What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Janice Erlbaum

memoirist

Janice Erlbaum (website) is the author of Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir (Villard, March '06). She has been a contributor to Bust magazine since 1994, and has also written for NYPress, POPsmear, and McSweeneys.net. She is featured in the anthologies Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Verses That Hurt, and The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order, and she's been written about in Poets & Writers, Interview, PAPER, Harper's Bazaar, Backstage, the Daily News, and New York magazines. She once kissed a girl on MTV. She now lives in her native New York City with her domestic partner, Bill Scurry, and their three cats, and she volunteers at a shelter for homeless teens. She especially enjoys talking about herself in the third person.

 
I'm about halfway through the first draft of my second book, another memoir, with the working title Volunteer: A True Love Story. It's about going back to the shelter where I lived as a teenager, this time as an adult and a volunteer, and the relationship I formed with an extraordinary kid I met there. She was a nineteen-year-old junkie, homeless since the age of twelve, when she'd escaped her hideously abusive meth-cooking dad and hooker mom and started living on the streets. She was also brilliant, sensitive, an amazing writer, an avid reader -- a total autodidactic savant. I stayed involved with her after she left the shelter, following her from psych wards to detoxes to rehabs to halfway houses, and eventually to a hospital, where I spent months at her bedside watching her suffer from an autoimmune disorder. But just as I was looking to adopt her as my daughter, her real disease, and her real history, started to come to light -- this story has a pretty surprising ending, I think.

 
What is different about this project from your work in the past? How did you get the idea, and how did you make the decisions that make this book different?

Well, it's actually pretty similar to my past stuff -- it's another memoir, just like the first one, and I've tended to write autobiographically for as long as I've been writing, whether it was poetry or comedy or first-person essays. When I was nine, I wrote a thinly veiled autobiography called, "Me, Maxine." So in that sense, this book is not all that different, because it's all about meeeeeee.

But in the last book, which covered events that took place twenty years ago, I took liberties with the timeframe -- for instance, I knocked six months off the end of my first real relationship, just so I didn't have to detail its long slow decline -- and I also used some "composite characters," (or so I claimed) because I thought I could obscure people's identities and spare their feelings that way. Which didn't work, by the way, and also made me less credible. So I won't be doing that again.

In this book, I'm committed to presenting the facts exactly as they happened. The story is so unbelievable as it is; I want readers to know that I'm being 100 percent honest and forthright (inasmuch as that's possible, for a subjective narrator who was part of the events described). I am taking no narrative liberties. This crazy story actually happened, exactly this way, no shit, and I'm going to include an author's note to that effect.

As for where I got the idea, she was right there in front of me. I resisted writing about her, especially when she became gravely ill -- something I'm discussing in the book -- but I couldn't. I've tried to make this book more about me than about her, but if it weren't for Samantha, there'd be no story.

 
What techniques or approaches are you using for the first time on this project?

This time, I'm running the manuscript by the people who were involved in the story beforehand, to get their comments and recollections, and so they can see how they're being portrayed. Fortunately, I don't think there's a single main character in the book who's portrayed in an unsympathetic manner; I don't have any hesitation about presenting the manuscript to anyone.

Also, I'm fortunate that the events were very recent (2005), and that I kept extensive journals and records of everything that was happening, some of which appear on my blog. So I have a very rough first draft already done, in a sense, and I don't have to rely solely on my memories, or whatever artifacts I've retained after two decades, to check my own recollections. My entire family and circle of friends watched these events, as did my editor; it helps a lot to have that many authoritative witnesses who can corroborate or dispute my version of events.

 
What is the most challenging thing about working on this project?

Well, the plot keeps changing. And my feelings about it keep changing, too. In reliving the events of last summer -- literally, "what was I doing last year on this day?" -- I'm reliving a lot of stress, anxiety, pain, and grief, as well as a lot of elation. It's pretty fucking exhausting. I'm also forcing myself to be honest (in this draft, anyway) about some things I may or may not leave in for the final edit. I didn't spare myself or my family any embarrassment in the first book, but it sure would be nice to do so for the second one, if possible, as long as the book remains honest. But right now I'm exposing a lot about myself and the people I love -- and not as we were twenty years ago, but as we are today.

 
What is the most rewarding thing about working on this project?

Oh god, it's such rigorous therapy. And by therapy I don't mean self-indulgent bourgeois navel-gazing, I mean a thorough analysis of one's own behaviors and motivations, with an eye to becoming a better human being. I've been taking a reeeeeally long, hard look at myself in the writing of this book, and it's been extremely helpful to me in my own quest for growth, understanding, and all that other happy crap to which I sincerely aspire.

 
What is the future for the project -- do you have a contract for the work, or what are your plans?

I'm super-lucky, in that my original deal with Villard was for two books, so this one is contracted to be finished at the end of November, and I'm hoping it will come out by Winter 07/08. I'm writing it as fast as I can!

Links

An excerpt from Erlbaum's first book Girlbomb, a memoir of her "halfway homeless" days in New York City. Book Standard interviewed her about the book in March.

Erlbaum's MySpace page.

See more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 9 Aug 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco