questions & answers
q. I want to write a book, but I work and have children. How do you find the time?
a. You have to steal the time from something else. A lot of go-getters subsist on no sleep; I need nine underachieving hours a night. Giving up my job is always tempting but out of the question. So to write It's About Your Husband, I quit the gym for two years. To write Mating Rituals of the North American WASP, I stopped watching all television. I don't do much on weekends, either, except write.
q. Is there really a boutique in New York like the one Iris discovers in It's About Your Husband - so exclusive, it won't let people in unless they're on the guest list?
a. If there is, I'm not on the list, either.
q. How about the rundown, 200-year-old Connecticut mansion in Mating Rituals of the North American WASP? Does it exist?
a. The Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick House in WASP is based on one of the grandest old homes in Litchfield County, Conn. When I started writing WASP I tracked down the home's owner, explained that I was an author and asked if I could look at the place. He was a great sport about it. He took me through all 21 rooms, through the garden, into the basement and onto the widow's walk and let me take dozens of photos. By the way, the real house was in perfect condition - I had to add basement fungus, a leaking roof, mice, cobwebs and creaky floors to the book version.
q. How much of your novels is based on your life?
a. I did move from the San Fernando Valley to New York for a job, like Iris does in It's About Your Husband. But I've never followed anyone's possibly cheating spouse. Mating Rituals of the North American WASP is set in a fictionalized, highly embellished version of a real Connecticut town in which I have a home.
q. Are your characters based on real people?
a. A little. In Mating Rituals of the North American WASP, the self-sufficient, no-whining Yankee great-aunt, Abigail Agatha Sarah Sedgwick, is a bit like my (decades younger) friend Sandy, who mows her own 4-acre lawn with a push mower and recently built a cover for her well. In It's About Your Husband, many of the characters and products are named after friends, sorority sisters and ex-boyfriends. For both books, I also tinkered with the time-space continuum by giving myself cameo roles. I appear in It's About Your Husband once as an adult in Central Park and once as a child at the museum. In WASP, I'm riding the subway.
q. You've worked at women's magazines. What is it like? Do celebrities roam the halls? Do you get free designer clothes?
a. The business has glamorous moments. But there's also a lot of sitting at the computer trying to distill, say, a hairstyle that took a professional an hour and six products to achieve into a single-step routine readers can do at home - and fit the description into an inch-wide caption box. All the while you're thinking, "I should be helping solve the world's truly urgent crises."
Generally the celebrity interviews and photo shoots are conducted far away from a magazine's offices. But you do see tons of models as they come in to meet with the magazine's bookers. The models are as tall and gorgeous as you'd expect. There's also often something surprisingly sweet and Midwestern about them.
You field your fair share of offers of free or hugely discounted handbags, clothes, makeup, teeth-whitening, cosmetic surgery, hairstyling, trips to exotic foreign lands and so on. I could never bring myself to take any of these extravagant goodies. I did once score a tee-shirt that spelled out "Botox" in rhinestones, though.
q. What's the most fun newspaper story you've ever written?
a. While doing research for an article on engagement rings, I met a diamond dealer who invited me to his office, in an unassuming building on Fifth Avenue that houses scores of diamond wholesalers. To get in, you show a photo ID and pass through a metal detector. Once I got upstairs, the dealer opened up his vaults and let me hold a succession of loose diamonds that would have made Elizabeth Taylor drool. Then he took me to a room in the building where wholesalers make deals with each other. It's a very old-world business; diamonds are passed along with just a handshake and the promise of cash later, and anyone who doesn't honor his end of the bargain gets his photo posted on the "bad dealer" wall, and nobody will do business with him anymore. It was a world I never knew existed, and it was fascinating.
Read more from Lauren at the Grand Central Publishing website.
Read an interview with Lauren on Conversations With Famous Writers