Jennifer Gilmore

"It's actually quite frightening to be an author and know the business side of publishing. I imagine it's easier to be in Iowa and not know what's going on with your book. If the industry had stayed the same, I might still feel in control of the publishing process, but sales reps' jobs have changed, marketing jobs have changed, publicity jobs have changed."

"... when I just started this book I thought: Roth’s pretty much has it down on what the worse thing a Jewish boy can do but what is the worst thing a Jewish girl can do? Well: it is most likely throwing up her mother’s cooking. Food is identity, it’s love, it’s politics, it’s family. To reject that, and in such a self-destructive manner, is something I wanted to investigate. It also implicitly brings up the notion of privilege, which is also a stereotype many young Jewish women are saddled with."

"My husband and I were on this protracted and tragic adoption journey. It was really hard and there were a lot of things that went wrong, so I decided while this is happening I'd write a book about it to make it more interesting as opposed to just tragic. It's definitely based on our experience, but not exactly our experience. You know, I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers [laughs]. I think I learned some things about it, how to be patient, a little bit, and I'm so hard on that narrator, that I got to see the worst of how I felt. My husband said this to me actually—he said I was taking this horrible thing that we were going through and turning it into something positive. I felt productive in that way."