Suleika Jaouad says: “If you want to write a good book, write what you don’t want others to know about you. But if you want to write a great book, write what you don’t want to know about yourself.”
She’s had a lifelong love for words, ever since she was a little kid. She began writing for public consumption in her twenties, after being diagnosed with serious cancer. From her hospital bed, she started writing for The New York Times, which led to her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, and her book on creativity, The Book of Alchemy.
What are the driving themes of our conversation?
How do you free yourself to be creative
How do you show up as your most unedited self on the page
How do you fight writer’s block
How do you live with curiosity, wonder, and enchantment
How do you truly open your eyes to the world
Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Transcript
00:00:52 Being vulnerable
00:06:56 Writing from the hospital
00:09:58 Why write by hand
00:12:29 How to make space for writing
00:14:55 The struggles of writing a memoir
00:21:09 The ‘Bed, bath and bus’ framework
00:26:39 Motifs and themes
00:33:16 How to use prompts
00:38:29 Getting unstuck
00:42:46 How to get good feedback
00:45:50 The value of daily journals
00:50:05 Techniques for capturing ideas
David (00:52-01:09)
The biggest thing that stood out in my preparation was the idea of being porous and open to the world, cultivating that quality, and maintaining it despite the world’s intensity and harshness. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but could you elaborate on that?
Suleika (01:10-02:01)
I grew up in a tough, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” family, where having thick skin was valued. Both my parents are immigrants. When I was diagnosed with leukemia at 22, I felt the complete opposite of having thick skin.
I felt exposed, vulnerable, and porous to everything around me, and everything happening inside me. Initially, this shift to having tender skin felt unwelcome. However, through my writing, I quickly realized there was something
Suleika (02:07-02:47)
really conducive to my creative process. It was about embracing that sense of fragility, embracing what, at the time, felt very much like drowning in an ocean of uncertainty. Instead of writing from a place of asserting authority, I learned to be in relationship with inquiry, to let the not-knowing guide the work.
David (02:47-03:25)
It feels like there are two kinds of porousness. One is porousness in terms of your consumption of the world, and the other is porousness in terms of your creation.
Porousness in consumption means fully feeling the intensity of a situation. For example, at a heavy metal concert, instead of resisting, you let the experience wash over you.
The other kind of porousness is the excavation of self. It involves uncovering internal thoughts and feelings that might be buried, and then translating them onto the page.
Suleika (03:26-05:30)
Exactly. I grew up in a very creative household. My dad is a professor of French and Francophone literature; my mom is a visual artist.
I had a great sense of creative freedom as a child. My mom’s studio was in our attic, where we’d make giant messes. I remember her always telling me, when I felt I’d made a mistake on the canvas, “No, that’s where the energy is. Don’t cover it up. Keep playing with what makes you uncomfortable.”
The strange thing is that my first publication was at 22, a weekly New York Times column and video series. This was a dream and an immense privilege, but also terrifying – the kind of opportunity that could lead to choking.
I suddenly had an impulse to open a Word document and tell myself, “I need to write something New York Times-worthy,” which immediately killed any creative impulse. Focusing on that feeling of porousness meant forgetting the Word document, forgetting imaginary or real readers, and getting back to that free-flowing space we access so naturally as children. It’s about making something because it’s fun or interesting, without focusing on outcome or sorting things into “good art” or “bad art.”
David (05:31-05:48)
I’d like to hear your reaction to this, because the word that comes to mind is a kind of unconsciousness. You’re obviously conscious, attentive, and focused, but perhaps unconscious about the “what” of what you’re doing. There isn’t a grander narrative; there’s just full presence in that space.
Suleika (05:48-06:55)
For me, there’s always both. There’s the initial conceit, the idea of what I want to create. Then, I almost have to forget that and allow the subconscious to lead so I’m not writing with an agenda in mind. I allow myself to follow a train of thought without knowing where it will lead.
When writing my first book, I found that my initial drafts were full of lies – a surface story, an aspirational story. The far more interesting story emerged during the excavation. It involved interrogating the story I thought I was telling, digging beneath it to find the deeper, more compelling narrative – the one that didn’t fit neatly into my outline or any preconceived notes about a chapter’s arc.
