Carol Fishman Cohen: Welcome to 3, 2, 1 iRelaunch, the podcast where we discuss strategies, advice, and success stories about returning to work after our career break. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, the CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host for today. This is Part II of our conversation with Laura Zigman. Laura is the author of the very popular book, Separation Anxiety that was recently published.

She's also the author of Animal Husbandry, which was made into a movie and has written three other books called Dating Big Bird, Her and Piece of Work. She has been published in numerous publications, New York Times, Washington Post, and she also produced a popular online series of animated videos. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, son, and deeply human Sheltie.

And this is a continuation of my conversation with Laura. I hope you have listened to Part I and that you will enjoy Part II. Here we go. Laura, I have to tell you, I admire so much that you have been willing to put in the public domain discussion, a first person discussion of very personal topics.

And I want to understand first of all, I want to talk about two of them. One is you had mentioned breast cancer. That was part of one of your career breaks, you had your own health issue. And I think that was another time when, I don't know if I had started following you at that point, but you published something called the "Brant," and I want to know if you can talk about that a little bit in the context of the health crisis that you were working your way through. And then I also want to talk about The New York Times article about the challenges of keeping financially afloat while you were caring for your parents.

How did you have the wherewithal? Did you feel worried about putting some of these topics in the public domain when they're so personal?

Laura Zigman: That's something that a lot of people talk about and it just never really occurred to me. I think the generation before me, I have friends who are 10 or 15 years older than I am, who had cancer, breast cancer, who did not go public.

And they were part of a generation, I think, where it really made sense to keep it private because they either had jobs, they were afraid they'd get fired. And of course I wasn't in that position. I was just home, so for me it really wasn't. But I do understand some people are very private and that's totally cool.

You don't have to be public. Just because some people are comfortable, it doesn't mean they have to be comfortable, but I was very comfortable with it because that's just how I am. And I started this "Brant." I had a blog, a website, I don't know. I think I was one of the last authors to get one in 2006.

And I started, instead of a blog, I started a blog plus rant. So I called it a "Brant."

That year, I had this diagnosis and I went through the surgery and one of the reasons I wrote about my experience with this double mastectomy reconstruction all in one day was because it was so farcical that I felt like it was a duty.

I felt that there was a duty to warn people because there's this pink washing in the breast cancer world that like, you're supposed to go into your surgery, like, really excited and happy and it's so great. And there's all of this pink washing positivity. And I was also like, "Hey, that's great if you're, if you are that way, but I'm not." And no room I think at times for a real reality in terms of, you are allowed to feel negative. You are allowed to feel really nervous and afraid and bad, and you'll get over it.

But this insistence on positivity, unforgiveness and positivity, and you have to look at it like this...No, I don't have to like this and there's nothing more offensive I think for people who are experiencing really hard times, especially grief, to be told it's time to move on now. There's just nothing more offensive than that. And so it's also like that sense of, you're just not allowed to have your feelings.

And so I was like, I'm going to have my feelings. I'm going to write about how ridiculous this surgery was. And of course I was grateful to have it, and I was grateful and all that. I was grateful a million different ways, but it was also I had been told by all these surgeons that it was nothing, I'd be up in about two weeks, that just wasn't the truth.

And so I wanted to inform women that, "Hey, this is a great surgery. If you have four months." I had four months because like I said, I wasn't working. Other people don't have four months and they should be told that they're not going to be up and around in two weeks.

So that's why I wrote it. And I really don't have any issue around being honest like that.

Carol Fishman Cohen: And I just, I want to say as a reader of it, I remember there was so much humor in it, the way you wrote about it. And it was such a serious topic and there were so many parts of it that you didn't sugar coat at all, but you also interspersed all of that with this underlying, humorous, I don't know, element and I guess, was that, was it therapeutic for you in some way to have it on the page and talk about in that way?

Laura Zigman: Yeah, I mean, it is because, like you said, there's so much, there's black humor in most things and especially for that. I remember I was in the hospital for, I was supposed to have five days in the hospital, like I literally couldn't move, like I literally couldn't move. And after two days they tried to get me to leave the hospital. And when I wouldn't, when I wasn't really amenable to that idea after two days, when I had been promised five days, they sent a social worker in to talk to me, and the social worker asked me if I was afraid to go home.

