Heather Havrilesky
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Former Salon television critic Heather Havrilesky has been known since the 1990s as one of the sharpest, wittiest and most prolific writers on the internet, as well as being the dispenser of simultaneously wise and funny life advice on her rabbit blog In January, she began immortalizing her childhood in print and audio with her memoir Disaster Preparedness, a gimlet-eyed exploration of a childhood and adolescence mired in divorce, quirky parenting, ill-advised crushes, high school cheerleading and, yes, disaster movies (which provide an ample metaphor for her relationship with adults).
In response to watching those films, she and her sister developed a series of elaborate plans to be prepared against any natural or man-made disaster, even as their parents fought their way toward a divorce. She writes in the book, “Grown adults either ran screaming or stood in confused clusters gasping and shrugging over what was to be done. Why wasn’t there a plan, I always wondered? How could so many adults stare blankly at each other as everything went to hell?”
eMusic’s Jami Attenberg talked to Havrilesky about why memoirs are still important, how to be a productive writer with two children under the age of five, and her obsessive love of Pinback.
I didn’t grow up on the same disaster movies that you did, which were the ones from the 1970s. “The Day After” — the film about the nuclear destruction of Lawrence, Kansas — was more my jam. I remember my whole family watched it together. I think that film taught me you can’t be prepared, so why bother?
I saw so many horrifying movies before the age of 10. I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1978 remake, when I was eight years old. As I mention in the book, I’d never even seen a movie with an unhappy ending before, so the notion of aliens taking over the planet gave me nightmares for years to come. I also saw a lot of the airplane disaster movies — Airport ’77. I think that genre can be credited with rendering a whole generation of kids afraid to fly the friendly skies.
What are your favorite contemporary disaster movies?
I’m not that into disaster movies now, but Battle: Los Angeles looks pretty intriguing. The trailer has this really sad soundtrack as aliens blow up L.A.; it reminds me a little of Battlestar Galactica, best melancholy TV theme song of all time. OK, no, that’s MASH, actually. Second best.
Mostly it’s hard not to enjoy seeing L.A. blown to smithereens, if you live here. Living in L.A. is cleaved into two moods: the ecstatic mood where you marvel at the blue sky, the greenery, the perfect temperatures and you thank your lucky stars that you landed in paradise, and the bad mood where the sky is brown and you’re sitting on the 405 North wishing that aliens would swoop down and put the whole city out of its misery.
Yeah, I live in Brooklyn and I love movies that decimate Manhattan, but I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic anything. And while I wasn’t a big of fan of I Am Legend as a whole, but there was something fulfilling about seeing the streets of Manhattan empty for once in our lives. You’re someone who is so talented at writing about things that are of the zeitgeist. Was it difficult or a bit of a relief to write about things that were less contemporary?
Writing about my childhood and young adulthood was really satisfying. I’ve been telling the same stories for years, so getting them all down on paper and then reexamining all of my assumptions about what had happened and my role in it — that was invaluable to me. I was attracted to the most humiliating and traumatic events — I didn’t really expect that to be the case, but that’s what I remembered the most vividly and felt the most moved to write about. The funniest and most colorful stories tend to be the most embarrassing ones.
You’re perhaps best known for your criticism as well as dispensing advice to others. How did you feel about throwing yourself full-force into an analysis of your life?
I’m pretty comfortable with overexposure, but I definitely had to feel that there was a point beyond “Here’s something odd that happened to me.” Each chapter is a separate essay, really, not just a period of time in my life. If I’d written the book in flat chronological order, it wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining. It was important to mine the best anecdotes and ideas, and get out without dragging the reader into every single thought and event in my life. Some writers might be good at straight, chronological tales, but personally, I tend to enjoy wide-ranging stories from a life — writers like David Sedaris, Beth Lisick, Joann Beard, David Rakoff, Julie Klam. I don’t need a theme or a narrative arc (although you generally do to sell a book like this, unless you’re Sedaris). I just want first-person writing that’s concise, vivid and smart — all of those writers more than deliver on those fronts.