David (06:56-07:08)
Do you feel that process was the same in the hospital when you were sedentary? Could you tell me more about what you were feeling then? Was it the same then compared to now, working on something on the far side of that experience?
Suleika (07:09-09:58)
The magic of being in the hospital – though I don’t want to make it sound like I went to some day spa; it was hard, incredibly isolating, and horrific – was that prior to that New York Times column, for the first time in my life, I felt no sense of expectation from myself or anyone around me.
I started to write like I had as a child: purely for the joy of it, for myself, or to interrogate a question or something I couldn’t quite understand. All of this was happening in the privacy of my journal, which is as private a container as it gets.
I used my journal as a kind of reporter’s notebook. I wrote toward things I didn’t feel I could discuss out loud, writing from the trenches of uncertainty and the unknown, instead of trying to shape it into something definitive.
The writing that unspooled in the privacy of that journal was exciting and interesting to me. I could feel myself learning, upturning certain assumptions, beliefs, or convictions I held. My writing, even at a sentence level, began to change.
Since then, whenever I write a column or a book, I write all my first drafts in my journal, longhand. This tricks my brain out of that “chapter one perfect sentence” mindset. It avoids the tyranny of the blinking cursor and the impulse to edit a thought or sentence before I even know what I’m truly saying.
There’s a direct subconscious-to-page connection that happens when writing by hand. You can only do so much crossing out and self-editing. For me, the temptation to edit on a computer is too great; I’ll start making a sentence sound beautiful before I’ve even gotten to the heart of what I want to say.
David (09:58-10:53)
That’s so true. When you’re handwriting, there’s a certain free-flowing quality and the ability to draw. I’m thinking of the little doodles kids would do in school, like 3D boxes or those cool S’s; there’s a sense of play.
I also feel that when I do voice dictation into my computer, I can often close my eyes and “un-mind” the mind. Yet, there’s something about the computer that demands formality, a sort of right-angled thinking from the brain.
This, in my interpretation, relates to what you were saying earlier: the judge who instantly judges the creator. There’s a role for the judge and critic in the creative process, but it comes much, much later. When the judge and the creator operate at the exact same time, you shut down the ability to access what lies in the sediment of your mind.
Suleika (10:54-11:27)
Many writers, like Anne Lamott, discuss the importance of a “shitty first draft.” My question is always how to actually give yourself permission to write one.
For me, it’s about the tactile experience of hand on paper, of not just typing a word, but physically writing the “A.”
David (11:27-11:36)
Do you ever change your handwriting as you’re doing it? I have a side-slant writing style and a more formal one.
Suleika (11:37-12:29)
My dear friend, the poet Marie Howe, says that when she feels creatively blocked, she’ll write with her non-dominant hand in a big scrawl, starting with, “I don’t want to write about...” then she writes freely.
To me, all of this is about loosening my grip, both on the idea of what I think I want to execute, and on the specific ideas and questions themselves. It’s about allowing myself to write and write until I get to the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth.
David (12:29-12:52)
As you write these books, how do you make space for that? To truly loosen the grip, you need dedicated space. What do you do on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis to create that space and time to be present in the creative process, without distraction or disruption?
Suleika (12:53-14:09)
I’m a very introverted person, and I spend a lot of time in nature. When I was writing Between Two Kingdoms, I reached out to everyone I knew with a remote house and offered dog and house sitting services.
I would do these self-styled residencies because I needed that space – away from my own life and its many responsibilities. I needed to be alone in my own brain.
When it came to distractions, I had a specific ritual while writing Between Two Kingdoms. I’d wake up, walk my dog, and leave my phone in the mailbox. Then I’d go back to the house and write. After a couple of hours of writing, I’d take another walk with the dog and retrieve my phone. Many people use apps and other tools for this.
David (14:09-14:12)
I use an iPhone timeout every day. I have this thing called “the brick.”
Suleika (14:12-14:13)
The brick.
David (14:13-14:22)
It’s on my fridge. I tap it, leave, and can’t access any distractions. When I return, I tap the brick again to get my phone back.
Suleika (14:22-14:55)
It may seem inefficient to write first drafts by hand. However, I find that when I start typing up what I’ve written, that’s when the editing truly begins.
Because they feel almost like two different genres – computer writing and notebook writing – I can view them with a little distance, rather than editing within the same document where I composed the first draft.
