She spoke to me from a hotel room in Philadelphia, where she was in the midst of her book tour. We discussed everything from ironing to why only 17 percent of U.S. Senators and Representatives are female.

Hi, Gail. Is this still a good time?
It's a great time. Let me just go turn off the oven.

[A minute later]

Did I say oven? I meant iron.

I was confused as to why you had an oven in your hotel room. But that actually reminds me of something I wanted to ask you—in a recent interview with Forbes, you said you didn't know any men who ironed.
I'm sure this has something to do with being in New York and class—men send their shirts out, unless their wives iron them for them.

My boyfriend usually sends his shirts out, but I did recently show him how to iron.
That is something my husband would never let me teach him, under the theory that someone is imprisoned by doing ironing—the revolution will be achieved when no one has to do ironing. Yet here I am ironing a shirt.

Maybe the revolution will be achieved when we can wear wrinkled shirts.
Maybe!

Anyway. In your book, in the section on the '60s, you write about two books, The Feminine Mystique and Sex and the Single Girl, that both had a major impact on women's consciousness. I wonder if it would be possible for a single book to make such an impact today.
Both of those books were partly the huge things that they were because they just caught a moment. Especially Sex and the Single Girl—she caught that exact moment and expressed it in a really dramatic way. It's harder to do that now because once a thought gets out there gets devoured so much faster, by so many.

Is that why there hasn't been a clear successor to Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and these other big names of the feminist movement?
No, it's the same reason there's not a clear successor to Martin Luther King. There are these crystal moments in history when something that's so obviously wrong gets tackled in the context of a society that's ready to hear it, and it happens very fast and it's very dramatic. Everyone who's part of it remembers it for the rest of their lives.

What was your mother like?
She wanted to be a journalist. She left college after her first year to work for the war effort.

Was she supportive of your career choices?
Yes. My parents were the kind of parents who would say, "Look at that, what a good sentence!" They were just wildly supportive, and not in a terrifying or bad way. It was very easy to feel wildly empowered.

Did you encounter discrimination?
The truth is I didn't. I came in at just the exact second when the windows were all thrown open by women who were like three seconds older than I was. They did all the suffering, the filing of the suits, the protests, the challenging of employers. I got all the benefits. I stand completely on their shoulders.

Did they ever feel any resentment toward you and the women of your generation—since like you said, you were born at that exact moment three seconds after them when things got a lot easier?
They never felt any resentment at the women who got to do the things. They felt resentment at the people who didn't let them do the things they wanted to do. They were a very generous group of women who celebrated all the good things that happened to all the women in their fields.

Do you think women are willing to mentor young women in journalism?
To the degree that people have time to mentor anybody. It's way way better than when I was starting out. Mentoring was not heard of. Early on, I remember we had a meeting of women. This was at one of the tabloids. A woman said that she would go in and say to her editor, "I want to know what I'm doing wrong." And he would never say anything. Finally, he said, "You're about where we thought you'd be at this point." I think guys were more comfortable with each other back then. My particular profession was not known for its mentoring. Now I think people are dying to mentor, but they're overworked. There's not enough time.

Did you read Joanne Lipman's op-ed in the Times on Sunday? She claims that in her entire career, a woman never asked her for a raise or a promotion.
I was only an editor for five years but that was not my experience. I just had lunch the other day with a young woman who used to be one of my researchers. She now has a really good job in the outside world, and she appears to ask for a raise on a weekly basis. It did used to certainly be true that women were not as good as men at asking for stuff. You did run into women who wanted their bosses to offer them promotions because it would be a validation. It was not a validation if they just demanded it. I really think that period is behind us. Then again, because of the economy, nobody is asking for raises now. They're just hoping they won't be noticed.

You don't get to the '80s until almost 300 pages into the book, and then you only spend 100 pages talking about the '80s to the present. Why did you decide to pay more attention to the '60s and '70s?
The '60s I thought were really important. I really wanted to go back and try to drench the reader in what it was like. Even people who were there don't actually remember what it was like. They just tend to gloss over it. It's not that everyone was suffering—women thought they were doing very well. But they weren't comparing themselves to the guys. They were compared to other women or their mothers. The change part happened so wicked fast, it's sort of amazing. That period from '64 to '72, '73. It was less than a decade, but all this stuff was legally changed. It was one law after another. Suddenly women's applications to law school and medical school shot up. The actual change in the mindset of the country happened really really fast. After that it's a story about how you digest all that and what you do with it, like what to do with kids. I just love the fact that the very second the women started to postpone marriage until later you start getting all these stories in the media that they've waited too long! The famous Valentine's Day story [the original is no longer online].

You were the first female editorial page editor at The New York Times. I was looking at the paper's masthead and there are still only seven women on the masthead, out of 25 people total. And in your book you mention the writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who decided not to become an editor and stay a writer at The Washington Post. Why is it still so difficult for women to advance to the top in journalism?
I think there's a bunch of things. Ideally you want to move forward into an industry where there's lots of room to grow, and this is a shrinking industry. There are not as many opportunities as you might have in another industry. But every single question goes back to the question of family-work tensions. There are a lot of issues, of course, but that is the big huge marker. I think that laps over into everything. There are still less than 20 percent women in the House and the Senate. There are corporate glass ceilings. Why aren't there more women partners in law firms? I'm sure part of it is discrimination lingering. But tons of it to me is the question of work-family tensions.

How can that be remedied?
When I was in college, we all thought there was going to be a revolution. Afterwards, I don't think I was surprised that we didn't have one, but in college—and I wasn't a big huge feminist at the time—if you had told me that jobs wouldn't be automatically structured to take in family issues, that guys wouldn't as often as women take two years off to take care of their families, that there would be no national access to quality childcare at every age—it never occurred to me that those things weren't going to be taken care of. And they're not.

Are things better in other countries that have better family leave policies and childcare?
I'm not a person who gets all bent out of shape about Sweden. Sweden's a lovely country but we're never going to be Sweden. Russell Shorto did a piece on Italy and Greece and Spain and their incredibly low birth rates. These are countries in which women are expected to work, but men maintain their old patriarchal values. That's the recipe for a zero birthrate. Then there are other countries in which guys are incredibly helpful and even then if there are no social supports then women have more children. Then there are places where there are social supports and the guys are helpful, like France. We're a mixture of all those things. Russell thought our companies were more flexible than companies in other countries. Clearly guys here, for whatever their failure to live up to 50-50 thing, especially when it comes to childcare, they're still shouldering quite a bit of the load. Still, it's always the women who seem to be the final person in charge. When somebody's sick, and people have big meetings, who stays home with the kid? Who keeps track of the birthday parties? Who keeps minimum quality cleanliness standards? All that stuff tends to be women.

You mention a Times article from last year by Lisa Belkin, where she wrote about households that split the chores 50-50, and how difficult that was.
It's really hard. Half of the world believes it's because guys genuinely do not have as high a standard about making sure you get invited to dinner every once in awhile, or having matching socks. It's possible that guys, if they don't care, then it's very hard to impose those standards. Others argue that this is all a plot and the guys are just waiting out the women. I would go for 50-50. Clearly guys enjoy the higher standards—they just don't want to be in charge of them.

Right now, 76 out of 435 House members, or 17 percent, are women, and it's the same percentage in the Senate. You also mention a statistic about female law firm partners—in 2005 it was also at 17 percent. Why are we still stuck at around 20 percent?
It's a mixture of things. Certainly the work-child tensions is an issue. It's also reapportionment. Once they figured out how to reapportion districts by computer to protect all the incumbent, it became really hard for women to get elected. That big year of women getting elected happened after reapportionment. In a lot of places, in any kind of hidebound, old traditional culture of doing something, it's really hard to get any place anyway because everybody stays so long. And it's so depressing at the lower levels. Kids ask me, "I'd like to run for office. What should I do?" Well, it takes 27 years to qualify. And then you're in the State Senate and if you're in New York then you just want to shoot yourself.

You didn't have much discussion of women choosing, or not, to take their husband's name. Among my friends this has been rather controversial—women finding out that their fiances actually feel strongly about it, for example.
Keeping your own name has dropped down again. There's much more inclination to do it the other way. It's never knocked me out. If you're planning on having children, it does get kind of complicated. I changed my name when I got married because the mailman said he wouldn't deliver the mail if I had a different name. But once you've created a career with a name, you're very unlikely to want to change it. I can see how it's important to people. I was surprised at how much it's become unpopular again to not change, after it became such a thing that you wouldn't do it. I do feel sorry for little kids who have these really long names.

Why are there no late-night female hosts?
I presume there will be eventually. All those kinds of things are matters of what people are used to and what seems normal to people. There was a long time when we were sure we wouldn't put up with women being anchors or radio announcers. Now no one thinks about it. That's what Hillary Clinton did for women running for president. It's never going to seem weird again. So you just need one to be there, and then it'll be a normal thing. I can see it happening with someone like Ellen DeGeneres.

The Times ran a story this weekend about how the White House is kind of like a frat house. Should Obama be making more of an effort to have women in positions of power?
I don't know if the basketball game is a prominent role, but clearly the basketball game is really important to him. Part of me thinks the poor man's tired, let him just have five minutes to himself. But it's a little weird to think that the time he wants to spend by himself is with guys only. I think it's fair game to discuss it.

Anything else?
You know what comes up a lot? It always comes from an older woman. They ask me, "Why don't younger women want to hear these stories? Aren't you concerned about that?" It's often phrased in a way that I have such sympathy for the younger woman. Like, we walked 50 miles and we couldn't wear slacks. And you just don't care! And partly, given the transformation that the world has made, the idea that right now a generation of young women has come into the world without thinking that they can be constrained by their gender—it's such a neat idea I'm perfectly happy to celebrate it. I know they have problems of their own, more complicated in some ways than ones my generation faced. I'm not inclined to beat my breast about whether young women know these stories. But they are really neat stories. When I did the book before this one, it was all sort of part of me and I had new thoughts about the way I did things. Because I had that larger sense, the more stuff like that you know, the more reasonable behavior seems—things that your sex does that seem strange or outlandish make much more sense if you can just put yourself in their shoes and live through their past. It's one of the very few stories that has a happy ending. It just knocks me out that throughout recorded history people believed that women couldn't do stuff and women were inferior. And this ended in my lifetime!

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present [Amazon]

Related: Gail Collins Columnist Page [NY Times]
Gail Collins on "When Everything Changed" [Forbes]
The Mismeasure of Women [NYT]
Newsweek: OK, Singles, Now You Can Worry About Terrorism [Salon]
When Mom and Dad Share It All [NYT]
No Babies? [NYT]

Many of the questions people asked were about life in the workplace, and Rosalind has some advice about how to deal with nasty, undermining people you work with—including what situations to deal with right away and what situations might require a more serious response.

