(the looking for love part), an audio documentary by Andy Miles (2005)

Please note: The audio documentary can be heard via the audio players below.

Introduction

In 1998 the author Jennifer Beth Cohen embarked on a fateful adventure, seeking love and livelihood in Moscow. She found both, if only fleetingly. What transpired over the course of a year would become the agonizing substance of her first book, the coming-of-age memoir Lying Together: My Russian Affair.

Cohen, a native New Yorker, returned to Manhattan in 1999 where she immersed herself in the painstaking work of recounting her personal and professional saga in the pages of a tell-all memoir. Terrace Books, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, published the book in 2004.

It doesn’t bother me so much, the strangers. It’s the acquaintances that’s a little scarier. My colleagues reading about me being on antidepressants or sexual relationships I had — those aren’t things you normally talk about at work, ever. But the thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I realized: everybody at work has their skeletons. It’s pretty obvious; we know that. The only difference is, I’ve put mine in a book and it’s available to everyone.  — Jennifer Beth Cohen

On the eve of Lying Together’s commercial release last September, sound producer Andy Miles had a chance meeting with the author in a Washington, D.C. bookstore. He quickly recognized — in both the book and its first-time-published author — the compelling stuff of documentary and went to work on what would become (the looking for love part).

The documentary charts a sequence of events that took place over six years, from the decision Cohen made to go to Russia, in search of the perfect man and the perfect career, to the decision by Terrace Books to publish her manuscript. Examining both the writing and the selling of the book, (the looking for love part) interjects the comments of Cohen, her friends, family and associates close to the memoir.

I knew a great deal of what was happening while this experience in her life was going on. And to read about it many years later is not as overwhelming for me in any respect as it was while this extraordinary experience was going on for her — because there were moments that I was fearful for her. And she came out in an extraordinary way. — Sue Cohen, the author’s mother

Production of the documentary occurred between September 2004 and February 2005. Interviews were conducted in Washington, D.C., New York and New Jersey between September and December.

The story

Eager to find the perfect man, the perfect job, in 1998 Jennifer Beth Cohen saw the opportunity to combine passionate romance with a passionate career. She jumped at it. Headlong.

Dispatched to Russia to produce a TV tabloid exposé on the international sex trade, Cohen reconnected with Kevin Dillard, a college acquaintance whom she hadn’t seen since 1992. They had met the final semester of Cohen’s senior year, two Russophiles in a cozy independent seminar. As they pored over and pondered the great works of Russian literature, the two formed a spirited bond.

Their flirtations confined within a fleeting friendship, Cohen’s dormant interest in Dillard was dramatically revived six years later when she found herself looking for a production assistant in St. Petersburg. Through one form or another, Cohen, who lived in New York, had kept apprised of Dillard’s professional and geographic whereabouts; she figured his various connections as a Russian news correspondent would prove useful in the trafficking piece.

[Jennifer Cohen, reading from Lying Together]  “I would be dishonest if I said that when I first contacted him, it was only about work. A part of me, a very conscious part (the looking for love part), was curious to check in on his marital status, his emotional status, his potentially latent interest in me. I could have chosen to hire any number of journalists I knew in Russia. I chose Kevin.”

She e-mailed him the 20th of January. He replied, immediately. Within an hour Dillard was disclosing a scandalous “tip” implicating a high-level State Department official in alleged escapades with a Russian prostitute. He promised a pilfered credit card receipt as evidence. Cohen was hooked, turned on by the “potent aphrodisiac” of her erstwhile classmate’s “journalistic prowess.

She flies to St. Petersburg. Within weeks she’s quit her job in New York, they’ve moved in together in a dreary Moscow flat. He proposes marriage. She accepts. They set a date: October 31st, Halloween.

When that date arrives Cohen is flying home to New York, an incontinent cat in tow. Her relationship, like the fragile Russian economy, has collapsed. Dillard’s ongoing bout with alcohol and depressants has turned violent, self-destructive. Cohen is only visiting New York, too fearful of the reactions of friends to move back.

[Jennifer Cohen, reading from Lying Together]  
“I imagine walking down Broadway and bumping into an old friend; I imagine that typical "what’s up?” conversation, and I know I can’t face it. I can’t face the people who will say, “I told you so.” I can’t give them the satisfaction. Or maybe I just don’t want to admit that they were right. I want to believe that I did the right thing, chasing my fantasy, chasing this unknown.“

Lacking a support network and unable to find a psychiatrist in Moscow, Cohen began to recount her turbulent Russian romance in the pages of a diary. She soon recognized the literary potential of her diary meditations and began preparing a manuscript.

Eventually Cohen moved back to Manhattan, joined a writing group, turned out fresh drafts and countless revisions for the better part of a year.

Writing group moderator Victoria Rowan:

"She was absolutely committed to this as a story that she needed to get out and wanted to get out and felt had value, and she was absolutely disciplined and committed about it. You know, she made more classes than other people who were doing less things in their life. You know, she just really was dedicated.”

Cohen impressed literary agent Stephanie Kip Rostan with that same drive and determination. Rostan had just made the move from publishing house editor to agent. She took on Cohen as one of her very first clients.

[Stephanie Kip Rostan]   “I believed in the book from the beginning, but she was completely committed to it from the beginning, no matter what it took.

"She was always willing to do whatever she could to get the book published. First of all, she did these endless, endless revisions that I asked of her. She took a lot of criticism and worked really hard.

"The second part of that is the actual process of selling it, which we started out — we must have gone through three or four rounds of submission. There was some revision in between. She came very close a number of times.”

Rostan shopped the manuscript to publishing houses large and small. The rejection letters piled up.

[Stephanie Kip Rostan]   “Normally an author who had an experience like Jen, where we sent it out, sent it out again, they revised, they revised, they revised — normally they would give up. They would say, okay, I’m going to work on a new book. But with Jen she was just like keep going.

Around this time, Cohen reconnected with Michael Oko, a family friend with whom she’d spent a lost afternoon in Paris — adrift on a city bus as a teenager. As adults they had both become involved in television, Cohen working as a network news producer, Oko producing commercials and documentaries.

Cohen ran into Oko’s mother at a flea market. They talked. Mrs. Oko mentioned her son, her single son, who happened to be between jobs. Cohen contacted Oko, on a strictly professional basis. She didn’t find him a job, but they started dating. Soon they were engaged.

Michael Oko:

“I think every relationship, the person that you’re going out with tells you about past relationships. And it was pretty interesting in this case to not only be told about the past relationship but then to be told that she was actually writing a book about the past relationship, and so that definitely put a certain spin on things.

"But when Jen and I first started dating, which was a couple years ago, she had actually finished writing the book and she was trying to get it sold. And actually, any time I would ask her about the book, I could just say, ‘How’s the book going?,’ and suddenly she would well up with tears and just couldn’t even speak.

"The book business is a tough one; so you go from writing a book and finishing it and feeling very good about it to then getting an agent and trying to get it sold. And that’s a difficult process to go through.”

After the wide-distribution houses passed on the book, Cohen and Rostan focused their efforts on selling the manuscript to small and university presses.

[Stephanie Kip Rostan]   “You know, being published by a small press she was totally open to. As I said, she just wanted it published. But it was important to her to do it with some legitimacy and with somebody who was, you know, serious about it and it would be 'reviewable,’ and something she would feel proud of. So University of Wisconsin was a great — turned out to be a great place for her, because they’re small but they do have that prestige; they do get a lot of books reviewed.”

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin Press has been in the publishing business since 1936, issuing its first title a year later. Today the press has 1,400 titles in print, publishing and distributing more than 100 new books every year.

As Press acquisitions editor Raphael Kadushin paged through Cohen’s manuscript in the spring of 2002, he quickly recognized its potential as a “trade,” or general audience, release. Kadushin contacted Cohen. She had sold the book.

Jennifer Cohen:

“It’s interesting as a writer looking at the market out there and knowing that big presses don’t publish good books that often. I mean, they publish marketable books, and it’s really important that university presses and small presses are doing trade, doing memoirs and fiction and things that wouldn’t normally be a university publication, because otherwise some really fine literature won’t get published, period.”                                                                         

[Janet Leissner, introducing the author at the book launch]  “The first reviews are in — the San Francisco Chronicle, right? — and it’s a rave review.” [Applause.]

[Jennifer Cohen]   “When I told Janet I had written the book and she said, "Oh, we have to throw you a party,” I had no idea that this is what — I thought she meant she’d have some people over to her house for a little wine or something. I was just so blown away.

“And it’s interesting how people react. I mean, it’s, I guess, a really big deal to write a book, and maybe when you’re in the process of doing it it somehow stops seeming like such a big deal.”

On a warm night in mid-September 2004, the author’s family, friends and colleagues turned out at the Russia House cocktail lounge in Washington D.C., where Cohen now lives with husband Michael Oko, to launch Lying Together in style.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “The people who showed up at the party were all invited. And it was a mix; it was a mix of people from the CBS news bureau, some of whom I know very well and some who I don’t, you know, I pass in the halls. I don’t know, maybe they heard there was free vodka, but it was still very nice that they came.”[ Laughs.]

Cohen’s mother came down from New York City; her aunt surprised her by coming down from Vermont. Old friends and new friends gathered to mark the official release of Cohen’s memoir.

[Jennifer Cohen, speaking at the launch party]   “For actors, it’s the Academy Awards; that’s the big dream, right? And for writers, I think it’s the book party. [Laughter.] And I don’t think I could have ever wished for something this wonderful to happen.”

[Ari Goldman] “She was always a romantic. I remember her as being in love all the time.”

Columbia University journalism professor Ari Goldman:

“In the most wonderful way she is ready for adventure of all kinds — romantic, travel. She’s willing to take the plunge.”

The second child of a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Jennifer Cohen grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When it came time to study a foreign language in high school, Cohen chose Russian. She visited Russia in the waning days of the Soviet empire, working as a camp counselor in a Pioneer youth camp.

After completing a bachelor’s degree in Russian languages and literature, Cohen earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Ari Goldman was one of her professors.

[Ari Goldman]   “She was in my first class, and that’s a class you don’t forget. You remember your first class. I like to think I remember all my students, but I have a very, very vivid recollection of her. She was a young, lively, attractive student who was a real leader in the class. You know, you could see she was destined for great things.”

Following graduate school, Cohen took a job with “Good Morning America Sunday,” where a segment she worked on earned an Emmy Award. Cohen then took a job with the investigative unit of a long-running syndicated TV news magazine.

As the Monica Lewinksy scandal was breaking, Cohen was working up a source on a different story — the trafficking of sex slaves from the former Soviet Union into Brooklyn. The source, Kevin Dillard.

Cohen urged her boss, the investigative unit’s senior producer, to put her on the story. He wasn’t persuaded. He wanted her in Washington on the Lewinsky story.