David (14:55-15:04)
When writing a memoir versus a non-memoir, did you find yourself getting stuck in different ways?
Suleika (15:04-15:46)
Hugely. With Between Two Kingdoms, my dream, like many writers, was to write a book someday. I felt intense pressure to honor this beautiful, privileged opportunity to write the manuscript.
I struggled immensely. It took me about six months to let go of the idea I had outlined in my book proposal.
David (15:46-15:47)
Oh, really?
Suleika (15:47-15:50)
And to understand that many people don’t actually write the book they initially proposed.
David (15:50-15:52)
book proposal, why did you need to let go of it?
Suleika (15:52-15:57)
It’s the part of me that wants to be a good student.
David (15:57-16:00)
I do not have that part of my brain.
Suleika (16:01-19:03)
I have two warring parts of my brain: the good student and the hellraiser.
I didn’t understand that when you write a memoir about trauma, you sometimes return to a scene not as an observer, but as an inhabitant. Writing about a traumatic experience can retraumatize you in the process.
Every day, by 3 or 4 PM, I would find myself curled up on the floor as if something was coming for me, even though the only threat was a blinking cursor. I didn’t understand what was happening; I didn’t realize I was having a trauma response to what I was writing.
Writing about a traumatic experience forces a dissociation from the experience itself. You’re not just rendering a scene and reimagining it, but also making stylistic decisions: moving paragraphs, cutting content. This creates a kind of distance while also generating a confusing sense of immediacy.
It took me a long time to write Between Two Kingdoms; I was two years late on the book. The more I struggled, the harder I worked.
In retrospect, I really needed distance. I needed to give myself permission to step away from the work, to process the scenes I was writing, and to gain perspective instead of bullying and muscling my way through it.
I reached a breaking point after struggling through about 150 pages of the manuscript. I hadn’t shown it to anyone, but I decided to send it to a writer I admired. It was my first time sharing those pages. They asked what kind of feedback I wanted, and I said, “Tell me the truth. Is it as bad as I think?”
David (19:04-19:06)
Which is an interesting first reaction, by the way.
Suleika (19:06-21:09)
I’ve since learned to be very careful about who your first readers are and what feedback you truly want. Part of me was hoping I was wrong.
They wrote back: “It’s not working.” That was all. I felt a deep sense of defeat.
My impulse was to double down, to work harder, which was already my approach. But I couldn’t do it anymore. “Fuck it,” I thought. “I’m going to the beach with friends.”
As we drove to a beach in Rhode Island, I was having a completely unrelated conversation when a thought came to me with surprising clarity. I had been trying to create distance by writing about the aftermath of illness in the past tense, as if it was behind me. However, I was still in the midst of that reckoning. Perhaps I should try shifting to the present tense.
I was so excited that I opened my laptop in the car, balancing it on my knees, and began shifting the first few chapters of Part 2 into the present tense. Suddenly, it unlocked for me. I hadn’t felt that energy and excitement in a long time; I could feel the writing coming alive.
That was a crucial first lesson for writing this book: finding a balance between rigor, discipline, and consistently working through challenges, while also taking distance from the manuscript. This distance wasn’t a break from writing, but something that actually facilitated it.
David (21:09-21:49)
A lot of creative ideas come from our periphery. A friend of mine says, “If you’re stuck, try bed, bath, or bus.” “Bed” means go to sleep; “bath” means completely relax, putting your brain onto something else, almost like setting it to a low simmer, a hibernation mode. “Bus” means just going on the road.
It’s important when doing creative work to be honest with yourself about whether you’re distracting yourself and running from the problem, or if you’re truly out of ideas and need to refill the tank.
Suleika (21:50-22:58)
A friend of mine describes the temptation to step away from the manuscript or work on a different project as a mistress doing the Dance of the Seven Veils. She says if you’re on record as someone who has finished projects from start to end, you can indulge that impulse. If not, it might just be procrastination or distraction.
For me, the kind of distance that aligns with your “bed, bath, or bus” concept is something I think of as creative cross-training. It’s stepping away from the writing itself, sometimes shifting to a different mode of creative expression. That might be painting, walking in the woods with my dog, visiting a museum, or hearing another writer speak.