So I answered, “Yes.” I was afraid to go home. And they said, “Does your husband hit you?” And I said, “No, I'm not afraid to go home, because I'm afraid because I can't move.” It's not that it's funny that people have domestic situations like that. But to me it was just so absurd that they were asking me that question.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yeah, they were drawing those conclusions, just like right to that.

Laura Zigman: It really gives people, it lets you exhale in a way, because these are really tough topics to discuss. And there is a lot of humor. It's just, life can be ridiculous sometimes and you have to, it's good to acknowledge it.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Right. And then not to belabor this, but just to move back to the New York Times article for a minute about the feeling like you're in a very precarious situation financially and how you were advised, maybe that was not such a big, not such a good idea to put in the public domain.

But you did anyway. And you talk about how there is typically shame attached to that. Were you feeling like by getting that out in the open and talking about it honestly that it would allow other people to acknowledge that, I don't know, even if they weren't acknowledging publicly, would allow other people to face that same kind of situation and feel less shame?

Was that part of your thinking or was that more of a by-product an afterward?

Laura Zigman: Definitely. Because any time you can help somebody else feel better, in even a small way, is motivation for revealing things about yourself that you may not necessarily want to reveal. And I was asked to write that piece.

It was one of those pieces where I really was like, I intellectually wanted to do it. And then I just viscerally, when it was time to sit down and write it, I could not believe how hard it was. Because it was, it's one thing to intellectually feel no shame, and then to actually sit down and write it, to have been someone who was getting really nice, fat, book deals and movie deals and all that, to have it really out in the open that had dried up, that had really dried up my income had dried up for whatever reasons, I'm the main breadwinner and I was not able to really produce, what I needed to produce. It's very, even if you're not ashamed, you feel just a sense of even sadness that your inability to provide or to, to really earn. There's a real sense of pride we take in being able to earn our living, even if we're single, when I was single, the fact that I never earned a lot when I was single until I was selling my books.

But I just, even just supporting myself in New York and an apartment, I never took money from my parents. I just never got into debt. I was lucky in that way. And so I always took pride in that and I took pride in the money I made as a novelist and, selling the film rights, and having the movie made, and that kind of thing.

But that was a relatively short-lived time of abundance. And the years, the lean years were many more lean years. And it was, I really did feel like a need to tell that to people because people really feel shame, and it's so unfair. It's just so unfair to make people feel, to have people feeling bad and the sense that you're supposed to not talk about money. And a lot of times on Twitter, there are threads where people are, writers will say, “No, my husband is a big lawyer and that's why I'm able to sit in my beautiful office and write all day.”

Sometimes people really do come clean about why they have an easier time in terms of just having the time . .That doesn't mean, you can have a lot of time and still not, so you have to give them credit for doing it whatever way they do it. But, there are a bunch of threads that have come about the past couple of years where people are being really honest. Which is nice because, yeah.

Carol Fishman Cohen: I want to thank you for writing it. I just thought it was brave. I thought it was important and I was really riveted when I read that piece. And it's one of those pieces, it's a relatively short piece and those are sometimes the hardest, you have to have so much economy of words, but you're still trying to get across so much. And you really accomplished that. And thank you. That was really something . I do want to skip to this part about, what is it like when you, your book is made into a movie, like what happens? Do you get a phone call I mean, do you have even some inkling in advance that there's some sort of negotiation going on?

Or how does that happen?

Laura Zigman: Yes. So the way it usually happens is you have a literary agent that deals with selling your work to publishers, and they often contract out to other film agents. So you're either sent along to a place like CAA or UTA or WME, the big talent agencies, William Morris, Endeavor, Creative Artists, those kinds of really big places, and I've been at all of those. And they have in addition to representing people like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, all the actors and directors, they have a book division. And so there's a group of agents within those big talent agencies out in LA who sell, take books and sell them to... back then it was , they would submit to producers, directors, studios, and I guess it's similar now, except back then, it was easier. You were able to just sell to one person like a producer, and the producer would buy it on behalf of a studio. But now you have to have a whole deal in place.

