held it in my hands, I knew what it was—three cans of Easy Cheese. I’m still munching on them. Those are the moments that, as a writer, always surprise you—what people connect with.

On the other hand, I have also been surprised by just how connected people still are to the inauguration and my role in that as a poet. It seems like something that will go on for my lifetime, and happily so.

How does your personal coming-of-age story mirror or represent the larger story of America?
The story of “becoming” is primordial; it’s trans-cultural. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, 50 or 15, we’re always becoming. There’s always a sense of transforming. It’s a fundamental part of the human psyche. We’re never really fully there. Just when you think you’ve got it all done, you have . . . grandchildren. The “you” is always this mirage just down the road, and when you get to it, it slips away from you. You’re kind of following yourself all your life to become who you already are.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of becoming, and in the process of my experience serving as inaugural poet, and if you look at a country, it also has an evolution, and a sense of its own becoming. And America right now is about 13. As a country, we’re young, and we’re still asking all these questions, just like little Riqui is asking in this memoir. Who are we? We’re having all these conversations about labels. Do we use labels? Do we not use labels? Nobody knows the answer.

I find that America is also, as a people, coming of age. We are becoming and deciding. We tend to be very impatient in our causes and the things that we want to see changed. And we think that the story begins and ends in our lifetimes. But the story of America will continue far beyond our lifetimes. And just because we haven’t reached what you thought was the end of the story, you have to realize that all you’re doing is adding a sentence, a word, a paragraph, and that the story continues. We’re not there yet, but that’s not the point. The point is, hopefully, as a democracy, we continue to “raise” this country, we continue to “rear” this country. Some days we go two steps back, some days two steps forward, depending on what side of the fence you’re looking at it from.

The idea of becoming is such an American idea that it parallels very much the personal stories of coming of age. If you really think about it, the questions I was asking as a child are in some ways the same questions that Whitman was asking not too long ago. Who are we? Who are we as a country? Do we distinguish ourselves or do we just blend? Is there a right thing to do? Is the ultimate aim of diversity to be un-diverse? What do we call “American”? We don’t know yet. We’re still a teenager, rambling about and figuring things out.

I love reviewing memoirs for BookPage. I read them all: memoirs about surviving dysfunctional families, surviving addiction, surviving in the wilderness—as well as the odd celebrity tell-all (surviving fame?). So I was especially excited for Kevin Sessums' I Left It On the Mountain, the follow-up to his best-selling 2007 memoir Mississippi Sissy. Quirky and raw, Sessums’ new memoir has all my favorite survival themes, plus cameos from Hugh Jackman and Courtney Love. I adored I Left It On The Mountain and, after reviewing the book, I posed a few follow-up questions to Sessums, which he thoughtfully answered for BookPage.

Walking as a healing practice structures much of your book: from Jessica Lange’s thoughts on walking, to your own journeys up Mt. Kilimanjaro and along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Why is walking emotionally and spiritually healing, do you think? Do you continue to walk now?
I have come to believe in the power of walking meditation. I'm not sure why it works for me. I just know there comes a moment on any long walk when the landscape through which you're walking combines with some sort of interior one and you feel connected with the world and not of it at the same time. All truths are finally incongruous, aren't they? So it is in that moment when I feel more tethered to the earthly world in which we all live and at the same time freed of it. I often tell people that during that walk on the Camino that I have never felt such stillness while at the same time experiencing such forward motion. Life, let's face it, is so often a trudge. We might as well learn how to trust the trudge, I guess. 

"I have found in my recovery that all the impulses that led me to addiction are still there. The difference is that I no longer act on them."

I love the bits of spiritual revelation you get from celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Jessica Lange, Madonna and Courtney Love. Your interviews with them seem to go much deeper than ordinary celebrity journalism. Why do you think this is?
Maybe because I don't sit in judgment of the celebrities. Some people accuse me of writing puff pieces. I tend to think of them as impertinent ones though. I think the people you mention all like a bit of impertinence. Maybe that impertinence on my part opened them up. If I drove a car, this would be my bumper sticker: NEVER JUDGMENTAL, ALWAYS DISCERNING. So discernment plays a part in it as well. 

You talk about the comfort of the “nest” when an interview with a celebrity turns into a real conversation. How do you feel about being interviewed yourself?
I'm much more comfortable posing the questions than forming the answers. I sometimes try to be too pithy in my responses. Was mentioning pithiness too pithy?

One of the most moving images in the book is you as a child safe in bed on a snowy night with your father, mother and two dogs Coco and Chico. How have your dogs now—Archie and Teddy—changed your life?
Archie and Teddy have more than changed my life. They saved it. I love them unconditionally and they have proven to me that I can love another living creature in such a way. I often say I've become the cliché—an old gay man with two small dogs. But there is comfort in clichés. And just on a practical level, since they've entered my life and curl up next to me at night to sleep, I've never had to take another sleeping pill. Dogs have it figured out: All they want is for someone to love them, feed them and deal with their shit. Indeed, if someone from another planet happened here and saw the relationship between dogs and those who care for them they would think that dogs run the planet. Because they do. 