[Jennifer Cohen, reading from Lying Together]   “Covering the president’s intoxication with an intern while working at a tabloid would be the end of any journalistic credibility I might have. All the years of graduate school and dues paying would be wasted. I would never emerge from the sensationalized trenches of tabloid TV. I had to save myself. I had to sell him the sex slaves.”

She sold him. She had that credit card receipt. Or at least Dillard had the receipt. Or at least he said he had the receipt — the one implicating the Clinton Cabinet official in alleged escapades with a Russian prostitute.

“Sex slaves trafficked into Brooklyn and proof of Clinton administration officials using taxpayer dollars to party with whores.” Those are Cohen’s words, the ones that got her to Russia.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “Given the circumstances, given where I was at in my life, the chance to jump at that relationship was really an exit strategy for me to try a whole new thing. And it wasn’t just about the relationship — and it’s pretty clear in the book — it was also about pursuing a different direction for my career. So I don’t regret it. ”

Sue Cohen, the author’s mother:

“The world looks very glamorous and exciting, and sometimes we make choices that get us into situations that are kind of above anything that we’re prepared to deal with. And the situation Jennifer found herself in was one that was extraordinary in all kinds of ways.”

[Jennifer Cohen]   “So many people say that they’re so impressed with how fearless I was, and you know, that even though it didn’t totally work out it was still a really amazing thing that I did it.”

Impressed in retrospect, but reactions at the time ran from dubious to deeply concerned.

When a friend suggested that Cohen slow down, take a deep breath, see Dillard in the context of the many would-be soul mates of her past, Cohen said it was different this time. She had no doubt he was the one.

When weeks later Cohen showed her parents a photo of the man she loved, her mother shrieked.

[Sue Cohen]   “The first time Jen — she had a photograph of him, I said, 'You have got to be kidding,” and that just came out of nowhere for me. So there was a part of me that kind of probably intuitively knew that this was really not the person that I had dreamt about for her.“

Months later, when Cohen, sobbing, told her parents the wedding had to be postponed, that she had concealed the truth of her fiancé’s condition, that he was drinking, entering rehab, that she was scared, they told her to come home immediately.

That night he slit his wrist in the bathtub. "Let me give you some advice,” he says to her. “Go home.”

[Sue Cohen]   “I knew a great deal of what was happening while this experience in her life was going on. And to read about it many years later is not as overwhelming for me in any respect as it was while this extraordinary experience was going on for her — because there were moments that I was fearful for her.”

[Jennifer Cohen, reading from Lying Together]   “Perhaps, I think, those women, the ones whose stories brought me here, the ones who answered innocent sounding classified ads, only to wind up in basement brothels, maybe I am not so different from them. Not to say that my fate is anything like theirs, but there certainly is a sort of wing-and-a-prayer factor at play, both for them and for me. On some level I admire their enthusiastic responses to the opportunities those ads promised, even if they (the women, not the ads) were tremendously naïve. And now, thinking about it, my heart breaks a bit at the tragic sense of trust that they had when they got on the plane. Think about it. How, when your trust is so dramatically abused, can you ever learn to trust anyone or anything again? And without trust, without the ability to jump on planes and fly off on wings and prayers, how can you go forward in life?”

[Jennifer Cohen]   “I did see some sort of vague parallels that still resonated with me. And it kind of makes me wonder, if I was — if I had been born in some small town in Ukraine and had no money and saw this ad, because of my nature to jump on a plane and go fly into the arms of a man I hadn’t seen, would I have been the kind of girl who would have answered one of these ads? You know, 'Waitress wanted in Paris.’ Maybe I would have been.”

As Cohen’s memoir took shape, she grappled with how much of herself, and how much of her family, she should reveal in the pages of a book. Agent Stephanie Kip Rostan recalls that in early drafts that she read, Cohen was reluctant to reveal too much.

[Stephanie Kip Rostan]   “She had really kept back a lot about herself and a lot about her parents and hadn’t really fleshed out that relationship. And I had so many questions when I read the story — like, well, what did they think about you running off to Russia to marry this guy? That’s part of the story. But it took her — she struggled with it a little bit before she got it out.”

[Jennifer Cohen]   “I guess I didn’t really think about in terms of my close friends and family reading it. It was more the world at large, and the world at large I’m anonymous; it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it matters but it doesn’t really matter quite as intimately as my parents and my family and my friends. And so when we came close to the publication date, I started freaking out — [laughs] — a little too late; the deal was done. And I’m thinking, why, why did I do this? Why this book? Why was this my first book? Why did I have to do it?”

Cohen’s husband Michael Oko:

“It’s a very personal book, and showing it to a large audience — I mean, she was terrified of what her friends’ reaction and her family — especially her parents, who are in the book, and you can’t disguise them too much, you know. They are who they are.”

Sue Cohen:

“It was Jennifer’s private, individual choice to write this book. We knew she was writing it and we would joke about that we would have to go underground after she published the book and change our names. And once I read the book, it was really not as upsetting as I had anticipated.”

[Jennifer Cohen ]  “My mom called me up having read it, when she read it. I didn’t even know she was reading it. I thought that they were just putting it off and putting it off. And she read the galley, and she called me up and she said: "You’re crazy. What were you so worried about? I loved this. This is wonderful.” She said, “I know this was your past; I know that your present is so much happier.” And it’s her past too, and so she can move on from it as well. And so she was able to read it and say this is a story, this is a coming-of-age story. And it has a happy ending. And I think the fact that it has a happy ending in real life makes it a lot easier for friends and family to read.”

[Sue Cohen]   "It was really a celebration of Jen that she could write this book and write it in the honest way that she wrote it.”

[Excerpt from “Eye on Books” radio interview]

[Bill Thompson]   I’m Bill Thompson with “Eye on Books.”

In early 1998 TV journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen was assigned to go to Moscow to track details of a story. Before going she launched an e-mail correspondence with a college friend who worked in Russia. And before long they fell in love and decided to marry. But that was before things started to unravel.

Cohen’s book is called Lying Together.

What inspired you to write this book?

[Jennifer Cohen]   Well, I didn’t start Lying Together as a book; I started it as sort of a diary. I was living in Moscow far away from my friends and family and some pretty bad things had happened to me and I needed an outlet. Couldn’t really find a psychiatrist …  

[End of excerpt.]

A couple days before the official release of Lying Together, Cohen did her first interview in the cozy Silver Spring, Maryland studio of Bill Thompson, the affable host of “Eye on Books,” a nationally syndicated author interview program that airs on more than 1,000 stations nationwide.

That was just the first of an impressive sequence of interviews Cohen had during the next two weeks, interviews that found her on live national television making unexpected, unscripted small talk in her rusty Russian with CBS weatherman Ira Joe Fisher, and trying to keep pace with the manic energy of morning drive-time radio.

But as a network news producer, Cohen’s accustomed to asking the questions, not answering them.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “I’m very used to interviewing people and I’m very used to selecting sound bites. And it is sort of a detriment because I am very aware of what I’m saying. You know, is that a good sound bite? Is that less than 15 seconds? You know, is it tight? Is it concise? Does it make sense? Is it pithy? And I’m trying not to think about that so much because it does make me nervous. 

"But then I also have the sort of pathetic thought of, 'What if he doesn’t like me?’ [Laughs.] I don’t know, it’s this sort of pathology I have; I need everyone to like me. And I was thinking this over my six-and-a-half-minute live interview with this man in Dallas, Texas, who I have no idea — I have no idea what he looks like, I don’t know how old he is; I know nothing except that he’s got this very fast, you know, cadence. I had never listened to the show before. And so it’s this weird vacuum. And yet I’m thinking, you know, I hope he likes talking to me. It’s crazy. [Laughs.] It’s totally crazy.”

At one point Cohen found herself defending choices she made in her book, and her life, to a prying, insistent New York City radio host. He seemed to be one of those “I told you” so voices she writes about with such trepidation in the book.

Cohen admits that when the book was first released she feared those reactions from readers and radio hosts alike. She was more concerned though about the judgment of her CBS colleagues — the people she’d see at the office every day.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “My colleagues reading about me being on antidepressants or sexual relationships I had — those aren’t things you normally talk about at work, ever. But the thing is, you know, the more I thought about it the more I realized, you know, everybody at work has their skeletons. It’s pretty obvious; we know that. The only difference is, I’ve put mine in a book and it’s available to everyone. But there’s nobody who can really cast a stone, or if they do they have no right to, because everybody has their story. Everybody has a story. And there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

Cohen is adamant that Lying Together is, at its heart, a true story. But parts of the memoir are, in fact, fictionalized. Time frames are changed, names are changed; some of the characters are composites of people she knew at the time.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “I changed things to make it a better read. It’s true.”

At a certain point though distinctions between fact and fiction begin to blur. Cohen says she’s reached a point where she’s sometimes not sure if parts of the memoir were fictionalized or real. Cohen remarked in a radio interview, “The funny thing about writing a memoir is, as true as it might be, it really becomes a story and it stops feeling like it was my life.”

[Jennifer Cohen]   “Except that every now and then my life creeps back into it. You know, somebody from my past will show up or call, and suddenly it’s real again.

"You know, part of the reason it doesn’t feel quite so real is because my memory of it is of course now so much more vivid than most of my life, because it’s sort of like when you’ve seen lots of photographs of a part of your childhood and so that’s what you remember. So because of that, because I’ve spent so much time thinking and pondering and talking about this part of my life, it’s sort of overly vivid, which makes it feel not real because real memories don’t feel that vivid.”  

As the first-person protagonist in her story has in some way become a separate character, Cohen says she feels a kind of powerless frustration in reading or thinking about the story.

[Jennifer Cohen]  “You know, I’ll read parts of it when I’m doing a reading or something — and I think what the hell was I doing? [Laughs.] Like, oh, my God, I can’t believe I really experienced that. And it’s sort of a very out-of-body thing. Like, did I really experience that?”

When Lying Together was released last September, Cohen expressed modest expectations for the book.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “I’m sort of afraid to say that I expect to sell this many copies, I expect to have this many decent reviews, I expect this, I expect that. I don’t. I hope that it does well. I hope I get some nice praise. I hope the numbers are pretty good.”

The book has far exceeded those expectations. The San Francisco Chronicle was the first major newspaper to weigh in, pronouncing the book “a quick, juicy read.”

[Jennifer Cohen]   “It was amazing. I mean, it’s like, 'Wow, it’s real; I mean, it’s really real. The 11th largest newspaper in the country wrote a review about it, I must be an author.’ [Laughs.] You know, it’s still sort of this 'pinch me.’”

The New York Times made the book an Editor’s Choice two weeks in a row, praising Cohen’s story as “simply riveting.”

Following her appearance on the CBS “Early Show,” Lying Together had a brief run as one of Amazon.com’s 100 best-selling titles. The University of Wisconsin Press quickly ordered a second printing.

[Jennifer Cohen]   “The book did so much better than I really ever thought it would. I mean, yeah, I had these crazy, wild dreams that it would be on 'Oprah’ and all of this, but those weren’t my realistic dreams. In my realistic dream scenario, you know, I thought well, maybe I’ll get a few kind of mixed reviews, you know, where we can pull out a few words and put them together. You know, "this … is … a … good … book,” you know. And in fact, there it was in The New York TimesEditor’s Choice two weeks in a row with this — some of the things she said I could put on my epitaph. I mean, they were pretty amazing.

“And so yeah, the numbers of the book — we’re not talking Clintonian memoir numbers here, and I haven’t made back the money that I paid for the publicist, but I’m very happy with it.”

Of course, it’s not over yet. Word of mouth on the book is strong; it continues to sell. Major publishing houses have expressed interest in acquiring the paperback rights. Cohen’s literary agents are shopping the book around Hollywood.                                                                  

A commercial paperback release, a movie version would no doubt give the book, and its author, a significantly higher profile, the sort of exposure a small university press typically can’t manage. But a small press has its advantages.

Press acquisitions editor Raphael Kadushin:

“I mean, we have a very different mentality from a lot of commercial presses where, you know, they put 90 percent of their marketing money behind 10 percent of the list. If a book doesn’t, you know, break, if there isn’t a huge review or great orders in the first month, they essentially just abandon it. We don’t do that.

"I mean, we really give a book time to sell. We keep it in print as long as we can. And that is one of the reasons more and more authors are coming to university and smaller presses, because they know that they’re going to get attention. They know that we’re going to keep the book in print and we’re going to, you know, try to keep selling it. And our most successful books have been books that have just gotten a succession of sort of boosts. I mean, the books that really do well have a series of lives.”

If Jennifer Beth Cohen’s life today is not exactly the makings of turbulent coming-of-age memoir, she’s in a happier, healthier place. She’s still looking for a fairy-tale ending, but she’s wise enough to know that the fairy-tale ending isn’t always the one you expect.

[Jennifer Cohen]  “In real life the fairy-tale ending is never quite as fairy tale-ish as it is in a movie, but it is a happy ending. I mean, it’s a happy ending in the book; it ends hopeful. And then in real life, you know, I went on and I actually met somebody who I love deeply who’s a much better partner for me, and we’ve established a life together now that is a lot saner and a lot healthier, and I’m very happy. And so that’s a happy ending, you know, in all sorts of ways. So, yeah.”

Cohen is currently working on a second book, a novel.

Credits

The documentary was researched, written, recorded, edited and narrated by Andy Miles.

He would like to thank The Cannanes (music), Jennifer Cohen, Joshua Dodge, Benson Gardner,  Yael Gen, The Great Depression (music), Angela Hauser, Ulrike Leis, Alexis O'Hara (music), Norm Stockwell, the University of Wisconsin Press, WORT Madison, and everyone whose voice is heard in the documentary.

                                                                
Excerpts from Lying Together: My Russian Affair by Jennifer Beth Cohen used by permission of the author and The University of Wisconsin Press; © 2004

Excerpt from Bill Thompson’s Eye on Books used with permission; © 2004

Music (in order of “appearance”)

The Cannanes, “Western Slowdown,” from the Slabco Records release Trouble Seemed So Far Away; composed by The Cannanes; © 2002

The Cannanes, “Radio Moscow,” from the Slabco Records release Trouble Seemed So Far Away; composed by The Cannanes; © 2002

The Great Depression, “Used to be Luke,” from the Teens on Teens Records release “Heaven Is Becoming”; composed by Todd Casper; © 1999

Alexis O'Hara, “Spaceship Matria,” from the Grenadine Records release “In Abulia”; composed by Alexis O'Hara; 
© 2002

Banner by Yael Gen Design.

Sources

The New York Times, September 26, 2004, Section 7, page 12, “Leaving St. Petersburg,” by Liesl Schillinger … Read

The San Francisco Chronicle,“ September 12, 2004; "Reviews in Brief: Lying Together,” by Tess Taylor … Read

Radio interview with Leonard Lopate, “The Leonard Lopate Show,” WNYC New York, broadcast September 20, 2004

Radio interview with Bill Thompson, “Bill Thompson’s Eye on Books,” recorded September 13, 2004 … Listen

Radio interview with Anne Strainchamps, “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” broadcast October 24, 2004

Interviews

The following is an interview with Jennifer Cohen conducted by Andy Miles, September 16, 2004, in the Washington, D.C. home of the author.  Please note: This interview can be heard via the audio player above.

AM  Writing the book is one thing, and then having people read it is another. But now that you’re going into this process of publicizing the book and talking about it in very public ways, is that a whole different experience that you’re adapting to, struggling with?

JC  Well, when I started writing it I didn’t think of it as, “Oh, this is going to be a big public thing.” I started writing it as a diary for myself. So that’s a whole other issue.

When I started to think of it as a book, I guess I didn’t really think about in terms of my close family and friends reading it. It was more the world at large, and the world at large I’m anonymous; it doesn’t really matter. It matters but it doesn’t really matter quite as intimately as my parents and my family and my friends. And so when we came close to the publication date, I started freaking out — (laughs) — a little too late; the deal was done. And I started thinking, why, why did I do this? Why this book? Why was this my first book? Why did I have to do it?

Aside from all the jokes my father has made — he said he’s going into the Witness Protection Program and is going to wear a Groucho Marx nose at the book party — it was really quite wonderful actually.

My mom called me having read it, when she read it. I didn’t even know she was reading it. I thought that they were just putting it off and putting it off. And she read the galley, and she called me up and she said: “You’re crazy. What were you so worried about? I loved this. This was wonderful.” She said, “I know this was your past; I know that your present is so much happier.” And it’s her past too, and so she can move on from it as well.

And so she was able to read and say this is a story; this is a coming-of-age story. And it has a happy ending. And the fact that it has a happy ending in real life makes it a lot easier for friends and family to read.

Of course for my husband, no, it’s not comfortable for him to read intimate scenes about past relationships. And I actually did take a big black sharpie and censored the copy of the book that I gave him. (Laughs.) But he, too — he understands it’s the past. He’s a big enough man to understand that it’s not the present. It informs who I am, but it’s not who I am. So of anyone, I was the one who was most uncomfortable, not the actual people I was concerned about.

AM   Will you talk a little about the [book launch] party? Who was there? Did you consider it a success?

JC  The party was amazing. It blew me away.

First of all, I’ve only been at the CBS Washington bureau for a little over a year. And I’m not technically a Washington producer. I don’t report to any of the people who were throwing me the party.

When I told Janet I had written the book and she said, “Oh, we have to throw you a party,” I had no idea that this is what — I thought she meant she’d have some people over to her house for a little wine or something. I was just so blown away.

And it’s interesting how people react. I mean, it’s, I guess, a really big deal [laughs] to write a book, and maybe when you’re in the process of doing it it somehow stops seeming like such a big deal. You start thinking, well, I didn’t get the six-figure advance and I wasn’t published by this enormous press, and all of these other things. And then recently, it finally hit me — wow, wait, I actually really accomplished something. It’s an amazing feeling, one, to be able to recognize that myself but also to have all these other people recognize it. And maybe that helps me recognize it myself. And it’s just incredibly flattering.

AM   Was that process of recognition still taking place as late as the party?

JC   (Laughs.) That process of recognition is still taking place. My first review in a real major paper, not a trade paper, came out in the San Francisco Chronicle, and it was a very positive review. And it was amazing. I mean, it’s like, “Wow, it’s real; I mean, it’s really real. The 11th largest newspaper in the country wrote a review about it, I must be an author.” [Laughs.] It’s still sort of this “pinch me.”

I wonder when I’m going to get to the point where I’m at a cocktail party and someone says, “What do you do?” and I’m not going to say I’m a television producer, I’m going to say instead, “I’m an author.” That’s going to be the real sign I finally believe that I did this.

AM  And that hasn’t happened yet.

JC  No, that hasn’t happened yet. It’s usually my husband sort of elbowing me, “Tout your book.” It’s hard for me to do.

AM  And the people who were there [at the party] were largely friends, colleagues, family?

JC  The people who showed up at the party were all invited. It was a pretty good mix of people. And again, since I’ve only been in D.C. for a year, it was really overwhelming to me that that many people showed up. And it was a mix; it was a mix of people from the CBS news bureau, some of whom I know very well and some who I don’t — you know, I pass in the halls. I don’t know, maybe they heard there was free vodka, but it was still very nice that they came. (Laughs.)

And then we’ve made quite a number of really nice friends here and they were all there for me. And I have a writing group that I started here in town; a lot of those people showed up, and it was really wonderful to see them all.

I had a writing group in New York who I wrote the book with. And next week when I do a reading in New York, a lot of them are going to be there. And it’s going to be pretty incredible, because I feel like it’s partly their book. I couldn’t have written this without some of those people.

There’s this whole — Hillary Clinton, “it takes a village.” For me it really did. In addition to the fact that this was a true story and a painful story, and it took a lot of friends and family just to help me get over it, it took a lot of people to help me believe I could do this. The acknowledgments were the most exciting thing to write.

AM   Is it a long list?

JC  It’s a pretty long list, yeah. But it’s a really heartfelt list. There are more people that I should have included, but the people who are there, really, I would not be here as a published author if it weren’t for them.

AM  Yesterday being the first day of the book’s release, was there anything you did yesterday to make that real?

JC  I was home. I was working from home. It didn’t really hit me. It was just this sort of weird feeling, something’s happening. It’s sort like an out-of-body experience.

I was up on my roof deck doing yoga, because I was a little wound up and was trying to chill out. And literally, I was in downward dog and my cellphone went off, and I saw that it was my publicist calling and I answered it. And she doesn’t call me a lot; we e-mail a lot, but she was calling, so clearly she needed to tell me something.

She told me about the San Francisco Chronicle review, and it pretty much ruined my yoga session — (laughs) — because I was so excited. I mean, you really can’t be very Zen in that state. And I came downstairs and I was jumping up and down like a rabbit.

AM  Did she read it to you over the phone?

JC  She read me a little blurb from it and then she e-mailed it to me. I came downstairs and I was jumping up and down, you know, trying to find it online, pulling it up, and e-mailing it as fast as I could to all my friends. It was veryexciting.

AM  The events that are taking place to promote the book really begin, in a significant way, beginning, really, Saturday with the appearance on CBS and you’ve got several days of events in New York. So what are your expectations going into that?