She also responds to a question about what to do when you work with someone you've had conflict with in the past.

Earlier: Queen Bees, Wannabes & How Technology Has Changed Teens Forever

Jezebel Asked, I Answered [Rosalind Wiseman]
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World [Amazon]

High school was bad enough when I was a teenager. But reading Wiseman's new book—which expands on the original by discussing technology and why "Mean Girl" culture has filtered down to younger girls—I realized how much trickier being a teenager is today. When I was in high school, if I got in a fight with someone, maybe we'd exchange a couple of bitchy notes. There would definitely be some behind-the-back gossip. But I never had to worry that someone was going to set up a fake Facebook account in my name or trash me on MySpace or unearth naked photos of me on their cell phone.

Still, there are some things that seem to be universal. There will always be Queen Bees, the Regina Georges of the world, who are, as Wiseman so excellently puts it, "a combination of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Barbie." For adult women, learning how to navigate the Queen Bee isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; unfortunately, many adult relationships still seem to hew all too closely to the lines drawn in high school (or earlier).

On her website, Wiseman answers questions from teenagers and parents every day. But she's agreed to answer questions from Jezebel readers who might need advice about how to deal with the bully at work, or the friend who's mad at them but won't say why. Leave your questions in the comments or email them to Doree if you want to stay anonymous. We'll publish her answers in a separate post next week.

Why did you feel like you needed to write a new edition of Queen Bees and Wannabees?
As soon as I'm done with something I always think of things I forgot to put in. I've done that already with the new book. But definitely, about two years ago, I realized that the only thing in the book about technology was email. That is just not acceptable. I started feeling guilty that girls and moms and dads were reading it, and I do feel a very strong sense of obligation to these people. I'm constantly trying to take the things that I see and put them forward and think, what can we do about it. Specifically the things I wanted to change the most about were about technology and some of the more leading questions that I get—people always say, everything that's happening is happening so much younger. I wanted to answer that question.

How do you answer that question?
Okay, yes, girls at younger ages are acting more "teenage-like" and exhibiting mean girl behavior. But it's because we're not teaching our kids to be more mature, we're teaching them to be older. Older meaning getting to sort of typical adolescent behavior earlier, like dressing as teenagers, having them listen to teen music, laughing when they're "precocious," going with moms to get a manicure and pedicure, when they go to dance recitals dressed in hip-hop outfits. All these things we think are "cute."

What do you see on the ground, in terms of how things have changed since you wrote the first edition?
Every day I teach kids between kindergarten and college. And then the kids reach out to me all the time. Every day I get emails from kids, boys and girls. There is no part of their lives that is not connected to technology. But I don't teach on cyberbullying. I think it's complete waste of time, because it's completely integrated into everything that they do. I started out doing stuff on cyberbullying and six months into it I was like, this is ridiculous. We need to integrate it into everything that they do. All this social aggression, dominance stuff. It's exactly why they come to me about it—they say, I have a problem with this person and part of it is how I'm being attacked online.

What do you tell kids to say in that case?
I have a whole sort of system of how you deal. For example—you are hooking up with, hanging out with, however you want to call it, a guy. He used to hang out with/hook up with another girl. You're like, a junior in high school. You start going to parties where every time she sees you, she will start screaming something. It's not your name, but everybody knows it's you. She's screaming firecrotch. Or slut, or whatever. You know it's directed at you. Your boyfriend won't do anything about it. Then you find out she's completely trashing you on Facebook. So how do you handle it? I was giving a talk in Houston, for high school kids. I gave them three options. One, you say nothing and hope it goes away. Two, you talk to your boyfriend and him have to talk to her. Or you start your own Facebook war. All the kids in Houston were yelling, "Three! Three!" And I said, "That's acting like you're 12." Instead, you send one email to this person. You say exactly what you don't like. You admit you cannot control her behavior, but the drama stops here. I always give kids scripts that they can start with, but then they can put it into their own words.

How are adult women affected by Mean Girl behavior?
Some of them have never let go of their being ruled-over personas, never being able to say that they're angry with people. Women need to know how to take seriously their own feelings of conflict and of anger, and then know how to communicate that to people—because what that is is an underlying belief that someone will not take you seriously. Forget the Queen Bees—that's a minority of women. It's just that they have disproportionate power. It's this issue of not being able to express your anger because you don't take yourself seriously. Women say, I can't be the complaining bitch. They don't want to be seen as uptight. You don't know which battles to choose and so you choose none of them. It's also women knowing how to give apologies and accept apologies. If that was addressed we would have substantially less work to do.

This is the reason I prefer working with adolescents. If they're saying sort of crappy stuff to me, I know it's a rationalization of crappy behavior. I can say to them you're full of it, you think I believe that? And they're going to laugh and say, yeah, I was just trying to see how stupid you were. But that's not the way it is with adults. They get really angry with you and get really self righteous. You can't have that really honest exchange.

Is it fair to say women undermine themselves in the workplace?
I wish so much that women would take the risk to take themselves and their feelings seriously. And that means acknowledging your feelings and taking them seriously, and taking the time to think strategically through how to express that to someone. That is a way of being an authentic person of integrity. Of course this relates to relationships. This relates to intimate relationships and relationships in the workplace.

Is that why women bully other women in workplace?
When you're in a position of power and authority, it's so comfortable to you that you don't often know where or what you're doing. I just sat in a meeting with a CEO—and she texted during the entire meeting. She was acting like she was 12. She was texting during the meeting and everyone was deferring to her. It was very much like a clique. That's not the only time I've seen that. It's why I work so much with girls and boys in positions of leadership. What does leadership really mean? It doesn't mean how you perceive yourself. It's how others perceive you. It's, I get to do this and you don't. I get to dismiss people's opinions but nobody else does. It's not just women—I've certainly seen that with men. I think it's an issue of power and authority and how one uses it. And it's exactly the same if you're a 12-year-old girl or a CEO.

How do parents deal with their kids' bullying or being bullied?
I'm a parent. So I can say true stories about my own mistakes. Even to my best of intentions, I find myself doing the things that I tell people not to do. Recently, in a video chat on my website, this parent says, I'm the parent of a fourth grader, and nobody wants to be friends with my daughter. The parent says, my daughter has no friends because she's imaginative, fun and creative. I say, you love your daughter so much but I doubt that people aren't hanging out with your kid because she's imaginative, fun and creative. We define the reason they're being rejected in positive ways. My job is to say to parents, in a way they can hear, you love your child and it's so difficult to hear negative social stuff. If we can do this step by step, we can get your kid to be in a better place. It's taken me a very long time to know how to talk to parents. I bombed when the Queen Bee moms book came out. It was just a disaster. I didn't know how to present the information in a way the parents can hear.

Do Queen Bee girls have Queen Bee moms?
I get that question all the time. But there are lots of kids who have Queen Bee moms who are the opposite. And I know why people say, I know why she's this way. But nobody says that about any other role. Nobody says, oh, she's a complete wannabe or rollover. There are lots of girls who look to their mothers as anti-mentors. Like women who try really hard with plastic surgery, who look like they're 18 when they're 45. Some of their daughters are like, that's awful. It's too easy of an answer for me, though certainly there are girls like that. I guess what you need [for a Queen Bee] is a girl who has a high degree of social skills and also ruminates a lot. She holds grudges and ruminates. Then, you have her mom showing role modeling, that the path to power is based on how you look, where you come from, fitting into that box you talk about so much—and the mom saying, I'm not going to hold you accountable for crappy behavior.

How do you advise people to deal with their Queen Bee daughters?
It's easy for me to get reactive. But it's my responsibility—I've chosen this as my path. I'm trying to get information to all different kinds of people. I've worked really hard to really reach out. I think they're hiding a lot. If you talk to them about being effortlessly perfect—everybody wants to be heard, including Queen Bee moms. There's a couple different variations on Queen Bee moms. They feel like they can really speak for other people. I'm speaking on behalf of all the mothers. The worst is when Queen Bee moms have gone after me—it's usually when a woman feels like she's not being taken seriously in other areas of her life. But it doesn't excuse the behavior. Really, you can see it. They don't feel taken seriously in other areas of their life.

What kind of mom are you?
The barely getting through mom. My boys are six and a half and eight and a half. I really try and aspire to be the person I write about—the loving hard-ass mom. But there are really moments when I'm so tired when I'm like, go ahead and do it. Right now, at this moment, my sister's staying with us. My sons went into her bedroom and opened her computer to try and get on computer games. So their punishment is, they're allowed to watch TV, but they have a trade-in system for good behavior, and they're not allowed to play a game on a phone. Also, I'm teaching them how to fold their own laundry. They drop it everywhere. Socks are like a calling card around the house. Now they're doing their own laundry, but it's tough. I want them to fold it, and instead they leave it in an enormous pile in their closet. It drives me crazy but I have to let it go. They are washing and drying and taking into their room, so the idea of having it in perfect stacks is ridiculous and I have to let it go.

Have you ever had to deal with a bullying situation with your own kids?
I had a really tough time with my older child. He was acting out in school and getting into trouble. I was freaked out. It was completely bad. It turns out he was being bullied really badly by five kids and I didn't see the signs. I didn't pay attention to anything I talked about. There was someone at the school who I had trained, just by happenstance. At the time I trained her my children weren't even attending that school. But she has just been a lifeline for him. Sometimes as a mother you really aren't the person who can fix the problem. Your anxiety is so high. You can't think straight. It was a pretty life changing moment for my family and for me. I was like, oh shit, I can't see the signs of my kids being bullied. There was a lot of social aggression. Boys saying they were going to beat him up at recess. It was quite similar to girl dynamics. My kids are getting in trouble all the time—it's not an infrequent experience.

Are you going to be doing any work at Millburn High School [the high school in New Jersey where the senior girls write a "slut list" of freshmen every year]?
I got an email from the head of the PTO there and I wrote her back and I haven't heard back.