You have to have a director on board, a producer on board. You have to interest the whole team before they make the deal. So back then, my book was a hot product, that first one, and CAA was representing me. And yeah, I got a really nice, exciting phone call that Lynda Obst, who had been the producer for Sleepless in Seattle and Flashdance, had a production deal at Fox 2000, which was a new division of 20th Century Fox. And that was like, who would not want that phone call? And so it was great. And the way it generally works is they hire, I think they had asked me if I wanted to write it. And my agent at the time suggested that I not do it.

And I think he was right. It had taken me about six years to write the novel and writing a screenplay is very different. So they hired somebody else. And what was really nice was I was living in Washington at the time and I was still single and Lynda Obst would have me come out to LA, they love to have meetings, so we have to meet, we have to meet.

So they go out and you'd meet. And then really, nothing would happen during the meeting. We would just get together. What was the meeting? Nothing, I don't know, we had dinner. But this went on for a while and it was just, as most people know, it's very rare to actually have a movie made or anything made.

You can sell stuff or have stuff optioned, and in my later books my parents used to refer to my second novel, Dating Big Bird is the book that didn't have any Hollywood sales, I was like a failure. But the other, it was funny because my third novel, Her, was bought by Julia Robert's company and Wendy Wasserstein was hired to adapt it. And I met her and she was great.

And then I was supposed to write it and then she disappeared and then she died, which was so sad.

Carol Fishman Cohen: She died, I remember.

Laura Zigman: And then my fourth novel was optioned by Tom Hanks for Nia Vardalos, who was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I mean, it was the cover of Variety, and nothing happened. Typical. And then a little bit of interest in my new novel, Separation Anxiety, hoping it comes through, but it's very exciting. You know, people often complain they don't like the movie version of their novel. And I just have never been one of those people who've ever complained.

Would I have made some different decisions? Probably, but I was very happy to have a movie made. And what was funny was that it was in production right at the same time that Bridget Jones's Diary was in production, and it was very exciting. My movie came out first and then Bridget Jones came out.

But it was funny, this is like an echo to an earlier thing we were talking about, which is that,yeah, my movie came out, didn't get great reviews, opened and closed within maybe two weeks I think. It was in theaters very briefly. It's not the greatest movie, but hey.

And so for years, people would say to me, "Ah, gee, how'd your movie do?"

And I was always, it was the one time I actually in the moment was able to think of a response. And I would say, "Great! How did your movie do?"

Couldn't believe that, I was like, “Are you kidding me? Like... I HAD one, mate, I don't care if it was open for an hour.” That's another example of that kind of feeling of this success, how do you define success?

And for me, I define success as having the movie made, I like that.

Carol Fishman Cohen: That's great, and super interesting about how movies, like you can have your book options for a movie, but then maybe it never gets made. But even having them buy it, to potentially make it and not make it is still like a great thing.

Laura Zigman: Yeah.

Carol Fishman Cohen: So, very interesting. Thank you. And tell us about Separation Anxiety, of course, your latest book, and it just went into paperback and it's had all sorts of acclaim, and I just love reading everything about it. Can you tell us a little bit about it, how you got the idea, what your writing process was, especially given the writer's block discussion and where you are now with it?

Laura Zigman: So I, in 2015 I had gotten an actual job, downtown Boston, working for a startup, a company called The Happiness Company. And it was disbanded and I was left without a job. And I was ghost writing two different books at the same time at that time too.

And I decided that I really wanted to start writing a novel, even though I hadn't written one for many years. And so what I did was I decided that I would dedicate one day a week and I went on Craigslist, which is one of my favorite things to do. And I found out that I could get office space by the hour, because I couldn't afford to have an office, even though that's what I really wanted. I couldn't afford an actual office. So I went on Craigslist and I found that you could rent shrink's offices by the hour, which is kind of creepy. So I rented a shrink's office right in Harvard Square. It was a really cute little space. And I rented it, I think Sunday afternoons and all day Mondays. And at least I knew I would go into that office and I would not ghost write that day. so I always felt okay, the rest of the week, when I'm doing other people's stuff, I had Sunday and Monday to do my own.

