On a windy, early October day, ODU second year MFA student Rebekah Sanderlin sat down with author Lauren Oyler for lunch at Ocean Eddie’s on the Virginia Beach pier for burgers and a delightful conversation about writing.

On breaking into writing

Rebekah: Let’s talk about breaking into a writing career. What was your trajectory?

Lauren: I started writing for the internet in college—my college newspaper, but also websites that don’t really exist anymore. Then I started writing top 10 lists. It was just a different time in media. I used the word “listicle” the other day talking to a student, and he didn’t know what that was. He’s 23. A listicle was a huge form at the time, especially in the early days of social media.

I started doing that, which was horrible. Then I started writing book blogs for my friend in Berlin. I wasn’t paid for it. I did copy editing and babysitting. I lived in Berlin, which was really cheap—my rent was 240 euros a month for a room.

Because my job was researching what was going on in contemporary literature, I learned what was going on and I learned that I didn’t like it. So, I started writing angrier blogs and they got attention. The first thing that went really viral was this long piece I wrote about Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. Because of that, I got a job at Vice for a couple of years.

Working at Vice was terrible. We worked 70 hours a week. But it was a really good opportunity because there was just an endless need for content. And now that’s not there because people aren’t reading articles. So, there’s probably another way you can break in now, but it’s not that anymore.

On the outsider’s perspective

Rebekah: I wondered if your experience as an outsider–as a southern West Virginian who attended Yale for undergrad—informs your approach to criticism.

Lauren: The traditional view of the critic is that they’re standing above and looking down. The stereotypical novelist also stands in the corner of the party and watches. I think it’s actually the same set of skills—watching, noticing strange details that signal some meaning that maybe people aren’t picking up themselves.

My outsider experience—I grew up in the working class, not surrounded by books—I do think it helps. Living abroad also makes you much more comfortable in that distant observant mode because there’s a part of you that will just never fully integrate.

Sometimes I go back to West Virginia and people will be like, “Oh, you’re not from around here, are you?” And I’m like, “Well, actually, I’m from up the road.” There’s also a kind of shame where I grew up about not knowing certain things that now people in cities make fun of. Now when I go back and I’m like, “Oh, actually now I’m much more like those rich people than I am my family.” It’s a very common experience for people who move away.

Rebekah: But you’re not afraid to be outside of what everybody else is saying.

Lauren: When you publish some of the things , people will come out of the woodwork and say, “This is really great. I’ve never heard anyone articulate this before. I felt so alienated by literary culture.” So when you express that, you actually create an new inside; other kinds of connections.

When you feel comfortable being outside, you realize there’s not actually an inside. I mean, there’s power, but there’s not one door you need someone to open. There are lots of doors. And when you have access to gossip, you realize it’s really hard to be kicked out of them. I know several people who have good jobs in publishing who very publicly did things that should have ruined their careers, and it didn’t. So, actually all these anxieties propping up this idea of a closed off, hard-to-access literary world are just fake.

On voice and style

Rebekah: Your prose style is distinctive. How much do you think about your voice when you’re writing?

Lauren: It usually just comes out. You can’t really control it. I can prevent it from going wrong, but it’s not like I consciously think about it. I think, oh, that’s funny or that’s an interesting turn of phrase. And then it turns out that I have a very unique way of thinking about language.

This is probably because of being an outsider. I grew up speaking the way people speak in Southern West Virginia. Then I went to Yale. Then I moved to Berlin with this British boyfriend, where people speak English in a really strange way. In Berlin, a lot of the people I talk to don’t speak native English. So, I think my willingness to pull from different versions of English comes from all of these backgrounds, and I speak pretty similar to the way that I write.

Rebekah: Do you feel like your voice has changed over the years?

Lauren: It’s becoming more mature, which is sad. And more journalistic, because I am doing journalism. But you become better at thinking about themes or story. You get better at seeing what’s really going on—what is actually driving people, their actual motivations, where they’re lying, where they’re in denial. You get better at seeing that in yourself as well. Because you don’t want to be writing personal essays where the writer is using it as an elaborate excuse to remain in denial about some obvious thing that everyone can see.

On moving between forms

Rebekah: Moving between criticism, essays, and fiction, how do these different forms allow you to explore different ideas?

Lauren: Everything is kind of falling together now. I have this novel that’s kind of post-autofiction. And then these critical essays, like in No Judgment and some of my stuff for Harper’s, still heavily rely on my personal life. If you’ve read the Goop-cruise thing I wrote, on the one hand I’m saying quite a lot—I have these two boyfriends, I spent all summer doing drugs, I’m really sad. But actually, you don’t really get the deeper story. I use the assumptions of the reader to get over saying too much in nonfiction. But in fiction, I’m like, yeah, I should probably write about that more.

I also started writing poetry over the summer instead of writing my novel. I was going out with this musician and we talked about songwriting a lot. And I was like, oh, I used to write poems all the time. So, I started writing these poems. Sometimes I’ll write a movie review that’s a poem. Everything goes together.

Rebekah: Do you feel like pieces you want to write come to you in certain formats?

