Transcript for Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode 84

Encore Episode How Recovery Supports Memoir Writing and Book Marketing Tips with Laura Cathcart Robbins

Lisa [0:00]  

I met Laura Cathcart Robbins in 2018 while participating in a memoir collective. Her essay about being the only Black person at the Brave Magic Writing Retreat had just gone viral, and she was in the process of creating her podcast, The Only One in the Room based on the responses she'd received to it. Over the years, I've watched Laura take her podcast idea and turn it into an award-winning show, read her many essays on HuffPost, Oprah Daily, and The Temper and cheered her on as she became both a Moth Grand-Slam champion and TEDx speaker. I could not wait to read her memoir Stash: My Life in Hiding, which I reviewed for Hippocampus Literary Magazine. I've always admired how Laura balances her fierce dedication to her writing with the work she does to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. To learn more about the many amazing things Laura does, please see the show notes. During our episode, Laura and I took a deep dive into what recovery is, how it helped her cultivate the honesty needed to write her memoir Stash, and how she balances marketing her book with living life. Before we get to our conversation, I have a few questions for you. What is your relationship to honesty? Are there times when it's difficult to be honest? What supports your ability to be honest both in your writing and your life? I hope you'll ponder these questions as you listen along. Now let's get to my conversation with Laura Cathcart Robbins.

Lisa [0:00] 

Well, hello, Laura. Welcome to the podcast. I am so happy to have you on today.

Laura [0:04] 

Lisa, you know I love you. I'm so happy to be here too.

Lisa [0:07] 

Well, the feeling is mutual. I'm super excited because not only is it a treat to have you on here, but this is the week of your book birthday.

Laura [0:19] 

It is indeed. I was one year ago this week that Stash burst onto the scene. I mean, as much as a first-time memoirist can burst onto the scene. But yeah, I'm actually celebrating this week and really acknowledging that. You were the first person that reminded me that this was my book birthday week. So, thank you for that.

Lisa [0:46] 

You are very welcome. I think the date is actually March 7th. Today is March 5th. So, we're recording this two days in advance. I'm going to give you an opportunity to share what your book is about, because I want everyone to know, and then I want everyone to go and buy it, if they haven't already done so. Then tell me how you're going to celebrate.

Laura [1:07] 

Thank you. I should probably have what my book is about down by now. But basically, Stash: My Life in Hiding is about a 10-month period in my life in the year 2008. During that year, I was getting a divorce. I was named parent association president. I was a mom to two boys. I was asked to join the board at their school. The entire time, I was living this very fancy Hollywood life with nannies and drivers and private planes, and the entire time I was grappling with a life-threatening and debilitating addiction. This book talks about the kind of reckoning that I went through with the addiction. The through-line is I want to be a mom to my kids, and I want to be there for my kids. So, it's the journey of me grappling with that, and then truly trying to get well, which was not easy for me. It took different forms and shapes during the book. So that's it in a nutshell. To celebrate, besides the Instagram posts that'll come out on March 7th, Scotty and I, Scotty is my boyfriend, he's one of the characters in the book. I met him in 2008, so we'll be together 16 years this summer. We are going to go to a variety of different bookstores and taking shelfies—that’s a selfie with my book on the shelf, and just seeing where they are and who's carrying the paperback, which is also out now. It’s very exciting, because it has all the reviews in it and a whole section for book clubs in the back. So, there are questions and topics to discuss. It's just really cool. I love the paperback. So that's what we'll be doing. We'll be going around and taking shelfies and then he’ll probably take me out to lunch or something while we're doing that.

Lisa [3:24] 

I love that. I also love that the paperback has these book club questions, because when I first read your book, I felt like, oh my gosh, this is totally a book-club book. I mean, it's got so much depth to it. What I love is that you have this tight timeline, which creates this intensity. There is such vulnerability. You take us deep into the experience of addiction and what it's like. I felt so often when I was reading this like I was right next to you, Laura. I felt like I was right there with you, and my heart was aching. Just the pain and that desire to get well for your children and that you wanted to be the mom you always wanted to be. And the struggle to have this very public life that seemed so good on the outside but had so much suffering inside. 