What do you do about something like the Millburn High School slut list? The girls were defending it, saying that it was something that people wanted to be on. How do you teach them that it's actually not okay to make a "slut list"?
I think you talk about it very straightforwardly. You talk about the reasons why a ninth grade girl would want to be on the list. And just because you've done it forever doesn't make it right. Just because people have been treating each other like shit forever, doesn't make it right. You don't just get a pass. That's one of those tricky things about tradition. As soon as you say it's tradition you don't question it. But that should be when you do question it. When i talk to the girls about it, I'm really straight up about it. The senior girls are like, it's so pathetic, she wants to be on it. You really have to put a mirror up to the senior girls. They can be so cold and unforgiving about a position that they were in very shortly before. I do a lot of work when I work with high school kids about that dynamic. I say straight up, some girls will want to be on it desperately. Let's talk about why. There are girls who don't want to be on it. There are girls who will lie about being on it because they're so desperate for attention. I just talk really straight up with them about what's going on. I'm like, if I'm completely wrong, you think I'm insane, you need to back it up.

The principal's reaction to the list seemed, at first, to be very ambivalent—he didn't want to search for the perpetrators because he said no one would come forward and it wasn't fair to punish the whole class.
People feel like, oh, we have a policy about that stuff—but very few people know how to implement a policy in real life. They get co-opted by the system like everybody else. It takes a really gifted administrator to know how to deal with that. It takes a tremendous amount of thought in the midst of a tremendous amount of drama. It's always really disappointing. I was speaking at a conference of superintendents. I was like, look, here's the deal. You can continue to say, if it's done outside of school grounds then we have no jurisdiction. But there is no separation with technology between outside of school and school. Now, I think that administrators are going in that direction.

But what I think is more compelling in a way, is why would girls in a perfect, high achieving school want to do this. Girls haze for social power. In my experience, what I've seen with girls who do that, is those girls are not doing well. They're not excelling in other areas. You have to excel in a school like that in something. You take what you can get. Girls haze. They always haze to dominate socially. It also shows the lack of power that some girls have, if this is the only power they can get. Their capacity is limited in other areas. It sort of goes to the heart of everything we're talking about. In Chicago, girls completely beat the crap out of each other at a powder puff game. That was exactly the same thing.

You have a YA book coming out soon too—Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials.
I'm psyched about the YA book. I'm relieved about Queen Bees, but I'm so nervous about the YA book. I try to do my best to talk about these issues in a way that's more subtle and more graceful. But what's really cool is to look at these YA bloggers. I'm watching these young women write about this stuff and it's amazing to me to watch this. The book comes out in January. It would have been really easy to write something about a really rich kid—but I'm really hopeful that this just reflects all these issues that we're talking about. I just hope this gives people more answers.

Anything else you'd like to add?
I feel so strongly the reason why I'm successful is because of women supporting me, laughing with me, buying me a drink when I needed it, sometimes being hard on me, but working with me. For girls to not have that is just unacceptable. I want girls to have that. I want to be able to talk about the ugly stuff so we can get to the good stuff.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and the New Realities of Girl World [Amazon]
Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Dealing with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches and Counselors Who Can Make—or Break—Your Child's Future [Amazon]
Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials [Amazon]
Rosalind Wiseman: Creating Cultures of Dignity [Rosalind Wiseman]
A Rite of Hazing, Now Out in the Open [NYT]

She's a copywriter, but she gets paid much less than the other copywriters, all of whom happen to be male. And so she invokes the recently passed Equal Pay Act. "It's a law now," she says. "Equal pay for equal work." Don looks at her as though she's speaking another language. "Peggy, it's not a good time," he tells her. Then he asks her if she wants a drink.

When Peggy confronts Don, it's 1963, and the median annual income for women was around 60 percent of men's. Today, it's around 77 percent—a gain, to be sure, but hardly anything to be thrilled about. While some of the so-called gender gap can be explained by the fact that women tend to work in lower-paying fields—such as education and child care (I'm going to bracket the debate about whether these deserve to be lower-paying fields at all)—there's still a five percent wage gap for male and female college graduates, even after controlling for things like age, race and ethnicity, region, marital status, children, occupation, industry, and hours worked, according to testimony given in April to the United States Joint Economic Committee. The conclusion? "It is reasonable to assume that this difference is the product of discrimination."

But it's slightly more complicated, I think, and it raises uncomfortable questions about the differences between men and women—whether they're socially determined or not. A couple years ago, there was another study that focused on men vs. women in negotiations; men, it showed, will take the initiative and ask for things like more money or a promotion, while women will wait to be asked. And this can have major repercussions:

If a 22-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman are offered $25,000 for their first job, for example, and one of them negotiates the amount up to $30,000, then over the next 28 years, the negotiator would make $361,171 more, assuming they both got 3 percent raises each year. And this is without taking into account the fact that the negotiators don't just get better starting pay; they also win bigger raises over the course of their careers.

It's hard not to look at these studies and think about anecdotal evidence from my own life. At my first job out of college, I was offered just that salary: $25,000 a year. I didn't even think about negotiating. Sure, you could argue that I wasn't exactly coming from a position of strength, as a 22-year-old college graduate with little experience who was desperate for a job. But over the years, I saw how certain people—and nearly all of them were men—were able to ask for things that I wouldn't even have thought of to ask for: Extra vacation days. Bonuses. When I was in graduate school, better teaching schedules (and better professor assignments). A few years later, I was offered another job at what I now considered a laughable salary, $35,000 a year. I countered at $65,000. We settled on $57,000, with a guaranteed raise to $60,000 after three months. And I came up with a new motto: "You don't ask, you don't get."

I bring specific salary numbers in part because women, it seems to me, are generally less comfortable discussing money than men—which also leaves us in a position of weakness. At yet another job I had (salary: $38,000), the founders of the company told us, with straight faces, that one of the bad things about unions were that everyone knew what everyone else was making. The employees all nodded solemnly, like, OMG, wow, what a horrible thing to know. Talking about money is taboo, of course! It was only later that I realized, duh! Of course they wouldn't want everyone to know what everyone else is making, because then everyone would ask for more money.

These days, when people are desperate for work and employers admittedly have the upper hand, it can seem as though we're all Peggys in a Don Draper world. But Peggy, I suspect, just might have the last word.

The Gender Wage Gap 2008 [Institute for Women's Policy Research]
Equal Pay for Equal Work? New Evidence on the Persistence of the Gender Pay Gap [AAUW]
Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling [Washington Post]

Richards - the daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards, and the former deputy chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi - is also the head of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, its advocacy and political arm. She spoke with Doree Shafrir about grassroots organizing, why it's important to have moderate Republicans in Congress, and how Planned Parenthood helps women worldwide.

You've had a lot of jobs. Why did you want to work for Planned Parenthood?
I went to Planned Parenthood in college as a patient. I had been on a board of Planned Parenthood. I have two daughters. In some ways it just was the right thing to do. I used to organize low-wage women in a lot of industries, and they're our clients in a lot of Planned Parenthoods and so it's a part of the big picture of my work for all my life. Planned Parenthood Federation of America is this incredible organization that is a legacy organization – it's 92 years old – and yet, as relevant today as it was when Margaret Sanger started it. And the potential to sort of put my energy into this is very exciting.

So what are some of the things that you wanted to do when you started?
Well, I knew that there was a real interest by the organization in trying to kind of leap forward, and think about how do we look and feel and who do we work with and who are our patients today and who our patients were. I didn't come in with some preconceived notion of what that looked like, it's just that I knew there was some work we needed to do. And I think the other side of it was, we'd been kind of taking a beating for a long time from the extreme right. And I think they had been, to some extent, in the driver's seat about defining who we were and what we do, and it was time for us to really go back on the offense and talk about the important healthcare we provide, the education we provide, and sort of what we are as a movement. So I just finished three years, and now we're in this moment in the country where there really is an opportunity to both expand what we do as a service provider but also rebuild a movement. So it's turned out to be a good time.

You started in February of '06. So, obviously George Bush was still in office. What were some of the things that Planned Parenthood did to help Obama get elected?
When I first came in, in sort of preparation for '08, the Action Fund worked a lot of governor's races. For women, and for women's healthcare and for young people, actually, a lot of the decisions that get made happen in the state legislatures and the governors' [offices]. I thought it was really important to be able to demonstrate that you can be pro-choice and pro-Planned Parenthood and get elected governor in the heartland of the country. The Action Fund worked with governors' races in Iowa and Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin – to really say, these are states where it's about as middle-of-the-country as you can get. And in fact we were successful in electing folks and really, I think, the folks that were elected ran on the fact they were for women's health and for women's life.

So that kind of led into the '08 election, which was the Action Fund's opportunity to focus particularly on women voters, because there's a lot of independent women voters who very much support Planned Parenthood for a whole host of reasons – not very political reasons, just that's where they went for healthcare. It was called the Million Strong Campaign, and the idea was to try to target one million women voters, and make sure that they were registered and informed about the presidential election and that they voted. So in addition to that, the Action Fund focused on these voters, and we did a lot of mobilization on the ground level in our states. Because the incredible thing about Planned Parenthood is we're in every state. We're not just in blue states or just red states or just in in-between states. We're everywhere. And our folks really rose to the occasion.

What does grass roots mobilization entail?
There's definitely a lot of door-to-door, I knocked doors in a lot of states, and a lot of Action Fund folks did. Many of them had never really taken part in that kind of electoral activity. The most important work you can do as a grassroots organizer or advocate is have a face-to-face conversation. Like, phoning is fine, mail is fine, internet is fine, but it's literally those conversations that really influence whether people vote and how they vote. And the great thing is since New York wasn't a contested state, a lot of folks bused in from New York to Pennsylvania, a lot of folks from Massachusetts who went to New Hampshire. So it was really an opportunity for everybody to literally be on the ground. We did a lot of volunteer phone-banking, because the technology now is amazing. You can really focus on the folks that you need to talk to. Obviously, it was an incredibly exciting election both in the Action Fund and across the country because in the amount of just volunteerism and people feeling like they had some stake in the outcome. It's been a long time.

I was reading a profile of you in the Washington Post from probably two or three years ago, and one thing that struck me about it was, you had spoken to a group of women, and they were saying that they never really thought about choice as the pivotal issue for them when they were voting. They were like, "Well, we always end up voting for the pro-choice candidate, but it's not my issue." It struck me that that is an issue that that's a pivotal issue for the anti-choice people.
Right. It's kind of like all they talk about.

So how do you then turn that into a pivotal issue for women?
Well, it's funny. Usually if a candidate's anti-choice, there's a whole lot of other things that they are as well. So for example with John McCain, it wasn't simply that he was anti-choice, but that he had never supported family planning, he wasn't supportive of comprehensive sex education for young people, a whole lot of other things we worked on. In some instances, it's sort of the whole package. Being anti-choice just tells you a lot about a candidate, even if that isn't the only issue you vote. So I think it's kind of filling in the whole picture. If someone is that out of touch about women's health and women's rights, then they're probably not gonna be that good on other issues you care about.