Memoir writing has been the subject of some criticism lately. Why do you think memoir is still important?
It makes sense to me that memoir is taking such a hit from so many fronts again. The term is probably overused, and we’ve all read memoirs that read like excerpts from a rambling blog. But there are dozens of novels that shouldn’t exist, either. The genre or the word or category written on the cover of a book, dictated entirely by trends, isn’t the problem. It’s the fact that publishers are excited (understandably) about writers who already have an audience, through their blogs or their reality TV shows or something else, and those publishers neglect to edit or demand revisions on books. Bad books end up on the shelves. I’m not sure that the nice lady with 1 million hits a month on her autobiographical blog should bear full responsibility for publishers who are aiming to scoop up all of those readers without actually fine-tuning the material so it doesn’t suck.
Memoirs and first-person writing in general don’t corner the market on bad writing, and obviously some of the best writers write beautifully about their ordinary lives. One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White, is basically just a great writer wandering through the wilds of his neurotic mind after moving out of Manhattan and into the country. It’s a wonderful book. The notion — recently embraced by a writer for The New York Times in an article that pans my book — that you should be a president or an incest survivor or a former drug addict if you’re going to write a memoir, is just ludicrous to me. There are no boring lives, just boring writers. I challenge anyone who tends to agree about the glut of memoirs to read an excerpt of my book and see if they’re bored.
Yes, read it, or perhaps listen to it! Have you listened to your audiobook at all? Do you get anything out of reading your work out loud when you’re writing it? Or reading it to other people?
I haven’t listened all the way through, but I’ve listened to some of it. It’s really interesting to hear how someone else — in this case, Karen White, who does a great job — interprets my words. I think she puts a sunnier spin on my life than I probably would with my voice, something that many listeners should appreciate!
I never read my book out loud until I did a few readings on my book tour, and those have been really fun. The book is pretty suited to be read out loud, actually, because it’s reasonably conversational, includes dialogue, and spirals into absurdity in ways that work when you’re reading live.
Have you had anything interesting happen on your book tour so far?
One woman at my first reading in Durham, North Carolina, my hometown, raised her hand and said, “You know, I have to admit, I thought that based on the title, Disaster Preparedness, you were going to tell us about how to get ready for a catastrophe.” “You mean, you thought I’d be giving you handy tips on where to get oxygen masks and stuff like that?” I replied. “Yeah,” she said. “But with so many great people and so much laughter here, it makes me think that maybe that’s all you need.” “No,” I told her, “You’re also going to need an oxygen mask.”
What music are you listening to these days?
Loving the new Wye Oak right now, Civilian — I’m new to them. Also just discovered the Joy Formidable. Their newest album, The Big Roar, is so good. Sometimes I can’t believe there’s so much great music these days. Was there a lull for a while there, or was I just busy following babies around in circles? I think my all-time favorite band is Pinback. They can do no wrong in my book, just so original and perfect. I love them. I listen to them constantly, to the point of it becoming a little pathological.
What are you working on next?
I’m working on a novel and writing full-time for The Daily for the iPad, covering movies and TV. If I want to be prolific, I have to wake up at 4 am, basically. I discovered that with Disaster Preparedness. It’s a little insane, but my writing is about 500 times better in the wee hours than it is in the afternoon. Just requires going to bed by 9, but with a two-year-old and a four-year-old in the house, sleep is my favorite thing in the world, so it’s not a problem.
How does your family feel about you writing about them?
They’ve been really nice about it. My sister is a cancer surgeon with three kids at home and I think juggling the stress of her job and her big family has turned her into a really calm person. She’s much easier going now than I am — I’m really in awe of her — maybe because the stakes are so high at her job that regular life doesn’t ruffle her. And my brother has always been the live and let live sort. My mom read the book several times before it was published and she’s been very supportive. She’s a big reader; if she didn’t think the book was very good, I would’ve been in trouble.