Lauren: I can see very clearly where something belongs. I’m like, that’s a poem, that’s for the novel. Anything could work in any way. It’s just how you feel. If you’re an artist, you have to have developed your instincts so you can make those decisions without thinking too much. Because if you’re vacillating all the time, second guessing yourself, then you never finish anything, and you can tell in the work that it’s not confident. I think as I get older, I’m getting much more confident and that’s because i’ve written a lot. I’ve ghostwritten six books.

On ghostwriting

Rebekah: What is that process like?

Lauren: I’ve done memoirs. My name’s on a couple. I’m not really allowed to talk about the others, but I’m allowed to say I do it. It’s really nice because you’re doing it for someone else, so you’re not as precious about it. I often can do one in two or three months.

The subjects are not writers themselves, so they’re grateful and they want it to be simple and easy to read. So, it does make me more confident. When I’m doing my own stuff, it makes me more experimental in my real work because I have this income that is not tied to my own name.

Basically, I did one and it became a New York Times bestseller. Then people knew who I was, and editors knew that I did and still do it. Now, if there’s someone who seems like they would fit with me, they go to my agent, we have an interview, and then I work with them.

On the writing process

Rebekah: What is your revision process like?

Lauren: It’s very instinctual because I’ve done it so much. I know it’s about looking for problems—word issues, redundancies, too many words. I also tend to have the same problems over and over. When I was in college, I had a professor who taught us to think of a list of your worst problems that you do over and over.

One of the things I do is always, especially in an essay, put the end near the beginning and then I need to move it down. And I don’t use contractions enough, which is wrong because I write in this casual style.

I also procrastinate a lot and I don’t do anything on time. When I’m editing, it’s the same way. I put it off, put it off, put it off, and then I do it. And I’m like, oh, this is not so bad. Why did I put this off for so long?

On book criticism and magazines

Rebekah: How do you decide which books you want to write about?

Lauren: I usually don’t pitch anymore. Mostly, I just get told. Sometimes editors will see me posting on social media about something, and then they’ll ask if I want to review it. The last one I did was Emily Witt’s memoir Health and Safety about raving. I’d written about clubbing a couple times so people asked me to review that.

But now I don’t really want to just review anything. I don’t want to review something that’s going to feel like a waste of time to read. I don’t really read that much contemporary literature anymore because I got bored of it. So, it really has to be an exciting thing for me to do it. But I do like to be involved in public discourse.

Rebekah: If you’re writing for Harper’s, are you thinking about the Harper’s reader?

Lauren: The Harper’s reader is kind of the ideal. It’s the ideal magazine for me. They want it to be eclectic, well written, but also interestingly written. There’s not a certain style. You don’t have to worry about being too smart or using too many references.

But I find it even more freeing to write books because you can say a lot in a book that you just can’t say in a magazine. You can do a lot of stuff creatively that you can’t do in a magazine. Magazine editors all have editor brain where they’re constantly trying to make sure they’re not going to get in trouble.

I’m so sick of writing for magazines, so now i’m writing for my own magazine, which is a book. All those essays in No Judgment were things that I could have done for magazines in a very different way, but I didn’t want to. I wanted them to be really long. I wanted them to be very aggressive and strange.

On social media and publishing

Rebekah: Do you feel like there’s pressure or benefit to being on social media as a writer?

Lauren: There’s definitely benefit. I think my whole career is because of that. The articles were going viral on social media and then people could see the profile of the person who’d written the article.

I’m sure it looks good. But in general, publishers are not imaginative. You kind of have to fight to prove that you know what you’re talking about. Even I had to, and by the time my novel Fake Accounts was on submission I was pretty well known, but my book was rejected by 25 editors. I’d done several very big articles that had gone viral. And it still didn’t matter. They were wrong. Then it came out on Catapult, which is a small press, and it was a huge success. I earned more than double the advance. That’s the thing about small presses—if you get a good one, they’re much better at marketing and you get much better attention because they’re small.

Social media’s been extremely harmful for society and people personally. Still, in hindsight, it was a much better opportunity for me than what writers have now. Now, you can’t really make a career on social media. You have to do TikTok, which is not writing. And I don’t use it. I’ve never looked at that app.

On what’s next

Rebekah: What are you working on now?

Lauren: I have a novel that I’ve been preparing to write for about three years. I have lots of notes for it, but I haven’t started. And now everybody’s like, where’s your novel? So, I have to start that. I’m writing an introduction to an old novel that was never published by this writer I really love, Elaine Kraft.

And then I have all these poems. I wrote like 40 over the summer that I think are good. So, I’m going to do something with those poems. Just collect them. That’s what you do with poems.

Rebekah: Do you think there’s a book of poetry in your future?

Lauren: I don’t know. I don’t know anything about publishing poetry. I’m reading for the first time on Sunday at a bar in Berlin. It’s so fun. I love doing poems. It’s so freeing.

Rebekah: Have you ever read your poetry in public?

Lauren: When I was 23. But this is the first time in over a decade. And I would hope that these poems are better. I’m very nervous. I’ve never been nervous to publish anything before. And now I am. But I think that’s a good sign.