A conversation with Amelia Morris

On publishing in dark times, being an introvert on IG, and CMBYN

When I started this newsletter, I knew that I wanted to make space for other voices to join me here. I envisioned that happening in the form of interviews, but it turns out that the word “conversation” is closer to what I’m after. Every now and then, I’ll share with you a conversation with someone whose work and mind I admire. Today, we’re kicking it off with my friend Amelia Morris, author of the brand-new novel Wildcat.

photo by Matthew Bookman

I met Amelia many years, children, and books ago, through the world of food blogging. She wrote/writes(?) the smart, irreverent, and wildly funny blog Bon Appetempt, and she’s the author of a 2015 memoir by the same name. You may also know her as the co-host (with writer Edan Lepucki) of Mom Rage podcast, which is sadly no longer making new episodes, but you can still listen to it wherever you get podcasts. If you follow her on Instagram, you’ll see that Amelia is also a gymnast(!). This woman is forty years old and doing backflips and a bunch of other contortions that I don’t know the name of.

Last month, Amelia’s first novel Wildcat was published to great acclaim in The New York Times, People, The Los Angeles Times, Kirkus, and more. It’s available everywhere, and if you’d like a signed copy, Skylight Books is your spot.

We Zoomed on March 2 and caught up about all of it: promoting books in horrible times, being an introvert on Instagram, Call Me by Your Name, hugging women, you name it. What follows has been edited for clarity.

Amelia Morris: [Trying to turn on the Zoom camera] Am I not showing myself?

Molly Wizenberg: That’s it, Amelia. Show me your whole self. But really, no, how are you? I've been having a lot of fun doing research on you.

AM: You have? I mean, I don't know. I don’t know how I am. This is what I wanted. My dream come true.

MW: Yeah, I had this strong sense when I was in the middle of writing my last book, like, oh man, this is really the best part, isn't it? Everything that comes after the writing is like not gonna match up to this feeling, the feeling of the writing itself. 

AM: Yeah, truly all my dreams came true, right? I got a great review in the New York Times. I got the Kirkus star. I got my book published. But you know, there's a war in Ukraine. And I'm still trying to sell this book. What can I do?

MW: That's how I felt, bringing out a book in late 2020. 

You know, something that fascinates me about your book is how it feels like it was written for this exact moment. The “vaccination debate” is a big part of the plotline. In the book, the debate is around routine childhood vaccinations, but still, it’s wild to remember that you wrote this pre-COVID. Of course vaccinations were something that those of us with young children were thinking about anyway, but it was certainly not the cultural preoccupation it is now.

AM: I remember when I was doing a round of revisions, there was a measles outbreak. [Vaccination is] a whoooooole thing. It’s always been a whole thing. I don’t know, I feel weird about talking about this, but it took so long for this book to sell. And I do think the anti-vax part of the plot is what sold it, because the book sold [to a publisher] during COVID. But I feel like you're not allowed to talk about that. You're not allowed to talk about how long it took to sell.

MW: Oh, god, yes. It was really a distressing process to sell The Fixed Stars. Because I have always been known as a genre writer, right? I have always been known as a food writer, but The Fixed Stars was not a food book. Food writing is a very hot genre, a desirable genre, but still, if you’re a food writer, you’re not looked at as a writer-writer. The Fixed Stars was passed over by many publishers because they did not feel that I was viable outside of food writing. Did you get a sense of that, of not being taken seriously?

AM: Well, I feel like it's different for you because your [food-related] books were bestsellers. You know, Bon Appetempt was not going to sell this novel.

MW: Ok, that's a good point. You’re right.

AM: It's interesting, because of course I find it very annoying when people put me in a box. But then when I follow gymnasts [on Instagram], and they start posting about, like, their husband or whatever, I'm just like, I don't care. Like just show me your skills. That’s the content I want. [Laughs.]

MW: Okay, but Wildcat. At the outset, did you know that this was going to be fiction?