But what about anti-choice Democrats?
Obviously they've always existed. But I'd say that, actually, if you look at the last election, that the vast majority of new members of Congress that were elected in the Democratic Party, were pro-choice. And the only thing that's sort of an unfortunate outcome about all this, and I think particularly in that way in an election that was such a sweep, is that pro-choice Republicans in Congress largely have been defeated now. If they were in a swing district, a more moderate district, and they were moderates, then the Democratic sweep kind of took them out of office. So I think if there were a place where there's a real opportunity to rebuild is with Republicans who are what I think of as old-style Republicans.

Like the Maine senators.
Exactly. Certainly, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Mark Kirk in Illinois. There are some Republican Congress people from Connecticut who were pro-choice. And I think it's, you can see, I think there's a real struggle within the Republican party now. You look at these town hall meetings and you think, "Oh my god, is that how you want to be defined? This is your party?" I'm very hopeful that there's this kind of emergent, moderate Republican strain. You see it written about all the time—folks are saying, "We don't want to be a party of only one hard-right point of view on women's rights."

Would you say that that's one of the major challenges the organization is facing now that Obama is in the White House?
It's definitely an opportunity. To me, it's an opportunity to say, women's health shouldn't be a political issue. It should be everybody's issue. So I think there's a way to try to take it out of that intense political realm and say actually if you care about women's health, women's well being, there's a whole host of things you can work on with Planned Parenthood. I'm actually excited because some ex-members of Congress, Republican members of Congress who are pro-choice, are now working with the Action Fund on trying to re-establish a pro-Choice Republican base in America. I think there's a real appetite for that. And particularly, look: women who are elected to office, they in particular understand, this is a women's health issue, it shouldn't be a partisan issue. I think the party is gonna have to do some sorting out here about whether they want to be a big tent again.

You just wrote on the Huffington Post about Bob McDonnell. And that he's a really viable candidate.
He is. But you know, it's so interesting. Obviously he's running for governor of Virginia, and has kind of made his entire career out of fighting against women's rights. Certainly against choice. And yet, now that he's running in this big high-stakes, high-profile election, he's trying to completely distance himself from that, and say, "This election shouldn't be about social issues, it should be about economic issues." Meanwhile, he hasn't done anything on economic issues his entire career. It's all been about trying to restrict access to abortion. You know, he doesn't even support family planning. So it's a question of whether or not women and other folks in Virginia are actually going to learn enough about Bob McDonnell to understand how far off to the right he is on some pretty basic issues.


What a danger.
Yeah. But you know, that's why these governors' races are really important, because that's where so many decisions get made about access to health care, about what's taught at schools, about family planning.

What do you think some of the misconceptions people have about Planned Parenthood are?
Well, the biggest misunderstanding about Planned Parenthood is literally who we are and what we do. We are the largest reproductive healthcare provider in the country, we see about three million patients through our clinics every year, and the vast majority of them are low-income, and mainly young. We're kind of the entry point for a lot of women in this country, where they first go to get counseling about family planning and those kinds of things. Ninety-seven percent of our work is preventive care—contraception, STI testing and treatment. We do cervical cancer screenings, we do breast exams. Last year we did 1.3 million cervical cancer screenings as an example. The thing that's great about a Planned Parenthood clinic is that a woman may come in because she really needs birth control, she knows she needs to take care of her birth control, but she may not have the money or just the inclination to get the rest of the preventive care she needs. So the great thing is, once you go to Planned Parenthood, she can go ahead and get her cervical cancer screening, her breast cancer screening. And that's actually how we catch a lot of sort of pre-cancerous situations for women who might otherwise say, "Well, I can't afford that," or "I'm not gonna do that now."

And payment is on a sliding scale.
Yes. It really varies state to state, because each state is a little bit different in terms of even how states fund family planning services. We're always looking to expand more into areas where there's the most unmet need. The other thing, when you say, what are the most common misconceptions, or maybe things that people don't know, is we're the largest sex-educator in America. So we work with thousands of young people who are trained at Planned Parenthood to work with their peers and teach them about safe sex, and prevention, about getting tested for STDs. And for me, that's some of the most exciting work we're doing. We're really trying to change healthcare for this next generation of young people in America.

Were there laws or regulations passed during the Bush administration that you are actively trying to overturn?
There were a lot of things done during those eight years. It wasn't a high point for women's healthcare, that's for sure.

Or sex ed.
Or sex ed, no. One of the things most representative of this shift and why it was so important to elect a new president is the Global Gag Rule, which had prevented funding for a number of family planning providers around the world. It was overturned, I think, the third day in office by President Obama. And that has implications internationally, for obviously just millions of women. Then we've been really pleased that this president has taken a totally different approach to sex education, which is that we should teach abstinence, absolutely, but you've also got to teach comprehensive sex education. During the last few years, we've seen this country with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the Western industrialized world, and we have now one in four teenage girls in America has a sexually transmitted infection. So this is like, it's not just a theoretical problem, it's a healthcare problem. I'm excited that this president, he doesn't just talk the talk, he actually is making things happen.

And how are you guys involved in the current healthcare reform debate?
Like 24/7. I mean, this is the biggest opportunity for the women that not only that we see, but that we would like to see or that we'd like to be able to get affordable health insurance, to finally get covered in this country. So we've been focused on two things. One is just to make sure that reproductive healthcare is part of the healthcare package – and the second is that women's healthcare providers are part of whatever exchange is developed. If a woman gets an insurance card, she can take it to any family planning clinic, she can take it to any community health provider, and she can get contraception.

What states right now are sort of turning back the clock, in terms of family planning…? The ones that are not progressive, that are becoming less progressive, that you're working on.
Well, there's a couple of states that we're just constantly suing, where there's just always litigation, and you'd have to say the top of the list are South Dakota and Kansas. So we just won a really important case in South Dakota actually, about the South Dakota law that had been passed about instructing doctors what they had to tell women who came to them seeking an abortion, and like 90 percent of this was struck down. That was a really important case within the state of South Dakota, but it was also important in principle—you can't have state legislatures getting in between doctors and their patients, and telling doctors what they have to say to their patients.

And then Kansas as you know has just been a really difficult place for women and for women's health. I mean, most people know of it because of Dr. Tiller's assassination, but it for many years, has just been a place where it's been really tough for women to access all kind of reproductive healthcare.

Is there a legacy of your mom you carry with you?
It's interesting, it was her birthday September 1st, so I've been thinking about her this week. I just dropped my daughter off at college, and I was thinking, God, I wish mom had been here, because she was really many things, and I'm sure people have their own feeling about Ann Richards as they have certain memories about her. But women's rights—for her, that's it. That was the most fundamental issue, and even though she worked with a million things, she cared so much about women individually taking care of themselves, whether it was taking care of their health or taking care of their finances, or going to school. Right before she died, she opened The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, a public junior high and high school in Austin, Texas. ‘Cause for her, she just wanted women to keep moving forward. And honestly, she got more radical, the older she got. I just think she became – and maybe because, you know, you keep doing this work, and at some point, you think, "God, are things are going to change?" – I think that was probably a radical thing for her. I think after she got out of office, everyone wanted her to come and campaign for them. I don't care if you lived in Montana, Nebraska, or Oregon or whatever, and she only had one requirement of the folks she would go and campaign for, and that is you had to be 100 percent pro-choice. And if you weren't, that was it, she was moving on. So she really lived her beliefs. So it's wonderful to be at Planned Parenthood doing the work that she did all her life and felt so strongly about.

And it must have been challenging for her in Texas.
Yeah, you know, it was funny about Texas, she was always too liberal for Texas. There was no way to get around it. I always feel like her election was this one progressive moment in Texas where the stars and the moon and everything aligned. A day earlier or a day later, it might not have happened. But they still continued to like her, even after George Bush beat her. It's just that she was too progressive, which I hate to say. I think the state's kind of moving in the right direction. But she was always just a little bit out in front of where the electorate was.

Who are some of the women in the next generation that, you know, you see as kind of coming up?
Well, I guess I'd say rather than specific names, I would say I spend a lot of my time here working with teens and young people that are the next generation. So we're reaching pretty much down into the folks that are, to me, the future of Planned Parenthood, not only patients but leadership, volunteers, employees. And I see at least in the area we work in, I'm just blown away by the young people I meet, who even at a very young age, are asserting their responsibilities for their peers. I was just in New Mexico, which has a very high teen pregnancy rate. It's a wonderful state, but you know, there's a lot of poverty. And at the dinner I went to, we were awarding this group of really young women in their high school who had taken it upon themselves to become sort of peer educators, because they were really worried about the teen pregnancy rate in their high school. And that year there was not a single teen pregnancy in that high school. And these young women, they didn't wait to ask for permission. They saw this problem, and they took ownership, and I see that all over the place. We just brought two underage teenagers to Capitol Hill to lobby on healthcare needs and getting sex education. We got meetings with members of Congress we've never seen before, because you bring a young person from their district, folks are gonna make time in the schedule. And many of these kids had never been out of their home city, much less gone to Washington, and to see them in three days go from getting off the plane to lobbying a member of Congress, it was pretty intense.

Who are some of your mentors? You talked about your mom, but who were some of your mentors as you were coming up in the movement?
Well, I guess definitely Mom had the most influence on me, and largely because she just believed you just had to get out there and do stuff. I think that folks, though, who influenced me the most were the women I worked with when I started as a union organizer back when I got out of college. I worked with garment workers around the border and I worked with hotel workers in New Orleans, and these were women who – despite enormous odds, lack of income, many of them juggling being a single parent – they just got out there, and at that point we were organizing for healthcare coverage and better wages, and they risked everything, and they were just incredible. And many of those women I remember from every town I ever worked at, so I guess that's who I would say were my mentors. If there was one sort of people that I think of when I think about doing this work every day, it's about those women that I worked with in the early years, and seeing their courage, their belief that they were doing this even if never benefited them but for their kids or for their community.