JC  (Laughs.) You know, the funny thing about it is, professionally, I’m in your seat. I’m very used to interviewing people and I’m very used to selecting sound bites. And it is sort of a detriment because I am very aware of what I’m saying. You know, is that a good sound bite? Is that less than 15 seconds? You know, is it tight? Is it concise? Does it make sense? Is it pithy? And I’m trying not to think about that so much because it does make me nervous.

A lot of my friends were like, “Oh, you’re in a really good position because you know what they need,” and I’m thinking I don’t that that’s actually true. I think in some ways I’m not.

I mean, I’m not a shy person, but I’m not a person who needs to be the center of attention. I’m very happy to give that to my on-air correspondents and hosts and all of that; it doesn’t bother me. And it’s strange to suddenly have the chairs switched and having people asking me questions for a change. It’s kind of fun; it’s becoming more fun the more I do it.

But then I also have the sort of pathetic thought of, “What if he doesn’t like me?” I don’t know, it’s this sort of pathology I have; I need everyone to like me. And I was thinking this over my six-and-a-half-minute live interview with this man in Dallas, Texas that I have no idea — I have no idea what he looks like, I don’t know how old he is; I know nothing except that he’s got this very fast, you know, cadence. I had never listened to the show before. And so it’s this weird vacuum. And yet I’m thinking, you know, I hope he likes talking to me. It’s crazy. [Laughs.] It’s totally crazy.

But at the end I hung up the phone when it was over and it was just strange. I was like, what just happened? But it was good, too, because the next time I’ll be a little bit more prepared. There are a few more of those and I’ll have a better sense of what to expect. I had no idea what to expect.

AM  Just in terms of professional expectations, from this vantage point, what are they?

JC  God. There are expectations and fantasies. My expectation — I actually don’t really have any. It’s all wants, desires, hopes.

I’m sort of afraid to say that I expect to sell this many copies, I expect to have this many decent reviews, I expect this, I expect that. I don’t. I hope that it does well. I hope I get some nice praise. I hope the numbers are pretty good.

I hope I sell enough books that I can break even because I spent a lot of money myself. I mean, I hired a freelance publicist for a lot of money, and silly things, like buying a dress for the party. I’ve shelled out quite a few dollars. It would be nice to break even. I don’t expect to become rich off this, though.

AM  Was acquiring an agent an additional up-front expense?

JC  No, it’s not an up-front — the agent gets a percentage. And I think with my agent in particular — you know, obviously we sold to a small press; there’s not a lot of money there at all. We sort of joke, you know, with the royalties we’re going to go out and have a latte together.

I’m thinking, my assumption is that for her I’m sort of an investment as well. The hope is there’s another book. And assuming this one does well, we can ride on that. You know, we can say, hey, she got these great media hits, she got this great praise, she sold this many books from a small press where it’s a lot harder — it’s a lot harder to sell a lot of books.

If you’re the author with the $500,000 advance that they’re going to really invest in, they’re going to be able to send you all over the country to so many book stores to do readings and signings and all of these things. And I can’t do that. It’s all out of my pocket, A; and B, I have a full-time job, and I don’t have that many vacation days. I can’t do it.

I mean, my job, they’re being amazing. CBS, “The Early Show” — I seriously could not ask for better employers. They’re being so supportive and so understanding. But yeah, I still have a job. I have a couple major stories on in a couple weeks, and I need to do them. I can’t take off.

AM  We were talking about your expectations going into this. On the one hand, the expectation is that you’re going to sell books and you want that to happen, and you know that it will, to, you know, whatever degree that happens. But on the other hand, convincing complete strangers — really, is what we’re talking about — to buy this book —

JC  It’s funny. Kirt Murray, a guy at the Press, at Wisconsin, told me the other day that we had sold something like 850 books in August, and it wasn’t out yet. And I thought it was so neat! I thought, Oh, my god, that’s way more than the number of friends I have. (Laughs.) It’s not just my friends buying the book. And that’s one of the things that made it start to seem sort of real.

AM  And as this takes off now — again, to whatever degree it does — there are going to be all these strangers buying your book and poring into the intimate details of your life. But that’s the contract you’ve made!

JC  That’s the contract I’ve made. It doesn’t bother me so much, the strangers. It’s the acquaintances that’s a little scarier. My colleagues reading about me being on antidepressants or sexual relationships I had — those aren’t things you normally talk about at work, ever. But the thing is, you know, the more I thought about it the more I realized, you know, everybody at work has their skeletons. It’s pretty obvious; we know that. The only difference is I’ve put mine in a book and it’s available to everyone. But there’s nobody who can really cast a stone, or if they do they have no right to because everybody has their story, everybody has a story, and there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

My only concern, honestly, is — I tried to protect the identity of “Kevin”; and that’s not his real name. I know if he reads it he’ll obviously know it’s him, and his family and friends will obviously know it’s him. And I just hope that outside of that circle people won’t. I mean, they might; they might figure it out, but it was never my — it’s not my intention to hurt him.  That’s sort of my concern.

AM  Was there a thought at some point in this whole process of actually making the book a work of fiction?

JC  I never thought of it as something that could be fiction. It started as a diary. It is a true story. There are things in it that are fictionalized; that’s for sure. Time frames are changed. The true story actually happened a lot faster. I wasn’t working at one place the whole time; I was shifting places. I changed things to make it a better read. It’s true. I admit it. Characters are composites; names are changed, things like that.

But I still firmly hold — I’m standing by the idea that at its heart this is a true story. And there is nothing in it that is false when you get to the heart of it. And some of the really dramatic scenes — the things that people have said to me, “Is that true?” — those things are true. Those scenes are very true.                                                      

The following is an interview with Jennifer Cohen conducted by Andy Miles, December 2, 2004, in the Washington, D.C. home of the author.

AM  Now that Lying Together is out and you’ve had some time, presumably, to evaluate the book in the context of reviews that have been published, the feedback and reactions you’ve had from friends, family, readers unknown to you, what would you say works best about the book? And what, if anything, doesn’t work as well as it might have, that given the chance you might do it differently?

JC  I don’t know that there is a “what works best,” because honestly, different people have responded about very different things. I mean, some people love the depictions of Russia, and the sort of seedy, moody atmosphere that I present. But I think also a lot of people just really respond to the sort of raw, honest love story — well, it’s not exactly a love story —

AM  Would-be love story.

JC  Would-be love story, wannabe love story.

So I’m not really sure. And that’s actually one of the things that’s been really interesting to me is what people do pick up when I talk to them. And it’s actually been really — one of the most satisfying things for me is talking to people I don’t know who have read the book, and then what happens inevitably is that they then start telling me their story, be it their story of their time traveling in Eastern Europe or, usually more likely, their story of some disastrous romance. (Laughs.) So clearly it sort of works on these different levels. But it’s been pretty outstanding to me just that people respond to it in different ways. So I can’t say that one part of the book worked better than another.

AM  Does that go for what might not work as well? Nothing’s eating away at you?

JC  There aren’t any like, “Uck, why didn’t I put that in there, why did I take that out?” No. In a lot of ways it feels very complete to me and in a very satisfying way, especially because it is a part of my life, and so to have it sort of like a clean cut — it’s like, here’s my life; it’s in this package; it’s a nice, neat package now, and I can sort of hand it off to be read, but I don’t have to live it anymore.

AM  Have people by and large gotten what you’ve tried to convey in the pages of your book?

JC  Mostly, yes. And some people have gotten it more than I even realized for myself what was there. And that’s an interesting sort of experience, too, is somebody says something to you about your book — I can’t think of anything specific, but it’s definitely happened a few times where, you know, “When this was happening, this scene resonated to me” in such a way. And suddenly I’ll have this weird insight into me, or I’m not sure if it’s me but me who’s the character in the book. And it sort of adds a whole new depth to my own memory of the experience, which is very trippy.

AM   You expressed modest expectations for the book in September. “I hope it does well; I hope I get some nice praise,” you said. Now that the book has indeed exceeded those expectations, do you have a new set of expectations going from here?

JC  My expectations aren’t so much for Lying Together.

There are hopes. I would love to see it go into paperback. I would, of course, love to see it be made into a movie. That would be a hoot, and it would be nice to get some money. But honestly, I’m very happy with where it is. So they’re hopes; they’re not expectations. And there’s a difference.

My expectations are more about where it will take me as a writer in terms of my career as a writer rather than the book itself and its life. You know, it is funny; the shelf life of a book is so short. You know, we’re three or four months out now and it’s almost over.

AM  How comfortable are you in your book being categorized as “chick lit,” and how useful do you find those sorts of shorthand PR designations?

JC  You know, it’s kind of like hey, if it makes someone pick it up and sells the book, fine. The problem with those titles, though — the same reason a big press didn’t pick [Lying Together] up or isn’t picking up the paperback so readily is [that] it’s not exactly chick lit.

So they see it; they say, “Oh, chick lit.” And then they open it up and they say, “Ooh, deeper, darker, a little bit more involved than that — bleh!” You know, if they hadn’t been trying to see it through the lens of chick lit maybe they could be more open-minded to it. But again, it sort of goes both ways.

AM  You write in the book, “If I don’t tell, it never happened, there is no script.” At some point you did decide to tell, and it did happen. What was that process?

JC  That’s actually a really amazing process. I really firmly believe that by telling your story, especially a painful story, it helps you heal from whatever harm that story did to you, and it helps you grow from it — and in a way, now even more so.

Like I said, people, when they respond to me and tell me what they got out of the book, it gives me a new perspective on my own past, and it’s been pretty amazing.

AM  WNYC Radio host Leonard Lopate characterized your book as “a depressing tale of love and professional ethics.” Do you think your book is depressing?

JC   I think there are depressing parts. Depressing’s not a good word. I think there are some sad and difficult parts in the book. But at the end I don’t think it’s depressing. I think actually at the end what you have is somebody who’s gone through some really hard stuff and comes out the other end, and to me that’s actually very happy. I think if you picked up the book and just opened to any old page — yeah, there’s a chance you’re going to fall on a really dark page, but that’s not how it ends. That’s part of the story.

AM  Your story, you said in one radio interview, is like a fairy tale. “I think a happy ending exists,” you said, “but it’s not the one you expect.” Could you expand on that?

JC  It’s something that I definitely bring up in the book. There are fairy tales in the book — like literally a Russian fairy tale and this sort of Hollywood image that we all grow up with about how we’re going to have these fairy-tale endings to our romantic pursuits. And in real life the fairy-tale ending is never quite as fairy-tale-ish as it is in a movie. But it is a happy ending. I mean, it’s a happy ending in the book. It ends hopeful.

And then in real life, I went on and I actually met somebody who I love deeply who’s a much better partner for me. And we’ve established a life together now that is a lot saner and a lot healthier — for all involved — and I’m very happy. And so that’s a happy ending in all sorts of ways. So, yeah.