I was struck by your relationship with Brandon, the child you mentored through The Family Center. What has that relationship taught you? How is Brandon doing?
It has taught me some rough lessons about how hard it is too get kids out of generational poverty. But it has also taught me on a personal level the importance of intimacy that has nothing to do with sexuality. Brandon went through a rough patch—that's his story to tell—but we are still in each other's lives 13 years after I first met him when he was seven years old. I love the young man. He's got a beautiful, smart girlfriend and is trying really hard to make his way in the world. I wasn't really there for him during the darkest days of my addiction and I am so grateful that our relationship has remained intact now during my recovery and I can be there again for him when he needs me. He's no longer a child so it's a bit different. I can be a bit tougher in my advice now.

How does a Methodist make sense of the miracles you experienced on the Camino de Santiago? I’m especially thinking of your visitation by the “Jim Morrison” ghost.
The only way to make sense of them is to give up being a Methodist. That was one of the most surprising aspects of my experience on the Camino. I embarked on that most Catholic of spiritual paths as a Protestant and ended it not as an atheist but as a theist. I no longer call myself a Christian. That is a big step for me—as much a cultural one as a spiritual one. But I tend to live my life in that mysterious space between the "a" and the "t." And in that space there is enough room for a Jim Morrison ghost to appear. It is not about explanations, I've discovered, but acceptance and surrender. That is not only the way I have stayed sober, but the way I . . . well . . . trudge forth in my spiritual journey as well. 

The path to healing and forgiveness does not run smoothly for you. It seems like big visionary moments such as you experience on Kilimanjaro and the Camino de Santiago are followed up by descents into scarier and deeper webs of addiction. How do you understand the “one step forward, three steps back” pace of recovery?
I think I've tried to explain in the book—by quite pointedly giving the devil his due—that we are all combinations of light and dark and, instead of denying all those impulses, we must own them. We must find a way to harmonize them without doing harm. I have found in my recovery that all the impulses that led me to addiction are still there. The difference is that I no longer act on them. But they are still a part of me. Another journalist was asking me a few months ago to try to explain the impulse that makes one an addict. Was it the survivor guilt of being a gay man of a certain age who did not die of AIDS? Was it some sort of other midlife crisis or a manifestation of some sort of deep-seated shame? I tried to explain that I leave the explanations up to others. I simply came to a moment of grace when I didn't need explanations but acceptance and surrender. I am an addict. I don't really need to know why. The need to know why was lifted along with the need to use. 

You take the poet Keats’ letters and poems with you on the Camino and eventually make your own pilgrimage to his resting place in Rome. Why is Keats so resonant for you?
I've always found him a romantic figure, not just a Romantic one. His early death. His own soul searching. And the love his shared with his close friend Joseph Severn I find enticing and alluring.

The visions and hallucinations you experience in the latter phases of addiction are explicitly mystic, and introduce you to Hindu deities like Ganesha, the elephant-headed God, and his mother Parvati. You also experience more frightening, Luciferian visions. This is a question one could write books about, but how do you understand the relationship between mysticism and drug use? Can they be disentangled?
I know this part of the book will trouble some people. Other will perhaps be moved by it. It might be controversial. So be it. Honestly, I thought my editor would insist I cut these sections or tone them down but he allowed me to keep them all in. I hope I have written these sections with the clarity they deserve even without understanding all that happened to me and what I describe myself. I don't know if what I experienced is real, but it certainly is true.
I'll leave it to each reader to discern his or her own truth regarding it. Sorry to repeat myself but I hope they will not be judgmental about these passages but discerning. Some would describe what I went through as part of a drug psychosis. Others would say they were hallucinations. I tend to see them as manifestations. This memoir itself is, in its way, the final manifestation of it all.

Catherine Hollis is a teacher and writer in Oakland, California.

Photo by Matt Edge.

Clad in Starfleet regulation red and black, Kate Mulgrew helmed the USS Voyager for seven seasons as Captain Kathryn Janeway in “Star Trek: Voyager.” In the hit series “Orange Is the New Black” she co-stars as take-no-guff Galina “Red” Reznikov, who shrewdly navigates the echelons of a minimum security federal women’s prison. Now, Mulgrew proves equally commanding as a storyteller—with a new memoir that is equal parts triumph and heartbreak. 

The tellingly titled Born with Teeth is no cookie-cutter career chronicle. Yes, Mulgrew mentions the more notable film, TV and stage projects of her 40-year career. And there is occasional name-dropping. (A boozy Richard Burton, with whom she is co-starring in an Arthurian romance, tells her to “Get. Out.” Get out of what, she wonders? He replies, “This business will kill you. . . .”) But the book’s emphasis is on family and friendships, along with the actress’ own indomitable spirit, which is a hallmark of the characters she’s known for portraying. 

“If there is an arc to my life it is that wherever there is light, there is shadow,” Mulgrew says.

Speaking by phone from her Manhattan apartment, just days after recording the audio version of Born with Teeth, she describes what it was like to read her own words: “It was an existential, revelatory, bizarre, but strangely exhausting and moving experience. I encouraged the director and the engineer to keep rolling through it. Because if there were tears or a huskiness in my voice or an unexplained pause, the audience would certainly understand, and I think it endows it with an authenticity.”

The going was particularly difficult when it came to the passages about her beloved younger sister, Tessie, who died of a brain tumor. And then there were the sections about an early-in-her-career unplanned pregnancy and the decision to give the baby up for adoption. 

“My own life—and I realize I’m at risk of sounding arrogant, but I assure you this is not intended that way—has surpassed, in richness, size and depth, anything that I have lived as an actress,” Mulgrew says. “The people that I’ve loved, the losses that I’ve experienced. . . . My upbringing alone was extraordinary.”

