The AV Club Q&A is "Love the song, hate the lyrics." Find my input here.
Today I chat with a longtime e-buddy of mine, the author of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. Lizzie Skurnick is the columnist for Jezebel.com's Fine Lines and the author of ten teen books in the Sweet Valley High, Love Stories and Alias series. Her literary blog, Old Hag, is a Forbes Best of the Web pick. She's on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and has written on books and culture extensively for the New York Times Book Review, Times Sunday Styles, the LA Times, NPR.org, The Washington Post and many other publications. Her poetry has appeared everywhere from Morning Edition to the Iowa Review to New York magazine online, and she is the recipient of residencies or awards from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the AWP.
How do you review books? Do you write notes in the margins? Wait until you're all done? Do you read at any particular time or place?
I underline and write notes in the margins and concurrently jot sentences down somewhere to begin making a coherent hash of things. I also I pull down other books and add thoughts and sometimes tweet and call people for vague references I can't remember. All in all it's a really big hullaballoo for $250.
Have you ever heard back from authors whose books you've reviewed?
Strangely, I hear back the most when I've posted something on my blog. (Print reviews usually just lead to awkward interactions at conferences.) I think blog is drunk, print is sober, in the confrontational world, basically. My favorite was the author who kindly wrote to tell me his character was a transvestite, not a hermaphrodite. (I did KNOW this, but this is another example of how blog is drunk.)
What do you think is the most overrated YA book or series?
This the meanest question I've ever had to answer! Finally -- thanks so much. Christopher Pike.
What are you reading right now?
The Room and the Chair, by Lorraine Adams. Also about 90 other things, but that's in my bag.
What's your favorite thing that you've read lately (if not what you're reading now?)
Adored "Beach Week" by Susan Coll and "The Three Weismanns of Westport" by Cathleen Schine. Am working on a piece about smarty-pants women writers who don't get the respect they deserve.
Do you read reviews of your own books?
Sure. My favorite review of my book ever, because it WAS ENTIRELY AND TOTALLY CORRECT IN ITS PARTICULARS and very well-written itself, is Mary Pols' review of my book in Time.
You've written several books: what's a lesson you've learned after each one?
Hmmm. I think that books have to marinate, but also that you have to make sure you have the energy to come back to them and fix them the way they deserve. Writing whole books is like hauling flour sacks around under the thumb of an evil tyrant who keeps wanting the sacks stacked in new and different arrangements. You just have to remember the tyrant really does have a vision, and he will settle on it if you give him enough time, but it is important to tell him to fuck off and that you need to go lie down whenever you want, too. (See, on the second pass, I would make these metaphors agree, though I would fight to keep the sack thing.)
What have you learned about book publicity? What are you good at and with which parts do you struggle?
I am very Zen and hippy-dippy and internet-y about book publicity today -- I think if you are out there twirling around and having a good time discussing the world IN the world, you will have followers interested in your work. However, I often struggle about asking people to pay for things -- specifically, to hear me speak. Apparently I can do this!
Where are the majority of your favorite reviews published? Do you prefer the Review of Books or do you find gems on blogs or Goodreads, etc?
My favorite reviews are by my friends, wherever they publish. This sounds awful except my friends became my friends BECAUSE I met them through their reviews, so it's not entirely weird. But I think a good new place to find INTERESTING cultural criticism today, if I'm naming a new place, is The Awl, which is consistently excellent in the school of blogga circa 2003.
You've written about how supportive your parents are of you as a writer. Do they read everything you write? Does that affect your writing at all?
Did I write about that? God! No. My mother always told me I was a writer, and my father never bothered me too much about becoming one, both of which were enormously helpful. I find it mortifying when anyone I know reads anything I write, so I try not to think about what my parents think, or I would be entirely paralyzed. I spend days rationalizing about writing among the living at all -- "One day we will all be dead"; "Other people were drunks and lived off their relatives their whole lives," that kind of thing.
What's your favorite guilty reading genre? (For me it's gossip and Hollywood biographies).
I feel guilty about nothing. NOTHING. That I read. (Also easy, because you just tag on "cultural critic" and you're good to go.) Can this really be true? I'm going to think about it some more and comment when you put this up. It would be so great to know there is an area of my life in which I experience no guilt!
You're reading a book and you just can't get into it. Do you slog through the end or quit?
I don't slog through the end, but sometimes I ask a publicist I trust, "Is this a twenty pages problem?" Like, Olive Kitteridge and Wolf Hall had seven-page problems, and I was assured this was this case in the later. (I don't remember why I continued with Olive but I'm so glad I did.) It's like talking to a really boring person at a party and you go up to your friend and are like, "I HATE that guy!" and they're all like, "No, he's a cool guy," and then you feel entirely different.
What do you do when you're drowning in books? Do you keep them all? Donate, sell, gift them?
I give them to a wonderful organization that helps homeless families move into independent living. When I lived in Baltimore, I gave them all the The Book Thing, which is a sort of large freecycle of books. It can actually be quite hard to get people to take your books away, but it's worth it to find an organization -- old folks' home, VA, school, bookstore, whatever -- that will send someone with a car and needs them.
I've been amused by the name of your blog now for like 8 years. How did you originally come to title it that?
It just CAME TO ME. I know that's useless information. But I was 30, miserable, jobless, sweaty, and I was like ALL OF THIS WILL CHANGE WHEN I START MY BLOG 'OLD HAG'! And it did.
Do you find that you have less time for blogging now that you've got your book to promote? Does that cause you any angst or you're just happy to be busy?
It's not that I have less time, but I do find I get bored easily (a blogger who gets bored easily? Get out!) with various media and am always searching for a new one. So I'll switch from blogging to Facebook to Twitter to Daily Beast to Politics Daily to O. And ONE DAY God WILLING, one of these places will really pay out.
How does it feel to be the 254th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
It mostly makes me laugh at that poor fool 255, because it's like, LOSER. Go 254!