Brooklyn-based writer Jean Hannah Edelstein is the millennial Nora Ephron. Whether in her articles for The Guardian, The Pool, and Elle or her debut memoir This Really Isn’t About You surrounding her father’s death from cancer and the discovery that she had inherited the gene that would cause her the disease too, she confronts some of life’s big questions with heart-breaking honesty, brilliant wit and wry humour. Keep scrolling to read our interview with Edelstein ahead of the book’s publication this Thursday 23rd August.
When did you decide to write the book?
In its original incarnation, the book was an essay collection — I started writing the first essays about five years ago, when I was still living in Berlin. But as circumstances in my life changed, over time it became clear that it would make more sense as a single narrative. I have to credit my agent, Daisy Parente, with playing a key role in helping me thread it together! We met in person for the first time at a hotel bar in New York In the spring of 2016, and she just let me talk at her about my life until I could see my way through it.
Was it difficult to write, or cathartic, or both?
The epigraph from Nora Ephron at the beginning of the book is about the benefit of telling one’s own story as a way of feeling control, and that was part of what I was doing in writing This Really Isn’t About You — finding a kind of resolution, or at least ease, with the hardest things in my life, through taking my experiences and shaping them into a narrative that I wanted to share with other people. Which is to say, I suppose: that it was indeed both cathartic and difficult, but also a pleasure. Writing can feel like torture sometimes, but for the most part I enjoy it.
What’s it like writing memoir? Is this style of writing something you were doing before you knew you wanted to write this book?
I think I’ve been writing memoir in one way or another since I was a kid writing accounts of the mild adventures that I had on my summer holidays when I returned to school. For a long time I tried to write fiction — I think I believed it had more artistic merit than memoir. But at some point I realized that I was at my best when just owning up to writing about myself, rather than writing about myself but giving my faintly-fictionalised character a different name and slightly better hair.
In the book, you’re very open about your lack of confidence to write… When did you know you could write?
I believed for a while that I was a decent writer, but it took me a long time to gain the confidence to think that other people might want to read what I was writing, that it was worth publication. At university my courses were quite theoretical — creative writing was not an option for focus at my uni — and professors would often write comments on my papers like ‘entertaining writing, poor analysis.’ That made me think that maybe I had a certain flair, but since I thought I wanted to be an academic I was discouraged. (Thank goodness I didn’t become an academic.)
A turning point happened when some friends of a friend started a magazine at a time when I was very miserable (readers of the book will recognize this as the occasion when I was fired and dumped on the same day) — to cheer myself up I submitted a short piece of memoir, because I felt like I had nothing to lose, and lo and behold they published it and invited me to be a contributing editor to the magazine. This changed everything in terms of helping me to believe that I was writing something worth sharing.
How hard is it to motivate yourself to write?
My writing practice is shambolic by any measure. I have a full-time job in addition to writing, but actually I think the limited time is what helps motivate me — I have to make the most of it. I write a lot on my phone during my commute, in the evenings after work, at the weekend, during my lunch breaks, and so forth. It’s what works for me, though I wouldn’t especially recommend it — I’m somewhat skeptical of mimicking other people’s writing practices, because whenever I’ve tried to adopt someone else’s discipline or habits, it’s just made me feel like a failure. At one time in my life I was a full-time freelance writer and I actually hated the isolation and lack of structure, though of course it’s perfect for many people.
Can you talk about the moment in the book that inspired the title?
The title of a book comes out of a conversation that I had with a doctor — we were discussing my diagnosis and the loss of my father and he shared that his own father had died recently. I am sure he said it to show empathy, but it annoyed me because it seemed irrelevant to the conversation we were having about my own health and life. But more broadly the title refers to how little control we have over our own lives — how so much of our experience is determined by things like genetics, luck and privilege.
It’s really refreshing to read about a parental relationship, and dare we say it, a positive one. Is that something you wanted to highlight/ celebrate?
I’ve been very lucky in my relationship with my parents — I wouldn’t say that I set out to explicitly celebrate it, but I think that was the result of writing this book in a way that felt authentic to my experience with them. Several early readers have said that the book is a tribute in many ways to both my mum and dad, and I’m glad that’s one of the things that stood out to them.
The book feels like a super-honest account of what it’s like to live now, as a single woman. Did you want to bring the realities of renting flats, mediocre dating etc to life?
Yes, I wanted to keep it real. But I also wanted to write a book that was about finding solutions, or at least peaceful co-existence, with these realities, by oneself, rather than one that was resolved by romance.
How does it feel to be compared to Nora Ephron, by Olivia Laing?!
It feels like a dream! Heartburn was a watershed book for me — in the edition I read, around 2012, I was struck by the introduction in which she noted that several people had been salty with her for writing the book — to which she responded, to paraphrase, ‘well, they should have been nicer to me.’ Reading her work made me feel that I had the permission to be more honest than ever as a writer. And Olivia has been a close friend and mentor since we worked together at a newspaper a decade ago — I have to give her a lot of credit for the book’s existence, as she’s been telling me to write something like it for most of the time we’ve known each other.
Who are your writing heroes?
This list could go on forever, so I’ll share two recent memoirs that I’ve loved reading: Sick by Porochista Khakpour and Educated by Tara Westover.
How has travel helped your writing?
I wouldn’t describe myself as a traveller so much as an immigrant — I’ve had the privilege of living in five different countries so far, and I think that the discomfort of new cities and cultures has helped to hone my skills of observation, as well as compelling me to be a person who forms interesting relationships with lots of different kinds of people, both of which inform my writing.
This Really Isn’t About You is published by Picador on Thursday 21st August. Pre-order your copy here
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