Who are the female politicians you've been following?
The great thing is now there's a whole bunch, though I will say I was just with Barbara Mikulski, who's now the dean of women in the Senate. So she's seen it all, right? She was back there in the days when she was it. And she just did a really important thing for women—women all across America should be thanking Mikulski, because she got a women's healthcare amendment into the healthcare reform bill. So I'm particularly fond of Barbara. But there's also a lot of up-and-comers. One colleague, Donna Edwards, who's a new Congresswoman from Maryland, who everyone should watch. She came to Congress for a purpose. She's wonderful. Chellie Pingree, from Maine, also a new member of Congress who's really great. These are women who have already lived a life and done a lot of great progressive organizing and advocacy and now have chosen to go to Congress to sort of continue that work. So they're really grounded. Jan Schakowsky, who I just have enormous respect for, who started out as a mom who was fighting for food safety in Chicago, now is one of the leading members of the United States Congress. And I can't close without mentioning m old boss, Speaker Pelosi, who unbelievably sort of leads what is very much the ultimate sort of old boys' network. And I have enormous respect for her, and you know I think you see with Nancy, much like I think you saw with now-Secretary of State Clinton, the unbelievable bias of the media against women in politics. And the fact that she continues to hold her own, and I think really forward progressive values and hold that Caucus together – amazes me.

Obviously giving money is always welcome, but what are some of the other ways that women can get involved in Planned Parenthood?
Well, I think that absolutely getting involved politically is critical. And the great thing again is that even if you live in a state that's relatively progressive, there are so many ways now to get involved in affecting elections in other places, even if it's doing volunteer phone-banking, traveling to help, you know, talk to voters, so I would really encourage folks to sign up for the Action Fund, on the Action Fund site, and become a volunteer that way. And I think right now, because we're sort of in this moment, it is so important that every woman in America lets their member of Congress and their Senator know that women can't be left worse off after healthcare reform than they were before. And that means we need to have our full reproductive rights and healthcare covered, and we need women's healthcare providers as part of the healthcare network in America. Literally, if every single woman who read this did that, that would be an enormous thing. And I know I sometimes think people think it doesn't really matter, and you look at all the stuff that's going on, but folks pay attention. And they really pay attention when people personally take time. Sending an e-mail is fine, but when you actually make a phone call to an office and say, "This is what I'm calling about," believe me, I go to those offices all the time, they absolutely are keeping track.

I saw that you're on Twitter.
Yeah. We're doing the Twitter, we're doing the Facebook. We partnered with MTV this last spring on helping young people get tested and treated for STI's, and the great thing is when we can kind of co-brand with other sites where young people are coming, and MTV was thrilled because they were saying, "Look, we got all these kids coming, and the thing they want to know about is they don't want to get pregnant, and they want to know about STD's, and so you all have the information, we've got the traffic, let's get together."

How involved are you internationally?
We are actually really involved. We fund programs in 11 countries – in Africa, Asia, and in Latin America. Our providers in this country do a lot of sort of exchange of information and ideas and capacity between the states and other countries. And again, it's sort of not just a North-South, it's a South-North thing too. I was down in Ecuador visiting this program there that we've supported and have partnered with for many years, and I met with their teens, like our peer educators here. In Ecuador, because a lot of them out in the rural areas, they really have a list of clients for whom they help them get birth control, they help them get testing if they need it, other kinds of healthcare. So they've taken it like another step further than we have in this country, so I think there's just things we can learn from each other when we talk about, how do we improve healthcare outcomes for women and for young people?

Where in the world are women most at risk now
It's hard to say. It's hard to pinpoint one place. Obviously, some of the worst healthcare outcomes are now in some of the countries of Africa, where we're dealing with issues of maternal mortality, related to unsafe abortion, and certainly, the rise of not only HIV-AIDS, but other STD's. That's why policies in this country are so important, because there's this enormous ripple effect. I don't know if you saw the article by Nick Kristof in the Times Magazine, about this thought, which is just so right, which is if you invest in women, it has all kinds of residual great benefits for society. And in fact, Secretary of State Clinton, who came and spoke to Planned Parenthood in the spring, really made the same point, which is, if you look at the countries where women have the best access to health care, access to family planning, and rights, they're the countries with the least amount of economic instability, the least amount of terrorism, a whole host of issues. There is just a very strong case to be made if you can help women with planning the number of kids that they want and allowing them to voluntarily have the family of their choosing, and access to work and the other things that they need, all of society benefits. And where you don't, you have the very worst outcome.

Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you think you want to mention?
Well, the only other thing that I've been really interested in and that we've invested a lot of time and energy in is making sure that the internet is providing all the ways for young people and women to get the healthcare information they need. Young people come to us online and ask the very same questions that kids were asking when I was in high school. Like, "My boyfriend and I had sex but I heard you couldn't get pregnant the first time," or, you know, whatever, just make up the myth. So I think that I'm really excited about Planned Parenthood online because to me, it's a place where, even if you're a kid sitting in East Texas, where you can't talk to your parents and you don't want to talk to anybody at school, you could at least go online and get the information you need, and if you need it, find out how to get birth control, how to get tested if you might have an STD. That's the most hopeful thing about the future—both the young people that I think are now infusing this movement with new energy and the fact that technology is just going to help us leap forward.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America [Official Site]
Planned Parenthood Action Fund [Official Site]
Cecile Richards' Twitter [Twitter]

Related: Virginia Women: Get Back in That Chastity Belt! [Huffington Post]

How did you come up with Stupid Pet Tricks?

Oh, jeez. Well, we're talking about the 1300s. People were rioting in the streets and there was blood and the black plague and stuff. We were hanging out and trying to come up with things because we were gonna do a morning show. We actually came up with it on Dave's morning show, which was a live, daily thing. It took place at like 9 o'clock in the morning live in New York. We had to come up with stuff that you could do repeatedly because, as it was explained to me by Jimmy Breslin, who we met sort of around the same time, it's kind of the way it is with newspapers; you have to keep refilling things or else you're facing an infinity of blanks every single day all of which have to be created from scratch. So we were trying to find refillable categories.

When I was in college I had some friends who had a Great Dane, and we were broke and so forth, and when we would get together we would drink beer and we would put socks on the dog. And that would be hours and hours of laughter. Seems a little sad now. But it occurred to me that pretty much everybody I knew had at least one thing like that that they do with their dogs or other animals. So we gave that a try; we just ran an ad. And very briefly Chris Elliot was the doofus who had to go around and gather the data.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because he was a 19-year-old who was just giving tours at 30 Rock at the time. We were his first job.

He was Kenneth the Page.

He was, basically. He was always hilarious. You know, he was always just smart and funny the second you laid eyes on him. So in that sense he wasn't exactly Kenneth the Page. But yeah, he was in charge of Stupid Pet Tricks until he could weasel his way out of it.

And you had met Letterman at The Comedy Store.

Yeah. We were both doing standup. The way I always think of it is he was sort of a graduating senior and I was kind of an incoming freshman. I was green and he was one of the two or three big men on campus. And the big man on campus at that time was, or a pretty big man on campus now too, was Jay Leno. It was also where I met Jay's wife, who's become a good friend of mine, Mavis Leno. She was around with him at that same time. And Richard Lewis. And there were these certain people who were the big guys and Dave was one of them.

The way you sort of describe it in your bio is that you almost accidentally started writing comedy. Or you had been writing it in your apartment and then it just kind of got picked up.

I think that people pretty much play the hand they're dealt. And if you're born the prettiest girl on the block, you end up finding that that's a tool you can use. And at some point if you've got the ability to sling wit, you just start doing that early on and you get a response and you just stick with it. It's just an adjustment to tackling life that you sort of make very early. I mean, I can remember making jokes in first or second grade. So at some point I was doing that even when I was an art teacher.

I actually didn't intend to be a writer, because I had a mother who meant to be a writer and she was sort of a frustrated, serious person. So she was kind of pushing me in that direction and I never considered it for even one second and I went into art. I was teaching art and then somehow I switched over and was able to get work as a writer much more quickly than I was able to get another job as an art teacher.

So all the sort of backhanded training from Mom kind of worked I guess, even though I didn't really take any writing in college. But comedy was just sort of the voice I had. I knew how to write comedy more than I could've ever written anything else.

What was it like being a woman writing comedy in the ‘70s? It seems like it was a very male-dominated world.

It's really way less male now. It's way, way better for women now. And the ‘70s — actually, I was at the way tail end of the ‘70s. I'm still friendly with Elayne Boosler, and she and I are in — there's a comedy issue of the L.A. Weekly right now, comedy horror stories. I was reading her story, which was about her initial audition at The Tonight Show.

You know, she was huge at that time. The big issue at the time for women who were doing stand up was that all the precedents in female comedy were very self-deprecating. It was all, "My boobs are so flat. My husband thinks when he looks at me and I take off my clothes, he throws up. Everyone hates me." So she actually just sort of bypassed all that and started doing political humor and sort of observational stuff about people, and so forth, and that was really considered astonishing. Anyway, when I was reading her horror story in the L.A. Weekly, I had forgotten the word they used to use about her at the time – this was the derogatory term and I heard it used repeatedly about her and I'd forgotten completely about it, except for, it used to color the way I saw myself and make me nervous about what I could and couldn't do – they used to call her "threatening." You really don't hear that word used about women doing standup now, but they kept saying, "She's so threatening. She's too threatening." And you think, "Threatening? She's a woman standing on stage telling jokes." But it was such a sort of a delicate dance you were theoretically doing, that it was crazy, the idea that that would be threatening. And she couldn't actually get on The Tonight Show at the time because she was so threatening. Whereas somebody saying, "My boobs are so little that I take off my clothes my husband throws up," weren't threatening.

Right. Because it was sort of safely within the women's realm of comedy.

Well, that was the theoretically figured-out women's realm at the time. It's so much better now. There's a virtual ton of women now doing whatever they damn well please. It's still not as easy for a woman, I don't think, to get launched in the biggest possible way the way that it is a guy, but it's certainly not the same. I remember thinking when I was doing standup back in those days, I kept hearing that word "threatening," and I kept trying to figure out how to defang myself, and what did I need to be to be not threatening and yet… it was a lot of weird calculating going on for people that I don't think is necessary anymore. It's still not so easy to get in front of a group and get laughs. That's another dilemma entirely, but it's not so much about are you threatening. Look at Lisa Lampanelli for crying out loud. "Threatening" isn't really the issue anymore. Did that answer the question?

Yeah, it does. Do you have any sort of war stories about yourself-say, in the writers' room, for example?

I actually never have had any trouble hanging out or getting on with guys that way, I don't think, although I don't think it was a smart thing for me to put work and love together. I think that's a battlefield a lot of people can get killed on, and do. And I would say that was a mistake that I really would try not to make again, although I don't know if you can not make it. When it's there and it's compelling, then there it is.

What I love is funny people, whether it's hanging out with guys or women, if they're really funny, it's like another language you all speak. I'm not the sort who would get offended by, you know like that one woman who was suing the guys at Friends because they were making dick jokes. There's a lot of sex jokes going on in any big group of guys, probably more than a big group of women, but if they're funny at least, you know, to me…

But were they funny dick jokes?

