RH: How much of the story is "true" or "autobiographical"?
LZ: The Ray character is based on a composite of several
different guys, but basically I got dumped in incredibly bad ways,
and I figured that since I was a writer, I should write about it.
RH: What gave you the motivation to put aside your career and
devote all your time and energy to this novel?
LZ: I started this book about six years ago, when I was still
working full time, and it was frustrating because I'd only get to work
on it a few weeks out of the year, mostly during summer vacation.
But I did have a draft by the time I left New York for Washington. I
left mainly because I was exhausted from my job, and I just needed
to finish the novel. If nothing happened after that, I could be a
publicist for the rest of my life, but I had to know. Besides, I felt that
this idea might only be interesting to me for a finite amount of time,
and I'd been working on it for nearly five years, and I thought, "If I
don't finish this soon, I'm going to get really bored with it."
I went to Washington in late December 1995. I had some freelance
work at first, and then I worked for five months at the Smithsonian.
It was a very easy job, nine to five, no work to bring home, no phone
calls in the middle of the night. Once I got adjusted to not having an
office with a window and an expense account and all that, I realized
that that was why I moved. I had a normal job that didn't eat up my
life. So I was able to finish the novel and send it to an agent by
August of 1996.
RH: When did you decide to name the character Jane
Goodall?
LZ: Late, about three drafts into it. I don't know why. I moved
to Washington, gutted a lot of the book, and started over with a
skeletal version of the story. I just put the name in to see what it
would be like and it worked, so I kept it.
RH: In the book, Jane becomes a sex/dating columnist. Had it ever
occurred to you to write about relationships in non-fiction?
LZ: No, I always wanted to do fiction. With non-fiction it
seemed like you needed to have a degree in psychology or some
social work field. This just felt like a story that I wanted to tell, and
when other women began telling me similar stories, that encouraged
me to write this as a story, one that has happened to a lot of women
in some form.
RH: If women readers think, "Yeah, that's happened to me," I'd
imagine men probably squirm at Ray's behavior.
LZ: They squirm, but most of the guys who read it when the
manuscript was being considered were men, and they really liked it.
I think a lot of men are curious about how women see them, and
they can recognize things they've done in Ray's behavior. They don't
think it's malebashing, which makes me happy, because it isn't
intended as a malebashing book.
RH: How hard is writing comedy for you?
LZ: Sometimes it comes on the first try, sometimes I go back to
it a couple hours later or the next day and then I come up with the
funny line to end the section. I'm lucky, though, that I'm pretty quick
at writing once I figure out what it is I'm doing. I don't torture
myself over every sentence. The humor just comes.
RH: Do you have a second novel lined up yet?
LZ: Yes, amazingly enough, because I was really convinced
that if I ever finished this one I would never do another one. A lot of
the authors I worked with as a publicist had thousands of story
ideas, and I didn't. I just had this one. But I've got my second story
idea, and I'm about twenty-five pages into it now. It's called
Dating Big Bird, and it's about women my age, mid-thirties,
who really want kids, but aren't married, or their boyfriends don't
want kids...It's what women like me have to start thinking about at
this age. Yeah, it's all about me. (laughs)
RH: So should men be wary of getting involved with you?
LZ: I'm sure they already are. I've told a lot of people I'm
certain I'll never get another date now that this book is out because
they're afraid that I'll be dissecting them to stick into my stories.
And I probably would, to some extent. Even the most imaginative
novelists, the ones who can write about something completely
different from their lives, base some part of their characters on the
people they know.