AM  As your relationship is unraveling [in the book], you more than once express the concern that to leave Moscow and return to New York would only invite a chorus of “I told you so"s from friends and family. Even with the "very happy place” you’re in today, do you still dread that sort of reaction, that judgment from readers, interviewers and critics?

JC   I did initially when it first came out, but I think that I’ve been so bolstered by the positive reaction that now when there is a negative reaction, it’s just like well, that’s your opinion but I can present quite a number of people who don’tthink that.

You know, obviously we all like external gratification and support. And so, yeah, I don’t worry about it so much anymore, but I definitely — when it first came out, yeah, I was really worried about that.

AM  At the same time that you’ve criticized the [television] networks for failing to convey nuance in their newscasts, you’ve conceded that you missed some of the nuances of the relationship you were in that time. But how realistic is either suggestion — discerning nuance in a heady relationship or conveying nuance in a network newscast?

JC   (Laughs.) Not very. It is kind of like a fairy tale. It’s never going to be as good as you can imagine it could be, but I think we can do a better job, both professionally and in relationships.

I mean, you can go into things with eyes open, and maybe it helps to be a little older and have had a little experience, professionally and personally, because then you kind of know what you’re getting. You know, you’re not going to be bowled over by an interview subject or by a — (laughs) — relationship. It all gets a little bit — not that it gets easier, but things get easier to navigate, I guess.

And also in terms of television news, we do have the luxury of hindsight and we can look and say, “Okay, our coverage missed on this point and maybe we can make a correction here,” and occasionally we do. And occasionally there are some really fabulous stories on. It’s hard. There are so many different factors at play that are beyond me, way beyond me.

AM  Would you characterize the choices you made as poor choices or as risky choices that didn’t play out as you hoped?

JC  The smart answer would be poor choices. But actually the truth is risky choices that didn’t play out. I think that given the circumstances, given where I was at in my life, the chance to jump at that relationship was really an exit strategy for me to try a whole new thing. And it wasn’t just about the relationship — and it’s pretty clear in the book, it was also about pursuing a different direction for my career. So I don’t regret it.

It’s also another thing that people have responded about. So many people say — they’re so impressed with how fearless I was, and that even though it didn’t totally work out, it was still really an amazing thing that I did it, and gutsy. And it’s sort of funny because it kind of blew up in my face, you know. But because of it — because of it, so many things. Because of it, I wrote a book. Because of it, you can argue I’m in a relationship that’s a lot better.

AM  Not to mention your job.

JC  And it looks really good on my résumé to have worked in Russia, yeah.

AM  And there was certainly no guarantee that you would have that kind of success professionally.

JC  No, there was no guarantee. I did actually line up some freelance work before I actually got on the plane, but the ball was already in motion by the time that had happened. I was going come hell or high water.

AM  Is the story as simple as you were young and naïve, made mistakes, learned from those mistakes, and you’re a wiser woman today?

JC  (Laughs.) No. Of course not. I mean, yeah, you can distill it to that if you want to, but I think there’s so much more going on there. I hope there is.

I think a number of readers find a lot more going on there, because it’s a multi-layered story. It’s not just my coming of age story. It’s also this story of a time and a place. It’s a story — I mean, to some degree — of a culture, literature, different influences that I had in my life and how they affected me.

So yeah, you could distill it down to that, but I think there’s a lot more going on.

AM  You’ve said that the “funny thing about writing a memoir is as true as it might be it really becomes a story and it stops feeling like it was my life.” How so?

JC   Completely so. Except that every now and then my life creeps back into it. You know, somebody from my past will show up or call, and suddenly it’s real again. In good ways and bad.

You know, part of the reason it doesn’t feel quite so real is because my memory of it is, of course, now so much more vivid than most of my life, because it’s sort of like when you’ve seen lots of photographs of a part of your childhood and so that’s what you remember. So because of that, because I spent so much time thinking and pondering and talking about this part of my life, it’s sort of overly vivid, which makes it feel not real because real memories don’t feel that vivid.

AM  Your friend and former writing group moderator Victoria Rowan said that as a reader she is “wanting to scream at the screen as if it was a movie — 'don’t, don’t!’” If the first-person protagonist in your story has indeed become a separate character, do you share that sense of powerless frustration in reading or thinking about the narrative?

JC  Oh, totally. And sometimes I’ll read it — you know, I’ll read parts of it when I’m doing a reading or something, and I think, what the hell was I doing? (Laughs.) Like, oh, my God, I can’t believe I really experienced that. And it’s sort of a very out-of-body thing. Like, did I really experience that?

And you know, there are some parts of the book that are fictionalized, and I have actually gotten to the point where I’m sometimes not sure. You know, was this one of the parts that I fictionalized or was this real? And you know, it’s weird. It’s really weird. Your memory does weird things to you. But I can definitely step back and go — (laughs) — “Whoa,” you know, “what a crazy ride,” totally.

AM  You talk in the book about the women involved in the trafficking trade and observe that on some level you “admired their enthusiastic responses to the opportunities the ads promised. My heart breaks a bit at the tragic sense of trust that they had when they got on the plane,” you write.

Throughout the book you compare your own circumstances to that of the women in the sex trade, reaching varying conclusions. Looking back did you share with them that “tragic sense of trust”?

JC  Well, not nearly as tragic as theirs. Their story is so horrific. And I think to some degree what’s going on there in the book and in my head at the time was depression, actually.

I think when you’re looking at things through a lens of depression you start to see things in these very extreme ways. And you know, is my lot like that of a woman who’s been trafficked? No way in hell. But I did see some vague parallels that still resonated with me.

And you know, it kind of makes me wonder, if I had been born in some small town in Ukraine and had no money and saw this ad, because of my nature to jump on a plane and go fly into the arms of a man I hadn’t seen, would I have been the kind of girl who would have answered one of these ads? You know, “waitress wanted in Paris.” Maybe I would have been.

AM  Did you see larger themes and symbolism like that at the time or did they become clear only in the writing?

JC  They didn’t become clear in the writing but in the reading. I would read things that I wrote and suddenly — it’s this wonderful feeling of oh, my goodness, that comes in a way I wasn’t even thinking about. It’s like your subconscious somehow puts a puzzle together and you’re not aware of it, and you need to step back. And then you read it and it’s kind of cool. And that happened a lot for me. It’s very satisfying. But I’m not sitting down going okay, let me plant this symbol here; it’s not that conscious.

AM  And wasn’t at the time.

JC  Oh God, no. (Laughs.)

AM   You write late in the book: “I can’t say I love him anymore, because I am not sure I know what love is. Whatever I thought it was, I was clearly off-base.” Now, you’ve said in interviews that you weren’t in love with Kevin, you were in love with a fantasy. How do you sort that out and distinguish the two things?

JC  Being in love with a person and being in love with a fantasy? I didn’t know him, and I think to really be in love with somebody you need to know them. And maybe that’s some wisdom I’ve gained by being a little older, too, and actually knowing what it’s like to love somebody and really knowing him. But I was very good at projecting ideas of the perfect man, the perfect relationship, and I projected it onto this person.

AM  Poor Kevin.

JC  Yeah, poor Kevin. And, like, bad choice; he wasn’t ready to handle that projection. I mean, nobody could. Who could handle it? Nobody could. Nobody wants to be put on a pedestal.

AM  I’m guessing your engagement ring from Michael did not come in a Ziploc bag, having slipped off a whore’s finger in St. Petersburg [as had the ring Kevin gave her]. You found that ring “fabulous and intoxicating.” How did receiving a more conventional engagement ring compare?

JC  Ah, this is even better. (Laughs.) This one has a story too. This was his grandmother’s ring. His parents had met on the boat coming over from Poland, and they had no money, and his grandfather became a jeweler. And so this is their 25th wedding anniversary ring. They’re like the opposite rings. And it’s funny because, in a way, this ring is so pure and so clean in the way it’s this crisp diamond, very large — (laughs). And you know, it speaks to me. It’s like a very honest, open ring, whereas the other one had these tiny little diamonds that are sort of dark and deeply embedded. So, in a way, they’re sort of perfect metaphors for both of the relationships.

AM  In the book you say you found the chaos of Russia liberating. Kevin’s life, of course, was increasingly chaotic while you lived there with him. To what degree was Kevin’s personal chaos also liberating, and when did it become — well, the opposite of liberating?

JC   I think when life is difficult, you don’t have time to be real neurotic. It’s like you just have to get things done. And in a way, that’s liberating. So if you’re trying to somehow support and nurture somebody who’s falling apart, you can’t really think about yourself.

It’s kind of like a yoga class. You’re supposed to clear your mind. So in a way I guess you’re kind of clearing your mind of your own debris for that period. Unfortunately, it all comes back to smack you in the face afterwards. I mean, honestly, it didn’t really hit me hard until actually after I came home, after the [story related in the] book was over. I mean, it ends on a happy, sort of hopeful note, but it was not an easy thing for me when I came back home. That was a very, very hard year when I came back home.

AM  Your mother told me the night of the launch party that had you “been in a different place today, not been with the man” you love, she might have had a “very different interview” with me. What about you? How differently do you think you might have approached the PR for this book, and how differently do you think the sort of public relations machinery might have approached you, was your life not what it is today, if you didn’t have the “happy postscript” that you’ve spoken of?

JC   I think it would be much harder. I think it would be much harder for me to talk about a painful relationship if I hadn’t totally gotten over it. I mean, not necessarily that I had to be married, but it makes it a lot easier.

But also it makes it a lot easier because I do have my husband to be sort of my cheerleader. He’s got my back. And it’s a really scary thing putting a book out into the world. So even if it was a different book, even if it was this happy-go-lucky whatever, it would have still been terrifying. And so having somebody with me to sort of prop me up is incredible. I feel really, really lucky. I can’t even imagine going through this without him. It’s just not conceivable to me at this point.

AM  What do you think makes a successful author, and what tips might you offer aspiring first-time writers of either fiction or non-fiction?

JC  You know, it’s funny, because you sometimes hear writers talk about how “every morning I get up and write for four hours.” It’s annoying. Nobody can do that, you know? I was never like that. But I had this story and I had to tell it; it was burning inside of me. And so when I had free time, here and there — not every day, not every week, but I would find time and I would work on it.

You have to be interested in your story, first of all.

For me, one of the things that is really helpful is having a writing group and having a peer group that I can report to and that somehow holds me accountable. It’s like, okay, I have to produce something for this coming week or I’m just full of words we can’t print or say on the radio, because you can talk and talk and talk — “oh, I want to write a book” — but it doesn’t happen unless you actually make it happen. And I think having a group of other people who are sort of in the same predicament really helps.

AM  You said in September that your book is partly the writing group’s book. “I couldn’t have written this without some of those people,” you said. Could you talk about that process and the influence your writing group colleagues had on the book?