Laura [4:21] 

Thank you for that. Thank you for saying that you felt like you were with me. That's kind of the whole point of the way that I wrote the book, which is active first person, I just kind of drop you into the middle of a scene, basically, and then you take the entire ride with me. That way, you're sitting on my shoulder as I'm going through all this. In writing it like that, I wanted to challenge myself to be as transparent as possible about what it was really like, because I had hidden what it was really like successfully from even the people that were in my life at that time. A lot of them had no idea what was happening in my life until they read the book. These are friends that I've had for 30 years who just didn't know. So, I was good at it, you know. I was so afraid of so many things coming to light, so many aspects of my life that I was ashamed of. I wanted to be rid of that fear and that shame. I’d told my story in recovery communities for years, but I hadn't gone public with it. I didn't know who needed to hear it. It was not easy. In fact, this was hard. And even while I was doing this, I hated it. I was resistant, but I was still willing, you know, like, I didn't know who needed to hear those things, but I knew that I needed to hear them in the year 2008, if I could have found that book. I mean, I don't know what it would have done. But I know that it would have been helpful to me, to see what the reality is, of being in a position where you have access and resources to hide an addiction like mine. Without the access and resources, I wouldn't have been able to do so. But it allowed me to do it longer than I should have. I don't like the word should. But I was doing a lot of damage to myself and to the people around me because of the length of time it took for me to get help. And I wanted that in the book.

Lisa [6:39] 

To me, that's some of the best writing. I mean, the whole book is great. But I think that honesty about what it was like, and the struggle to get well, is so important for people to hear. It just makes me trust you as a narrator, and I personally love first-person pieces that are very scene-driven, which is what your book is. So, it was not only a great story, but it's my kind of story. I love that about it. So, one of the things you really wanted to do with this book is get rid of the fear and the shame and come out to the world about what had happened. And you've done that. So, what has the response been like?

Laura [7:25] 

The response has been amazing. I don't know what I expected. Honestly, I think I expected for people to want to talk about the craft of the writing. But most people saw my book kind of on a tabloid level. They were very interested in my journey and the relationships. I was a little surprised by that. But you know, you I've written a lot of articles for HuffPo. I'm actually their most prolific personal essayist, and I get trashed every time I write an article. There are these people who come for me. They love to hate me. There's a whole section of trolls devoted to hating me on HuffPo, which is one of the reasons I haven't written on that site for a while. It just gets exhausting to wade through that negativity. I thought, because this is my biggest writing experience, that I would get the same thing with Stash—that people would come to me and tell me things like what a terrible mother I was, and like, what did I do to my kids? And look, you're responsible for the demise of your marriage. Nobody's done that. Everybody that's come forward—and a lot of people have come forward—mainly to say thank you. Thank you for telling this story. It’s very much like the article that I wrote that started everything, which was about being the only Black person at a 600-person, writer's retreat. The responses, I thought I would get to that article, which I thought would just be Black people who said, yes, I understand what that's like. I've been in Black and white spaces, blah, blah, blah. But the responses I got to that article, which is what started our podcasts, The Only One in the Room, were from people of all races, all ages, everywhere in the world. That's what I found with Stash. I thought Black women would respond to it, because there aren't any books for Black women out there right now that deal with addiction and privilege and race. But it's like everybody, mainly women, or people that identify as female, predominantly, but otherwise, there's really no median age, socio-economic status, you know, mainly Americans. But I'm texting with these people in the Netherlands right now, who have a super book club there, and they've chosen my book this month. So, it's shocking to me how well received it's been, I really tried to temper my expectations going in. I didn't know what to expect, but I didn't want to hold out hope that it would do something that maybe it wouldn't do. So, I really just tried to come in like, I'm going to see this as a teachable moment for me, or a series of moments for me. I'm going to learn what it's like to publish a book, and to be an author, and to claim that title. But beyond that, I'm not going to expect anything.

Lisa [10:40] 

Well, I'm going to say that your experience has been a teachable moment for all of us, because you have done it so beautifully. What has been exciting for me as your friend, and someone who has watched this happen over the course of time, is that it was named one of the best Memoirs of 2023. You were recently in the New York Times article “Eight Books to Help You Drink Less or Quit.” You were in the New York Times before. You've been in Real Simple. You've been on an O Magazine. So, you've had all these great accolades. And you know, as I was listening to you, I was thinking, what is it about Laura’s story? Like, why does this resonate with so many people? To me, it's the honesty. There is this way that you show up fully as yourself, warts, and all, and you are willing to take us inside that world. So many people have a mask on, where they're trying to present in some way, for whatever reason, because that's what Instagram says, or that's what they think society expects of them. There are so many ways that people do that. You took the mask off, and we all benefited.

