Jillian Lauren

Melissa and me.

With Stephen Elliott and Sonya Chung.

Tuesday I did a conversation event with Melissa Febos at the gorgeous Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. Melissa’s book Whip Smart chronicles the four years she spent as a dominatrix. Kind of. Really, it’s just a kick ass coming-of-age memoir. I so enjoyed talking to her about endings (narrative not happy), power, sexual currency and the challenges of using life to make art and vice versa.

We had an all-star guest list, including Sonya Chung, Cintra Wilson, Stephen Elliott, Sini Anderson, Julien Nitzberg and Catharine Dill. Not to mention appearances by summer camp friends and by family members who are miraculously still talking to me.

It’s amazing to be back in New York touring with this book. New York is the place where I made so many of the mistakes that gave me a book to write in the first place. I love when life brings me full circle.

Two very different books by two equally rad women came out today and I’m so looking forward to running out to buy both of them: Sonya Chung’s novel, Long For This World, and Melissa Febos’ memoir, Whip Smart

As a side note, the talented Miss Melissa will be appearing in conversation with me at Powerhouse Books in Brooklyn on May 4. My plan is to convince her to dye her hair blonde so we can do a rousing rendition of “Two Little Girls from Little Rock.” Go to her facebook page and leave tons of harassing wall posts to help her see my point of view. It’s just a little peroxide…

More Some Girls tour dates coming soon.

Junot Diaz writes here about becoming a writer. My favorite line:

By then I wasn’t even interested in a Great American Novel. I would have been elated with the eminently forgettable NJ novel.

I found this article by way of Sonya Chung (by way of Alexander Chee). The blog game of telephone. Actually, do kids even call that game telephone anymore? Do they call it facebook or something now?

Anyway, the gist of Diaz’s article made me go: Yes!, Yes!, that’s it exactly! Here is an excerpt:

I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or my second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.

I actually wrote two eminently forgettable NJ novels before selling my memoir. One of them is coming out next January, so I hope it isn’t, in fact, eminently forgettable. But I remember the same moment in my life that Diaz describes in the article: the moment I knew I was a writer. It was the moment when I knew, really knew in my heart that my first novel was going to live in a drawer forever and I went to my kitchen table to write the next one.