And there were some days that I went in there and did nothing and played solitaire on my phone. And other days I got a lot accomplished. And so I'll tell you about the novel and then I'm going to go back and tell you why baby steps are the key to, like, how you get anywhere. But the novel is about a woman who's 50. And she's in a marriage that, you know, and that's another source of shame. People never want to talk about their marriages, difficult marriages. So she's in a marriage that's very difficult, her husband has severe anxiety and smokes a lot of pot. And they would get divorced, but they can't afford to, they don't have enough money to have two places.

So he sleeps in the basement and they pretend he snores. And so she has this marriage that's not working. Her son is a normal teenager, but growing away from her, her best friend is dying of breast cancer, and her career is just not happening. She had a big success with a children's book years earlier, and much like me just could not get anything going. And that's the framework where the novel starts. And then she goes down to the basement to declutter with the Marie Kondo thing, and finding this old baby sling and putting the dog in the sling to feel a sense of comfort and to have a comfort animal.

And it was funny because I wrote a big chunk of it and I sent it to somebody and he read it and he was like, "Uh, yeah, does it get funny?" I was like, "Yeah, it does get funny," but I felt it was really important to start the novel in a sad place. I felt it was really important not to pretend, you know, that she's having great sex or that she's having an affair or that she's rolling in dough, how all these great these books start. I was like, "No, she's miserable," like...everything.

And then of course you can't have an entirely miserable book because no one wants to read it. So you have to balance that with some kind of plot that's semi-entertaining, but I felt it was really important to mark that period of life that we, I think we all go through in some form or another. Sometimes it happens in your forties, other times it happens in your fifties or sixties, but where you really, especially in your career you're at a total loss. So that's what the novel was about.

And how you move through that process of sadness to getting a spark relit in yourself. And so that was very much my story. I had really stopped writing my own stuff in 2006. I had a lot, as we mentioned, a lot going on and I just really felt dead inside, especially creatively. And all those years, I was always doing little things and always feeling like a failure that I wasn't able to monetize them.

I know you were a big fan of my little videos that I made using the software called Extra Normal. And it was software that had animated characters. I think Geico did a really famous ad using them. But the software was great because you would pick your two little characters and you would literally write a script.

And it would take about 10 minutes for it to do its thing. And then it would produce this little movie where the characters spoke to each other in the words that you used. And I did about 75 of them, they were called "Annoying Conversations," and I would post them and they made the AOL homepage . They got a lot of traffic.

Carol Fishman Cohen: They were very clever and creative and funny.

Laura Zigman: And, I had fun doing them and yet I felt so much like a failure because I couldn't figure out how to monetize them. It was so great, but I wasn't earning from them. And I was just so frustrated. And then I decided I wanted to write a film script and I wrote a film script and my agents at the time loved it, but they couldn't sell it. And I felt like a failure because I hadn't been able to monetize it. And so all of these things felt like just huge frustrations. And yet when it came time to sit down in that shrink's office on Sunday afternoons on Mondays with my laptop to write a novel, what did I do?

I took the bones of the film script that I had written that had not sold. And I started with that. The novel became very different, the film script was a road trip movie, but it was about a couple. I used a bunch of scenes from the screenplay and seeded the beginning of the novel using stuff I had written.

And then there were a few moments in the novel where I ended up taking things that I had put into those little movies. The point is that, without those, without the work I had done all those years feeling like I was wasting my time and spinning my wheels, I would have had a much harder time starting a novel from complete scratch, but I had done a lot.

I had done more than I thought I had done over those years. And so nothing is wasted in terms of, in my case, I'm talking about writing, but in other people's cases, it's the efforts you make, someone that you meet today may not help you, but maybe two years down the road, it's someone you're going to connect with or whatever.

And so if nothing is wasted and I think that's the hardest thing when we're on a kind of fear trajectory of, 'I have to make this happen, I have to make this happen,' that 'oh, it's not working, it's not working right this minute.' Sometimes it works out differently a little bit later, and if you can hang on and keep the faith it's really important to remember that it's just not wasted.You're not wasting your time.