Laura [11:58] 

Thank you. I think this is the right use of the word irony. The irony is that I'm a really private person. I would never, ever discuss anything that went on in the bathroom or the bedroom. Personally, I don't discuss politics with people, I don't discuss religion. I feel like that's just information for me and doesn't need to be put out there in the world. So, to write something like you said, that is so vulnerable and honest, seems counterintuitive to my being private, which is another reason why it was so easy for me to hide. I'm naturally private. Anyway, I'm not somebody who over shares. I rarely over share anything, I'm much more on the other side. But being honest and real about what's going on in my life, and even just, with what I'm thinking about, and what I'm feeling has been the cornerstone of my recovery. And so there's a service element to the 12-step program that I'm in. The 12th step is service. It's carrying the message to the next person who suffers. So, I looked at this book on a broader scale. I'm carrying my message to people, whoever might want it or need it or find it. But that sounds selfless, but it's not. It's to bolster my own recovery, and to solidify it by having, you know, like that kind of thing that Eminem does on Eight Mile where, at the end in the rap battle, he basically says everything they can use against him. So that was another thing that I did. I Eight-Miled it. Everything's out there. Nobody's going to come up behind me and say, well, you didn't write about this. That should have been in the book. There's nothing out there that wasn't included in that year in my life.

Lisa [14:06] 

I love that concept. You Eight-Mile’d it. What I love about this is that this leads to one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, which was recovery, just as a general principle and how your recovery program has helped you be honest and do this work. So, I think you and I both know that 12-step recovery programs are just one of the ways that people can recover and get their sobriety. Yet there are some things that are very specific to 12-step recovery that work. They just clinically work. So, I want to name some of those things for people. Number one confidentiality—they call it anonymity—but there is a confidential element to it, which means it’s a safe space. Within that safe space, one of the things that's really important is being honest. And one of the things that fosters that is all the sharing that happens within the rooms. I can say this because I've been in the rooms, right? So, this is not me just thinking about this academically, it's having worked the steps, and those steps are part of my everyday life. But you know, if someone is thinking, well, what could recovery look like for me? Here are the ingredients—that confidentiality, mutual support, which shows up again in the sharing and sponsorship. There's a framework for operating within a group, which is so important, because so many of us grew up in spaces where there were no boundaries, there were no operating principles. So, we're trying to figure that out. Then there's a framework for making meaning of your experience through a spiritual program, and your personal relationship with whatever you see as your higher power, as well as a way to have agency. The 12th step, that's one way, and making amends, the fourth-step inventory, which is where you're taking a look at your life. All those things are the ingredients that can support someone's sobriety, or recovery from many different things. As you think about all of this, how did these ingredients, or anything else, support the kind of recovery that would allow you to be so honest when you are a private person? 

Laura [16:27] 

Wow, that was a really good breakdown. I really enjoyed a cocktail of drugs and alcohol when I was using and drinking. I could never just take a pill or take a drink. I needed to mix a bunch of things together to get the relief that I was seeking. I found that this is the same for me and my recovery. I can't just do one thing; I couldn't just do a step and get the relief that I needed. And let me preface this by saying I didn't want to do any of it. Because I've been doing it for so many years on a regular basis, I don't have the same resistance to it. But I still don't really enjoy it. Honestly, I don't ever love the idea of going to a meeting in the same way that I don't love the idea of going to work out. But I do it anyway, and I do it on a regular basis. And, you know, I food prep on Sundays. I don't look forward to that, even though it can be kind of enjoyable if I’m listening to a book or a podcast. But I'd rather not. I'd rather skip food prepping, because it's chopping, chopping. It's, you know, all this stuff. But I do it anyway because those things make me better. Even if they don't make me feel better in the moment, I am better because of it. I make better decisions. I'm less reactive and more responsive. I can show up more as the woman I want to be, than the woman I might have been before I did all these things, before I took care of myself. So, you're absolutely spot on. I think that I learned I had a lot of tools when I got into the rooms of recovery. I'm a very boundaried person. But I didn't have the tools to be vulnerable. I don't mean, ever but not in a way that was helpful to me. I certainly have been vulnerable throughout my life. But it was very selective when I would allow that for myself. What I found pretty quickly in recovery was that vulnerability was really important for me to get well. The secrets I had been holding on to, not the private things. but the secrets I was keeping were killing me, even in recovery. Even without a drink or a drug. So, I chose to engage in this work the way it was suggested to me. So, I did everything that was suggested, from sitting in the front row of meetings to making sure that I always thank the speaker. I got there early. I stayed a little bit late, like all this stuff I didn't want to do. I didn't want to be seen sitting in the front row. That meant I had to be seen. I would have rather sat in the back and arrive late and left early. But I did everything, and you know, I found as time went on, like oh, this is what I need to do to be the woman I want to be, or the person I want to be without the gender. I have great admiration and respect for a lot of people in my life. I've always wondered what the secret ingredient is to how they live their lives with such integrity and pride, but the good kind, like the pride of work and ownership and confidence and generosity. Like how to be generous when someone's just getting on your nerves or who has slighted you or wronged to you. How do you be generous with that person anyway? I did not know how to access that. That's what I learned in these rooms through the steps that you mentioned. I learned how to access curiosity and generosity. For me, it's a shift. Sometimes it's meditation, sometimes it's prayer, sometimes it's just, I'll get back to you in 24 hours, and taking that 24 hours before I respond. But I learned those tools in the room at age 44, when I came in. And so, I've been learning this stuff for the last 16 years.

