Elizabeth Mosier

About My Life as a Girl:

Q: How much of My Life as a Girl is based on events in your own life?

A:  Like Jaime Cody, I grew up in Arizona and attended Bryn Mawr, which I felt would literally save my life: transform me from a smart girl with a romantic weakness for bad boys into a scholarly woman of substance. I also drew upon some of my job experiences: waiting tables at many different kinds of restaurants and cleaning hotel rooms at a resort hotel.  For about a week between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I worked two waitressing jobs, as Jaime does.  At one of them, the manager asked me to hem my uniform to a skimpy length.  When he kept insisting, I quit.

Fortunately, I wasn’t as desperate for money as Jaime is; my parents sacrificed to put me through college, while I worked for spending money.  Jaime’s situation grew out of my desire to write about the compromises young women are often faced with making in order to become independent.  The story began with the question, “What if?” What if Jaime’s father, who is supposed to support her on her path to independence, instead steals her means of getting there?  How would her choices be different from mine?

Q: Is Jaime Cody’s first romance story modeled after your own?  Did you know a boy like Buddy Holt when you were a teenager?

A:  Buddy Holt was not my first love, but I knew many boys like him, who because of divorce or neglect or abuse were damaged in some way, dropped without a safety net.  Some of these boys played at being bad; some truly were.  I suppose that, in creating Buddy’s character, I’m still trying to understand these boys, and maybe to express a wish that they somehow survived.

Q:  How do you keep in touch with what teenagers are thinking and feeling?  Do you have teenagers read your work before it’s published to get their feedback?

A:  First, I trust my own memories — and if memory fails, I consult the journals I kept back then.  My parents kept the letters I sent them from college, for example, and these helped me to conjure Jaime’s freshman year in My Life as a Girl.  Some things have changed drastically since I was a teenager — clothing, slang, technology — and some things not much at all.  When I’m unsure of a detail, I consult my students. 

About Writing:

Q: How old were you when you decided you wanted to be a writer?

A: As a girl, I talked about being a veterinarian, a psychologist, even a professional softball player — I think because the paths to those careers seemed more straightforward, less potentially tragic.  I had read many biographies of women writers — Louisa May Alcott, Dorothy Parker, Shirley Jackson, Lillian Hellman, Sylvia Plath — which seemed to equate being a writer with being poor, unhappy or crazy.  But whenever I actually tried to picture my adult life, I saw myself sitting at a desk in front of a window, writing.  Making a life as a writer is complicated — but writing is as simple as sitting at a desk in front of a window, fingers on the keyboard, as I do today.  That vision is part of what has kept me going.

Q: How did attending Bryn Mawr, a women’s college, influence your writing?

A:  As a reader, I’ve noticed that boys’ stories are considered classic, while girls’ stories are often marginalized, genre, “young adult”.  At Bryn Mawr, I was surrounded by amazing protagonists, who had more going on than what to wear to the prom.  The experience taught me to think of girls’ stories as classic, and women’s lives as central.

Q: You’ve taught creative writing to high school and college students.  Do you find any of your own lessons useful in terms of your own work?

A: My mantra with students is, “It’s just a draft!” I encourage them to be fearless in revising their essays and stories and poems.  You must be willing to write a bad draft in order to write a good one, and you must be willing to revise until time’s up — and then to let go of your work.  For me, releasing my work to an editor marks the real beginning: the opportunity to “re-see” the material, imagine a different path, even a different destination.

Q: What steps did you take to become a published author?

A:  I wrote.  I wrote in my journal, I wrote poems and stories for school and magazine contests, I wrote wildly exaggerated letters home from camp or vacation or college.  At Bryn Mawr, I wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper, the first time I’d risked exposing my ideas to a smart and vocal audience I’d have to face in class or in the dining hall.  That was a good experience; it taught me that writing isn’t meant to be a private monologue, but a public conversation.

After college, I worked for a magazine in New York, and began taking fiction workshops in the evenings at The Poetry Center.  After the workshop ended, I continued to exchange work with three of the women I met there.  Especially when you’re a beginner, it’s so important to have people who are waiting to read your work and who understand why anyone in their right mind would devote so much time and energy to finding the right words to describe experience.  With my group’s help, I finished enough stories to apply to graduate school, and had already published several stories when I was admitted into the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

In graduate school, I finished a collection of short stories and discovered a new way of reading (to learn from writers I admired) and of writing (every day, no matter how busy I was or how uninspired I felt).  My advisors taught me so much about the writing life — most importantly that, as with any job, you have to show up or you’ll be fired.  And that if you practice consistently, you’ll get better — maybe even so skillful as to make all the hard work of writing seem effortless.

Q: What is the best advice you can give teenagers who wish to become published authors?

A: Write.  Read constantly and critically — learn to articulate what you like and why.  Find encouragement wherever you can.  Set goals for yourself.  Focus on the process, the satisfaction of capturing a character or making a scene come right, not on becoming rich or famous.  (Of course, I didn’t listen when my teachers gave me this advice.  I was too busy imagining what I’d wear to my book-signing party.)