The eldest daughter of a loud, boisterous, unconventional Irish-Catholic family, Mulgrew grew up in a rambling house in Dubuque, Iowa, where she was mother hen to her six siblings (a seventh died in infancy), and the best friend and confidante to her mother, Joan, whose own dashed artistic dreams propelled her to urge Kate toward success.

A pivotal moment came when the young Mulgrew became transfixed by both writing and the theater. “You can either be a mediocre poet or a great actress,” said her mother.

Looking back at that exchange, Mulgrew, on the cusp of turning 60, says, “I was to complete her incomplete journey. At the time I couldn’t have understood that she needed to live through me, vicariously.”

It was after making her way to New York University, and into the acting program taught by the legendary Stella Adler, that Mulgrew encountered another defining figure. “Stella unleashed in me the things that allowed me to become who I did become. My mother had the map. She understood the road. But Stella knew the way.” 

Mulgrew was just 19 when she was cast in a new daytime soap, “Ryan’s Hope,” and as Emily Webb in the Broadway revival of the Thornton Wilder perennial, Our Town. “I spent my days in the studio, my nights on the stage. I knew that I would never be this happy again in my life. Or feel so exhausted. Or joyful.” Adds Mulgrew, “I was elated. I was alive. I was unfettered and I was free.” Then came the unplanned pregnancy. 

The soap opera star lived a soap opera of her own. A pregnancy was written into “Ryan’s Hope,” and Mulgrew made arrangements with a Catholic adoption agency.

After giving birth, she wasn’t allowed to hold her baby daughter—though a hospital nurse allowed her one quick peek at Baby Girl Mulgrew before closing the Venetian blinds that shielded the newborns from onlookers. Three days later Mulgrew was back at work—where the script called for her character to cradle a stunt baby.   

Mulgrew subsequently moved from daytime to primetime TV as the title character in “Mrs. Columbo,” and starred in sweeping miniseries like “The Manions of America,” which introduced viewers to a handsome Irishman named Pierce Brosnan. There were movies, too, and lots of stage work. And romances and marriage and motherhood (two sons). And divorce. Through it all, Mulgrew agonized about the daughter she had given up. When queries to the adoption agency were ignored, she hired an investigator.

When, in 1998, Mulgrew was at last put in touch with her daughter, Danielle, and asked for an in-person meeting, the young woman said, “I’ll have to ask my parents first.” Today, birth mother and daughter are close. (“She’s coming in this weekend,” Mulgrew notes.) Danielle was given an advance galley of Mulgrew’s book—as were a handful of close friends, siblings and Mulgrew’s soulmate—husband Tim Hagan. (The memoir chronicles Mulgrew’s romance with Hagan, an Ohio politician.)

Mulgrew wrote Born with Teeth over a year-long period without the usual co-author (or ghostwriter). “Writing is different than acting, but it’s the same longing. It’s tapping into the same primitive place.”

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

UPDATE: Mulgrew has confirmed in an interview posted on her website that she is now divorced from husband Tim Hagan.

Although Paul Kalanithi dreamed of becoming a writer, he first planned to spend 20 years as a neurosurgeon-scientist. Tragically, however, in 2013—during his last year of residency at Stanford—the nonsmoking 36-year-old was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. 

Soon after, he wrote a powerful New York Times op-ed piece, “How Long Have I Got Left?,” describing his diagnosis and struggle to make the best use of his remaining time. “Tell me three months,” he wrote, “I’d just spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d have a plan (write that book). Give me 10 years, I’d get back to treating diseases.”

In the months before his death in March 2015, Paul managed to do all three. He received treatment, continued to perform surgery as long as feasible, spent precious moments with his wife and family, became a father for the first time, and wrote a thought-provoking memoir about his life, illness and mortality, When Breath Becomes Air.

“He was working really hard,” recalls his widow, Lucy Kalanithi, a Stanford internist who met Paul while the two were in medical school at Yale. “He was suffering physically and of course emotionally. But he was very, very tough and thoughtful, and somehow coped and kept going.”

She describes her husband as “unbelievably smart, and, to top it off, the funniest person I’ve ever met, while at the same time, soft-spoken and subtle.” The couple often sat or lay side by side during his illness and Lucy’s maternity leave, with Lucy sometimes reading Paul’s words as he wrote. His manuscript afforded the couple a natural opportunity to communicate about what was happening and how Paul was feeling.

“It was exhausting, but we were having a really good time,” Lucy says. “It was very purposeful; we loved each other and we loved Cady [their daughter]. We knew that Paul’s time was limited and we were in pain . . .  but it was kind of an amazing time. It’s a weird word to use, but also very fun.”

Lucy notes that her husband was “uniquely positioned” to write this book, and that she, as a physician, was also uniquely positioned to help take care of him, along with their families and friends.

“And it still took everything I had,” she says. 

In the book’s foreword, Stanford physician and author Abraham Verghese aptly describes Paul’s writing as “stunning” and “unforgettable,” noting: “See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”

Paul thought deeply before he wrote, and then his words flowed; his wife recalls that he wrote his op-ed piece during an airplane flight. “He wrote very quickly,” Lucy explains, “and didn’t spend a lot of time going back over it, partly because he didn’t have a lot of time and he knew it. Literally, he was racing to finish.” 