Lisa [20:39] 

I’m trying to think of how long you've been in recovery by the time that we met, because I think it was 2018. Your article, which will be in the show notes so everyone can read it, about your experience at Brave Magic, was the impetus of all of this. It had just come out when we first met. One thing that has been my experience of you is that you are a woman who knows what she wants and is willing to do what it takes to get there. In terms of your book, which I really want people to read, so we're not going to talk about some of those things, but OMG did you do everything. There is some stuff in here that you just have to read about to see, like the lengths she was willing to go to maintain her sobriety. So, I just watched you do everything you needed to get this book out in the world in the way that you have. You know how to channel your energy, or I've seen you do that. I want to know how you do it. What do you draw upon inside yourself that allows you to when an agent says something like, yeah, this is a great story, but you don't have enough platform, you say okay, I'm going to create the platform, and then all the other things that you've done?

Laura [22:04] 

Thank you for that. I feel very warm and glowy from being seen that way. I think there are a couple of things. One, you know, I've always written, I've always written since I was five years old. But I didn't ever know if I would be a writer, like if that was going to be my career. When I decided that I really wanted to give that a try, which is as you know, after I got sober, as a career, to really give it an honest try, I decided, and I was in a place in my life where I could. My children were almost out of high school. I was in a steady, long-term committed relationship that is pretty much drama-free, which was a brand-new experience for me. I was settled in where I lived. I was stable. At this point, I mean, obviously life was in session, but I was stable. I thought this was a really good time for me to just try it. But if I was going to try it, I was going to do everything, just like I did with recovery. If somebody gave me a suggestion, and they were someone who had what I wanted, I was going to take it, and at least try it, and see if it works. I've tried things that don't work for me that well, but I've tried them anyway. The agent who rejected me, being one of the 16 agents who rejected my first book proposal, who gave me this laundry list of things that I should try. I was like, yes. I didn't even see it as a rejection. I saw it as this advice as a path toward publishing my book. So, she said, try some storytelling. Start a podcast. Write and publish some articles. Do some speaking. Try to get a TEDx talk, like all these things. I wrote them all down. I didn't need to write them down actually, but I wrote them on a list.  Her email to me laundry listed them out, and I decided someone had given me a blueprint. So not only did I want to get published, but I wanted to get published by one of the Big Five houses. If it hadn't happened that way, I'm sure I would have been really happy at a smaller press, but that's what I wanted. At the time. I wanted my book to go at auction. I wanted there to be like a bidding war. I wanted to go for what I wanted and to have that experience of an author's tour. These are the things that I wrote down that I wanted, and what I saw in this rejection was a blueprint toward what I wanted. So, I just decided to do it. I also want to just say that I have space in my life for it, because of the stability I mentioned, because this is not how I support myself. I make money from it, but it's not how I support myself. If it was how I supported myself, there would have probably been more efforts in different directions to create different income streams around my writing. But I'm very privileged, and I acknowledge this privilege to just devote all this time to seeing if I can make this work and into trying as many things as were suggested to me. So, I tried everything and embarked on all these different journeys to create that platform. Then I get the agent. Then she sells the book at auction to Simon and Schuster. I work with an editor of color, which is the other thing I wanted. I really wanted an editor of color. I'll just make a footnote here, there aren't very many editors of color. There just aren't very many in the publishing industry, which is baffling to me and a shame. But I have a beautiful editor, and she and I worked together and got the book out, and I got the book tour. So, I've now had the experience that I wanted, and I'm very grateful for it.