Well that's really what it is. If it's a bunch of funny people making them, then they're funny, and if it's a bunch of people just making dick jokes and they're not very funny, then it's intolerable, then you just wanna just kill yourself. But it would be the case no matter what the topic. I'm mean, I'm not the biggest fan in the world of dick jokes, I'll just go right ahead and say that, but at least if it's really funny guys, then they're funny guys.

I was always working with guys on the Letterman show. A lot of them are still my friends. They were so hilarious and sweet, such really hilarious guys, and also I was in charge.

What's your relationship now with David Letterman?

I sort of don't have one at the moment. I mean, I was on his show a few times and it was a weird experience in all ways, but I haven't spoken to him in years. You know, he's married and has a kid. And I live with someone. I don't have an ongoing relationship [with Letterman]. I'm not the sort who really stays chummy with exes. In fact, that's why I'm not on Facebook. I don't really want everyone I ever met to just go ahead and friend me.

So talk about the inspiration for The Pyscho Ex Game, since we were just talking about exes.

The inspiration for that was that I met the man I wrote it with who now lives with me, by the by. Andy. And he had a musical that I went to see a bunch of times, which was remarkable. And he and I started e-mailing, and it was a very compelling e-mail relationship, and the reason it got so compelling is we started playing a game. When we were e-mailing, I barely knew him, so I was just sort doing defensive, jokey bantering with him, because that's what I do with people I don't know. And he made some kind of remark, and I made some sort of a challenge to him, about yeah, well, whatever happened to you, I can drink you under the table three times, that kind of a "yadda yadda yadda," because I get very brave when I'm being banter-y.

And we started playing the game of who'd had the more horrible previous love life for points. And it was really, really hilarious. It got really hilarious really fast. So then I thought, "Well, this is such a great idea for a book," because we were writing the stories so kind of specifically. But it really wasn't obvious how to make it into a book. Also, two people writing a book was hard enough, but we were also using all this disparate sort of information about all these various people, and so forth. And there was no way to really turn it into a book without really reconceiving it all together –I thought it would just be, "Oh, we'll just take these and we'll just make them a book." Making that into a book was, I would say, the single hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

The other thing that was nice about it is we were trading chapters back and forth and we were each allowed to just take whatever the other person and just move it on. I would get my chapter back from him and he would have moved it to some place that I never dreamt of in a million years, but I'd think, "Wow, that's so much better for the plot than the actual thing that I had written." So it kind of went like that. But it was, I still think, a very funny and interesting idea for a book.

Actually, the book was an evaluation of narcissistic personality disorder that I was learning about. It's kind of a narcissistic personality disorder bible in my opinion, because we had both been with a lot of people, having grown up in certain situations. I don't want to tip any details, but we'd both been with a lot of people who were extremely narcissistic. Which is a thing I know a lot about. I had a piece about that in Real Simple about it. It's up on my website. Real Simple asked me to write one of these things called a Life Lesson, and so every other life lesson was, you know, an amazing little homily Mom told me at the kitchen table and so forth, and I thought, well, my big life lesson was understanding what Narcissistic Personality Disorder is. I read like 20 books on it. So I explained it. And I had a very narcissistic mother, and therefore went on to meet a lot of very narcissistic people and think of them as family.

How can you know that you're in a relationship with someone who is narcissistic? What are the warning signs?

How can you know? You know, it really has to do… the "you" in this really has to be taken under consideration, because how can you know? Maybe you're the narcissist. I mean, I can't really just say who and what it is. But there's a great book I read that I always recommend to people called Why Is It Always About You? If you're in a relationship where everything you do seems to be the instigation for a fight and you didn't even think you were getting in [a fight], you don't know why you're fighting and you didn't really mean for it to be a fight, you didn't really know it was gonna be a fight, that's a pretty big indication: that you feel continuously attacked when all you were doing is sort of being banal.

That was my relationship with my mother. Pretty much everything I said created a fight, and I couldn't figure out how not to be in a fight with her. And then finally you find out that there's a category of person who's just looking for a fight. And it's generally a narcissist, because they are sitting on a wellspring of rage and humiliation that comes from when they were three and they're untreated, and usually narcissists are not the kind of people who go to therapy. They instead just look for targets for rage. And if you're raised by one, you pretty much already know what that dynamic is, and you're likely to fall back into it with many another person. Think of it as comfort.

I don't think I'm in a relationship with a narcissist.

Well, I bet you aren't then.

But I've probably dated them in the past.

Well, it sounds like you have a nice relationship with your mother, and that's usually an indication of whether you're going to fall into the trap.

People who have weird relationships with their moms—you can't make a blanket statement, but it's often a red flag.

It's a dilemma. In fact, I'm writing a new book, another collection of short pieces, and one of the pieces is called "In Praise of Crazy Moms." And I'm holding moms responsible for the invention of comedy by having produced people who have no choice but to defend themselves all the time. The funny ones cause comedy.

Can you talk a little bit more about the book and when it's coming out?

Well, I have been writing novels. I have a newish novel out now called Nose Down Eyes Up.

The talking dog?

Yes, the talking dogs. I love the talking dogs. It's written in the voice of a guy, and it was the first time I'd done that, which I had to do a lot of research for, because I'd gotten really comfortable writing my own voice, which I sort of came upon post-Letterman show by writing columns. And I was sort of happy to have stumbled upon my own voice after a lot of years of collaborating and becoming somebody else's voice. You find yourself sort of hungry for, who am I outside of this person?

But in this book I wrote in the voice actually of a guy who works for me, who I have spent almost as much time with as I have with Andy, but in a different kind way. He's my handyman, he works for me. But in order to write in the voice of a guy, I was very busy color-correcting it with all the men I know because I was very worried I would girl-ify it and make it wussy and so forth. So hopefully I didn't do that. The new book I'm writing is gonna be another collection of short pieces, which is actually the thing I like writing best. I like writing short, funny stuff. It's an area of comfort I have as far as writing goes, if there is an area of comfort in writing. As you may know yourself, it's just the hugest pain in the ass.

And the mother stuff is in one of the pieces?

Yeah, that's one of the pieces I'm working on, "In Praise of Crazy Mothers." I'm holding them responsible for the invention of standup comedy. I documented it. Lots and lots of standup comedians have crazy mothers. It's a big, big definition of crazy. It's not clinically incarcerated in a mental institution; it's just an impossible kind of a person. Difficult and hard to get along with and so forth. The red flags of which you were speaking.

Right. Another reason why not to date a standup comic.

Standup comics—very, very difficult group of human beings. They have an upside, but they're a difficult bunch.

Have you encountered a lot of age discrimination in Hollywood?

There's a lot. It's very much easier to get a job in the entertainment industry if you're between 25 and 35, I would say. And after that, everybody starts getting paranoid. Although, there are some really good examples of older people, you know, like the guy who did The Sopranos, who did well for themselves at ages where you're not supposed to be permitted to participate. But they were able to just have an opportunity and hit it out of the park. If you at that age and have an opportunity and don't hit it out of the park, I don't think you get another opportunity. It's very youth-oriented.

Is that partly why you started writing novels?

Yeah. You know, it was partly why. When I was working on the Letterman show, I had an opportunity to write a column. And I kind of got overwhelmed by how astonishing it was to be responsible for your own work fully. You don't get that much opportunity to do that when you write television. It is a massive collaboration and it has other things that really are going for it, like a giant paycheck and the fun of collaboration, and so forth. But there's not of that, "I did this and it's by me" kind of a feeling. And I started out in art and I kind of missed that. So when I started writing things by myself it like, wow, so that's what it's like when I do things by myself. A lot of people go into creative stuff thinking that they would like particular credit for something, and you can't really get it when you're in a massive collaboration. You can get it in other ways, but you know, the battles of directors trying to get a cut and having it taken away from them or writers being rewritten by 25 other writers are, you know, well documented. It's very hard to be the initial writer on something and make it through to the end as the writer still. It's more common that you get rewritten and they take it away from you. And for the artist, that's frustrating and crazy.

When I first started writing print, and especially publishing, and I would turn in something and I'd go, "Well, do you have notes for me?," I would expect them to say, "Well, ok, we want you to just throw out the beginning, and start here and add a black child," you know, whatever kind of crazy shit they come up with when you have notes given to you in the entertainment industry. But in publishing, they don't do that at all. The editor I had at Random House used to write "G.W.F." on certain sections of what I wrote, and that would mean "goes without saying." Like I was overstating the obvious. And I was doing that sort of not because I wanted to overstate the obvious but because when you do standup and write for television, there's no such thing as overstating the obvious, you're supposed to state it two and three ways in different ways in order to make sure that the stupidest person available understood that you said something.

I mean, that's certainly the training. And the idea that you could just say something smart and leave it alone and let the person ponder it was sort of beyond delightful. Because when you write print, it's not going anywhere, it's just sitting there. Of course, with TiVo now, it could just sit there too, you could play it back and play it back. There wasn't TiVo when I started doing that. So anyway I just thought that was amazing, that the editors I was working with in publishing were trying to make me sound more like myself and not like an entirely different person, which is what the tendency tends to be in Hollywood. There's layers of executives that you give you notes when you write TV and movies. The first layer and then the second layer and then the next layer, and you just have to deal with it somehow. Some people get in big acrimonious fights and some people just give in. And it's very obvious when you watch a movie and there's just mysterious things happening that a committee got involved. When I watch movies, I always think, "Well, this had to be a committee decision, you can't tell me anybody came up with that plot point on their own" in an early draft.

That sounds really annoying.

Well, it drives a lot of people crazy, from F. Scott Fitzgerald on, you know. And then there are those people that are the beacons that the rest of us think, "Why can't I get that?" Like, nobody's saying that to Judd Apatow. He fought his way through and somehow is a franchise of his own design now. You think, "Maybe that could happen to me." Or the guy that did The Sopranos. I don't think anybody was giving him notes that he had to pay any attention to. Or the people that do The Simpsons. From what I understand, they don't really get network notes. But that's not the case for the next show that comes on that's like The Simpsons. They will give them a million notes. But once you've got a really proven success, they back off. They don't want to mess with success. But really proven success is not an easy thing to just stumble into.

One of your scripts has been on the infuriating verge of being produced for the last 20 years.