David (22:59-22:59)
Do you still play music?
Suleika (23:00-23:17)
I do still play music; sometimes it’s listening, sometimes playing. I find that it brings a different energy to the work.
Music and visual art very much inform my writing process.
David (23:18-23:20)
Tell me about that. Tell me about the visual arts.
Suleika (23:21-23:41)
I’ve always been a visual writer, in the sense that I think in scenes. For my first book, I began by writing 20 scenes, stream of consciousness, without worrying if they made sense or how they fit.
David (23:41-23:43)
A list of scenes?
Suleika (23:43-24:30)
Just 20 short scenes, moments.
Then I thought about the connective tissue between them and wrote into that.
Before pursuing writing, I wanted to be a classical musician. I think about music constantly when I write. I consider rhythm, crescendos and decrescendos, movements, and recurring motifs.
My favorite books have a symphonic movement.
David (24:31-25:34)
It’s really cool when it’s not just the rhythm, which you can achieve through varying sentence and paragraph length. When I taught writing, we had an exercise called “Reading the Right Edge.” Imagine a paragraph: what you do is take every single sentence and put it on a new line.
Then, you arrange them like an accordion, with some sentences shorter and some longer. We would teach people to alternate: short, long, long, short, longer, shorter.
But there’s something beyond that—a rhythm of voice. You can hear or see that rhythm on the page. You hear it in music, you see it in writing, and you instantly recognize it.
It’s an inexpressible quality, often not something you’re consciously aware of as a creator. However, when you’re in the flow of writing, you begin to feel it. That’s what you’re striving for.
Suleika (25:35-25:54)
I’m a big fan of reading a book while listening to the audiobook, especially if it’s read by the author. I want to hear the rhythm of the sentence and the way the author intended it. I feel like it sharpens...
David (25:54-25:57)
What do they emphasize? What do they enunciate? Where do they pause?
Suleika (25:58-26:04)
How are they thinking about punctuation? How does that sound musically?
David (26:05-26:22)
What’s interesting is that your process has two distinct parts. On one side, there’s the journaling, the raw outpouring of thoughts. Just let it out.
On the other side, there’s the intentional, refined process. Both of these need to coexist to produce a good book.
Suleika (26:22-26:38)
It’s a constant balance between surrender, loosening the grip, and revision.
David (26:39-26:48)
How do you think about theme? You’ve mentioned motif. When you’re writing a book, how intentional are you about those recurring loops?
Suleika (26:49-27:27)
In a first draft, I try to let the themes announce themselves. The clarification of the theme happens during the revision process.
I like to write into a question I don’t know the answer to, and sometimes I don’t even arrive at an answer. For me, writing is where I puzzle through what I don’t understand.
David (27:28-27:29)
What have some of those questions been?
Suleika (27:31-29:18)
With Between Two Kingdoms, the question was, “How do I move on from this?” I remember having a conversation with Cheryl Strayed before writing the book. I told her I wanted to write a book, but not about illness. I was so over it; I desperately wanted to move on with my life.
She shared her own experience when writing Wild. She kept telling everyone she didn’t want to write about her dead mother, that all she ever wrote about was her dead mother. The book she wrote ended up being about a hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, but it’s also deeply about grieving her mother.
She told me, “You have no business trying to avoid writing about the thing you need to write about.” So, the question of how one moves on from a massive reckoning, from a traumatic experience—is it even possible to move on?—was something I was actively puzzling through in my life.
I was grappling with the collateral damage of that experience. That became the subject I started writing into, this feeling of in-betweenness, of being between two kingdoms.
David (29:19-29:32)
How would you describe these questions? Do you feel they’re granted to you, almost divinely gifted? Or are they core frustrations that gnaw at you? What exactly should we be looking for?
Suleika (29:33-30:34)
They are often the questions I ask myself and the people around me. For Between Two Kingdoms, I was interrogating this question privately, but also in conversation with my friends.
I felt like I had no idea who I was on the other side of that experience. I couldn’t go back to the person I was before, and I didn’t know what this new identity looked like. I struggled with how to carry that collateral damage, or ideally, how to get rid of it.
It was something I was already talking about; it just didn’t occur to me that it was a viable subject. It was also something I was already writing about in my journal.