Lisa [26:22] 

And what I'm going to say when it comes to that list is check, check, check, check. I say that because you're a Moth Grand Slam champion, you have an award-winning podcast, The Only One in the Room, if anyone is listening and you want to hear the best podcast out there, listen to this podcast, because it truly is. I mean, even from the first episodes, I was like, wow, this is produced so well. The storytelling is so good. You're a great interviewer. There are so many great ingredients in it. Your writing is stellar. You have published different articles for HuffPost. I'm going to link a couple and I'm going to ask you by email to give me a couple more, so they're in the show notes. You did all those things, and you recognize that you have a certain level of privilege to be able to dedicate all this time, which not everyone does. Yet it was the fact that you did all this stuff that helped you get where you are. As you think about your career now, what's next?

Laura [27:23] 

You and I were talking a little bit about the marketing part of it, which is still part of it. I find the marketing part very depleting. I get very inspired and excited. I was at an event for the McDowell Foundation yesterday. Are you familiar with them? I was not, but my friend happens to be the executive director. I was just listening to these different authors, mainly fiction authors, but talk about dreading the blank page and what they do to get through writer's block, and my goodness, I recognize how lucky I am. I have not experienced writer's block. I can't wait. I'm like slapping my hand in my fist. I can't wait to get to the page. I'm always writing in my head, and it just pours out of me when I sit down. I love that part. The part that I find very depleting is the marketing of myself. Yes, I have a little bit of an easier time marketing the book. But that's only part of it, because it's a memoir, and the book is me. So, I must market myself and that just feels all kinds of wrong to me to do that. I don't enjoy the spotlight. I don't enjoy it. I enjoy speaking when it's helpful to people, like in recovery meetings or I've spoken at different rehabs or for women's groups. I enjoy that, but just to be pitching myself out there. I do not enjoy that. So, I hired a guy who ran our podcast’s Instagram, to run my personal Instagram. It was supposed to be for a finite period, but he's still running it. So, he's like my boss. He says, I want videos on this, this and this this month, and I'll make those videos. Scott shoots them so I'm the talent in the video. We send them to him and then he cuts them up and repurposes the stuff. He just goes all month with these things that I sent him, and I don't have to like or follow or hashtag or do all this stuff that just makes my mind lock up. When I was launching the book, I hired a podcast publicist, Tink Media. I have to give them a shout out. They were in-credible. I mean, incredible. Simon and Schuster publicity was great. But Tink Media had me doing so many podcasts. I was doing three and four a day. Sometimes it was hard to keep track of who I was talking to. Then I watched my book sales. When I was on Tamron Hall, there was a big spike in book sales. When I was on MSNBC, there was a big spike in book sales. But the steady lift of sales came from those podcasts because I did so many. They were released for the next four months. So, every week, there were three or four podcasts, interviewing me about Stash and that was incredibly helpful. I took some of my advance money to hire her, because I figured that was a good reinvestment of that money. I would highly recommend that.

Lisa [30:43] 

Yes, I'm so glad that you brought that up. Some of the things that I want to point out that I've seen you do, and then we can talk about creative nonfiction marketing, because it's different. All those fiction writers that you were around, the reason that they worry about the page is they don't have to do all this stuff. There's a great blog post that Jane Friedman just put out. I'm going to put it in the show notes. She was talking about how children's book authors and novelists don't need a platform. You don't have to do those things. I mean, you must write well, and you have to come up with a great story, which, of course, we do, too. But there is a certain kind of marketing creative nonfiction writers must do. I'm pointing this out because you do it so well. On the video, if anyone's looking, and if you're not, go to YouTube so you can see Laura in all her glory. Her book is in the background. We were recently at AWP together, and I got to get a hug from her—which you're the best hugger ever, just so you know, you truly are. She had her book, front and center. You had this water bottle that also said Stash, which was nice product placement, and you had a bag that also had your book on it. So, you had these things that could serve as reminders of, hey, I'm an author, I have a book out. You have your podcast. You're able to talk about it there, and Stash is on your podcast’s website page. You have all these product placements. When I was looking at all the places you have things, I was feeling tired. There's so much stuff that we have to do. How do you care for yourself when you know that this work is both essential to sales and so exhausting?