I've got a piece in that L.A. Weekly I was talking about that's about that, that's about the 25 years of this one script. It started in 1986 and it went through countless rewrites and it went into "turn around" and "turn around" and "turn around." And it was at Paramount, and then it was at Lorimar, and then various principles who backed it died, and it had Nora Ephron attached to it for a while, and it just went on and on and on and on. And every time you get your hopes up it just crashes and burns again. I would tell you the story, but I wrote it.

Oh, here it is: "Lather, Rinse, Repeat: My Hollywood Horror Story."

That's it. Exactly. And I finally – it ends with me getting called by Fox who apparently has it is their basement now. It's not in development, but they tried to stop publication of my book Walking in Circles Before Lying Down because it was a talking dog movie and I wanted, at some point, it was like 24 years in and I thought, "You know, I haven't really written this talking dog thing and, I mean, no one's ever going to see this damn thing. I'm gonna use the premise of a talking dog and a girl and advice and stuff and redo it entirely so it has no conflict with the script just because it's still an area that I like and I'm gonna write it into a book, because I would like before I die to have certain things…" So I did that, and the book is doing really well; it just went into a 24th printing yesterday. But before it came out, Fox tried to stop publication of it, even though it's a different plot, it's a different girl, it's a different dog. It's a different everything. I wrote all different stuff. My joke that I make in that article is that William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and Richard III and nobody told him that they were the same play because they both had blood and talking kings in them.

But also it's like, they're not making the movie!

No. They're not making the movie and they have no plans to ever make the movie, because they thought it was a conflict with Marley and Me, even though Marley and Me is nothing like the movie that I wrote. But the movie's clearly never – if it were ever going to get made, it's when Nora was attached. And it didn't. And at that point the reason it didn't get made was is, we actually got to a table reading with Lisa Kudrow and Matthew Perry and Ed Norton and others reading, and Matthew Perry couldn't get through a whole sentence without starting over, was the astonishing thing to me. And I thought to myself actually, "How did they get him to do Friends? He obviously can't read. Did they give him line readings, or…?" And then about a day later he was put in rehab. Remember, there was a big mess with the rehab situation that was very all over the tabloids about a day after my reading, and I'm sure he doesn't still have that problem, and maybe he didn't have it before that. I caught him at the cusp of it. I honestly couldn't figure out how they were filming Friends the way that I was watching him at that point.

Couldn't they have gotten someone else?

Well, who knew? He didn't look weird. He looked like a regular person. I don't know what the substance issue was particularly, but it was being the top-notch actor that we know and love at that moment in time. I mean, he did go into rehab for a very long time right after that. Like I say, a day later. So I caught him at the worst of it. That was the last time I saw that movie on its way to being made. I actually thought there was a pretty good shot at that point.

When was all of that, the late ‘90s?

That was at the cusp of the new century. Because I remember writing a draft of it that said, "Me and my boy! All new for the 21st century." It was only 14 or 16 years into it at that point. Now we're a full 20-…well, we're going for the 21st year soon. But it's not in development so it's not really a real 21st year. So, fake. But I was happy I wrote Walking in Circles About Lying Down. I'm a big, big, big, big dog lover. I spend all my days surrounded by dogs staring at me, like I'm gonna do something good. They all are continuously let down by me, but I honestly felt like I had a lot to say about it, so I'm glad I wrote that book. And then I wrote a follow-up, which is Nose Down, Eyes Up.

So your dogs are kind of…

My muses. I feel like we're in a conversation all day.

I know. It's nice. I feel like I'm in a conversation all day with my dog.

Well, you are, actually. They're not saying anything about the war in Afghanistan or anything, but they have their things to say.

It's true. But maybe if I had four dogs, I'd be more inspired.

Well, it makes me really laugh. I find dogs hilarious. I love that we're sharing our living space and our mental space with a totally other species. I love that it's just another species. To me, it's sort of like having exchange students from Neptune. They share our furniture, but you wonder exactly how much they share of what we are sharing with them, what they comprehend, what they don't comprehend, what they think we're doing. To me, that's just amusing. It's kind of like talking to someone from another country. You know, that's what I like to write about. I just never understand what they think I'm doing. What do they think I do for a living, for instance? What do they think I'm doing while I'm sitting here, besides not giving them enough walks?

Right, exactly. Like, they're just waiting… — like you just exist to give them walks and feed them and then pick up their poop, and in between that, you know…

Yeah, I like writing about that. I just wrote a piece for this new book I'm writing where I'm explaining the idea of selfishness to them. Because it would be such a complete anathema, the idea that you could have a concept of selfishness. So I like the idea of trying to go back and forth of what I image the dogs would say to that concept. What inspired me is that in the morning, I still get the paper, because I still like to read the paper, and they stand on it. And they always stand on it, usually it's right before they decide that it's now or never for breakfast, they're just all standing on it, and they're ripping it and they're ruining it and I'm, "No! Get off! Get off!" So I was writing this whole piece where I explain that it's very selfish of them to ruin what I'm doing just because they're hungry, and the answers which are uncomprehending and also "huh?". Well, I don't want to try to paraphrase it, because I'm actually just only writing it now. That's what I like writing about, is just the idea that there'd be anything that they could comprehend, what it is they get about what we're all doing.

Oh, totally. I mean, I don't think they can comprehend their own existence, though, right?

I think they do comprehend. Well, I don't think they are worried about their mortality.

But they have survival instincts.

This is the second group of four that I've had. I had four other ones who just all died of old age, and they have four distinct personalities and they have a pack order. It's completely hilarious to watch them juggle all this stuff all day. These four – the last four I had reminded me of four people I met on an elevator who were now forced to hang out together – these four are just more like a pack. Some of them have shared interests. There are two ball fetchers. There's one – two of my dogs, I got from my vet when he was trying to place them because their dad went to prison for Ponzi schemes – so they came as a couple. I was gonna take just one but I'm glad I took them both because they're sort of like a married couple. He's always humping her and she's kind of like, you know, looking for a cigarette or something to read, and she just sort of puts up with him humping her. So they kind of sleep together, so they have a relationship. And she's one of the ball fetchers, so she has a relationship with the older dog in the pack, who insists on being the alpha even though the other three don't care. Every single day he takes I.D.'s from them and it's like he's going, "Alright, everybody, everybody remember. I'm in charge here!" And the other three are like, "Yeah, we know you're in charge, we don't care. Be in charge. We don't care who's in charge." So they all just really make me laugh. This is going on all day long. Luckily nobody else cares who's in charge, so that guy's not getting in a fight with the other three.

There you go.

And one of them has got that rescue dog personality of "Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me," which is, "No one's killing you! I don't know what happened to you before I met you, but I have never done anything to you, why are you acting like I'm going to kill you?"

Like, "Don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me."

Yeah. I wrote her into Nose Down, Eyes Up. She's one of the dogs in that. It's a funny thing to have a dog presume that you're a violent offender when you have done nothing but kiss her and give her treats for the whole six years you've had her. It's a good argument for what happens in early childhood, the way that it affects everybody.

Oh, totally. Yeah, I don't know what happened to my dog before I had her, but I'm sure it affects her personality.

It's the same as with human beings. The stuff that happens in early childhood, before you're three years old, you know, that's who you're dealing with when you're dealing with petulant adults, is somebody wasn't smart enough with their three-year-old. And who really knows how to get everything right with a three-year-old? So, you know, that's the history of violence and insanity in the world at large: mothers who can't really comprehend what they're doing to a three-year-old. And why would they be able to? Probably people not getting more sane anytime soon.

Probably. Is there anything else you're working on that you want to mention?

I've been making a bunch of short movies.

Oh, cool.

I just love doing that. I don't have a job doing that. But I got a really, really cool camera. I just upgraded my camera stuff. I learned how to edit on Final Cut. I taught art at U.S.C. for a year, and I was taking a lot of film classes while I was there because I could, because I was faculty. And I got really excited about the idea of making films—it was sort of the transition in between doing comedy and doing art. And in those days, you couldn't do all the stuff that… — you'd have to rent [equipment], get an editor, there used to have to be cameras that you'd have to change reels of tape in the cameras or film and get film processing and all this stuff that you can do it all just in your office now. I can't get over how completely great that is. Including color-correct it yourself in Final Cut. I love editing. As difficult as writing is is as much as I love editing. I think it's the most fun. I used to sit for hours and hours with editors when they were editing giving them timecodes and waiting for them to do all this stuff and it would just be the most endless waiting task to see something assembled.

Do you think you ever want to work in TV again?

Yeah, I would. You know, it was something that I believed in. I come up with stuff and try and sell it. And then I tried last year again and didn't succeed in selling something. My friend Laura Kightlinger and I were trying to come up with some ideas recently. It gets less easy all the time, since reality TV took over, you really have to get the right angle. With reality TV, it's harder to get that other stuff launched. I tried to get kind of a standard funny half-hour show and they looked at me like I had all the pieces in place and then it fell apart. That's the way that really tends to work a lot. So I keep writing books. One of the things I instantly liked about books is that they go forward. When you're writing other stuff, a lot of times you wind up with giant page counts and no one sees it, you know. You can have the end of a really a lucrative and very satisfying career without anyone having seen your work. I know people who have written dozens and dozens of screenplays that didn't get made. At least when you write print, it comes out. At least somebody sees it. Whether they like it or not, whether it does well or not, that's a separate problem entirely.

Presumably, if you get a book contract, you will have your book published, whereas you can get something optioned or get a screenplay deal and it will never see the light of day.

Yeah, and you can always – if you write the thing in print first, at some point maybe it can become a screenplay, but at least it also existed at some point if the screenplay never sees the light of day. The other stuff, it goes into this weird vortex of the unseen that… I should write something about that. All those creative things that are sitting in that giant vortex here in Los Angeles and in New York too that have never been seen.

It's a very big vortex. I suppose that's why it's a vortex.

It would be a scary vortex to enter by the way if you think about all the violence and the misconstrued comedy and the weird people.

Seriously.

I should write a graphic novel about it.

You should write a screenplay about the vortex of screenplays.

I know, I was just thinking that's a pretty good idea.

It'd be very meta. It'd be very Being John Malkovich

This whole business is getting weirder and weirder. Getting things on the air becomes stranger and stranger and stranger. It used to be that, like when they would just shoot a show like The Osbornes, they would fact-gather forever. They would shoot and shoot and shoot – I used to shoot a ton of what would be reality TV for the Letterman show, I would do all the remote pieces in addition to whatever else I was doing. And I would shoot hours and hours and hours and then put together a four-minute piece. I would just cull it down to the very best, most hilarious four minutes. And that was the kind of percentages that it took. That was what they did when they first started doing reality TV. It's like when they shoot a documentary, you shoot forever. And then you get the best stuff boiled down to an hour. Now they insist on doing an episode of a reality TV show in three, four days. And nothing really happens in three or four days necessarily. Also, they now just have to construct plots out of it. They just make stuff up. They give people lines. It really no longer is what it is, really reality TV, it really is just forcing a plot on people who aren't actors in their own home situation.