The beauty of his prose is hardly a coincidence, because Paul earned graduate degrees in English, history and philosophy before turning to medicine. Early in the book he declares, “I knew with certainty that I would never be a doctor.” Pages later, he eloquently traces his unforeseen career trajectory, explaining, “I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context.” 

Paul didn’t expect to face his own intersection so soon. Summing up his transformation from physician to patient, he writes: “Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? But I’d had no idea how hard it would be, how much terrain I would have to explore, map, settle. I’d always imagined the doctor’s work as something like connecting two pieces of railroad track, allowing a smooth journey for the patient. I hadn’t expected the prospect of facing my own mortality to be so disorienting, so dislocating.”

The book was nearly complete when Paul died. “One of the last things he said to me was ‘Please get this finished,’ ” Lucy remembers. She explains that all the words in the book are his: His editor occasionally supplemented his manuscript with passages written elsewhere in essays, his book proposal and lengthy emails to friends. 

Lucy also penned a powerful epilogue describing Paul’s last days in a sad but elegant coda to the book. “I’m not at all a writer like Paul was,” she admits. “But writing that epilogue—I just loved it. It was the most meaningful thing I’ve ever written.”

As she works part time at Stanford (planning to return full time in March), Lucy finds the grief process to be “unexpected and unpredictable.” She rejoices in every milestone of their daughter Cady’s life. “Paul would have loved that her first word was ‘dog,’ ” she says. “There are all these little things that are just so bittersweet because he’s not here.”

When Breath Becomes Air closes with Paul’s heartbreakingly beautiful words to Cady, who brought him so much happiness during his dying days. “I’m so happy that he wrote it for her,” Lucy says. “That passage is my prized possession. I haven’t memorized it. I didn’t even try. I’ve just read it so many times.”

In the midst of her grief, Lucy remains excited about the book’s publication. “I’m keeping a promise that I made to Paul, which feels really important and makes me feel purposeful.” 

“I’m very happy about sharing him with the world,” she adds. “This book will be on people’s bookshelves. I can’t believe it. Paul really wanted to be a writer. We worked so hard to make it happen.”

Nonetheless, she can’t help but lament: “I’d give anything for you to be talking to Paul rather than me.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct the date of Paul Kalanithi's death.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There were many surprises in store when you inherited your father’s desk and 1,800 pounds of his writing. Of the more than 400 novels he wrote, most were pulp porn. Were you aware of this as a child? What did you know about his writing career then?
Dad was a salesman who wrote at night and on weekends. He got a few stories in print, then, when I was 12, he published his first novel. My understanding was that he wrote only science fiction. He kept his porn activity very secret. This was mainly due to living in a very conservative area—the Bible Belt of Appalachia.

By the time I was 16, I realized he wrote some porn. But I believed it was supplemental income, a little bit here and there to make ends meet. It wasn’t until his death that I fully understood the scope of his output, and the primary focus on porn.

As the oldest child of four, you ended up taking care of your siblings while your mother defaulted to taking care of your father’s needs. Do your younger siblings view your father very differently from you?
I’m the oldest by a few years, and took care of them extensively. Dad was always in the house, so it wasn’t a case of a physically absent father. But he worked nonstop.

As a kid, I occupied both a parental role and a big brother role. Later, after we’d all left home, this influenced our relationships as adults. They gave me more authority than I wanted or deserved. Sometimes they wanted approval from me that they didn’t get from Dad. They could also be angry with me because it was safer than getting mad at Dad.

These days, we are all still trying to work through this—not Dad’s death so much, but who we are now. All I really want to be is the “big brother.” But that may not be possible, since I still have more responsibility—for my mother and for Dad’s literary estate.

Apparently your mother typed up your father’s manuscripts for him. Do you think she ever made any editorial changes while typing them?
Yes. She corrected any surface errors and deciphered his handwritten edits. Mom was a good typist, much better than Dad. He taught himself to type with three fingers and made many errors.

Due to the sheer volume and the pace that he worked, Mom worked on some books in a more collaborative role. They worked together very fast: Dad wrote a first draft in longhand, then began typing. He’d get 30 or so pages and pass it on to Mom for the final draft. As a result, she made some changes—for clarity, structure and details. Sometimes she did the final typing while he was still finishing the book!

Your father earned a decent living from writing pornography (at least enough to pay for orthodontia), and as you say in the book, “died in harness,” as a professional writer—he kept writing until his end. You yourself have found success both in literary fiction and as a screenwriter. What traits as a writer (if any) did you inherit from him?
It’s difficult to know what was inherited and what was modeled in terms of behavior. I certainly inherited his love of reading, which is crucial for a writer. I have his curiosity and energy. Perhaps most important, I learned the value of discipline—treating the act of writing like a job. Like Dad, I write every day. Unlike him, I revise very heavily. He was much more prolific.

His father, my grandfather, was a failed writer. So maybe there is some genetic component. I didn’t want to be a writer because it meant admitting I was like my father. But at a certain point in my early 20s, I really had no choice. I wrote all the time.

You were a passionate reader as a child, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was a particular favorite. I’ve known many women writers to claim Harriet as a role model, but not male writers. What did you learn from Harriet?
Harriet’s gender didn’t matter as much as her circumstances and behavior. Her parents were busy and she was on her own most of the time. Harriet was a loner who walked around recording her observations in a notebook. She dressed like I did—jeans, long sleeves and sneakers. She often carried a flashlight and tools, as I did. Harriet had a strength and confidence that I admired. What I learned from the book was the value of recording thoughts on paper. I resolved always to carry paper and pen. I still do.