JC  The group in New York that Tory Rowan ran, we had some strong writers, but even more importantly, we had some very strong critics.

AM  What do you mean by strong?

JC   They were very candid. They were harsh but they always had constructive comments. We were very good about that — not just tearing somebody’s work to shreds but actually giving them incentive to keep working.

So I was able to sort of comb through a lot of stuff, the clunkier parts with these people, and also just engaging their interest. I mean, people would read a chapter and they’d say, “I can’t wait till next week, I want to find out what happens.” And you know, it eggs you on. Writing is a very lonely thing, they say, but for me, I’m a very social person and I need feedback, I need other people bolstering me up. And I have a writing group now in D.C. and it’s very much for the same purpose, to support each other.

AM  Your husband Michael recalled that when you and he first started dating, you had finished writing the book and were trying to get it sold. “Any time I would ask her about the book,” he said, “suddenly [you] would just well up with tears and just couldn’t even speak.” Is that how you remember it?

JC   Totally. (Laughs.)

AM  And what were the emotions involved in finishing the book and trying to sell it?

JC  There were all of these different points. I remember when I actually finished it and wrote “the end” — even though I didn’t say it there — and how that was just this amazing feeling. And then suddenly it’s like, okay, next! Now we need to get an agent and now we need to get it published, et cetera. And at each of those points there’s this really tense moment, and then there’s this release and then it’s sort of like what’s next? This is the rollercoaster you go on.

So by the time Michael came along, I had just been through so much emotionally with this story, with this book that, yeah, it was crazy. I was a mess. (Laughs.) I had so many hopes and dreams wrapped up in it because I wanted so bad to be a published author and to have this work that I’d spent so long on to somehow be validated.

AM  Back in September you told me: “I wonder when I’m going to get to the point where I’m at a cocktail party and someone asks me, "What do you do?” and I’m not going to say, 'I’m a television producer’; I’m going to say instead 'an author.’ That’s going to be the real sign I finally believe I did this.“

Been to any cocktail parties lately?

JC   (Laughs.) I was, and I did it! And not only that, it was a PEN/Faulkner cocktail party. We all introduced ourselves, and it was going through my head — actually that exact thing. "I’m going to do it this time; I’m going to say I’m a writer.” And [the host] came around to me, and I said I’m an author. And we talked about my book. It was nice.

The following is an interview with Michael Oko, the author’s husband, conducted by Andy Miles, September 14, 2004, at the Lying Together launch party, Washington, D.C.

AM   You’re the husband.

MO   I am the husband. Recently the husband.

AM   And how recent is that?

MO   We got married in June.

AM   And you’re not the man in the book, which is an important distinction to make.

MO   Yes, very important. I have nothing to do with what happened in 1998, which is what the subject of the book is.

AM   And is your relationship also the material for a book?

MO   Well, Jennifer and I do joke around occasionally, and I promise her that if she wrote a book about me it would probably be a bestseller. But truth be told, we actually like to think we have a little bit calmer lifestyle now than what she was going through back then when she wrote Lying Together.

AM  And you’re hoping to be able to sustain that over many years of normality?

MO   Yeah, I think we both probably learned from past mistakes and have grown up just a little bit, and now hopefully have started on a good course and will not have too much fodder for future books.

AM   And if you wouldn’t mind telling me, how did you meet?

MO   Actually, I’ll tell you the quick story, which is actually a funny story, which is that Jen and I met when we were actually teenagers. She was 14 and I was 13 and our parents were friendly. And we actually met in Paris together, and the story goes that we got lost on the bus in Paris together when we were teenagers. And we didn’t see each other again basically for 18 years.

And she actually ran into my mother. And my mother told her that I was working in documentaries, and she was working in the news business. And so we got together, at first just for business and then that turned into dating. And two years later we got married. So it was a long courtship; over 18 years actually.

AM   Even though the book has been produced for a mass audience, it is still a very individual process; it’s very personal. How much of it was she willing to talk about while you were dating?

MO   That’s a big question.

It’s funny, because this book in particular is a very personal book and she shares very intimate details of her life. I have to say, for the most part she told me about her relationship, as anyone would, and told me pretty honestly about some of the problems she had back then.

Although, I have to say, in reading the book, there were a couple of surprises [where] I said, “I didn’t know that.” (Laughs.) We had a couple of those moments where I said, “You did what?” Especially after she — she had actually been engaged to this guy before and had actually started planning a wedding. So happily I read it after I was married to her already, but reading about some of that definitely was pretty interesting.

AM   In the form that the book has taken and the form in which it’s being published, technically, what category does it fit into? Is it memoir, or is it being sold as fiction?

MO   It’s definitely non-fiction. It’s definitely her story.

Jen and I have actually talked about this a lot, but memory — your memory plays tricks on you. And she actually now almost thinks about it as a separate character. Of course it’s her; it’s a real character. Certain people have been morphed; maybe two people become one person for clarity of dialogue. But as far as the emotions go, and as far as the experience goes, this is very much a true story and her story. And it’s a memoir. She calls it a memoir.

AM   You sort of entered the story after the story [in the book] had actually been written; she was finessing the manuscript. Was it still an emotionally charged experience for her, where she was working on this and still going back into some of these scenes and immersing herself in that life again?

MO   Yeah, it’s interesting. She definitely had to revisit some of those issues over time. The book is about some difficult experiences. It’s also about some fun experiences, adventures. She calls it a coming-of-age story, and I think that’s very true. She was in her mid- to late-20s, and as we know, that’s a very pivotal moment in somebody’s life. Looking back at the mid-20s, that’s when a lot of stuff is happening.

Even when the book finally came out and she got her copy of it, I remember she was very filled with emotion — you know, joyful that the book came out but also having to look at it again and the experiences that she had during this time. It brought up a lot of emotions. Mixed emotions.

It’s a very personal book, and showing it to a large audience — I mean, she was terrified what her friends’ reaction and her family — especially her parents, who are in the book, and you can’t disguise them too much; you know, they are who they are.

AM   Events that took place that were eventually put into this book, these are things that you only know of in book form. When you met she was working on this project, having lived the experience.

MO   It’s interesting. I think every relationship, every person you’re going out with tells you about past relationships. And it was pretty interesting in this case to not only be told about the past relationship but then to be told she was actually writing a book about the past relationship, and that definitely put a certain spin on things.

But when Jen and I first started dating, which was a couple years ago, she had actually finished writing the book and she was trying to get it sold. And actually, any time I would ask her about the book, I could just say, “How’s the book going?” and suddenly she would just well up with tears and just couldn’t even speak.

AM   Her emotion being that she was frustrated with —

MO   Just that creative process and probably having to do with the subject matter. And it brings up a lot of issues.

The book business is a tough one, so you go from writing a book and finishing it and feeling very good about it, to getting an agent and trying to get it sold. And that’s a difficult process to go through.

The great thing is that when I ask her about the book now, she doesn’t well up in tears anymore. Normally we get a smile, so that’s good.

The following is an interview with Sue Cohen, the author’s mother, conducted by Andy Miles, September 14, 2004, at the Lying Together launch party, Washington, D.C.

AM  What have your impressions been of this, the success that Jennifer has had with publishing this book?

SC  Jennifer is an extraordinary young woman and this has been one of her dreams. And to watch one’s child’s dreams come true is an amazing and most gratifying experience.

AM  Now that the book is coming out, are you finding this is coming up often in conversations that you have with friends and family?

SC  As the book has come out, I think as more people read the book, they’re going to have some serious questions about the book. But it’s so incredibly well written that I think it’s going to be perceived in a very, very positive way.

AM   What sort of communication did you have with your daughter during this experience that she relates in the book? What did you know was happening?

SC   I knew a great deal of what was happening while this experience in her life was going on. And to read about it many years later is not as overwhelming for me in any respect as it was while this extraordinary experience was going on for her, because there were moments that I was fearful for her. And she came out in an extraordinary way.

AM  Fearful for her physical safety and her psychological well-being?

SC  Both. I was at one point very frightened for her physical well-being because the man she was with was not in control of himself at that point, and her psychological well-being. But I really believed in Jennifer and I knew that she would come out the other end, which she clearly has.

AM  And you met him?

SC  I did meet him several times — many times. And it was all very fast. And I obviously had a great deal of concerns, because the first time Jen — she had a photograph of him at one of my birthdays. I said, “You have got to be kidding,” and that just came out of nowhere for me. So there was a part of me that probably intuitively knew that this was really not the person I had dreamt about for her.

AM  As far as the psychological process that was involved in writing this, in the actual writing and the telling of the story, were you involved at any level with her during that time, or was that a very individual, private kind of experience?

SC  It was Jennifer’s private, individual choice to write this book. We knew she was writing it, and we would joke about that we would have to go underground after she published the book and change our names. And once I read the book, it was really not as upsetting as I had anticipated. In fact, it was quite wonderful to read about it. And it was a part of her life that she went through that I wish that she hadn’t had to have that pain, but the writing of the book for her was a real healing process. So I really respect her for having done it and done it in the way that she did do it.

AM  On what levels would you have expected the book to be upsetting as you prepared to read it?

SC  I think that Jen was more concerned about what our reaction was going to be to reading it because it’s pretty personal, on many levels. But because we had lived through this extraordinary experience with her and she allowed us into her life, and has always allowed us to be part of her life, it was really a celebration of Jen that she could write this book and write it in the honest way that she wrote it.

AM  Well, in thinking about this, no matter how close a parent might be with a daughter or a son, this brings it to a whole different level of intimacy, because there are obviously things that she elaborates on in the kind of detail that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, in a one-on-one situation. I wonder how that registered with you?

SC  I think that’s a wonderful question, and I’ve thought about that. And I think the answer to that is that time plays a wonderful dimension in all of this and that Jen is in the place she is today probably because she went through this experience. Had she been in a different place today, not been with the man she loves, who we adore, I might be having a very different interview with you. So there was nothing in the book that was as shocking as I had anticipated it would be for me.

AM  How would you compare Michael and —

SC  (Laughs.)

AM  I guess in some way there’s no comparison.

SC  There isn’t. Michael is somebody who embraces life in a very wonderful, loving way, and it’s not fair to compare two people. Michael is somebody who — he kind of entered our family’s life and we all felt like this is the right person. And in our wonderful, sometimes chaotic but very loving family, it was the right fit. And there was not a question on the part of any of us.

AM  And you had no sense of that with Kevin?

SC   No, I had no sense that this was going to fit in the way that we needed it to fit, or that Jen would feel comfortable, ultimately, in having it work for her in our family. We would have made it work. But there’s something magical about Jennifer and Michael together that just makes me feel really at peace for her.

AM  When I talked to your sister, she said that this was not the kind of thing that would happen to Jen today because she’s a different person now; she wouldn’t necessarily fall into the same traps. And her husband says the same.