Laura [32:41] 

Thank you for noticing all that. I have to shout out Simon and Schuster's marketing department. There is a multicultural marketing department within the marketing department. They select five books per year to devote funds and effort toward and they selected Stash last year. I have all this merch because they devoted those funds to it. We got tote bags, and we got water bottles, which was really helpful. Every time I went to a book event, I gave the tote bag strategically to my friends. They sent them to influencers. So, there are influencers walking around with my Stash tote bag. That was really nice. It's not something that I could have afforded to do, had I not had that extra lift from them. But the way I take care of myself, and this I learned from you, Lisa. I didn't know how to articulate it until I heard you talk about it at an AWP. You were talking about writing about trauma, and how one takes care of themselves. You talked about three phases—the prep, the during, and then the post time and you said to leave space before and make sure you have space during and then make space for yourself afterward, which I don't always do. I wrote that down. I also told my writing students about you and what you said, because I think that's just so important. I always made space during, but I didn't always make space afterward, and to bake that into the writing afternoon or whatever it is. But the way I take care of myself is shades of that. I always look at my calendar. I never put in more than one outing a day. I don't piggyback things. I don't bundle things unless it’s doctor's appointments or something I do like once a year. So, I might do those back-to-back, but typically I only put one outing a day. I have three weekdays that are just for writing. Maybe I do other stuff too, but they are blocked out for writing. We do our podcast interviews on Mondays, so I know on Monday, I'm going to be doing that. I do all my admin work on Mondays and get that out of the way when we do our interviews. Then Tuesday, I might go to lunch with my girlfriends, or I'll try to reserve either one of those days, Monday, or Tuesday, or I could do an evening a dinner with somebody or an event in the evening. But I really try to make sure I don't overschedule myself, so that I have all the energy, and the water bowl, or the well, is full when I go to pour myself into the writing. Even if I wasn’t writing, that's good for me. So, to do with marketing, which is even more depleting. I do not devote three full days to marketing. But I do make sure that I am not overscheduling myself—that I'm fed with nutritious food because I'll be 60 this year and I just can't eat anything and feel okay. I'd love to drink Pepsi and eat pizza all day. But I haven't had Pepsi in I don't know how long. But I need to eat for fuel—and taste—but it needs to be fuel as well. I need to get sleep. That's really important for me. I'll forego an evening event if it's going to interfere with my sleep, especially since I was addicted to sleeping pills for so long. I don't want to mess with it. If I’ve got a sleep groove going, I'm taking it. I just try to parent myself around it. Like I would make my kids do their homework, but then we would bookend it with fun stuff. That's how the marketing thing is for me. You have to do this so let's do this first. Then afterwards, get back into The Sopranos, because that's what I'm rewatching right now. So, I guess it's just parenting myself.

Lisa [37:09] 

One of the things a parent must do is say no. That was one of the other things I’ve talked about at AWP, is that you, especially for new writers, we think, oh my gosh, I've gotten an opportunity. That means I have to say yes. If I get five opportunities, I have to say yes to all of them, because the opportunities are going to dry up. Have there been times when you’ve said no because it would have infringed upon your self-care, or it just wasn't the right opportunity? You don't have to name the opportunity, but just a scenario where no was part of the equation.

Laura [37:45] 

I mean, in my life. I'm trying to think of in this past year with Stash. I kind of said yes to everything. I really did. There were a few podcasts that I said no to because I had this amazing podcast publicist, she would send me downloads and subscribers. There were some that just, you know, if I were going to do this, or that, I would rather do the podcast that maximized the effort for me. So maximum number of listeners. I did that a few times. There were a couple of events that were out of town where I would have had to pay for myself to go there, and I wasn’t sure if the benefit was worth what I was going to expend traveling there and putting myself up. So, I said no to stuff like that. But most of the time, during the author tour, I just put my head down and was like, okay, from March 2 through April 28—those were the actual dates—you're going, and you got to take care of yourself whenever you can, and you're not doing anything else. Forget anything else. We stopped recording the podcast. We recorded in preparation for it. We batched all those episodes ahead of time, so that all I needed to focus on was the author tour. I moved everything else out of my life. It was really head-spinning and exhausting. Even still, yeah.

Lisa [39:26] 

Every author I've spoken to has said the same thing that there is this period that is so frenetic, there's so much you have to do. Now that you are getting ready to celebrate your book birthday, and you're through that first year of the book, which of course, you're going to continue to market to make sure people know about it, are there any new projects you're working on? Or is there something new on the horizon for you?