Often, the question is right there. It just takes a moment to realize that the question you’re already asking yourself might be the very one that guides your writing.
David (30:34-31:18)
I resonate with that so strongly. I always imagine there’s something right in the middle of our forehead, something so obvious you could touch it. Everyone else can often see it, and you wonder, “What are you talking about?” And they say, “It’s right there!”
Sometimes you need a change in perspective to finally see what was there all along. The strange thing about these deep questions, the things we yearn to write about, is that they are so close we can’t see them. It’s not about hunting for them; it’s about seeing what was there the whole time.
Suleika (31:18-33:16)
Exactly. My second book, The Book of Alchemy, is exactly that. I have been drawing since I could hold a pen. I have hundreds of journals. I didn’t want to write a book about it because it felt unserious, almost too easy. But it was what I was obsessed with.
Keeping a journal has been the single most important part of my creative process. At times, no exaggeration, it has felt life-saving. You’re exactly right. It’s often something right in front of you. This is true whether you’re writing memoir or fiction. It’s these questions, these curiosities that won’t quit us, that we keep circling, which end up making for interesting work.
A friend, Johnny Miles, a brilliant novelist, says that novels with a great one-sentence premise — where at a cocktail party, someone asks about your novel and you deliver a scintillating, juicy, and topical one-liner that people praise — rarely make for good novels. Instead, it’s the things that are hard to explain, that don’t lend themselves neatly to a one-sentence summation, that end up yielding something richer, more complex, and nuanced.
David (33:16-33:20)
Can you tell me about prompts? Why are they useful, and how do you think about them?
Suleika (33:21-36:27)
While working on my first book, I felt incredibly stuck and frustrated. I noticed my journal entries were similarly recursive, trapped in the same thought loops. I grew bored of my own voice, bored of the same recurring themes, and the temptation was to stop writing.
I began reading the journal entries of writers I admired: Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde. I would pick a page or paragraph at random, and each time it sparked something. It had a kaleidoscopic effect, shifting the chamber ever so slightly and allowing the light to fall differently.
I found myself prompted in a way that made me feel I wasn’t stuck in my own brain. I was in conversation with these admired writers. Sometimes it was the way a sentence was written that inspired an entry. Other times, it was the topic itself or a question one of these writers was grappling with. I started prompting myself that way whenever I felt stuck.
I never formally studied writing. If someone had instructed me to write to a prompt, I would have said, “Absolutely not.” It would have sounded like homework, too prescriptive. I wouldn’t have been interested.
However, the more traditional notion of prompts arrived during the early days of the pandemic. So much of that experience felt familiar to me as someone who spent a lot of time in medical quarantine at home, unable to hug or shake someone’s hand without fear of getting sick.
I decided to start a newsletter, essentially an extension of what I’d been doing for myself. The premise was simple. I invited writers and artists I admired to craft a mini-essay and a prompt. I sent these out daily, inviting anyone who wanted to journal to do so alongside me. Within 24 hours, 40,000 people subscribed to that newsletter. This was in the early days of newsletters, and it was an early adopter of—
David (36:27-36:29)
Was this on Substack back then?
Suleika (36:29-37:28)
Long before anyone had heard of Substack, and I’m still writing that Substack. We now have nearly 300,000 readers, which is wild.
Every week we feature a guest contributor and a prompt. I love the prompts; sometimes they inspire me, other times I don’t like them, and I write into that resistance. Actually, the prompts I resist often yield the most interesting results. I think there’s great value in that kind of prompting, whether you’re self-prompting or actively seeking prompts. I return to many of those prompts in both the writing I do in the privacy of my notebook and in my other work.
David (37:28-37:32)
I tell this story all the time because I love it so much. Brian Eno, the music producer—
Suleika (37:32-37:32)
I love Brian Eno!
David (37:34-37:44)
He would basically put tape down in the middle of a recording studio and say, “Alright, you guys are stuck. You can only use this side of the studio now. Go figure stuff out.”
Suleika (37:44-38:03)
Totally. In fact, we did 30 days of prompts in January, and one of the prompts was a Brian Eno song. You had to write for the duration of one of the songs.
David (38:03-38:05)
One of his long ambient songs, okay.
Suleika (38:06-38:29)
I also love ekphrastic writing. Sometimes the prompt is just a painting.
