In Process with: Edan Lepucki

"I am writing this draft to figure that out. And that’s normal–if a little uncomfortable for me to sit with."

Edan, photo by Ralph Palumbo

Today’s In Process With… brings us to the writing tables of the writer

Edan Lepucki

, who I have long wanted to have guest post. I adore Edan’s work, which looks unsparingly and kindly at topics like motherhood and artmaking and independence, at what it means to be an embodied, desirous person. It asks, always, what does it mean to be a person amongst and in relationship with other people when we are trying to know ourselves? Edan has a remarkable gift for letting her characters be fully themselves. I love, for example, what Edan has said about her characters from California, her first novel, in this evergreen essay about likeability: “What if, at the end of the world, we aren’t our best selves–we’re just ourselves?”

Edan’s work not only allows characters—especially mothers—to be less than perfect, but embraces that imperfection, points to it, wants us to remember that we are all this way, a collection of traits and wants that may be judged good or bad or flawed but we might as well be honest about it, for fuck’s sake!

Readers embrace this. Edan is a New York Times bestselling author of three novels, as well as the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mother as We Never Saw Them, and her nonfiction archives contain so many wonderful essays I’m just going to point you over there. Fiction-wise, I’m particularly fond of Woman No. 17 because in addition to the story itself, I love its structure. My husband’s favorite is the most recent, Time’s Mouth, which has the make-you-wish-you-knew-Los-Angeles-like-this setting I expect from a Lepucki novel and a really moving storyline about fathers and daughters that he especially sunk into. Not to mention Edan figured out how to handle time travel!

In writing this intro, I realize how long I’ve been reading Edan’s work as an essayist and writing teacher, since the early days of The Millions. Her essay on not selling a novel was one I remember reading on the first go-round, and that I re-read when I had to write my own version because Edan’s writing as a whole, but especially her essays, make me feel less alone in the realities of both writing and parenting. I appreciate how she often says what is taboo for mothers to say in the public eye, and when she does, how considered her thinking is about these sticky things, and how she never tells you she has an answer or better way of being. I have sent so many replies to her newsletter that are versions of yes, ugh, solidarity, I feel this too.

And when that newsletter,

Italics Mine

, lands in my inbox, I read it immediately, and then more often than not, I’ll forward it to a friend. Often it’s something funny and tender about raising kids—like this one on mothering a daughter, or this one, on the inanity of what it costs to have a career and raise humans—or writing advice, like I did with that one literally the other day, or one of my personal faves and conversation starter of last year, the burning question of who’s in your hot tub? Or this one, about dancing, and pleasure. Pleasure! A subject Edan writes about in a way that makes you immediately want to better integrate it into your life, and which I am always grateful to be reminded of. In these newsletters, the big swells of emotion and amusement and joy and difficulties all coexist, not peacefully exactly, but just like, hang out, real and true.

I think of Edan when I write about my own process, as she’s always been so open with hers, in her newsletter and in various interviews and essays, and, like so much of her work, doesn’t try to make it all seem glamorous or torturous, like writing is a chore. Like I said, Edan will remind of you of all that’s pleasurable while also not denying what is hard, and complicated, what makes us all perfectly imperfect. Lucky to have her answering our questions today!

-Danielle

What have you been working on this week?