Laura 39:56 

Yeah, two things with Stash. We’re focusing on book clubs right now. With the new paperback, there's a whole section on topics for discussion that is devoted to book clubs. I have brought somebody on for a 90-day period to find all these book clubs, for which I'd be a candidate, like African American book clubs, Black book clubs around the world, sober book clubs, mom book clubs, like all those book clubs. There are a couple more. She's putting together a spreadsheet for me, and she's reaching out to them one by one, and we're starting to get hits. So, this was the thing that was suggested to me by my agent and my editor. There's really nothing the publisher can do at this point for the book. They're not going to devote any funds toward it when it's in paperback. But this is when book clubs pickup. So, this is the suggestion I was given, so we're doing a book club campaign on Instagram that'll launch soon. Then I'm doing this extra effort where I've put in—and I'm sure your listeners know this, but the way most advances work is you get them in installments. The first one when you sign the contract. The second when you turn in the manuscript for the first pass. There's sometimes a third and a fourth. The third when the book comes out in hardcover, and the fourth one, if it comes out in paperback. But sometimes it goes straight to paperback, so there's just the third installment. So, with this fourth installment that I got, when the book came out in paperback, I used some of that money to hire this person to push for book clubs. I knew that I was going to do something like that with that money. I didn't know that it would be specifically book clubs, but that's one thing that I'm doing. The other thing that I'm doing is I'm almost done—I’m about 69,000 words in, my goal is 80,000 words, of autofiction, which is autobiographical fiction. This just means memoir with some added stories that may or may not have happened and some bundled events that maybe happened three years apart, but in my book, they're all happening within the same month. So, stuff like that, which I don't do in a memoir, because I want it to be as true to the memory as I can be in memoir. So that is a new thing for me. I have not written fiction before. I mean, I wrote made up stories when I was little, but to write an entire book is brand new for me. It took a while. I was sending in pages from probably April of last year to my agent and everyone was like no, no, this isn't it. Then finally in December, she's like, you’ve got it. Keep going. Don't send it to me until it's done. This is it. So that's what I'm doing. 

Lisa [43:04] 

Well, I'm really excited about this. People often think, I have to always write memoir or memoir is truer than fiction or autofiction. That's not necessarily true. What I always tell people is to think about the contract you want to have with the reader. Sometimes the most powerful thing is the fact that it really happened. Sometimes the most powerful thing is what you can do with it when you can bend the truth. In fiction, you can do all the things you just described: compressing and combining and making things happen that didn't happen, which is refreshing. I find that refreshing because I'm working on a novel myself. 

Laura [43:46] 

Once I got in the groove of it, I'm having a lot of fun with it. What I find is the scenes that aren't directly based on the things that happened in my life are harder for me to write. Almost everything in the book is something that happened, or at least the basis for it. It's about a Black publicist in the 1990s in Los Angeles who owns the only Black-owned entertainment PR firm, which was me. I have all these crazy stories about that time I did music and film and TV. I got to put in all those stories. If I have to change the names, I'll change the names. There's a lot of really cool celebrities in the story, but the work for me is okay, I need a scene here. That didn't happen. So how do I create this scene out of nothing? That's hard for me.

Lisa [44:43] 

The fear of the page!

Laura [44:48] 

I'm still writing though. Something else that I learned at a writer’s retreat was to put your hand over the stove and see what's hot. So instead of sitting in front of a scene that I don't know how to write, I jump to the next one that I do know how to write. Inevitably, I'll start to get ideas for the scene that I didn't know how to write, like, oh, this should happen like this. So, I don't stop writing. But I do sometimes stop writing that scene. 

Lisa [45:17] 

I love that strategy. It's such a good one, because sometimes, once you get the next scene out of your system, you can go, oh, this is how I get here, and so that's what must happen. So, I love that. Well, I know you have someplace to be today. And I mean I could spend the next three hours talking to you, but I'm going to ask you just a couple of quick questions. What is the best piece of writing advice you've received? 

Laura [45:45] 

It's definitely the advice that you gave at AWP. It truly is. I mean, that was profound. It changed the way that I think about how I write because I do write about trauma. I mean, when you said to set yourself up with time before and give yourself the time during the scene, and then to make sure that you have, what I call a denouncement, but like some time afterward to do whatever you need to do to replenish yourself, like eat or sleep, but just where you're not obligated to be somewhere or do something right away if you can help it. Sometimes our lives are such that we can't, so the idea would be to do as much of that as you could in these busy days. That'll stay with me for the rest of my life. As I said, I had been doing some of that, but the way you articulated it as a tool just made so much sense to me. This light bulb came on, and I was like, yes. This is going to be my schedule from now on. This makes perfect sense. Thank you, Lisa. 