AM: I was deeply inspired by Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? I read it when I was pregnant with Isaac, so seven years ago or something. It's autofiction, and it felt so vulnerable. I thought, What if I could just write everything that scares me about myself? Just write it all down. What would that look like? That's what got me started.

MW: And the result is so FUN to read. I know you well enough to recognize aspects of you in the protagonist Leanne. But because she’s a fictional character, you got to really play with her, push her closer to the limit. You can’t do that with memoir.  

AM: That's the beauty of fiction. My friend who's a fiction writer – we always like say, Thank God for fiction, because we can have sex with somebody else! And I felt that way about the character of Leanne. 

MW: Like scratching an itch. It feels really good, and as readers we all get a little triumph, a sense of satisfaction.

AM: I'm glad. Leanne is on her own path, and she's fairly happy with it.

MW: You have an MFA in creative writing. Was it in fiction? Were you a poet?

AM: I wasn’t a poet. I was roommates with a poet though. [Laughs] I was writing fiction, and I wanted to be a fiction writer. It’s funny. I picture my little house in Wilmington [during grad school], and that was right when I started [the food blog] Bon Appetempt. I graduated with a novel that I sent around, but I couldn't get an agent. And then one finally responded and was like, um, What about a memoir? I like your food blog. And I was like, Okay.

MW: Did writing memoir feel right to you? 

AM: Having the food blog had made me much more comfortable with nonfiction. I set myself a schedule, and I was writing a lot.

MW: The practice of it, yes. There's no substitute for that. Writing online, especially – it gives you a regular deadline. If I don't have a deadline, it can be hard to justify making time to write. I'm not a morning-pages person. I'm not someone who has to write to live.

AM: But do you miss it when you're not doing it?

MW: For sure. I miss the version of me that I get to live inside when I’m writing. I can't wait to write a book again, to feel that kind of immersion. But I'm also somebody who needs time between book projects. I’m not, like, bursting with ideas. But I crave that feeling, and writing online gives me some of it, but it’s not the same immersion. It’s like micro-dosing that feeling, I guess.

AM: Well, I also feel like it's kind of a map. Like maybe you'll hit upon something.

MW: I certainly won't hit upon something if I'm not writing. But back to your book. It’s populated almost entirely by women. And even though Leanne's husband is clearly a lovely guy – I get the feeling he's a lot like [Amelia’s husband] Matt – still, he's peripheral. Did you know from the beginning that the book would be almost entirely women?

AM: I did make that decision early. I wanted it to be a female story. I was driven by female friendship and motherhood. When I started writing it, I was reading Women Who Run with the Wolves, and I'd recently discovered Of Woman Born, by Adrienne Rich. I felt so powerful after my first child. With my second child, less powerful. But after my first child, I felt so powerful – and so dismissed. I wanted to do, like, a paean to women – but at the same time, tackle how weird and complicated it can get, too.

MW: I’m interested in the way the jacket copy describes Leanne’s new friend Maxine: “Feeling frustrated and invisible . . . Leanne seeks security wherever she can find it, whether that's by researching whether she should vaccinate her son, in listening to the messages she thinks her father is sending her from beyond the grave, or in holding her own against a petulant student in her creative writing class.” I loved that part of the plotline, by the way! But okay, back to the jacket copy: “Most of all, however, she looks for it within Maxine, who offers Leanne something new.” The first time I read that, I was like, Are Maxine and Leanne going to DO IT?  [Laughs.] 

But then, in your essay on LitHub, you add some nuance, writing, “I could give Leanne an ally, someone grounded in a more spacious, open hearted reality. Maxine, in many ways, is Wild Woman.” You write that Maxine is the mother you always wanted but never got. That makes sense. But god, I’m so sorry, I have to ask: was there ever a draft in which Maxine and Leanne had sex?

AM: I definitely thought about it. Definitely. The other thing that was going on during this time was I discovered the movie Call Me by Your Name. I was obsessed with that movie. Oh, and I was definitely taken with the fact that you came out. As did you come out as gay, or how did you?