You speak of your deep affection for the land you grew up in—the wooded hills of Appalachia. Why do you think lonely, imaginative children attach so strongly to the natural world?
I can’t speak for other children, but in my case it was simple—the natural world was stunningly gorgeous and very safe. I never felt afraid or alone in the woods.

I believe that spending so much time alone in the woods sharpened my perceptions. You have to rely more on sound and smell, and careful observation, to not get lost or scared. Essentially, I learned to see in the woods—to see things as they are, not what I’d like them to be. The natural world doesn’t lie. There’s no hidden agenda or clever marketing. Nature is brutal and relentless and beautiful. Perhaps that’s why I don’t waste time on small talk.

My question is this: Why don’t more people form attachments to the natural world?

It’s hard to process the death of a difficult parent. You write of loving your father, but not liking him. Can you speak to the difference?
Babies are born with an impulse to love. They love whoever is around, especially their caretakers. It’s a natural drive that benefits humanity. Then kids grow and become adults. Some realize they don’t actually like their father or their mother or their siblings. But they still love them. Love doesn’t have an off-switch.

My father could be very funny and extremely charismatic. He was extremely likeable for short periods, but people had to interact with Dad on his terms or not at all. I loved him the way any boy loves his father. But Dad made himself very hard to like. He preferred not to be close with most people other than my mother. I believe it made him feel safe.

As with many people, he was easier to love at a distance than to like close up.

It was emotionally wrenching for you to organize and catalog your father’s literary output, so much so that your siblings suggested that you burn his papers instead. In the end, are you glad you completed the task?
Yes. I learned a lot about myself in the process of writing the book. I was also able to understand my father better. When I finished, I felt relieved. It was exhausting in every way—physically, mentally and emotionally. Two years went by, and my memory of that time is vague. I worked 12 hours a day. I read tens of thousands of pages of his work. I eventually cut 200 pages from the final manuscript. I’m not fully certain what is in the book and what is not. I don’t even know what it’s about. Dad, I guess.

Writing this book had short-term effects, some of which weren’t good. I’m very interested in learning the long-term effects a few years from now. What benefits will arise from having devoted myself to this book? At this point, I believe I’m a better person for having done so.

RELATED CONTENT:  Read our review of My Father, the Pornographer.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The author of Fair and Tender Ladies and many other beloved novels reflects on her Virginia childhood and her beginnings as a writer in the new memoir, Dimestore.

At what point did you decide to collect these essays as a memoir? Was that something you had in mind from the start?
I can tell you exactly the moment I decided to publish Dimestore: the day when my childhood home—the house my parents built and lived in for over 60 years—was demolished as part of a massive flood control project. The only thing I have left is the brass doorknocker with the curly “S” on it, for Smith, which a kind neighbor salvaged and put in a homemade box frame for me to keep. My father’s dimestore had already been blown up along with about 60 other stores lining the main street of Grundy, Virginia.

Even though I’d known for a long time that all this was coming, I was devastated. Place has always been paramount to me as a fiction writer—especially this place, this little town, these mountains. Immediately I found myself writing sketches, like word photographs, of all the people and places that were gone. I kept it up. Eventually I had the long title essay “Dimestore,” and then I decided to write some more, also adding and expanding some other occasional pieces and talks I had written over the years.

Is it harder for you to write about yourself than to write fiction?
Yes! It’s much harder! I have always believed that I could tell the truth much better in fiction than in nonfiction: You can juggle the chronology, switch the facts around to make your points, emphasize some elements and ignore others, write a novel from several different points of view in order to present everybody’s motivations. With nonfiction, you’re stuck with the little old boring stick-in-the-mud piddly SELF (though I should add that many of these Dimestore essays are actually more about other people who have made a big impression on me and on my writing along the way.)

Did you ever feel as though your parents might be watching over your shoulder as you wrote?
No, I’ve never really felt that way. Since I was an only child born to them late in life—a big surprise since they’d been told they could not have children—they were unconditionally OK with whatever I did. If I’d told them, for instance, that I wanted to be an ax murderer, they would have gone out and bought me the ax.

Tell us about your "writing house" that your father built on the edge of the Levisa River.
My writing house kept changing because the river kept flooding—every time, my father would build it back or make me a new one, mostly little prefab storage sheds with a table and a chair and an old wooden box to keep my books and treasures in, perched on the side of the riverbank.

Do you have any memorabilia from your father's dimestore? Or something you wish you had?
I really wish I still had my own little typewriter which Daddy kept right there in his upstairs office on the long desk where I could observe the entire floor of the dimestore—all the aisles—through the one-way glass window, reveling in my own power—nobody can see me, but I can see everybody! I witnessed not only shoplifting, but fights and embraces as well. Once I saw a woman put a big old Philco radio between her legs, under her coat, and waddle right out of the store!

I have lived in North Carolina for many years now, so Grundy is no longer my literal “home,” yet psychologically—and speaking as a writer, now—it still is. I think we are forever formed by what we first see and the way we first hear language, in my case that rugged ring of mountains and the unique mountain dialect, the soft Appalachian speech of all those older family members telling stories on the porch while I was going to sleep in somebody’s lap. So, even today, stories still come to me in a human voice, and I just write them down. I’m not so much a writer as a listener and a storyteller.

