2022-07-17 LIVE from NYPL Writing Memoir: Isaac Fitzgerald, Ashley C. Ford, and Leslie Jamison with ChloƩ Cooper Jones [ Applause ] >> Isaac Fitzgerald: It's Leslie Jamison, come on. [ Applause, Cheering ] Chloe Cooper Jones. [ Applause, Cheering ] >> Ashley C. Ford: A professional hype man, like the Flavor Flav of literature. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: [Laughter] Has that been in the back pocket the whole time or is that just -- >> Ashley C. Ford: No, it just came out. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: All right, that's beautiful. >> Ashley C. Ford: From the heart. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Hi, everyone. My gosh, it's so amazing to be at an event in person and in this beautiful new space, which I feel sort of in awe of getting to do an event here in this beautiful space and with these beautiful people whose work I love so much. So the four of us are going to chat. I brought some questions to sort of start us off, but we can go back and forth. I want to know what, like, rapper/reality star I am by the end of this, Ashley. You don't have to know yet. Maybe you do. >> Ashley C. Ford: Yeah, no, you're Cardi B. [ Laughter ] It's okay. Accept it. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Oh, I accept it. I accept it. I'm honored. So I thought, you know, just a little warm up question, especially because we're here and all of our writing, all of our books, to some extent, use New York City as a subject. And so I wanted to ask just first what role New York City sort of plays in your thoughts as a writer. But then maybe even more specifically, how the New York Public Library has played a role. And I say this, too, because -- and Leslie doesn't know this because I haven't told her. I was waiting till now, but I have this friend who is like, "I always see Leslie." She doesn't know you. She's like, "I just see Leslie Jamison always at the Brooklyn Public Library." So I know that you're in the stacks there doing probably very important work. So I thought, yeah, if you want to start by talking about what these libraries have meant for you as writers and what the city has as well. >> Ashley C. Ford: I'd be happy to start. I am a library kid. I've always loved the library. I -- from the minute I realized what a resource the library was when I was growing up in Indiana, it's one of the first things I do when I'm in a new place, is where -- I got to find the library, and I have to get a library card. And this place wasn't any different. I mean, when I moved to Brooklyn, I was super broke, and I was very much on my own, and I'm a reader. Books cost money, for a reason. But they cost money. And I -- but I still wanted to read. And it was so nice to be able to go to the Brooklyn Public Library, to go to the branch that was closest to where I lived in Flatbush and be able to get books, return books. Not to mention when I realized that they had Kindle books and audio books that you can get through the library. And then I just felt like, you know, a literary rich person. I could get whatever I wanted, so. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Did you do your audiobook, by the way? >> Ashley C. Ford: I did do my audiobook. Can you tell from my voice? >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Okay, and you did your audio book. Yeah, it sounds really -- I was just saying because I read your book as a -- you know, with paper, but I was, like, so taken in by your voice. I was like, now I want to get the audiobook from the New York Public Library. >> Ashley C. Ford: Right? It's like kind of like somewhere between Maya Angelou and Whoopi Goldberg. [ Laughter ] >> Chloe Cooper Jones: It's an amazing selling point. >> Ashley C. Ford: Yeah. It works out for me. >> Leslie Jamison: Can I just ask, I mean, for anybody who's done audiobook recordings, like what did you -- how did you feel like your relationship to the text changed by virtue of doing it? Or what did you feel like you kind of learned or what surprised you from reading it? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: I got a good one on this, which is -- and it actually involves Chloe. Which is, Chloe did her audiobook, and she was telling me all about it. She was like, there's a director who's like zooming in from LA. There's like three people doing this. There's like ten people doing this. They're like telling me, like, "Oh, no, say that a little bit differently." And I was like, "What an experience! That sounds amazing!" And so they're like, "Do you want to do your audiobook?" And I was like, "Yeah." And they're like, "Well, you got to try out." [ Laughter ] But I was all right. I feel like, you know, I maybe don't have Ashley's voice, but I was ready. I was like, I've got a good enough voice. So I tried out, and I got it. I got the gig. Felt good. And then I showed up and I want to just be very clear, I'm very happy with how my audiobook turned out. And the person that I worked with was incredible in their own way. They were just a little bit more hands off than maybe the Chloe situation, which is to say that I opened a door to a closet that was above the Starlight Diner in Midtown, and there was just a microphone and a dude. [ Laughter ] And I was like, "Hey." And he was like, "Yeah." I was like, "Okay." And so I started. And I had a good feeling for it. I was doing all right. I felt -- but like every once in a while, and this is true, it's in the audiobook. You can listen to it. You can get it here from the New York Public Library. I just mispronounced a bunch of words. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Oh, they didn't check -- >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Oh, there was no director from LA, Chloe. And I do, I know how to write words. I know how to read. I don't know if anybody else has this like, "Albeit". Albeit is a word that for the longest time as a person growing up, I thought they were two different things. On the page, it was just a word I didn't know how to pronounce. And when I said it out loud, I thought it was I apostrophe L-L space, B-E space I-T, "I'll be it." Like and it kind of mean -- kind of like works, right? It kind of means the same thing. Anyways, the one story I just want to kind of end on, because I will say, to jump to the end, the audio producer by the end was like, "Just for the record, we usually do like Christian romance novels in here, and I just want you to know that I really liked your book." So like I won him over. I won him over in the end. But like day two, at one point, I said, and I'm still going to mispronounce it, but I think I can get it. It's furtive. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Furtive. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: That's a word, right? >> Ashley C. Ford: Yeah. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Okay. So I said "furitive." And I'll just never forget, I was like "furitive." And this is like one of three edits I got on the whole thing And just like a click in my headphone just like, "You want to try that again?" And I was like, "furitive." "You want to try that again?" "Furitive." Nailed it. And like that's how it went. Like it would just be me mispronouncing the word the same way like with no guidance. So anyways, that was my experience. What was yours? >> Leslie Jamison: Got it. Now I want to hear about the producers we're meeting from LA. I've recorded a couple of them, but I recorded my book, The Recovering, which is, I guess, my most memoir-esque book. I was like 8 months pregnant and definitely got, like a cold part way through that I didn't super want to medicate. So and they told me, they were like, "Oh, it's fine, you can't even tell." But then, of course, like the second my best friend is listening to it. She's like, right about the time you got sober, like the third time you got sick, I was like, yeah, that's correct. I like really did get a cold back then. But one of the things that I noticed like, you know, when you shared that thing about your producer saying that very nice and well-deserved thing about your wonderful book, my process maybe took 6 days of full recording. And Charles, my producer, or the engineer, I guess the producer was also remote. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Multiple people. >> Leslie Jamison: Oh, I know. Multiple people. I just want to make you feel a little worse. I just want to kind of dog pile on it. He was -- I noticed that we would take these lunch breaks every day and, you know, the book has quite a bit of personal material in it. And as I -- I felt like I was seeing enacted this thing that happens when you write from your life, which is readers feel -- they not only feel they know you but they -- it can inspire this urge to open up in different ways. So as day one, our lunch was like very pro forma, kind of on the surface. But by day 6, Charles had learned so much about me as we were in audio production that I was like hearing about -- I know the death of his mother and everything that had been happening with the siblings, in-between. But I felt like in real time, we were kind of playing out that way that like when you give the reader parts of yourself under whatever scrutiny and crafting in the text, there is also room to kind of -- they're looking inward and kind of feel this urge towards a kind of reciprocity sometimes which was cool to see play out. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Did that make -- >> Ashley C. Ford: That's what happened with me and Brice. >> Leslie Jamison: Your engineer? Yeah >> Ashley C. Ford: Yeah. My engineer, who I didn't know -- I didn't know his name was Brice when I walked in there. But I know it now and I'll never forget Brice. Yeah. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Y-C-E? >> Ashley C. Ford: Huh? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Y-C-E? B-R-Y-C-E? >> Ashley C. Ford: No, it's an I. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Oh. >> Ashley C. Ford: Isn't that wild? Because usually the Y's are nicer than the I's. But anyway, but he's an I. He's an I, Brice. And he was -- he was amazing. And I also had my producer who was remote. Her name is Maddie, who was talking to me. It was really fantastic. Yeah. They just -- they just took really good care of me. But you're absolutely right. Like that first day I was like, who's this big lurch? He's like, 6'5" and kind of like talk slow and got long arms. But by the end of it, he was like, you know, he walked in during lunch and he was like, "I don't know if this is appropriate but it's been really great listening to your story and I just wondered if I could have a hug?" >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Aww, that's so nice. >> Ashley C. Ford: And I was like, "For sure, Brice." It was great. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: I'll just say the one thing that was amazing is -- and I don't know what part in the process of publishing that you guys record your audiobook, but I was on my final pass. And I was supposed to turn in -- which means just like, you know, you turn your book in and then you get to copy edit it yourself a couple of times. So I was on my final pass. So it was just about to go to press. And I was supposed to turn it in on the Monday, the first day of recording. But when I was reading it out loud, I found so many things that I wanted to change or I found some mistakes that hadn't been caught before. So I think I was maybe sort of annoying to everybody because I'd be reading and then I'd go, oh, I can't -- that sentence can't be like that. So I was basically like rewriting, like, a lot of the book like in the middle of recording and then sending all these things to my publisher. But I don't think I'll ever publish a book without that process. It was incredible having so many people with me. Supporting me and bringing me tea. Did they bring you tea? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: No, there was no tea, Chloe. But we bonded real good in that closet by the end of it. I think we hugged. It didn't get asked for maybe it was more I forced it. But a little bit of a difference than the Brice situation. But no, this is -- like I do think it's an incredible way to get to the point of your question, which is what Chloe is just touching on. Is like, what is the experience of that? For me, it was incredible because that's probably the last time for a while that I'm going to read that book cover to cover, a book that I've read cover to cover so many times at that point. But that is probably the last time, and at least some years, that I would sit down and read that book, cover to cover. So in a way, it really did feel like closing -- that's bad. It just felt like that was a real like ending in a way. >> Leslie Jamison: Yeah, yeah. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: So I just want to pick up on something that Leslie just like kind of started almost to talk about, which is this idea of, you know, you're giving a certain sense of yourself in this book. But of course, in any book, especially when you're writing anything personal, you're also crafting a persona. And ideally, that persona suits the point of the book that you're trying to write. I mean, we're never, ever sharing an entire self, whether it be ourselves or the people that we write about. So really curious how you all thought about the sort of crafting of the persona that is in your books. And then for you, Leslie, you've written more than one, so I'm really curious for you if you feel your persona and the way that you're crafting it, shifting from project to project. And it's almost like meeting a new self every time. >> Leslie Jamison: It's a great question. And yeah. I mean, I think the answer is yes, that I definitely feel -- in a way, I always, you know, I always knew and believe that the self was a crafted thing on the page rather than a transcribed thing, or somehow. You know, I think Maggie Nelson said once that readers feel that they're getting all of you and you know that they're only getting 1%, but of course they only see that 1%, and so it feels like a kind of totality to them. But I think it's only after writing a few books where my story plays some role in it that I've become kind of viscerally aware of, like, right, it's a different version of my voice. And, you know, the persona, I think, is crafted to all sorts of different effects. Like The Recovering, which is a book about a lot of things, including addiction and recovery. There's -- one of the things that happened in the drafting and revision process was front-loading a certain kind of insecurity and vulnerability, really, to -- some early readers were like, you need to help us understand why you wanted to get blackout drunk before you get blackout drunk. And -- so there's nothing about the self-loathing and insecurity and like intense kind of like, I'm going to do so much coke with you just so that you'll try to kiss me desperation that shows up in the beginning. You know, like that's all real, it all happened. I was there living in that body for those moments. But it's a conscious craft choice where you put that in the book. Do you put it on page 70 or do you put it on page 10? You know? And it -- a reader's early impressions of you carry a particular sort of impact and force. And that's just -- I mean, that's just one sort of angle in which editing happens. But I think it's a nice example of the ways that like truth and craftedness are not opposing gods. Like it's not either crafted or true, but you're just -- you're figuring out what order the truth come in and what they create. And I guess the last thing I'll say, and then I'm so curious to hear how all of you would answer that question, is that the project that I've been working on for the past couple of years is a memoir about motherhood and divorce. And I wrote more of this book on -- like straight onto my computer than I had any of the other ones. Like I used to always do longhand, and that was sort of the slightly precious part of my process. And in going straight into the computer, I felt like I actually, as opposed to writing more kind of clinical or workmanlike or whatever I was afraid it would do to the prose, it did something different. Like I actually feel like I'm a little bit sharper and sometimes it feels weird to be like, oh, I'm funny or something. I don't know if it's funny or not. But it's less -- there's a kind of long-winded earnestness that more easily creeps into my prose when it's long handed. And so it's almost like somehow the medium or the mode of writing was putting me in touch with a different radio channel of all of my selves. And that was, I think, the radio channel I needed to be on for this particular project. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: I love that. That's really fascinating. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah, I won't lie, that's fascinating. That makes the most -- I am somebody who totally writes longhand, but that makes so much sense to me, that like it actually sharpens it in this very interesting way. After having written longhand for so many years because that's how you could, like, get past your grammar errors and your spelling errors, because that's -- when you're writing longhand, you just keep going, going, going. But now with the confidence sitting at that computer, that's fascinating. I do -- before -- I want to flip it back to you, though, because you asked the question, but then you always get to go last. So I wanted you to answer your own question on this. Like what is your -- yeah. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: He loves to do this. Well, I think for me, I mean, I was writing a book that had a very specific goal, which was, you know, there's a woman, that's me, who recognizes that she needs to make a change in her life. And the book is about trying to make that specific change. And it takes place over 18 months. So it's very clearly not my whole life, although it moves back and forth in time in my memory but is really looking at a very specific part of my life. And so, you know, the persona that's in that book is me really struggling and struggling very deeply with trying to figure this one particular thing out. And then I think -- and this is sort of like a follow up question to my first question. I think like the secondary difficulty is that like other real people are in my book. So not only am I giving the reader a certain percentage of myself, like 1% of myself, but then I'm bringing in, especially for me, part of the problem that I'm trying to solve involves reconciling an influence from my father and an influence from my mother, and trying not to suffocate or get rid of either one of those influences. But try to figure out how those two influences can live peacefully together in me. And that meant I had to talk about my mother and my father. But I'm not giving you their whole life either. I'm actually only giving you the parts of them that are relevant to the story because that's what a crafted piece of literature tries to do. And that meant that I'm not -- I'm talking about these other people without their permission. Although, yeah, they were sort of vaguely aware of it, but without their explicit permission, I'm giving you a reductive and almost deflated version of them. And then, you know, my son is in it, and my husband is in it, and some friends are in it. And so it's like the -- they all -- and to be quite frank, you're using them to serve a purpose. And so this idea of persona, it's like one thing when it's filtered through yourself, and it's another thing when you're bringing other people into it. And I guess like I kept telling myself, like art is worth doing that to people, but maybe that's a rationalization. It's one I'm like really living my life by. But do you think that's true, or are we just really bad people or what? >> Ashley C. Ford: No, I'm amazing. [ Laughter ] No, I just -- one of the things that has been really monumental for me to come to terms with is that I was a self the whole time, growing up. I was a person the whole time, whether or not I was being treated like one by the people around me. And so I think there's like a ferociousness in me about my right to my story and my right to talk about my experience. And that doesn't mean that I'm like, I don't care what happens to anybody I write about. I don't care how you feel about it. It's not an apathy. It's a -- it's a conclusion at the end of really, I hope, deep thoughtfulness about what it means to share my life and share these parts of myself with people. I mean, you're talking about your book, you know, only goes 18 months, which is wild when you think about like a whole memoir that exists within that frame of time, even though you have the memories that go back. And I know that a lot of people think that my book covers like the course of my life, and in a way it does. But it's really set up, from the beginning, to be about my relationship with my parents and sort of like coming to this place of realizing that my dad is getting out of prison in 30 years. And the book ends with my dad getting out of prison. And the distance between finding out he was going to get out and him actually getting out was about 3 weeks. Yeah, it was about 3 weeks. So I knew when I was telling that story that there would be parts of it that made the people who were part of it very, very uncomfortable. And that there would be parts that they didn't necessarily want people to know about them. But I do not necessarily feel like it is useful or even kind for me to sacrifice elements of my story to someone else's comfort. And that's not always true. Some things are sacred, and some things are like, this is a sacred thing between you and I, and we have decided this is not a thing we share with other people. I find that's not usually the things people get mad about you sharing or even thinking about sharing. The things people get mad about are the things that they had hoped you'd forgotten. And they're kind of just really mad that you remembered something that they feel like you should have just let that go. And that's not my problem. It might hurt, and I don't ever seek to hurt anybody. But I also, luckily, through the power of eleventy billion hours of therapy, have finally figured out that it's not my responsibility to fix that for them. And people having to face themselves is a necessary part of being human, and trying to keep that from them is kind of doing their work for them. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm. Yeah. [ Applause, Cheering ] I think it can also, in a way, stop conversations, because that's what so much of my book is about, which is it doesn't give away anything to say that the ending of my book is not a neat, tidy bow ribbon, nor most of the ones that are on the stage. It was a continuation of a conversation. I do not have 11 billion years of therapy -- sorry, hours. I have 3 years. But without therapy, I would not have been able to write this book. But one of the things my therapist pointed out to me was like, do you understand that this -- you literally spent a decade of your life figuring out how to write so you could write this book, so you could maybe talk to your parents instead of just talking to your parents? And I was like, "Well, you earned your money today!" But that's what it was. So there were friends in my life that I showed my book to early, because they're in it, and I wanted to make sure especially there are certain different types of jobs that I talk about that I think are very, very delicate. And so I wanted to make sure they felt like I was doing a good job with that. But I did not show it to my family because I knew that would just be another way of putting another hurdle. I'm a procrastinator. I would figure out a way to not write this book. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to not write this book. I didn't want to write this book in a way. I just knew that would be one more hurdle. But when I finished it before it came out, I did send it to both my parents. And I just said to them, you don't have to read it, you don't have to -- we can do -- there's a lot of Fitzgeralds in the world. Just call me a nephew. Like, it's like, you all, we don't know that guy, actually. And then we can just keep it moving. You don't even have to read it. But of course, they're very intelligent. Something that gave me to touch on the NYPL question at the beginning, like they gave me a love of literature. There's a lot of complex relationships with my parents, but the things that they gave me from a jump was a love of books. And so, of course, my mother, incredibly intelligent, just sat down and read it one night. And we had a conversation the next day that meant the world to me. And the first thing -- I mean, she wrote me an email. The first thing she said was, I'm sorry, which is something I've been wanting to hear my whole life, and I didn't even know that. The next thing she said was, I had no idea you were carrying this. Which is so true, because I think to your point where you're saying, when you're older, that was a rough few years for her. But when you're a kid, it's half your life. So it feels so much bigger when you're a child and you're experiencing these things that we write about. But this is all to say that then I got on the phone, I called her immediately, we started talking, and I get it. There's a part of her that was like, what about like a chapter on the canoeing trips, though? [ Laughter ] I took you to Toys "R" Us every once in a while, you know what I'm saying? Like, come on. And it just came -- but like this is -- this is the answer to the question. Sorry, there's like so much, you know, rambling there at the beginning. But like it's what I said to her. I said, mom, the truth is like a block of wood, or it's a log. There's a hunk of wood. That's the truth. That's everything. That's the canoeing. That's the Toys "R" Us. That's the other stuff that's in the book. I understand that you would carve a much different sculpture out of that hunk of wood than I have carved. Yours would focus on other parts of the hunk of wood than I have decided to focus on. But that's okay. Like it's