What is ekphrastic writing?
It’s writing inspired by art. Sometimes it’s a painting and a question related to it. We all prompt ourselves in various ways, even if we don’t call it prompting. It’s how we define inspiration.
David (38:29-39:02)
Something you were saying earlier, which I think is a core meta-question here, is: What do you do in the recursive loop of the mind? Part of it is just to keep going. There’s a way you naturally break out of a recursive loop over time. Even if the day-to-day feels repetitive, you often realize month-to-month that major progress has occurred. The flip side is to say, “I’m in a recursive loop.” A prompt or a constraint can break you out of that because you can’t move in the way you’ve been moving.
Suleika (39:02-40:08)
Exactly. Sometimes you write something without knowing the underlying question, and the prompt emerges from that. For instance, I might write an essay without knowing where it’s going, then ask myself, “What would be the prompt here for part two?” Then I’ll start over and write from that new perspective.
When I think about being stuck in loops, I think of my friend and mentor, Melissa Febos, whom you should have on the show. She’s brilliant and a genius when it comes to craft. She often talks about heat mapping. In a first draft, her goal isn’t to judge, “This sentence sucks,” or “This isn’t working.” It’s almost like putting your hands over different paragraphs and sensing, “Ooh, this feels warm. This is where the energy is. Keep writing into that.” I love that idea. It’s something I think about often.
David (40:09-41:03)
I love that idea. In baseball, players’ hitting is analyzed this way. Some players are good at low pitches on the inside, while others struggle with high pitches on the outside. They use a grid for things like inside fastballs, with a heat map to show where a player is in the strike zone.
Applying this to editing would be incredibly cool. Imagine having a marker with the entire color wheel, and someone draws on your work to indicate the emotions they’re feeling. A thicker color could mean, “This is exactly what you’re trying to say,” while a lighter color signifies, “This isn’t what you’re trying to say.” It’s a nonverbal way to communicate, almost like a game of hotter and colder.
Suleika (41:03-41:19)
George Saunders talks about this often. I had the privilege of being in conversation with him for the launch of his newest novel. He imagines a meter when he’s editing.
David (41:19-41:23)
A “yes/no” meter.
Suleika (41:23-41:40)
Yes, a yes/no meter. He tries to look at something unquestioningly, and if it’s tipping towards “yes,” he leaves it. If it’s tipping towards “no,” he cuts or changes it. It’s a very intuitive process.
David (41:41-42:15)
I’m currently working on scripts for a film, and we went through the first episode last night. I used this exact method. Whenever I found a line that truly captured the essence of what we were trying to say, I underlined it in pink.
By the end, I had about six lines that encapsulated the entire essence. We distilled 5,000 words into those six lines. The idea is that if we can just orbit around these six lines, we’ll maintain the core message.
Suleika (42:15-42:16)
Exactly.
David (42:16-42:20)
It’s also a very inoffensive way to edit someone’s writing.
Suleika (42:20-42:45)
Yes, and it’s the opposite of the feedback I requested when I first shared the pages of my first book. I asked, “Tell me the truth, is it as bad as I think?”
Instead, I should have asked, “Tell me where the heat is, where the electricity is.” Then my job would be to push into those strengths without fretting over what wasn’t working.
David (42:46-43:20)
I love that so much.
Another helpful method for me is asking for feedback using the “trunk, branch, or leaf” metaphor. If we’re early on, and I’ve just come up with an idea, I want feedback on the “trunk”—does it work at a big structural level? I don’t want to spend four months on an essay only for someone to give me trunk feedback later. By that point, I want “leaves”—just the smaller details. This framework is valuable for determining whether I should zoom in or think big picture.
Suleika (43:21-43:47)
I realize this probably isn’t the most environmentally friendly way of writing, but I often have to print out what I’m working on. I read it out loud, then redline it. Sometimes, if I’m struggling with the structure, I’ll cut up paragraphs with scissors and move them around, creating a sort of jigsaw puzzle on my living room floor.
David (43:48-43:49)
Like a collage.
Suleika (43:49-45:06)
Exactly. I also love using Post-it notes. With your six sentences, for example, I’d write them on a Post-it in one color and put them up. I might write about different characters on different colored Post-its or note themes, then start mapping everything out on my wall.