MW: I think I said I'm not straight. Yeah, that still feels like the way to say it. I also use queer.

AM: So you did your thing. And then Glennon Doyle, she did her thing too. And then Elizabeth Gilbert was with a woman. So many women doing their things! And I remember just thinking like, I was so obsessed with Call Me By Your Name, and I remember just being like, Am I gay? What’s going on?

MW: You are the only person I know who loves that movie as much as I do! From the opening credits with the music and the images of Greek sculpture, I feel like it milks something out of me that needs to come out. What does the movie do to you?

AM: I think it came to me personally at a time when things were so dark. Trump had been elected, and it was hard to access joy and beauty, and then that movie came and I was like, This is it.

MW: It is saturated with beauty.

AM: It’s dripping with it. Every shot – the people, the parents, it’s just the best. 

MW: Even just Timothee Chalamet crying in front of the fireplace for seven minutes.

AM: So yeah, I found myself wondering, What's going on with women that they're turning to other women? Why am I so obsessed with Call Me by Your Name? But Maxine and Leanne never did make out, not in any of my drafts.

MW: But there’s still a wonderful satisfaction for me in the way you wrote them. I love that you took the time to explore through them what it feels like, as a woman, to hug another woman. That tactile experience.

AM: Wow. Thank you. Yeah, the other thing I was working out through this book was the ways that as a woman I felt powerful. If you're with a man, he's typically bigger than you, and his body, like, envelops you. I wanted Leanne to be in charge of herself, so I asked, what would it be like to be that role in a relationship?

MW: I think about that too. In my previous relationship, there were so many things that I sort of relinquished, or handed off to my male partner – sure, things that are not so fun, like taking out the garbage or changing a car battery, but also things that I could have done perfectly well myself. It’s so different to move through my life now as the default agent who will do these things. Or, if Ash is going to do it, it's not because they are bigger or stronger or something I'm not. It's because we're sharing the work of our lives. 

But on a different note, a prominent theme in Wildcat is social media – the power that social media wields both through us and on us. What is your relationship to social media? I noticed you didn’t post on Instagram on the day the book came out. 

AM: The self-promoting thing, it's not easy. I feel like most writers are probably introverts, right? And social media is probably particularly damaging for introverts. Because we live in our heads. I live in my head. And it doesn't help you get out of your head.

MW: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Me too. And the thing is, I follow a lot of writers on Instagram, and I love it, because I learn so much from them. But it devastates me nearly daily. I will find some way to make it about myself. 

AM: Yeah!

MW: Listen, I have to tell you this. One of my goals for when The Fixed Stars came out was to have a whole bunch of essays come out around the same time, to help promote the book. It’s what writers are supposed to do. But then it was 2020 and I felt completely empty and I never wrote a thing. So when I saw you have essays this week on LitHub and Publishers Weekly, the first thing I did was think, God, Molly, why didn't you do that? Like, Amelia is better than you are at being a writer. So I don’t know if it’s about introversion for me, or about the fact that I’m a human being and human beings are good at making everything be about us.

AM: It's that messed up thing of, like, [when you look at Instagram,] you're like having this conversation in your head. And if you actually have a conversation with somebody else, it's like a totally different experience.

MW: In your LitHub essay, you write so articulately about the questions that Wildcat explores for you. At what point in the writing process did you identify those questions?

AM: Honestly, I feel like things crystallized in that LitHub essay. I could see them more clearly after the fact.

MW: That’s reassuring! So often when writers talk about their process, it seems like they have a more thorough understanding of their own mind than I do when I begin to write. I’m glad to hear that you don’t. [Laughs.] You wrote an entire novel without really knowing what the central questions were, but you made them sound really good in that article. 

AM: Thank you. It was easier, you know? The worst part of writing is the first draft. By the time I wrote that essay, I understood the book.

MW: Well, thank you for all of this. Thank you for making this time. Say hi to Matt. Say hi to the kiddos. Keep posting your gymnastics videos.

AM: It’s keeping me sane. I think. Thank you.