Carol Fishman Cohen: It's very entrepreneurial. Like what you're talking about being in the long game and baby steps and having things that you focused on the past and you couldn't monetize all of a sudden come together in a completely new context, there are a lot of parallels there to the entrepreneurial journey and I think, it is an entrepreneurial journey.

Laura Zigman: It's so interesting. I think if you're a writer or someone like, in my position, you are an entrepreneur of yourself. In a way you have to figure out a way to make a business out of what your experiences are or what you think about or what you care about.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Oh, I love the expression, ‘the fear trajectory’... to remember that one, for sure. And actually in keeping with the entrepreneurial concept, just getting to this whole topic of making a living as a writer. You've already talked very frankly about it, but, and you've talked about so many of these elements and especially the ghostwriting piece, where actually doing a mini-series with a few different authors who are in all different stages of getting books published and success in their careers.

But no one has talked about ghostwriting. And so that's that's a really interesting element. Have you ever done anything in the education field, teaching, writing, and also you do a fair amount of freelance journalism and how does that play into it?

Laura Zigman: Yeah. I've never done any teaching. I think I've always felt really insecure because I don't have an MFA. After I was in New York for five years, I applied to MFA programs. I got into one in Boston. I left New York, gave up my apartment and all that. And I came to Boston and I started at BU, it was a one-year teaching fellowship.

And it just was not for me. I didn't like it from the first day, and I dropped out and I moved back to New York. And for years and years, I felt like a total failure that had I just stayed for that year. And what was really funny is that I found out that the woman that took my place with the fellowship, I met her years later and she was like, "It was a good thing you left, it wasn't a good year." But I've always felt, I think, a little bit insecure that I don't have the credentials to teach. But, I forget the second part of your question.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Oh, the freelance journalism piece.

Laura Zigman: Oh, yeah, that's really gotten hard too, I think years ago, and I'm talking at least 10 years ago, the print magazine, print journalism, print all that stuff, 10 to 20 years ago, you could actually earn a living. Though I did not. You could earn a living writing magazine pieces, print journalism was alive and well, they paid pretty well if you were writing for the major magazines.

But now with online and everything's free and a lot of the print magazines, the print edition has dried up. So it is very hard, so much harder now to earn a living as a freelance writer. To give you a sense, I wrote a modern love piece for The Times. I want to say it was $600, but it could have been $400. I used to write the wedding pieces for The Times. Go to the rehearsal dinner, and then you spend all night there, then you cover the wedding, and then you have to turn the piece around, like the next day, you have to write it really fast and it has to be short.

And that was I think, $600. That's what you're talking about when you're talking about writing for The Times, obviously people don't write in my position. They don't, we don't write a piece for The Times for the money. There were other places, of course, that pay a lot more but it's very hard now to make a living doing it. So most people, I pivoted to ghostwriting, like I said, a long time, a fairly long time ago, but I have a lot of people emailing me the past couple of years,'Hey, I used to be a reporter or journalist, how do you get ghostwriting work?' And so there are like these little secret ghostwriting groups on Facebook, and I'm part of two of them.

And we do share leads. If we hear something that one of us can't do we share, 'Hey, does somebody want this?' Or, 'Here's a book I can't do, is there a person that's looking for ghostwriting?', that kind of thing. So a lot of it's working out between ghostwriters and a few of them make a ton of money, a few of them around like the Trump beat, the wives and the people like on the fringes of the Trump thing.

And, but a lot of them make a really good living. I am really scraping by there, too. It's really hard. It's hard to get a job and it's hard to always sound like, "Oh, that's a nice, that's a nice figure." And then it's four payments and it depends on when a lot of times the celebrity you're working with is just really busy.

And the book is delayed because they had a movie to do and the book isn't coming out. And so your payments, it's like that. So sometimes you have to have two projects going at the same time and who wants, who wants to do two? But yeah, like that.

Carol Fishman Cohen: That's very interesting to hear that, there's some people that mix teaching in, and in fact, writers that I'm aware of who teach, they don't have MFAs. It's so interesting to talk about that in terms of viewing it as a failure yet, you made it in ghostwriting, even though I know that ebbs and flows too, that's like a huge success. That's an area where a lot of people don't make it in terms of having that be an element of their writing career.