If you could time travel, how would you spend a perfect childhood day?
It would be summertime and I would get up early and eat some of Mama’s biscuits and drink some coffee with a lot of milk in it and then run out the door and go sit under my "dogbushes" as I called them (a big clump of forsythia bushes). It was like a secret room under there—where a whole town of my imaginary friends lived. So I’d check in with them, find out what was going on with everybody. My best friend was Vienna, named for those little flat cans of Vienna sausages which I always took under there and shared with my dog Missy—Vienna herself had red hair and a very dramatic life, but my friend Sylvia could FLY! Then after a while I’d go get my best real friend, Martha Sue, and some of the other kids who all lived along the river there in Cowtown, too, and we’d head for the hills, literally, climbing up into the mountains across the road where we’d run like wild Indians all day long playing cowboys and Indians, forming club after club, climbing cliffs and outcroppings, building forts, swinging on grapevines, exploring caves, and enjoying a degree of freedom seldom found in childhood today. The only kind of twitter we knew about was birdsong. We’d stay there until somebody rang the big bell to call us home.

What was it like being a go-go dancer with Annie Dillard in your all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs, at Hollins College?
It was wonderful. Hollins not only had an excellent creative writing program—long before most colleges—but encouraged (or at least tolerated) all kinds of creativity. We first performed at a Hollins literary festival, then went on the road to UVA, Washington and Lee, etc. We all had go-go names—mine was Candy Love. I wore a glitter top and white boots and a cowboy hat.

Is there a piece of advice you'd like to be able to give your 20- or 30-year-old self?
SLOW DOWN. (Which is exactly what Jerry Lee Lewis said to my good friend, the rock and roller Marshall Chapman, which she did not, and which I did not either.) As a young woman, I was just drunk on literature, on fire with novels and poetry and writing, I’d write all night long. Now I’d say, slow down, honey. Read. Just because you like to write doesn’t mean you’ve got something to say. Know what you’re talking about. Learn about history and psychology and science and everything else in this big world. It’s not all novels. And don’t throw yourself into everything so much, don’t fall in love all the time, don’t get married so fast . . . slow down. Life is long.

How did you manage to achieve the delicate balance of writing about both great joys and deep sorrow, such as the death of your son?
Thanks but I don’t think I’ve achieved “that delicate balance,” though I’m always trying, and I believe that the writing itself keeps me up on the tightrope. Writing is inherently therapeutic. It can be a source of nourishment and strength for us all. Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives.

Writing is an addiction, you say, and early in a project you feel a "dangerous, exhilarating sense that anything can happen." What's been the most surprising thing to happen during your writing?
So many surprising things have happened during my writing that I don’t know where to start. Thing is, if a character really does “come to life” on the page as you write, she’s liable to do anything. Anything! Mine are always having religious fits or running off with men.

During the writing of Dimestore, the wonderful surprise has been that the more I wrote, the more I remembered—and at my age, memory is the best gift of all.

What's on your reading list these days?
Well, right now these books are not only on my reading list but actually on my bedside table: wildly different one from another, I just realized. But all fascinating. OK, here we go:

• American Housewife, stories by Helen Ellis, which I just finished—wild, hilarious, dark and subversive stories satirizing young American domesticity.
• The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All by the extraordinary poet C.D. (Carolyn) Wright, who recently died much too soon.
• Binocular Vision, stories by Edith Pearlman, just knocking me out. I have never read her before.
• The novel Stoner, by John Williams, kind of a cult book which people swear by and I haven’t read yet.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dimestore.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2007, Elisha Cooper experienced one of those life-changing moments that every parent prays they never face. He had taken his nearly 5-year-old daughter to a Chicago Cubs game on a beautiful summer day when he happened to reach his arm around her torso and feel an unusual bump under her ribs.

Cooper wasn’t initially alarmed, but ensuing doctor’s appointments revealed that Zoë had a rare kidney cancer known as Wilms’ tumor. Happily, Zoë got better and is now a healthy, vibrant 13-year-old. But during the aftermath of that fateful day—surgery, chemotherapy and years of appointments to ensure that the cancer didn’t recur—Cooper says he “fell apart.” He chronicles his memories of that difficult time in his spare and heartfelt memoir, Falling: A Daughter, a Father, and a Journey Back.

Before that discovery, life had seemed idyllic. Cooper wrote and illustrated children’s and adult books while helping care for Zoë and her younger sister, Mia. The paperback version of his book about Zoë’s first year was being released: Crawling: A Father’s First Year. The family was scheduled to move to New York City in just two weeks, where Cooper’s wife, Elise Cappella, would start teaching psychology at New York University.

Suddenly, however, a shadow loomed over their busy life. In a phone conversation from his home in New York City, Cooper gives an admiring nod to Zoë’s unfaltering courage: “Here’s this girl who’s 5 and 6 and 7 years old and going through this thing, and she’s being tough. And meanwhile, I’m falling apart, because it was devastating to have that kind of worry. So I was always smiling, but I was not smiling inside.”

Cooper didn’t begin to write about the ordeal until after Zoë’s four- and five-year checkups came back clear. “It was then that I could almost take a breath,” he says, adding, “And, this is a ‘good’ cancer. That’s something I’m still very aware of. Most kids are OK with this cancer and survive it, although 40 years ago, that wasn’t the case. But we were in a clinic where there were kids who were not surviving, and I’m always very aware of those parents who went through that heartache. I can’t even imagine that.”