SC  I think we all grow by the experiences that we have. So are we different because of the experiences? Sure. But each experience makes us into who we are. And you don’t wish that experience on your child, because it’s difficult as a parent to watch your kid go through that. But if Jen’s life remains the way it is, that will be wonderful. But I don’t know that you can look into a crystal ball and say, “this is what’s going to happen next.”

AM  Do you think that was the kind of experience that could have happened to anyone in certain circumstances, or was there something about her that maybe predicted that outcome?

SC  I don’t know that one predicts those kinds of situations. And it was a unique situation. There are many other young people who have gotten involved in — you know, the world looks very glamorous and exciting, and sometimes we make choices that get us into situations that are kind of above anything that we’re prepared to deal with. And the situation Jennifer found herself in was one that was extraordinary in all kinds of ways.

AM  Has this experience, this book made your relationship stronger, brought you closer together?

SC   I’m blessed with a very strong relationship with Jennifer. So has this brought us closer together? I feel that I’m one of the lucky mommies of this world that I feel that I have a very strong and positive relationship with Jen. So I don’t know that the book has brought us any closer together, but I am extremely proud that she was able to do this for herself.

The following is an interview with Stephanie Kip Rostan, the author’s agent, conducted by Andy Miles, December 6, 2004, Hoboken, New Jersey.

AM  What were your first impressions of the manuscript?

SKR  The thing I was most impressed with is Jen just had — not every single sentence but throughout the manuscript — a brilliant turn of phrase, and that was the thing that drew me to it at first. She just had a way of putting something that was so perfect. And it actually was incomplete when I first read it, so it was a little unclear — I mean, it was clear how it turned out, but it was a little unclear how it got there.

AM  In what way was it unclear?

SKR  She hadn’t finished writing it. (Laughs.) It was a partial manuscript. When I took it on I just basically took it on because I thought she was really promising as a writer. She had a great background and she was clearly a go-getter and worked hard on the book and to promote the book, which she’s done. So I took it on and asked her to finish it. And so she worked with me editorially to finish it. We went through a number of revisions and she worked very hard on it. And then we went out to try to sell it.

AM  What were the areas you thought needed work?

SKR  We went through many, many, many drafts, so there was obviously a lot to it. She needed to flesh out a lot.

Because she was writing from memory she had left a lot of placeholders — like “write a scene here in which 'this’ happens.” And so she had to fill in a lot.

She had trouble, I remember, with the ending; I think that was problematic for a long time. And I remember she had an issue with the beginning being so different in tone than the second half, mainly because there’s a big shift in the events. She starts off as sort of this happy-go-lucky girl who falls in love and then things spiral downward. So there was a real tone shift. That’s something we worked on too.

Because it’s a memoir there was a preexisting structure in terms of how everything happened. So it was a lot more about selecting the scenes and fleshing out motivation and working on her character — because, you know, you’re writing a memoir in the first person yet you’re a character in your own story, and it took her a little while to find her stride with that — you know, get enough distance on it to make herself a character but stay connected enough to it to really reveal — she didn’t want to reveal very much about herself. She wanted to tell a lot about the other people involved, including Kevin, but at the beginning she didn’t have very much about herself. So a lot of the stuff about herself — it was very hard for I think. She started telling me about it, and I was like, “How can you write this story and not tell your part of it,” which is very relevant but hard in terms of her family.

AM  To what degree were you involved with that struggle that she did have? Obviously at this point she had decided that it would be a memoir not a novel, but she still was grappling with aspects from her personal life as well as trying not to compromise her family’s privacy.

SKR  Yes, she was very, very nervous about that, all of that. And really, what changed it for her, and what I recommended to her, was to talk to them. And she actually got in touch with — obviously she was in touch with her parents, but she talked to them about it in detail.

AM  And the quote from her mother, having read it, was, “What were you so worried about?”

SKR  And that was the thing that I said to her too — I’m like, you’re revealing things but you’re completely kind about it. So, you know, it’s true; these things happened. And that’s the standard that we judge a book by, whether it’s the truth. So she was nervous about that, but I guess she had gotten over that by the time we got her to [UW Press]. She had kind of come to terms with that. But it was a lot about connecting with the people in the story, which, having worked on other memoirs, I find that to be the case, even when there is nothing damaging about the person. It’s hard.

But her parents were also not in the original version as much. She had really kept back a lot about herself and a lot about her parents and hadn’t really fleshed out that relationship. And I had so many questions when I read the story. Like, well, what did they think about you running off to Russia to marry this guy? (Laughs.) That’s part of the story. And she agreed, but it took her — she struggled with it before she got it out.

AM  How willing was she to make those changes?

SKR  She was always willing to do whatever she could to get the book published. I believed in the book from the beginning, but she was completely committed to it from the beginning, no matter what it took.

AM  In what ways would you say that she was committed to the book and to getting it published?

SKR  First of all, she did these endless, endless revisions that I asked of her. She took a lot of criticism and worked really hard. And she also went through all of this process of presenting it to her family, including more detail about herself and her family than she originally might have felt comfortable with. But she did agree it was important. And she did it willingly. I think it was like somebody had to say, “Yeah, you have to do it.” (Laughs.)

But the second part of that is the actual process of selling it, which we started out — we must have gone through three or four rounds of submission. There was some revision in between. She came very close a number of times.

AM  And when you say “rounds,” that’s sending it out to numerous —

SKR  Sending the manuscript out to 10, 15, 20 editors.

AM  And getting a number of rejections and then kind of preparing it for a new round?

SKR  Yes, and then trying again.

And what we basically did was we kind of started out going with the big hardcover houses; then we did a mix of small presses and paperback houses, looking for still a wide-distribution publisher. And then the last round was smaller presses, which included universities — but still prestigious.

It was important to Jen — you know, being published by a small press she was totally open to. As I said, she just wanted it published. But it was important for her to do it with some legitimacy and with somebody who was, you know, serious about it and it would be “reviewable” and something she would feel proud of. So University of Wisconsin turned out to be a great place for her, because they’re small but they do have that prestige, they do get a lot of books reviewed.

But I wish I could tell you the number of places that we sent it to that it got rejected from, because it’s high. (Laughs.)

AM  Higher than?

SKR  Like over 30.

Normally an author who had an experience like Jen, where we sent it out, sent it out again, they revised, they revised, they revised, normally they would give up. They would say, “Okay, I’m going to work on a new book.” Or I might even tell them you should really — this is not going to work out. But with Jen, she was just like keep going, no matter what.

AM  At some point you decided it was worth that effort.

SKR   Honestly as an agent, we sometimes say, “That’s all we can do for you,” because we only get paid when the book sells, too. So it’s like you put in an enormous amount of effort and then you make a small sale, so you don’t get paid necessarily based on the amount of work it takes. So you make a business decision not to work with somebody anymore. But with Jen, with her it was more about her as a package. I felt like she was going to write more books. She was an amazing person. If she got the book out there I knew she would work hard to promote it. And I became good friends with her too, so I felt committed personally to it, too — like I really wanted it for her. So in terms of the commission I earned, I did a lot more for her than many other clients. (Laughs.)

AM  You recognized this as a longer term project, looking ahead to a next book, as does Jen.

SKR  Yeah. Well, she was clear about that with me from the beginning, too. You know, get this one published in such a way that it will position her for another book. So getting it reviewed was important. But yeah, she from the beginning approached me as, “I want you to be my agent because I’m going to write more books, too.”

AM   What do you think did account for the difficulty in selling the book?

SKR  Well, I can tell you both what I think and what editors said about it.

Memoir is a difficult category, always, unless the person is a celebrity, because you’re selling it basically just on writing and on what they believe is the “promotability” of the story, because you’re either seeing it as a literary work or something that you can get media attention for.

And despite her connections and her background, most publishers just felt like the media is not going to be interested in this story. “It’s really this love gone wrong story and haven’t we heard that before?” So they just felt there was no way they could get the kind of attention they would need. They didn’t think they could get reviews for it. And maybe they couldn’t have, because it would have been one of 10 books on their list. I don’t know; we’ll never know. They just didn’t see it as something they could sell enough copies of to make it worthwhile.

I think they felt like it fell into — it was at a time when memoir had been really big and was sort of cascading down and people had bought a lot of memoir when it was selling well. And they had started to fail, many of them. So they were, I think, more hesitant to buy then.

And I think it’s really interesting, and most people I talk to find it really interesting — the setting of 1990s Russia just seemed like a screwball thing to them. Like, “What do you mean? Who’s interested in that?” It’s like, it’s totally fascinating. It just hadn’t been done very much, I guess. I don’t know.

AM  What is your impression of how the book has been received?

SKR  Really amazingly well. I think it’s very gratifying. The reviews are incredible. I mean, we don’t see that kind of review attention for a lot of big hardcovers from Random House or Penguin Group, or whatever. I mean, she’s been reviewed everywhere. They’ve been almost uniformly positive and the criticism has been in some cases completely true and in some cases been very funny, where it’s almost like the reviewer is criticizing Jen for the choices she made instead of the book she wrote. That I thought was really interesting. There were a couple where they were very critical of her, like you don’t want to read this book because it’s just this girl that does stupid things, basically. And I think a lot of readers react to that as, “Well, I’ve done stupid things too, so actually I’m not going to hold it against her.” (Laughs.)

That is, I think, a fascinating thing — this is probably a whole other conversation, but memoirs written by women, the fact that the woman’s getting dinged for her life rather than a review of the book, where I don’t know that you see that the same way [with male authors]. But maybe memoir that’s always an issue, where people feel free to criticize what you do in the book instead of necessarily how it was written. Maybe that’s one of the hazards.

AM  Do you think that the fact that it was well written doesn’t really in the end go that far?

SKR  I think it was well written and is well written, but it’s not the most super-literary, prize-winning kind of prose. You know, it’s good, and she’s a really good story teller and it has a cinematic quality. The pace is very fast; she really moves you through and you keep turning the pages. And she just has these moments where she just hits something right on and you’re like, “oh, yeah.” But it’s not like she’s the most literary writer.

So when you talk about writing, selling a book, it usually has to be at the sort of über-literary level where it’s just really, really beautiful, so unbelievably well done. And I think by her own — I don’t think she would say that she was either. She’s not quite that type of writer.

AM  What are your expectations going from here?

SKR  At this point I have two things in mind. One is her new book. She’s working on a novel, which is only partially completed. And the second thing is I would really like to see somebody pick up paperback rights. I know UW Press is interested in selling them, or open to selling them, and hasn’t necessarily gotten the big bites yet, although there was some interest. So I’d really like to see that happen so that she keeps the book in print. And I think if she gets wider exposure at a lower price point, she could sell more copies and get more exposure that way, all in the service of setting her up for the publication of this novel.