Lisa [47:03] 

I’ll tell you how I came up with it, which will not be a surprise once I start talking about it. The reason why I chose to do this is because as a trauma survivor, I can go to the deepest, darkest places without taking breaks. I did this with therapy for a while. I had therapy during my lunch hour at work. This is the worst possible thing you can do. I was like, okay, let's go into like the deepest hardest stuff. Now it's time to do spreadsheets. It was a horrible thing to do to myself. I realized that it was harming me and depleting me more. I did that with my writing practice for a while. So, I thought about 12-Step programs and the concept of bookending a hard situation where you've got to do something difficult. You might talk to your sponsor beforehand, do the thing, talk to your sponsor afterward, and come up with a plan for how you're going to take care of yourself. I thought that's brilliant, and I think it works for writing, too.

Laura [48:06] 

It really does. But the structuring of it, I heard from you differently than I've heard from any other source. So, I just I really appreciate that. I'm so glad that I went to AWP. Probably just knowing you, it might have come up eventually, but having heard you say that while I had my little notebook out, and my pen that I stole from Melanie, it was just the perfect moment for me to take that in.

Lisa [48:37] 

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. And for anyone who's listening, who’s wondering who Melanie is, we’re talking about Melanie Brooks, who was my first interview for this podcast. But yeah, I really appreciate that. We've talked a lot about self-care and recovery is a huge part of your life. What is one way that you nurture your resilience? 

Laura [49:05] 

One of the ways, because I'm a liar by default, and this is not just to manipulate you, well, I guess it is meant to manipulate you, but not to manipulate you out of something or into something necessarily. But I was someone who always said I was five minutes away when I hadn't left the house yet, because I want to manage your response to whatever it is that I'm doing. So, when I default to that, you know, if I told you that I was just about to jump on the Zoom, and I was still in my car, I go back and clean that up immediately. I say, hey, I know it's not pertinent to the interview itself, but I needed to let you know that I told you I was about to jump on when I was actually still in my car. It's really important for my recovery to let you know that, so I hope you can receive that I'm not trying to make you feel any certain way about it or to clear my name or anything. But I need to say these things out loud. It's kind of a joke among the women I sponsor and people in the community that I do these callbacks. I don't do them as often anymore because I don't feel the need to soften the truth anymore as often, but it's still my default. When I do, I clean it up. That has been really helpful to me. The other quick thing that I'll say, is not saying anything about anyone, unless I'm sure that they would be okay with it. So, I wouldn't talk to you about Melanie, unless I was absolutely sure that she would be okay with it, because it’s not good for my soul to engage in those things. It's can also be potentially really hurtful to somebody, which is also bad for my soul. So those two things, I would say, have been the pillars right now on which I'm standing.

Lisa [51:08] 

Those are two important pillars. What I would say is, there may be an addiction framework that you're thinking about when you're talking about these things. But for trauma survivors, these are huge issues too, because, we'll call it gossiping, can be a huge part of trauma bonds and triangulation and something that is being talked about more is the fawning response to trauma, which is where you're people pleasing, and there's a lot of unconscious lying, that happens out of fear. It's about exactly what you said, managing the response. And so, I love that you share this, because I think this is applicable in so many ways, which is one of the reasons why your book speaks to so many people. We can just bring it back to your book because it's translatable to many different situations. So, thank you for sharing that.

Laura [52:05] 

Thank you for listening.

Lisa [52:06] 

The last thing I'm going to ask you is how people can find you so that they can get their book clubs together and have you come?

Laura [52:17] 

I love that. The easiest way to find me is my website, which is lauracathcartrobbins.com. I'm also on Instagram, but it's the same name: @lauracathcartrobbins. I'm not really on another other social media. I have a TikTok account. I have X, and I have Facebook, but I don't cruise those very often. So, Instagram and my website are the easiest ways to reach me.

Lisa [52:52] 

And they should listen to your podcast. If you missed any of that, it will be in the show notes, so it'll be very easy to find. Well, Laura, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It is my deep honor to have you here, and to have this time with you. 

Laura [53:09] 

Thank you, Lisa. I was really looking forward to this and you always exceed expectations. So, thank you so much.