So, very successful there. And it's just fascinating to me how you put it all together. And then, do you think now, as you're coming off of the success of a very recent novel that you wrote, and celebrate, and I'm applauding and I'm so excited about that. Do you feel pressure now to produce the next novel?

Or do you already have it in your head that, 'No. Now I'm going to take a period of time. I'm going to try to focus on ghostwriting or something else and I'm especially not going to put that pressure on myself?’

Laura Zigman: It's funny. I sold my next novel this summer. I wrote 70 pages during the pandemic. So it was after I came back from my little, tiny tour before the world shut down. And then a few months of just sitting around, in shock and fear of anxiety of COVID. And then this summer, my son went away and I was able to just have a lot of time on my hands to focus. And I started a new novel called Small World.

And my publisher Echo bought it on the basis of 70 pages. So like I said, the old metaphor, now I am just full of dread because I have a contract and I have to do it. Whereas before I was full of fear that I was never going to get a contract. But of course I'm overjoyed that I have a great publisher and I keep saying, “Now, all I have to do is write it.” But I am excited and I am in complete disbelief that I've been able to even come up with 70 pages and enough for a publisher to take a flyer on it. I'm incredibly grateful after so long.

Carol Fishman Cohen: It's really exciting to have that come right on the heels of Separation Anxiety. So that's great. Laura, I want to thank you for having this long, winding conversation about so many different topics. And I remain such a huge fan and so inspired by everything you're doing. I want to wrap up by asking you the question that we ask all of our podcast guests, and that is what is your best piece of advice for our relauncher audience? Even if it's something that we've already talked about today.

Laura Zigman: I want, first of all, I want to thank you. I'm a huge fan of yours too, and what you do. Carol, my advice again, just goes back to baby steps. I remember in the midst of my most blocked years coming upon Instagram, and it would take all I could, it would be all I could do to post a photo and write a little, it looked like a mini blog. Just that little space on the Instagram, I was like, I would fill it and I'd be like, 'Okay, I wrote today.' And that level of accomplishment or, you know, block was like, that felt like writing to me. And, it seems like a joke as I talk about it now, but there were some times when I would craft that paragraph and feel like, 'Okay, I can write, I can still write, I wrote a really good paragraph.'

And it seems like a really small thing, and the sense of just doing things along the way, those baby steps, if you can't afford an office, do what I did, get by the hour, do what you can to just take these little tiny baby steps. You may not be able to do something full-time or switch into a different field full-time, but just even those little things that you do really will help you and will add up and will help you transform to your next move. That's what I've found.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Yeah, it's such great advice. And it applies in a very broad way, the idea of taking baby steps in a whole bunch of parts of the relaunch journey. It's a really great way to think about the process and to break it down and to keep yourself from feeling overwhelmed or also too worried, it always gives you, you're always moving in a forward direction when you're taking baby steps, even when they're small.

So thank you. That's excellent. Laura, how can people find out more about your work? Especially Separation Anxiety?

Laura Zigman: I have a website, so it's laurazigman.com and I am fairly active on Twitter and Instagram, much less active on Facebook. But I'm on there a lot on Twitter and Instagram.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Okay. And can you spell the website, just so people know exactly how to spell your name?

Laura Zigman: Sure. It's www, dot, Laura Zigmund, L A U R A Z, as in zebra, I G M A N, dot, com.

Carol Fishman Cohen: Great. All right, Laura, it's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Laura Zigman: So great, Carol. Thank you so much.

Carol Fishman Cohen: And that wraps up part two of our conversation with Laura Zigman. I hope you all enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening to 3,2,1 iRelaunch, the podcast where we discuss strategies, advice and success stories about returning to work after our career break. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, the CEO and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host. For more information on iRelaunch conferences and events, to sign up for our job board and access our return to work tools and resources, go to iRelaunch.com. And if you liked this podcast, be sure to rate it on Apple podcasts and your favorite podcast platform, and be sure to share this podcast with a friend on Facebook, Instagram and other social media. Thanks for joining us.