Beyond that, I believe who you ask to read your work and the instructions you provide are crucial. I think extensively about the ethics of writing memoir—how to write from your side of the story and the responsibility involved when narrating an experience for people who may be implicated in that scene, especially since they weren’t living that moment with the expectation that it would be recorded.
Because of this, I’ve used various types of readers. For my first book, which details a breakup, I had one of my best friends do a “pettiness read.”
David (45:06-45:09)
What is a pettiness read? What was she looking for?
Suleika (45:09-45:21)
She looked for any descriptions or characterizations that were subconsciously a jab.
David (45:23-45:26)
So, she was looking out for you being petty.
Suleika (45:26-45:49)
Exactly, I got it. Of course, we all have our blind spots, especially when writing memoir. I feel it’s my responsibility to become as aware of mine as possible. By definition, a blind spot is something you cannot see, so it requires someone else to point it out to you.
David (45:50-46:23)
Given where you are now, imagine, God forbid, something deeply grievous happened in your life, and you somehow knew—for the sake of this thought experiment—that you would want to write a book about it in the future. How much would you prioritize capturing things every single day as they happen through a daily journal versus stepping away and gaining distance, seeing it from afar, as we discussed earlier? How would you approach writing that book if you had that awareness at the time?
Suleika (46:24-46:32)
For me, that’s the value of a journal. I record everything—not verbatim transcripts, but a record of experiences.
David (46:32-46:33)
Do you write in it every day?
Suleika (46:33-46:37)
I try to write in it every day, even if it’s just little details or moments.
David (46:37-46:41)
When you sit down to write, how long does it take? Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or do you write for as long as you can?
Suleika (46:41-47:26)
It depends on how much time I have; sometimes it’s two minutes, other times twenty. I never imagined writing in the first person. I wanted to be a fiction writer or a journalist. I always loved reading memoirs, like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory in high school, and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. I was always fascinated by first-person stories, but I never envisioned myself writing one.
I’m someone who, in the moment, very rarely thinks, “Oh, this is going to be a great story.”
David (47:26-47:28)
You’re just living your life.
Suleika (47:28-48:28)
I’m living my life and trying to figure it out. It’s only later that I start to think about writing something. But having that source material is so helpful.
Committing something to ink often helps commit it to memory. I’m so grateful to have these troves of journals. When you’re trying to write a scene about something that happened when you were eight years old, you have to take creative liberty. You’re not a journalist, so you won’t get all the details accurately represented.
However, I’m grateful to have them. I even have journals filled with to-do lists. These lists are informative, revealing both the tasks I’ve completed and those that never got crossed off, reappearing again and again. They tell you a lot.
David (48:28-48:29)
I avoid these things.
Suleika (48:31-48:33)
I really don’t want to do that.
David (48:33-48:36)
You’re doing “to-feel” lists, right?
Suleika (48:37-49:30)
I love lists in general; I love writing them. I try to do a “to-feel” list before I do a “to-do” list.
One of my favorite lists is a prompt in the book called “Just 10 Images.” It was created by writer Ash Parson Story. She talks about being in the NICU with her adopted son, with no time to write, but feeling incredibly porous and raw. So much was happening, and she wanted to remember that clarity that comes with being in a crisis, that feeling of being close to the veil where your priorities are incredibly clear. So, she started writing down just ten images from the last 24 hours.
David (49:30-49:34)
What’s an image? Like, “I saw the tulips outside”?
Suleika (49:35-49:43)
An image could be, “I saw Bradley Cooper outside,” which I believe happened to you today.
David (49:43-49:44)
That happened to me today.
Suleika (49:44-50:05)
Thinking of images from my last 24 hours, one could be my dog coiling into a ball in a perfect spot of sunlight. It could be a conversation I had. It could truly be anything.
David (50:06-51:01)
Last year, when I was traveling a lot, I had a phase where I would go out at night at the end of the day. For some reason, I really liked doing it on receipt paper. I would just write down little images, stories, and one-liner ideas that came to mind throughout the day. I would fill out the receipt paper, which probably had about 20 lines.
I noticed that I would sit down and think, “Nothing today. I’ve drawn a blank.” But invariably, within 20 minutes, I would find those 20 lines. You just need to have patience.