Cooper began to process his own emotions as he wrote Falling, mostly at a table in New York City’s Stumptown Café in the Ace Hotel. “The good thing about this space,” he explains, “is that it’s very dark. I would go there and cry really. Not cry—I would go and write and get weepy. This was a book-length attempt to use words to try to make sense of something.”

Even now, years later, it can still be difficult for Cooper to discuss an experience so close to his heart. As he and I chat on the phone, I read out loud one of the many fine passages in his book: “The words ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ work for some; the words that worked for me were ‘laughter’ and ‘thanks.’ I like ‘beauty’ and ‘hope’ too, as they speak to the best in us.”

When I finish, there’s a long pause on his end of the phone.

“Thank you. It’s kind of amazing to hear those words. . . . I got weepy a lot writing this, as you can imagine. Probably around sentences like that. Sorry.”

After another pause, he elaborates, “As much as I like fighting and battling it out in sports, I had to kind of submit to something here, at least to find some type of patience, which I really don’t normally in my life. And I was kind of thinking about how words are saving—words from people whom I loved or finding words within myself that made me feel better.”

“Consider having a day that asks the question, Will your child live?” 

After Zoë’s surgery and chemotherapy, years of watchful waiting were necessary, involving periodic scans to make sure that the cancer hadn’t returned. “Consider having a day that asks the question, Will your child live?” he writes. “Then repeat that day every three months.”

Cooper hated those appointments, which intensified his worries and made him feel “angry and protective and wild.” At times he found himself erupting in unexpected explosions, which he describes unflinchingly in Falling. One winter, when a sports car nearly hit him as he biked through Manhattan, Cooper retaliated by punching the car until he broke its side mirror. He groans when I bring up the incident.

“That was one of the harder things to write,” Cooper admits. “That was just crazy. Why did I do that? I’m still incredibly embarrassed. I think it was a moment after that when I realized I can’t go on being this upset. But was it all because of Zoë and her cancer? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

His anger has subsided, and life now brims with cheerful details, like making pasta sauce for dinner, getting Zoë to soccer practice or taking Mia to lessons at the American School of Ballet. And Cooper can’t wait to present copies of his new book to the nurses and doctors who treated Zoë, most especially to oncologist Dr. Alice Lee at New York Presbyterian.

“I have so much appreciation for her,” he says, “both for being a scientist, and whip smart, and for doing all the things that she did, but also for being incredibly caring. Everybody there at the oncology department was.”

Cooper carefully anticipates the readings he’ll be giving from his new book. “I’m going to be talking to people who have undergone or are undergoing some worry or pain in their lives,” he notes. “And I just want to be present for people who read this book.”

Before ending our conversation, I mention one of Cooper’s children’s books, Homer, which he wrote and illustrated during Zoë’s illness and recovery. Cooper describes Homer as being about an old dog who “sits on the porch and worries about his family.”

“Later,” he says, “I realized, yeah, that old dog was me.”

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"Oh hi,” Clay Byars says, answering the phone at his home in what he calls “horse and cow country” in Shelby, Alabama, about an hour south of Birmingham. “How are you?”

The fact that 43-year-old Byars is giving a phone interview is nothing short of a miracle, given that he nearly died not once, but twice—in a pair of events that he chronicles in the intensely powerful memoir Will & I. Not much has been easy since, he writes: “Actions as simple as brushing my teeth, shaving and showering all begin with the question ‘How am I going to do this?’ ” 

Writing remained one of the few things he could still accomplish without struggle and quickly became “a healing obsession.” Telling his story, however, proved to be anything but easy. 

“I figure that with all the different drafts,” Byars says, “I’ve probably been working on it for about 15 years. So it’s been a while.”

In 1992, during his sophomore year at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Byars was riding in a car with friends when an oncoming car veered into their lane. Byars likely would have died at the scene had not a passing motorist removed a piece of broken jaw from his airway. Additional injuries included nerve damage to his right shoulder that left him unable to bend his elbow.

Meanwhile, his identical twin brother, Will, was hours away, back at home in Birmingham, studying for a test and unaware of the accident. Just before midnight, though, Will was suddenly awakened by a throbbing pain in his jaw. 

“We’ve had incidents like that throughout our lives,” Byars says. “People used to ask us what it’s like to be a twin. My response was always, what’s it like to not be a twin? So I didn’t think much of Will’s jaw pain at the time of my wreck.”

Tragically, things went from bad to worse. About nine months later, a New Orleans neurosurgeon nicked Byars’ vertebral artery while attempting to repair the nerve damage, causing him to have a massive stroke. For several weeks, he experienced Locked-In Syndrome, leaving his brain unable to communicate with his body. 

“It was a weird feeling,” Byars remembers, “and it’s sometimes hard to think about that now. The best way to describe it is having one dream inside of another and waking up, but not being fully awake yet from the first dream.”

Byars says the neurosurgeon continued to practice, eventually retiring. When Byars’ parents tried to sue, the surgeon was so respected that other doctors weren’t willing to testify against him. He never apologized, but Byar says, “I kind of understand why he didn’t. He didn’t want to make himself liable.”