So I feel like she’s in a really good place to take it — you know, I was hoping she would be in a place to take a small step; now I feel like she’s in a place to take a bigger jump forward and really make the second book into a bigger publication right from the start.

AM  Anything else you’d like to add?

SKR  It was nice, just on a personal note, getting to be friendly with Jen. Just the fact that as we were getting closer to selling the book, then she met Michael. And she had already known him; I’m sure you’ve heard the whole story. But she reconnected with Michael, and then it started to seem serious. So when we started selling the book, nothing was on the horizon in her love life, so it was this story of this busted affair that seemed more tragic. But by the time we sold the book she had met Michael, they were getting married. Even though it has nothing to do with the book, it felt like this great wrapper for the story.

Once she was with Michael, it was actually so much different. And it was funny because I had this weird thing when I first met Michael that, like, I was the agent who had worked with her on this book about the “other guy,” and he always thought that was funny and made a lot of jokes about that. I actually went to their wedding and there were a lot of jokes made about that.

AM  And what was the chronology, as you remember it? The manuscript was finished but hadn’t yet been sold?

SKR  When they re-met the manuscript had not been sold. They were dating when we sold it, but I don’t think it was totally clear that it was going to end up in marriage or anything like that. So that just all kind of happened, and then she’s like, “We’re getting married.” And it was so funny because it was like — it was so great because it just felt like this story was all about how she didn’t get married; it was this awful experience. And now she had this happy ending just as the book was coming out. It was really nice.

The following is an interview with Victoria Rowan, the author’s former writing group moderator, conducted by Andy Miles, November 22, 2004, New York, New York

AM   The story took place in 1998 and the publisher accepted it about a year ago, I believe. Within the five-year period there, when was it that she came to you? Was it just the 10-week course that she signed up for?

VR  No, she signed up for a few times. But honestly, it must have been 2001, 2002. So she might have been in two or three sessions of 10 weeks. You know, maybe a year.

AM   And so she arrived here with a work in progress.

VR  Yeah, she had done a good chunk of it, but she was definitely working on new sections per the critiques she was getting. And also, I don’t think she had really done the ending at all. And things were changing as she was editing.

AM   And at that point it was obviously more than just the diary she had started. She had shaped this into something potentially publishable?

VR  Oh, yeah. I mean, she definitely had already put it in — she was waffling back and forth on how memoir and how fiction it should be. But yes, she had already started to write it down in a narrative form.

AM  And in terms of trying to sort that out, between memoir and fiction, what sort of input did you offer?

VR  Well, we discussed the pros and cons. There’s always something about — the more extraordinary the story when it’s memoir, the more power it has. You know, since it’s your life and it’s your family, you might have reason to do that. So I think she came up with basically, from what I understand, a good solution of hybridizing a couple of characters but basically having it follow actual chronological time and order and having it be herself.

AM  And what were your initial impressions of the project? Did you think this was a strong manuscript?

VR  I felt it was a very strong project. I felt that initially, to my recollection, it was much more a love story, and I was more interested in it being a love story with the exotic subcultures of the newsroom and Russia at the time to be exploited as choices. I love romantic stories like the next person, but it’s so great when the love story offers some new content. I’m a big champion of exoticism, even if it’s everyday [exoticism].

But just having that reportage and authenticity of a very well delineated environment, where you get something new from the reading of it and the interpretation of the author and how the specific setting echoes metaphors of the story — I felt that in her case the backdrop of Russia was perfect metaphorically, so why not use that more to illuminate and underscore what she’s exploring on the narrative level.

AM   Was that just kind of a shift of emphasis — some of that was there but you thought it should be given more emphasis?

VR  I don’t want to claim too much credit, but I definitely would have championed that.

AM   So it’s not like that stuff just was absent but —

VR   No, but it was more sort of incidental. The initial drafts, as I recall them — I personally make a policy of working with what’s current because so much changes, and I try, to the best of my ability, to erase my prior experience of an earlier version because I want to see if it stands on its own. I mean, I might say well, gosh, an earlier version was much stronger in one area — I’ll mention that. But I try to work with the evolution of what the author wants for their project. And you know, I just felt that oh, my gosh, this is really fascinating; I want more of that as well. I mean, not to say that the personal story in the foreground wasn’t appropriate; I thought that was appropriate. And I did think it was appropriate because it was so interesting and unusual and very contemporary. Issues of depression and romance against the odds and ambition being in the foreground was, I think, of contemporary interest to upper middle-class college-educated people, particularly women, exploring their options.

AM   And some of those elements of the narrative, especially in that it’s a piece of memoir, non-fiction — how anxious was Jen in the process of writing this in terms of kind of exposing pieces of her own personal story that might be a little uncomfortable?

VR   It definitely was a consideration for her. But her family is very open and supportive, and I think that she comes across as someone who takes responsibility for herself and doesn’t blame her family for choices she made. I think it’s very different than the memoir where you’re blaming an ex-husband or you’re blaming your parents for a mess that you experienced. I think then you really cringe. And then you have the stories in the paper about families disowning authors and stuff. But that wasn’t the case in her family.

AM   And in the process of developing the manuscript, was any of that in play? Her maybe speaking out loud, kind of expressing some of those anxieties? Or was it that she had already resolved and reconciled some of those things?

VR   I think that she had. And she definitely, from what I know of her — I mean, I only got to know her in the last few years from this experience, but she has been a lifelong artist. She did photography — artistic photography, not just photojournalism-type stuff. I mean, she’s very ambitious and very accomplished and very talented. And I think that her confidence in those areas allow her to be vulnerable, which I think is a bold choice. I think that one of the powerful things about Jennifer’s book is that she does portray herself as someone who made poor choices, or risky choices that didn’t play out as she hoped, but that she survived them.

AM   So she came with a work in progress that at that point was fairly advanced. And you recognized from the beginning that it had the makings of publishable material?

VR   Yeah. She’s a very good writer, I think, sentence by sentence, even if you don’t connect with the material. I mean, I don’t know how a man feels about reading this book because I think it’s very much a book that touches on a lot of female issues. But yeah, she’s a very good writer. Sentence by sentence, I think you can’t dispute that she turns a beautiful line, and she has a good sense of humor.

AM   Now that the book has been published, what would you say about the finished product?

VR   I must perhaps give credit here to her agent. I definitely felt it was sharper.

I tell all my students this: It’s only when you get to the end of the first draft that you know what you have, and then you can go through and have that knowledge of the ending to inform the beginning.

I felt that there was less extraneous detail and everything felt more relevant and that that had been worked out. And I think that she had done a better job of both positioning her vulnerability but also portraying herself in a light that was appealing. Because it’s hard, especially when you are wanting to scream at the screen as if it was a movie — “don’t, don’t” — to, in a way, sort of be party to so many bad decisions for a long period of time. And I think that she did a better job of just sort of giving background of where she was coming from at that point in her life.

AM   Now that you know her at this point in her life, and you’ve only known her after the story that she tells has occurred — in terms of comparing who she is at that time and in the pages of the book and who the person she is who you’ve known, how do you interpret those choices that she made? Is it the kind of thing that anybody could possibly fall into? Do you think that she may have been especially prone to that sort of thing? What sense of that do you have now?

VR   My sense is that she remains an optimistic and gutsy girl who will do untraditional things — in a great sense. I mean, she fell in love with a guy and had to move to D.C. for his career, but she made it all work with CBS. You know, she’s game. And I think that’s really awesome. And I like that she’s flexible and that she’s found she even likes her life better there.

I think I met an older and wiser woman than the period — I mean, when something really awful like the romance she described and the professional things she described happen to you, it’s a painfully maturing experience. And I knew a woman who was — at the exact moment I met her she was looking for a different job, and she was at a place of transition, but she definitely had an incredible work ethic and was very focused that she’d get back in the game at a high level.

In terms of then and now, I think that the kind of woman that she was then in the book, as I remember it, was a woman who was willing to believe in the benefit of the doubt and she was willing to prize intellect over some obvious signs of security. And I think she had loyalty and empathy, and I think she still retains those. I think that’s great. I think so many people go through a tough experience and then come out the other side very cynical, and she didn’t. I think she got maybe wiser about holding off on trust and more discerning about who she dated. The man she married is wonderful. But to her credit, the core things that I experienced of her as a friend and as a reader of that book, the good things are still there.

AM   There might be a tendency among some readers to think that some of the story was sensationalized or exaggerated in some way. And obviously you didn’t live the story, but in the writing of it and her process of bringing it to the group and that sort of thing, as a literary project, would you say that the choices she made were very honest and very much faithful to herself and what happened?

VR   I think it was a crazy time. (Laughs.) I think that’s one reason why I made a stand for it being memoir versus fiction. I mean, you don’t want people to be doubting that this stuff actually happened. And I think that Jennifer really is, first and foremost, a good journalist. And I wasn’t there, but I totally trust the way she described the situations unraveling.

AM   And what were the reactions of other people in the group, as you remember them?

VR   People were enthusiastic. People were really interested. You know, very few people had been to Russia and [they] found that exotic and interesting. Definitely wanted to see the next installment. That’s what’s fun about a workshop. It can become like a soap opera.

AM   Anything else you’d like to add?

VR   I guess one thing that I was really impressed with — you know, I started the workshop five years ago in 2000 and she was the first person to actually finish a whole manuscript, get representation by a good agency and then get it published. And it really drove home for me something that I had been aware of and heard, but it really drove home how much to be a successful author is just to be absolutely committed to your story and to be absolutely persistent and dedicated. I think that so many people think that oh, you know, you can only be a novelist or a non-fiction writer if it comes out perfectly in some first draft. And most people aren’t good writers because they don’t have the fortitude for it and they don’t have stories that they care enough about. And I see all those elements as being absolutely critical.

She was absolutely committed to this as a story that she needed to get out and wanted to get out and felt had value, and she was absolutely disciplined and committed about it. I mean, she made more classes than other people who were doing less things in their life. She just was really dedicated. And I think that the people who treat writing as a job rather than just some sort of muse, divinely inspired, that only works at certain times, like when the moon is full or whatever, are the people who are never going to be professional writers. And no matter what you think about this book, I’m very confident that she’s going to be a professional writer. She just has the chops and the dedication, and I know she has tons of other ideas.

So it’s exciting to have been in proximity, new in my career as a writing instructor, to really understand that. And it really has informed the way I teach in some ways in that I am very practical; I really try to minimize people’s drama about their writing, and I think it’s a great service to them. I think we’ve all seen way too many movies about existential angst in writing, and here is a woman who’s writing about a lot of angst, but yet she had a businesslike approach to it in producing pages, in producing revises, in bringing creative energy to her revises, which is absolutely essential — not letting it get flat. And that was both inspiring to me and also instructive to me.

© 2005
Stephen Andrew Miles