The similarity between this and journaling is that you stick with it, and things come out. Crucially, once you write it down, you remember it in a way that allows you to constellate ideas much better than if you had just internalized everything.
Suleika (51:01-51:52)
Absolutely. Memory begets memory. I love getting to number eight on my “Just 10 Images” and thinking, “I’ve got nothing.” What usually happens is I’ll remember some detail that not only would have gone unnoted, but certainly unremembered, and it ends up being interesting and surprising.
One of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard, whose attention to the natural world is so inspiring to me. This prompt, much like her writing, teaches me to see.
David (51:52-52:11)
I love that turn of phrase: “the way that she pays attention.” A lot of what writing is, is transmitting consciousness. When you find a writer you really like, you think, “I wish I could see like that all the time.” But you can see like that for a few hours here, a few hours there.
Suleika (52:11-53:01)
One of my favorite things about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is that she wasn’t in the wilds of Montana. This was a creek in her suburban neighborhood that she sat down and paid attention to, day after day. That sustained attention unspooled into what I believe to be one of the most magnificent books ever written.
To return to that idea: sometimes the most interesting thing is right in front of you, and because of that, you don’t see it. I’m interested in prompting myself to see what I don’t notice and to see differently.
David (53:02-53:10)
Yes. Can you tell me more about the way she pays attention? If you were to put words to it, what is it that’s so gratifying to you?
Suleika (53:11-54:28)
She’ll take a moment with an insect, and from that tiny detail, she renders a whole galaxy of experience and thought. The language itself is beautiful, but the insight and the attention she pays to observation are remarkable and thought-provoking.
Sometimes, especially with memoir, people unfamiliar with the genre would tell me when I started writing my first book, “You’re far too young to write a memoir.” They imagine it as a womb-to-tomb biography.
However, a memoir can be about a single moment or a single day in a life. It’s less about the drama of the experiences than it is about the attention paid to an event or experience and the way it’s rendered.
David (54:28-54:57)
There’s a real gift you give other people when you’ve paid close attention to something and put that into language in a clear way. I’m far more aware of sinks and the different ways they can appear in the world because of how David Foster Wallace writes about them in his Harper’s Magazine piece about cruise ships.
Suleika (54:57-54:59)
I was just thinking...
David (54:59-55:29)
He devotes an entire page just to the sink and its glossiness. I’ve looked at 10,000 sinks in my life, and I’ve never looked at one of them the way he did. Now he’s given me a vocabulary to apply to sinks, and I’ve at least seen what it’s like to pay attention to them. I wonder, what if I could have that for everything in the world? How much richer could my experience of life be?
Suleika (55:30-56:20)
Absolutely. I’m thinking of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay about going to Disney World. Am I interested in Disney World? Not really. But when he tells me about it, I become fascinated.
That’s my favorite kind of writing to read, and I think it’s the kind of writing that made me want to write. It’s that quality of attention that takes you on a journey.
This is especially true when it’s about a topic like a creek in suburban Virginia. Am I interested in that? No. But when Annie Dillard tells me about it, absolutely.
David (56:21-56:26)
I bet you can see a creek now in a way that you couldn’t 15 years ago.
Suleika (56:27-56:37)
I have never taken a walk the same way since my first experience of reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
David (56:38-56:58)
What a cool gift to give somebody. It’s not just delivering facts or information; it’s a way of processing the world.
Because of how you’ve described something, you’re now teaching other people how to look at the world with that level of receptiveness. This applies whether it’s a creek, a tree, a flower, or a leaf.
Suleika (56:59-57:07)
Mary Oliver’s famous line: “To pay attention. This is our constant work.” I really believe that.
David (57:08-57:09)
This was awesome.
Suleika (57:09-57:10)
Thank you.
David (57:10-57:13)
I can’t believe this is already over so fast. I feel like we should do a Part Two.
Suleika (57:13-57:14)
Let’s do it.
David (57:14-57:15)
It was great to meet you.
Suleika (57:15-57:17)
This was so fun. I’m so happy to meet you.
David (57:17-57:18)
Thank you.
Suleika (57:19-57:22)
I love this podcast. To be continued.
David (57:22-57:24)
I feel like we’re just getting started.