The initial prognosis was dire, with the best-case scenario that he would remain paralyzed from his eyes down. Will recognized that his brother was “conscious and trapped,” which was unbearable to witness, so he said nothing and left. To others, Will’s reactions might have seemed abrupt, but Byars understood, writing, “Every stage of life we’d gone through not just together but as a unit, as a unity.”

Ever so slowly, Byars began to regain movement, first in his right leg and right thumb. While others rejoiced, hoping that Byars would recover fully, Will held no such illusions, and once again, quickly left his brother’s hospital room. “He didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t speak,” Byars writes.

After months of physical and occupational therapy and workouts at a nearby gym and on his home elliptical, Byars never did fully recover, but today, he walks, drives and lives independently. His vocal cords were left extremely weak, and he’s been taking singing lessons for a number of years, trying to strengthen his “head-injury voice.”

As he explains in his memoir: “I like being able to do things I’m not supposed to do. . . . According to my MRI, I should have been more or less a vegetable.”

The “Will” in Will & I refers not only to his twin brother, but to Byars’ own incredible will, something that he understood anew while still in the hospital, in what he describes as a “liberating flash of vision.” Both of these “wills,” it turns out, have remained essential to his survival.

Undeterred by his vocal problems, Byars is an engaging communicator. In addition to our phone conversation, he answers follow-up questions by email and shares a letter he wrote to Will about his hospital vision, which he later understood to have been the Zen experience of satori, or enlightened consciousness. “It wasn’t a near-death experience,” he wrote. “On the contrary; it was the greatest affirmation of life I’ve ever felt.” 

Byars eventually finished college, and he now writes short stories and serves as an assistant editor for Narrative magazine. Will ended up marrying Byars’ high school girlfriend, and Byars eats dinner with the couple and their three daughters each week. “In many ways, our relationship hasn’t changed since the wreck,” Byars explains in his book. “We are no longer physically equal, but we are more open with each other than we used to be.”

When asked if he ever feels jealous of Will, Byars responds, “Sometimes I’m envious of the ease with which he can do things that take me hours, if I can do them at all, but on the whole, no.”

Byars’ first attempt to write his story took the form of fiction, but he deemed the storytelling ineffective and too linear. He kept at it, though, eventually attending the Sewanee School of Letters to work with writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, who suggested that he weave his voice lessons into the tale and who also helped him pare down his manuscript. “We went over it line by line, working for about three months,” Byars remembers.

The result is compact, substantial and thoroughly compelling—reminiscent of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous bestseller, When Breath Becomes Air. While Kalanithi addressed the prospect of his impending death from cancer, Byars tackles the question of facing an immensely compromised life. 

When I suggest that Byars read Kalanithi’s book, he does, later emailing to tell me how much he admires it, and adding, “I wish he’d been my neurosurgeon.”

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The former co-host of “What Not to Wear” delivers candid and comical observations on growing up gay and other topics in an entertaining new memoir, I Hate Everyone, Except You.

My favorite line from the book is addressed to your fans: “Start focusing on you . . . your power, your value, the stuff that goes way deeper than designer jeans and the perfect shade of lipstick. But also on the perfect shade of lipstick if that makes you happy. Because you deserve to be happy.” What do you think needs to change for women to stop equating their appearance with their value?
A cultural revolution, I suppose. Men and women have tied a woman’s value to her looks for a very long time. That kind of thinking doesn’t magically cease overnight, but we could begin by praising our daughters, granddaughters, nieces for qualities in addition to their beauty, like their intelligence, strength, creativity, talent. And we could start teaching boys at an earlier age not to behave like pigs.

You write about how hurtful it was to you and your husband when Ted Cruz called the ruling on marriage equality one of our nation’s darkest days. You briefly considered moving to Sweden but write, “even if he, or someone just as horrible, becomes president, it’s not worth jumping ship.” How are you feeling post-election?
Well, I’ve been experiencing a wide range of emotions. I want to be clear, I would never leave the United States just because I don’t like a president. I love this country very much and believe the vast majority of Americans are good human beings. But if the Supreme Court reverses its marriage equality ruling, I’ll have a big problem with that, as I’m sure you can understand.

In the hilarious chapter “Clinton for President!” you eat a marijuana gummy bear and then talk about how when you’re president, you will make American fabulous again. So, Clinton Kelly 2020?
I’m not gonna lie: Part of me thinks I could do a freakin’ awesome job as president, but another—much larger—part of me doesn’t want to work that hard at anything. Taking all those meetings would be torture for me. If I’m on a conference call that lasts for more than 10 minutes, I want to commit hara-kiri.

You have a funny fake sitcom script in one chapter. Do you think you’ll ever try writing an actual TV pilot?
So glad you liked it! I have a drawer full of sitcom scripts I’ve written. Writing them and subsequently squirreling them away is a weird habit of mine. I never show them to anyone because I assume people will think they’re stupid. But then again, a lot of really stupid stuff makes its way to television.

Your afterword is addressed to your grandma, saying you didn’t share any stories about her because she’s all yours. Come on, tell us one thing about your grandma!
Aw, she’s just a dream. She’s 97 and originally from New Zealand. When I was a kid, she’d make me a proper cup of tea—she would never use a tea bag!—with lots of milk and sugar, then read my tea leaves, like a fortune teller. She always saw all these wonderful things happening in my future. . . . And this is why I didn’t include any stories of ours. I’m totally crying. Thanks a lot, Amy!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of I Hate Everyone, Except You.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.