okay that the whole truth is still there. And that's why we get to have these full conversations, because we have the whole relationship off the page. With this work of art, I just decided to take the parts of the hunk of the wood that built the structure that I was trying to make. And she got it. It was a blessing. It was a grace, it was a kindness on her part because she could have just been like, well, never come home. And instead, she just like, she really got it. And that was incredible. >> Leslie Jamison: Did you all's parents read you all's books? My parent's -- my mother did not and will not. But my dad is kind of getting through it. How about you? >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Yeah. Yes. I don't have a relationship with my dad, so he wasn't happy, but I don't care. And my mom, who I'm very, very close to, and I reveal a lot of very private, personal things about her, she read it, and I was kind of nervous. And then she said, I just need you to change one thing. And there's a lot about my mom that's, like, very, very personal. I was really scared what she was going to say. And she was like, I'm just really upset about this one detail. I need you to change this. And it was that when I was born, she and my aunt Rojan [assumed spelling] made 1000 cranes, which is part of this Japanese myth. So I was born with a disability and doctors didn't think I would sort of survive it. And so they made this 1000 cranes out of, like, origami. And then made this wish that I would be okay. And in the book, I say that, you know, she did this with my aunt Rojan. And she got really upset because she felt like my aunt Rojan deserved more credit for this. That was like her only complaint. She was like, it was really Georgie's idea, and like you didn't really give her enough credit. And I was like I said, you did -- she's like, no, no, like she really did it. I kind of helped, but I didn't really. She was like, I really needed -- and I was like, absolutely not. I'm not changing. That's a ridiculous thing. But so yeah, I mean the -- I really agree and admire so much about what you said. And I think all of us are here because we believe that we have a right to tell our own stories, even though, you know, maybe we feel conflicted at times, or it's difficult, or it leads to these really hard but important conversations. I think one thing I'm thinking about, and I'm really curious for Leslie, too, now that you're talking about the memoir that you're working on now is, I feel a little bit more conflicted because I'm also telling my son's story. My son is here, right there. There he is. He's only 10 years old and so -- >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Give it up for Wolfgang, come on. [ Cheering, Applause ] >> Chloe Cooper Jones: He's my little -- my book buddy. Goes on my tour events with me. I'm going to -- I'm training him to become my assistant because I don't want -- no. Anyways so it's like I'm telling his story, too, and there are aspects of, you know, of his life that I'm writing. And he's, you know, so young, and I'm writing about him at four and five years old, and, you know, I talk about his like incredible sensitivity and how he like didn't want to walk on grass because he thought he was hurting grass's feelings. Like he thought everything had like this animated soul, and he still thinks that. And he was like, I don't like chewing food because it's like, hurting food's feelings. But also, like -- he said to me, he was like, "But maybe it's important for food to learn early in life about disappointment." [ Laughter ] And he's like, that's how I like justified like eating and like walking. And so it's like, maybe when he's like 19, he's going to be really mad or embarrassed. And then -- or maybe I'm thinking about the book he's going to write about me, which I'll be mad about. But I think, you know, I did it anyway. Sorry. But I did feel like that was a harder thing for me. I think it's worth it, and there's a lot of important conversations that come out of it, and I tried to talk to him as much about it as possible and include him in this process as much as possible. But it feels complex to me. Not on -- not that I don't want to do it, but complex. And I'm wondering, as your writing about motherhood now, if that feels sort of markedly different than other types of personal writing that you've done. >> Leslie Jamison: I mean, it's so interesting, and there's so much from like what all of you guys have said that I just have found so moving and has rung so true and made me think about these things I've been thinking about for years in slightly different ways. And I agree, I mean, it's just beginning to answer that particular question about motherhood, but I might loop and be around a little bit. I mean, I think it's -- for me, it feels like every relationship calls for its own process around that writing. And a lot of times for me, that process does involve some kind of conversation before a piece gets published. Like sort of over the years, not to a particular kind of language that was like if you want to read this book, I would love for you to read it. But already like building in a question rather than sort of assuming as I think a younger version of me did. That like everybody was going to want to drop whatever they were doing to like immediately read the manuscript and engage with it. But like also -- and I'd love to edit kind of from that conversation we have, which is like saying something, but it's also not saying certain things. It's not saying, I'm going to take out whatever makes you uncomfortable. It's not saying, you know, whatever you want removed, I'll remove. And it's also not pretending to know what's going to bother them. Like, I was so struck by what you said, Ashley, and what you said, Chloe, about, I think there's this really important human lesson in being surprised by what people object to, where it's like, even going into it being like, well, I know they're not going to like, when I write about that affair. I know they're not going to like, when I write about that breakup. It's like, actually, you don't know -- you don't really know a thing about people's souls. Like, you don't know what's going to bother them. You don't know what's going to ring true. You don't know what's going to feel wrong. And I love that anecdote about the cranes because it reminds me of when I gave my father a manuscript of The Recovering, which doesn't have a lot about him. But it does have a number of things you could imagine a person being upset by around, you know, ways he behaved during my childhood and my parents' marriage. And he only wanted me to change one thing. And it was this moment where I described him as somebody who had a lot of power in a particular sphere. And he was like, I just don't think of myself as having that power. And I was like, I'm definitely going to write about this moment. And, like, another moment, you know, which is like totally the perils of being close to writer at all. But it was so -- I felt like I learned something that I'm still trying to learn, actually, about him and his being in that moment. But the surprise of it felt really important. And I think, I guess, to the question about motherhood, I mean, this book is pretty exclusively focused on the first two years of my daughter's life in which she feels she very much was a person and she very much was her own person. But I already feel like the questions about what might feel like, I don't know, a little bit more -- those feel like different questions to me with a kid at, you know, 10, at 15, at 2. And on a craft level, I was really -- it felt really important to me to make her a person on the page rather than just like I think before I had a baby, I thought babies were like -- their personality was like baby personality or something like that. But then I had one, and I was like, oh, I see you're so much yourself. And I think a lot of the best lines in the book are actually hers, like even though she's 2. You know, it's like -- so I wanted to give her that. But I also know that in that, I am making choices. I'm making choices for her about how she appears, and I'm making choices for her about her parents' lives being in the public record. And I think, to what everybody is saying, at a certain point, you have to own it. You have to own, I believe in this work of art. And so I am making these choices. And it's hard sometimes to say that. It's hard to -- it's hard to stay straight faced and say, I believe in this as art. But I think it's kind of all -- like, it was hard for me to vote for myself for student council in 5th grade, but then my friend was like, "Well, why the fuck are you running if you don't think you should be on student council?" And I was like, okay, yeah, I guess I do think I should be on student council. You know? And then I lost. But I think you at certain point have to believe enough in the thing you're doing. And with this project, I -- sometimes when I get up in my head about what it is or what it means to put it in the world, I try to actually just -- I -- really what works best is reading other people's work and being like, I'm so glad this person put this in the world. And that's true for all of you in my relationships to your work, but also, kind of come back to the pages and be like, these pages know something about what they're doing. And I want to trust that. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Absolutely. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: I love that. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Can I glean one little other like side tidbit off of what you just said, which is if you hadn't voted for yourself and you'd lost, you would have been worried that maybe that was the vote the whole time, and that would have just eaten you up inside. So it's good that you had your own back in that way. >> Leslie Jamison: I think it was clear to everybody that it was a landslide. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: All right, listen, I mean, I knew that was going to be the answer. But, like, yeah, no, no, yeah, yeah. >> Leslie Jamison: No, it's a good point. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: No, I think there is something about showing up for yourself. I just like -- I'm going to keep it real quick because I'm not a parent, but I do write about my nieces and nephews a lot. And so for me, the big thing one very early on is I made a couple of mistakes. I'm just going to own it. I was younger, and I wrote a couple of things. And again, we're a New England family, and it took a year before my brother was like, "By the way, hated that." And I was like -- and it hadn't even -- at that point, it hadn't even crossed my -- that was -- it didn't feel -- but then I was like, oh, this is a giant part of their life. And I used it for a paragraph. And that's when I realized, okay, these are people that I need to be in communication with. And the way that I do that one is, of course, I'm talking to them more whenever their children or they themselves are being written about. But more than that, it is, I'm like, if I'm going to write about being an uncle, I need to be showing up and being an uncle. I need to be spending time with these children in a way that doesn't feel like I'm just like, hanging out. They did something cute. Talk to you guys later. See you at Thanksgiving. Like it's very important to me to actually have real, whole relationships with this -- it gets back to your original point, Chloe, which is, we're only sharing a percentage on the page. And so whatever I'm sharing on the page, I want to make sure that I'm living a much fuller life and being a much bigger part of their lives than that, and that I'm having these types of conversations that we're having right now, where if they do get to a certain age, they're going to read this book, and I need -- it's on me, it's on my own. It's to sit down and say, the whole wood log, like, look, this is just a little thing that I made out of these things. Let me tell you the much larger story about our very complex, but still very loving family. >> Ashley C. Ford: Yeah. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: We -- I think that gets back to, you know, one of the things I was saying at the beginning of this question, is like, what I was calling a rationalization, but you guys are fortifying this for me, so now I feel like better about it. But just that question of is art worth it? Right? Like is art worth the risks that we take when we write about ourselves or other people? And I feel like a lot of what I'm hearing you guys say, and I feel this myself, is, I think it held me to a very high standard. Like, I wanted what I wrote to be worthy of my life, but also worthy of Wolfgang's life and worthy of my parents' life regardless of my closeness to them. So that, I think, is a power. Like, when you take on that responsibility, it can be a really powerful thing that can transform your own writing as well. And so, we're running low on time, but just as a last question before we get to audience questions, is sort of in that vein of holding yourself to the highest standards. I think even within that, there are always moments where maybe something is kind of hard to put on the page, or you kind of feel yourself dancing around something, or there's a certain scene of emotional vulnerability that feels difficult to write. Or maybe your first draft kind of glosses over things. I wondered, one, if you've had that experience, if you look back at the work that you did and it went well, that one was really hard to write. I had to write that a couple of times. And two, when you hit those moments in your writing of resistance, how do you break through it? And do you have any like good accountability partners that help you sort of push through moments where you might be pulling your punches or playing into persona so much that you're not telling an emotional truth. >> Ashley C. Ford: I always -- I wish I had like a writing group or something. I always wanted something like that. I've never had it. But I have a really awesome husband who is an amazing reader and editor who is one of the most well-read people I've ever met. And it really helps, at times, to have his perspective on things because he thinks -- I tend to go deep into the place of the personal, very, very much so. And I can get really wild with my emotions on the page for a while. And he's really good at helping me find the point of my feelings and what I'm trying to say and what it relates to and where that comes from. And that's amazing. But I mean, it's always hard. Like I come to places -- I found that the places where it was hardest to write when I was working on my memoir were the places where I understood that a situation was painful but I had not actually sat with the pain. And I was coming up against these moments where I'm like, why can't -- like I'm writing about it, but it doesn't sound right, it's not coming out the way I thought it would. It's kind of hard to fill out the experience of what I'm trying to convey. And I'm sitting there wondering like, what's wrong with me? Maybe I'm a fraud, maybe I'm a bad writer, maybe books are trash and I need to run away and hide in a river. And then you're like, wait, all that's wrong, all that's wrong. Let me start from the beginning. And really it came to finding out like, yeah, you -- it's really hard to write about how you felt about that because you've only ever thought about it, you haven't felt about it, you haven't let yourself do that yet. So I was trying to finish my book and was coming up against that really hard. And I went away, I went to a place I call trauma camp. That's not the real name of it, but I went to trauma camp. And I essentially, while I was there, figured out how to communicate with myself about things that I was really trying hard, in a myriad of just destructive and constructive ways, trying to avoid what was going on inside me. And I think it really comes down to, in a lot of cases, for writers and people in general that at some point in our lives, we get taught that we are not allowed to have experiences that we're already having. If somebody says, you're not allowed to be mad in my house, that doesn't mean you don't have anger. It means you don't know how to express your anger in your house. And so you get to be 30 something years old and you come to a place where what you really are trying to write about is the fact that you're mad. You're mad about this, you're mad about that. You actually deserve this, and you never got this, and you're angry, and you want to write about it, and you can't find a way in because you don't even know what it's like to actually look your anger in the face. You've always been like, no, I don't have time for that. I'm not allowed to do that. That makes me bad. That makes me wrong. That hurts people. I used to think that me having anger hurt other people just in my body. Just because I am angry in my body, someone else must be in pain. And learning how to just let that be my own thing, how to own it, essentially, I think, is what helped me. And that's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of work. It's not, you know, like you know. It's like if you're having a panic attack, bite into a lemon. That helps. If you are trying to write a book, you know, it's different. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Yeah. Well, I want to hear your answers, but just so you know, we do have some audience questions now. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: All right. I'll try to keep it brief. I've got a much longer version of the story. But just know, much like yourself, I don't have a writing group. But what I do have is an incredible writing community. And I have so many people, many of which are on the stage, who helped me make this book happen and where I learned that at a very young age of 23, I found myself in a writing center. It's 826 Valencia. It's in San Francisco, but you have an 826 here in NYC. It's a creative writing center for kids. I didn't really know it was for kids when I first walked in, but that's a whole-ish story. And so I was asking a question, and it was -- there were all these pieces of paper line along the wall that were framed, and I was like, what are those? And they're like, oh, each of those are printed out pages that are covered in pen or pencil markings to show the kids that writing while very much a solo art form, if you give your writing to somebody you trust or somebody you love, it can be an editor or a teacher, a volunteer, right, here at the center, a family member, anything, they can give you feedback. You don't have to take all of it, but if you take some of that feedback in, it will help you make your writing better. And the more you practice your writing, the better you will get, which is the first time I was 23 years old that I felt writing could be craft. Up until that point, again, I won't tell you the long version of the story, but I just thought it was a gift from God. And so that was -- I was 23 years old, and I was like, yeah, we should teach 8-year-olds this. And it was the first time I realized that like wait, maybe I could learn how to be better at this craft by sharing my work with other people. And so that has become such an important part of the process for me, is like getting smart people to read my work and give me that feedback that will make my writing better. >> Leslie Jamison: Yeah, I'll keep this so brief. I see there's a whole stack. And you said you were going to -- you said you were going to choose, like, the sauciest. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Yeah, I'm trying to look for the either the meanest or the sexiest question. But you go ahead. >> Leslie Jamison: I guess, yeah, I mean, I would just say that I too have -- you know, so I have readers where I feel like when you said the word accountability, I was thinking about the way that one of the greatest gifts that readers give me, whether they're people I've been friends with for 20 years or editors I've been working with for a long time, is like seeing past the veneer of a pretty sentence to withholding, to kind of this -- like I think often, polish and withholding go hand in hand. Where there's a way that sometimes -- and you're actually so great about this in the beginning of your book as like where you know you have this killer opening sentence and you give it to us and it's so fucking good. And it's like, oh, man, this is the best opening sentence. But then you come back to it over and over again and think about the ways that you've deployed it in anecdotes, what does it mean, that this is -- you enact on the page what it means to sort of break open the great line and find what's messy in there and even more truthful. And so I think readers deliver me to that imperative to break open and to be specific as many times as I tell my students, be specific, be specific, I need people to say it to me. My editor, I would talk about fighting with my boyfriend in The Recovering. You know, and my editor was like, look, we need to see these fights. Don't tell us -- don't use the word fight ever again. You're not allowed to use the word fight. But I thought -- I thought, who wants -- who wants to read me and my boyfriend fighting about whether or not he was flirting at a party? And the truth is, there are a lot of people who maybe didn't want to read that, you know? But nobody was getting anything from the kind of vague, unspecified version. And the truth is, everybody's fights feel banal. Whatever thing I was constructing in my head where other people over there were having relationship arguments that felt really profound, where like the deepest terms of human experience and intimacy were explicitly on display over and over again. It's like, you know, everybody is fighting about flirtation, time, chores you know, who -- and when you could get at the way that the kind of mundane terms of the argument are holding everything else, are holding each person's deepest selves, like that's where writing actually gives us the depth through the kind of grain of the particular. But I needed to be -- I needed to be told that it wasn't working how it was before I could kind of like swallow my own vomit enough to write it how it needed to be written. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: I love that. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah, sorry. Yes. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: These are great. Oh my gosh, we have so many good questions. We have so many good questions here. This is an amazing audience. Okay, so here's one that I think is wild and really important question. So it says -- >> Isaac Fitzgerald: What about sexy? Where does it rank on the sexy scale? >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Well, should I start with the sexiest? Should I save the sexiest question for last? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah, for the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Okay. I know exactly which one it is. So this question, I think, is really powerful. So this person says, you know, when young people, especially are in traumatic situations, they can feel gaslit and deny this feeling of you know, what's real. And it's really connected to actually what Ashley was just talking about. So they say, when writing your memoir, did you explore other memoirs to learn how to believe in yourself, and did you seek outside sources with literature, maybe, I mean, Ashley talked about, you know, this other sort of outside sources, but maybe just within literature like to learn how to believe in yourself and not gaslight yourself, or I think another way of thinking about that is, like, the tradition that your work comes out of. Did you seek that tradition in order to maybe find the best version of your story? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah, I feel like I haven't done one first yet, so I'll just do it because I feel like I keep putting you on the spot. A hundred percent. I mean, in a way, I'm going to just tie it to the first question, too, which I never really got to the NYPL thing. Like I was raised with books. I was raised in the library. I was in Boston. I grew up in an unhoused situation, and like the Boston Public Library was a second home to me. It was my cathedral. It was everything. And librarians and booksellers through my whole life have really helped me out. And that's the same as here of NYPL. In Boston, they have these two statues of ladies in the front, and I would pretend that they're my mom's. We don't need to talk about that here with the whole me going to therapy thing. But I remember the first time I saw the NYPL, it was like a big trip for me. And I was a little -- I like -- it just made me feel so small, but it felt so grandiose. And those two lines, again, they couldn't really be my mom's, but I was like, very -- I was like, two things again that are very cool, and I'm very into this. So like, the NYPL, especially has always been such a sacred space, and I love that building so much, and I love that they have this new building here. But books, 100% were my guiding light. If anything, it was -- it was the way that me and my parents spoke with one another. Even during our hardest years, we could always talk about what we were reading. And so I tried very hard not to write this book, like I said before. I was -- the book that I sold had nothing to do with this. And then two years of like flip flopping around, finally I called my editor and I was like, I think I have to write about my childhood. And she's like, yeah, I've been waiting for you to figure that out. We didn't need your essay on Star Wars. That went on for three pages about your dad. Anyways, I recognized that by writing what I was trying not to write, by looking at the things straightforwardly that I was not trying to look at, that that's what I needed to do. And I knew I needed help, and I needed like maps to how to get there. And one of the books that was so instrumental to me that I came to in my 20s was Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which truly you want to talk about seeing yourself on the pages. Like -- the book -- I'm dirtbag master, she's like -- come on, like obviously, like the influences are clear. But he very much was living in Boston unhoused situation that he was volunteering at. I'm pretty sure, and Nick and I have now met, we've become friends. Like, I'm pretty sure we've been in the same rooms when I was a much younger person, actually. But through that book, I got to see the way that he grappled with his own family trauma. He grappled with his own generational trauma. He grappled with the drugs and the alcohol abuse that was happening. And it gave me permission, you know? I don't know if I was gaslighting myself that much, but I really do believe that what we just did was we just didn't talk about it. We tried to get as far away from the stuff as possible without recognizing it at all. And by seeing it down there on the page, I was like, wait, there are ways to explore this. You don't just have to put the bad things as far in the rear-view mirror as you can and just hope to get away from them. Actually, by facing them, you will actually maybe be able to, like I said, be having some of the conversations I'm having with my family now. >> Leslie Jamison: Well, I'm really curious, actually, to hear both Ashley and Chloe's response. I guess the quick thing I'll say is, I think one of the ways that other texts have been really guiding lights for me is also in terms of form and structure. I mean, in addition to the kind of content of reckoning with stories and looking always for more complicated versions of the truth. That like I'm thinking about a book like Sarah Manguso's The Two Forms of Decay, or even like, Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. Like the Two Forms of Decay like has a lot of short fragments that felt -- even though the content of that book is really different from the one I'm working on now, I felt there was something about those fragments. I mean, like, every 21-year-old writer and everybody they know is inspired by the form of the fragment. But I guess what I loved about those fragments has to do with what you were saying about partiality, Chloe, when you're talking about writing about people in your life, there was something about just telling these searing pieces of the story that admits in the very structure like, this is only part of what happened, but there's some truth to be found in these parts of what happened. So fragmentation was formally really useful for me. Like, Terese Marie Mailhot's book, Heart Berries was really important to me, and for a lot of reasons, including even stuff that nobody really talks about, like her syntax. She'll often have these short, staccato sentences where she doesn't have a lot of conjunctions between them. There's not a lot of and, but. She's not telling you how to think about these things in relation to each other. She is putting them in relation to each other, and asking you to hold like multiple, often difficult truths at once. And there were some of that syntax I found so powerful and so freeing. So there's this way that how writers like, the form of how writers are getting at their truth is often really just kind of sets me on fire in the writing process, too. >> Ashley C. Ford: I really liked books that took the childhood experience seriously. That was really important to me. So reading, I know why the Cage Bird Sings. Rereading that by Dr. Maya Angelou. Even going back to some children's books that I loved when I was a kid. One of them being Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold, which is a picture book. But what I loved about all those books growing up and what I continue to love about memoirs, when the childhood is really like a prominent part of the memoir, is that it takes the childhood seriously. It takes the experience seriously, it takes their thoughts seriously, their analysis seriously, because it is serious. I mean, I think for some reason, a lot of people have in their heads that like a kid turns 18 and somebody hits reset, and like now, you can relate to them as an adult, and whatever happened in their childhood is like, well, that was childhood, and it doesn't count anymore, it doesn't matter anymore. But that happened to your body while you were in your body. No matter what it was, it will always be inside you. It will always live inside you. And if you don't take your childhood experience seriously, then your child self really, I mean, I guess, inside of you, will be really loud about that in one way or another. And that's not always external, it's not always destructive. Sometimes it's picking things apart from the inside. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Well, in the spirit of childhood, my child, Wolfgang, we have a late question from him. So we'll just -- do we want to know a Wolfgang one now? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: He says, did you make any long-term friends through the writing world? >> Ashley C. Ford: At least one [brief laughter]. No. I have, yeah. Roxanne, Isaac, Saeed, just so many people. Angel, Shira, like I'm friends with a lot of poets, which is wild because I can't write a poem to save my life. I married a poet. Yeah. I mean, the literary community has, in a lot of ways, become my found family. And the people who I end up trusting to take care of me the most, because they're the people who have taken care of me the most in a lot of cases. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: His follow up question is who among those friends have influenced your book the most? >> Ashley C. Ford: Probably Roxanne, for sure. >> Leslie Jamison: Yeah, I mean, great question, Wolfgang. And I think -- yeah, I mean, one of the things that has --I too have made I mean, so many of my closest friends are writers or people I've met somehow through writing. And that feels just like Grace and Mona and all good things. And one of the things, especially, I think, in the work that all of us do, where there's such a strong relationship between art and life, I find it so valuable and sustaining to have friends reading my manuscript who have been close friends for 20 years because they have been with me in the experiences that I'm writing about. And they're also amazing craftsmen, so they're able to hold all the parts. Like they're able to hold like, this is something I remember from when you were going -- or like when the therapist was like, well, when you talked about that, you actually said it this different way. And you're like, oh, fuck you're right. Like, you remember this actually better and differently than I do. Friends who are writers are able to bring that sort of knowledge, but they're also really able to engage with the work as work because they're craftsman, too. So they're not sort of just reading it as if it was a diary entry and only responding to the kind of humanity of it. And that bothness, like that bothness of mind, is just such a -- it's like there's no way to come by it except 20 years of friendship, I think. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Now flipping it on you. You got to answer. Come on. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: I mean, you, you've been a great friend and support to me. I'll use this opportunity to give a little plug for my friend who has a book coming out in September. But I think 1 of the -- the very first person before my editor, anybody, to read my book, and then I was the first person to read her book is Rachel Aviv, who I think is one of the smartest, most talented humans alive. She's a senior staff writer for The New Yorker, and she is prolific in a way I don't understand. And her book is incredible. She has a book coming out in September 13th called Strangers to Ourselves by FSG. And I was very, very scared to show anybody my book. I have a tendency to want to like hold everything very close. I didn't let my husband read it. Nobody. And then Rachel, because she was -- we were on sort of similar timelines, she had not let anybody read hers. And we sort of -- we did this exchange. But I also did a really terrible thing in this exchange, which is she emailed me her entire book. I knew I was the first person to read it. I got so excited because I just love her mind so much that I just opened it immediately and read it over the course of like 4 or 5 days. But I didn't respond to her or text her. So I wasn't like, "I got it. Can't wait to read." I just started reading it. I was just -- and then I felt like I was just with her, talking to her. And so then like, you know, a week or two later, I was like, oh my God, I read your book. It's amazing. And she was like, this is really mean because she was like so stressed, and she like -- she thought maybe I had just not cared, or I don't know what she was worried about. So that was a learning moment for me. If someone -- if your friend sends you your book, you should just say like, yay, I don't know. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Got it. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: But it was really because I was so obsessed with it and it's brilliant and everyone should buy it and read it when it comes to it out next month. >> Leslie Jamison: Can I add something quickly? I don't know if you guys agree, but I actually think the worst possible thing to say is like to say I've started reading your book and then to drop off. Because it's like, then you know -- because it's somehow like thinking, well, they just haven't started. But when they pick it up, it's going to be like somewhere that state of suspension that I'm like, just say nothing or say that you read it in a single 24 hours period because you couldn't put it down. And tell me nothing else. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: I know, you're totally right. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: But I started in 3 months. All right, listen, I'm going to give my time just because I know -- but come on, we can do a final round. Sexy question. Is this the sexy question? >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Last question, sexy question. I'm going to answer first because I have an answer. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Here we go. Let's go right down the line. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: In the last issue of The Drift, author's weight in on the state of autofiction. What is your hot take? Here's my hot take. Autofiction is memoir written by weenies. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Well, that's like a real -- that was like -- [ Laughter ] >> Chloe Cooper Jones: That's my hot take. It's memoir written by weenies. I just say that -- I mean, just because I wanted to call my memoir a novel, because that would be easy. And I also wanted to call it like, things I'm just thinking about, because there's something like the word memoir, it's like it carries a lot of like stigma, I think, actually. Like people have a lot of expectations that they bring to it. I sort of was afraid of how I would be -- you know, there's just like -- it's sort of a debased genre in some ways. And I was afraid of all of that. And I really just was like, I can easily call this a novel because like all these other people are doing it when I know it's just your life. But then I thought like, okay, I want to write something about disability and about my experience with a challenge in my own internal life and in life of my family. And I thought the thing I'm the most desperate for is for this to be resonant with other people and for it not to actually be about me, but to be about like an experience that anybody could relate to. So the more layers of artifice that I put between myself and the reader, I thought that was a disservice to this particular book. My honest opinion is like autofiction is its own thing and it's fine. But what do you think? Do you agree? >> Isaac Fitzgerald: No. I'm not coming to -- listen, you're out here fighting the streets. I'm going to be much more diplomatic. No, but hang on. We said we're going to go down the line. >> Leslie Jamison: Oh, my God. All right. I was hoping you forgot that you said that. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: No, I did not. >> Leslie Jamison: Yeah, I mean, I think -- I guess I feel like -- I guess I feel grateful that autofiction somehow gave like a serious or rigorous name to like essentially but what has been happening always and of course at the center of fiction. But I feel like there used to be this like low level slash I guess explicit, high-volume shame attached to like writing fiction that was close to your life, which is connected to the shame of writing personally at all, which is like, okay, we just didn't have enough imagination to venture beyond your life. I mean, all the kind of shaming that happens especially of women around personal writing has also attached to fiction that stayed close to it. So if it took a couple of men writing close to their lives to come up with this name, autofiction, which I know is what applies to Rachel Cusk too, but yeah, sort of rigorous redeemable category, great. But the truth is is like writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, can work so beautifully and productively with the materials, what we lived. And like so we needed that term to, I don't know, come to accept that. Fine, you know. But it's been true the whole time. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Totally agree. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: I feel like I've got the weakest argument up here. I'm following just like you all coming out here swinging and I'm just like, everyone get along. Surprising no one. No. So here's my real -- like because here's the thing. Like a lot of the books that I love, a lot of the novels that I love, would definitely fall under this label, autofiction. So I got to be honest, I think I'm kind of a fan of autofiction and I do appreciate and like it's going to sound awkward after all the very smart things you just said, but it's actually not surprising as I think about it. I think I still just carry that shame. Like I actually have internalized that shame and maybe I should work on it. But truly in my mind, like somebody is like, well, you could have just fictionalized this. And I'm like, nah. Because nonfiction, I love writing nonfiction because it feels like it's copying the world to me. Like it feels -- like that's what non -- autofiction is like, I do have to use my imagination a little bit. And I'm like, I don't know if I got that in me, maybe I need to like work on my self-esteem a little bit. But personally, I love memoir. I love writing nonfiction because I'm working with materials that exist in the world. I know I could do that for autofiction. But even the idea -- I'm just going to say this real quick. I had to change the names of the people in this book. If you knew the original names of the people in my book, the book would improve by at least 10%. The names were so good. Like I'm not going to like name full name, but just know that there was like, maybe the mildly racist and the last name was Pickett. Like how am I going to -- but I can't make that any better. So I had to change them and now they're all like John McMurphy. And like -- so I just don't have the imagination. Anyway, sorry. >> Ashley C. Ford: I -- it was really important for me to write my book as a memoir because I knew that partly why I wrote the book, was for the child version of me, and the child version of me desperately wanted to read this book as somebody's life and not as just a story that somebody had imagined. Otherwise, I don't think about autofiction. I'm sure -- I don't. I'm sure I read autofiction like and I read all kinds of stuff. I read a lot, but I don't -- I've never really been one to like sit and think about like what do I think about the existence of autofiction? It's like I don't give a shit. Like, how do I care about the existence of gray hair? It's going to be there. You know what I mean? And I'm sure it can be beautiful. I'm sure some people love it. I'm sure some people hate it. It's inevitable. It's something that's there. But I don't -- there are things that I don't think about a whole lot. Sometimes I feel like as a writer, I feel bad because people want you to have opinions about really specific things and you can be smart enough to come up with an opinion. But then I always feel like I'm lying because I'm like I can come up with an argument. But actually, if I'm being honest with you, I don't care. I just don't care. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Well, that's a perfect note to end on. [ Applause ] I just want to thank everyone who came and our hosts at the New York Public Library. All of our books are for sale right outside and we're going to be here to sign them if you want to, or if you want to hang out with us. So thanks again. And that's it. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Give yourselves a round of applause. Come on, clap it up for the New York Public Library. Ashley C. Ford. Leslie Jameson. Chloe Cooper Jones. [ Applause, Multiple Speakers ] >> Ashley C. Ford: He's not the host. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: I like to be loud. >> Ashley C. Ford: He can't help. It's the best. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Yeah, I knew you couldn't. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: Thank you. >> Chloe Cooper Jones: Thank you. >> Ashley C. Ford: Thank you. >> Isaac Fitzgerald: I got to run, and I'll be right back.