I would say that at some point that's gotta implode. That's the wrong direction to be going in with it. That's like a terrible sitcom. I can't imagine that it's going to be able to sustain at that level without some amount of reality being the core. The fascination was, these are real people doing stuff.

What do you think of the recent firings of Michaela Watkins and Casey Wilson from Saturday Night Live?
The workings of SNL have always been pretty mysterious to me. A lot of friends of mine have had a run through that system and emerged pretty frustrated. It seems to work for some people and not for others and I can't pretend to get it. I do know that it is incredibly painful to get fired, but also that Julia Sweeney, one of the most hilarious, most literate comedians I have ever known, emerged from SNL pretty much known only for Pat. Which was funny but if you ever saw "God Said Ha" or any of her other monologue work you know how much of Julia Sweeney never made it on to the SNL stage. So..I would tell those girls to just start writing a bunch of new material for themselves and keep on going. The rejection doesn't say anything much about their talent.

Merrill Markoe [Merrill Markoe]

The cornerstone of their project is to design goods in the U.S. that can be produced in Cambodia, thereby empowering former sex workers by providing them with a living wage, health benefits, childcare, and insurance. By partnering with other organizations in Cambodia, they've also been able to identify at-risk women and give them jobs. They've recently started selling a tote bag emblazoned with the slogan: Buy Her Bag, Not Her Body.

I spoke with Diana and Alissa in New York recently about the successes they've had, the challenges they face, and how great it would be to get Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore on board.

[Doree interviews interesting women every week for us. If you have a suggestion, email her.]

Tell me how you guys started Nomi Network—how you guys know each other and how this whole thing came into being.

Diana: I went to NYU Wagner School of Public Service and I was sent to Cambodia to do research on microfinance. In five different provinces, my research team and I gathered interviews. We interviewed women who make less than a dollar a day. In the villages I really felt this vulnerability existed—especially when fathers and mothers offered their children so willingly to strangers. I came back here and I felt a little overwhelmed, not only because of what I'd experienced in the villages but also in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, I saw young girls with really old men. I came back and I didn't know what to do, so I thought I'd gather a few people from church and we could talk about the issue and pray about it. Alissa was one of the five who came, and we prayed about it.

What church do you go to?

Diana: MSNY, which stands for Morning Star New York. From that point it was sort of a launching pad, because I had a product that I identified in Cambodia. It's a business card holder with a very ethnic design that I thought would do well in the luxury market because it's made out of wood and it was just a really unique design. Alissa looked at it and she was like, oh, what a great idea. She has sort of a design/artistic background, so she was able to look at it and offer some suggestions. From that point on we started meeting and drafting a business plan for the purpose of bringing it to the luxury market. Then we got involved with an anti-trafficking organization, and we decided we needed to go back to Cambodia and really assess the needs, and meet with the local NGOs that were already working with survivors, already providing the training, job opportunities, have a social enterprise. We interviewed about a dozen of them. They told us the same thing: they need a demand for their products. Many of their products are very fair trade looking in that they only appeal to a small market, people who buy things for a cause.

You wanted it to appeal to a broader market. So, Alissa, you heard about Diana's idea at church. Were you immediately like, oh my goodness, this is something I want to get involved in?

Alissa: It was, and particularly the design aspect. I learned about this issue in college, and it was an issue I did not hear addressed in a very tactile way. There was an organization called International Justice Mission, which today has actually changed its name to Love 146. And they were the group that I first heard talking about this issue. They do a lot of outreach in Southeast Asia. They allowed there to be chapters on different college campuses. We tried to start a chapter at our school, Skidmore College, but people had other commitments and didn't really cling on to it. So I had the early experience of being interested in the topic but I didn't really know how to address the need, engage on a deeper level. This seemed like an opportunity to do so. I don't have a background in business. My degree was in theater and American studies, so this was very appealing to me—I have a chance to stretch certain muscles that I didn't really use before.

What do you guys do in your day jobs?
Diana: I'm a consultant.

Alissa: And I work for the Theatre Communications Group, which is a national organization for non-profit theatres. We work with over 500 theatres that are all non-profits and we kind of work to ensure their access to professional development and tools for non-profits.

Can you guys sort of paint a picture of what life is like in these villages? How old are these girls, what are their families like, how much are they being sold for? What are their lives like after they get sold?
Diana: I can speak specifically to the villages. Most of these villages people are agricultural-based. They're farmers with three others jobs. That can mean they have a business that charges batteries, or they sell soap, or they sell products that everyone else is selling. We did research and microfinance is great. However, in certain areas where the economy is so depraved, it's really difficult for anyone to break over the per capita expenditure, which is a proxy for income, because no one really has a bank account.

What is the per capita expenditure there?
Diana: Based off of my research it was between $1 to $2 a day. Some of these women have gone through many funding cycles. The children were in school or weren't in school. We'd ask them questions like, where are your kids? They'd say, they're working somewhere—in a garment factory in Phnom Penh. Given the age range, they're likely not working in a garment factory. They're likely the same girls I saw on the street in Phnom Penh. In terms of what happens to them when they're sold, I'm not the expert. But pretty much their lives are at the mercy of whoever bought them.

How much money are we talking about here?
Alissa: I've heard several numbers thrown around. I've heard that some children are sold to be given away at a certain age. So when they're three years old they'll be sold for $500 and when they come of age, like age 7, they'll actually be handed off. There's a range of pricing. Those people who are more desperate, who tend to be in even more rural areas, the prices get lower and lower.

Diana: Some parents know their children will be in the brothels. They know. Other parents, they think their children are going to be in a garment factory, and they don't know. By the time the girls figure it out they can't go home, because it's a shame culture. They're not shunned but they can't face their parents, and they're sending back money to feed their seven other siblings and the parents sort of turn the other eye.

Alissa: In some situations there is not money coming home. Some traffickers put on a guise that out of guilt tripping, they will send a little bit of money home. That creates an even deeper sense of guilt. It makes them feel like there is a thing holding them there. But there are cases where these women and children actually disappear. The parents have no contact with them. They have no idea what's happened to their child.

Explain exactly how this is all going to work—the production of stuff and how you're going to be supporting these women.
Diana: We want to increase the demand for the products so they're not just products you buy because you feel good, but eventually we want to design products like T-shirts, ties, that will be brought straight to market and increase utility for the consumer. Buying from your heart only goes so far. You buy because you need something. If you work with the social enterprises, currently we're working with StopStart in Cambodia.

What do they do?
Diana: Their signature product is a rice-paper tote bag. In terms of product diversity, here and there there are cloth bags. We have designers here who we've worked with, who did the "Buy her Bag, Not her Body" totes. We're in the process of designing T-shirts. They want to use our designs for other things as well. We helped them source 2500 bags to another organization that needed the bags—they didn't have the time or the resources to work with a manufacturing facility, because it takes a certain skill set. We have people who have retail experience, production experience, buying experience. We have people who have worked for Saks. That expertise is very valuable for both sides. We were able to get the product over and provide 23 jobs for women, including health benefits. One meal a day, childcare, accident insurance. Things that are pretty much unheard of in Cambodia at this time. So that's one aspect. It makes it easy for the retailers too. A lot of them are criticized for their supply chain. So we're assuring, at no cost to them, that the products that get produced are employing women who are survivors or at-risk. At-risk we quantify as making $1-$2 a day.

Alissa: Looking at the big picture, I feel that as Diana and I got engaged with the anti-trafficking organizations, we were really listening hard to where the gaps were and where the needs were. It seemed like there were different needs to address the design aspect of the products that were being made. Also, making sure that the products do reach the Western market and that they're receiving placement next to products that are of the same quality. And then also leveraging this as a social justice issue and making sure that if they're going to be buying anyway, they can buy responsibly.

I think a lot of people feel like there's no options in terms of buying responsibly.
Alissa: One of the things we've done is we've put together a map on our website of New York City listing all the different organizations that do fair trade. And eventually we're going to scale that up and have it be slave-free products. So any organization that carries our bag would technically be carrying a slave-free product. It's hopefully going to drive that demand.

Diana: Because we are selling at a minor markup, part of the proceeds will be channeled back into individual training accounts for women. A lot of the women were trafficked at the age of 7, and they had hopes and dreams of maybe becoming a teacher, becoming a lawyer. We want to set aside money for women who have that drive to leave the manufacturing and go back to their villages and teach and whatnot. We really want to reconnect women with their families.

Where does the name Nomi come from?
Alissa: We had an opportunity when we were there last June to go to a rehabilitation home. We met survivors and there was a young child who immediately ran straight to us, flung her arms wide and bear-hugged Diana. It was one of the most welcoming receptions we had received in our time in Cambodia. I was very apprehensive at that moment because we had been meeting so many organizations, this was the first time we had been able to see the people behind this issue. I was thinking that all the girls were going to run in the opposite direction. The girl who ran towards us—she followed us around the entire time we were there.

How old is she?
Alissa: Now she's 8 years old. She is also mentally handicapped. According to the director there, he was saying it was probably a result of the abuse she experienced throughout her lifetime, at whatever brothel she was trafficked to. It was such an amazing experience for us, and we wanted to commemorate her as an individual who is still on the path of recovering. We're not allowed to disclose the location of the rehabilitation home—we can say it's in the northern region of Cambodia, closer to the border with Thailand, which is where a lot of the trafficking is happening. It was an incredible experience and because of that facility and other facilities in Cambodia, we really think she has a chance of being rehabilitated back into society.

And her name is Nomi.
Diana: Yes. We changed the spelling and the variation of it—we want people—it's anonymous for "know me." Because we want people to know her, know her story, know her success. And the rehabilitation home is one aspect. There's rescue—girls and boys are rescued. Then there's rehabilitation, then there's reintegration, and then there's our part, which is empowerment. We focus on empowerment, as well as prevention. There are a lot of variables with trafficking—we're not saying that everyone who is economically vulnerable will be trafficked. However, it is a huge factor.

What are your goals for Nomi Network? What do you hope to achieve in the next year, three years, five years?
Diana: Various non-profits are doing similar work in the area, and we hope we can streamline it, and really build a hub. Each one has a network where it's sort of like, not only is it training—right now the sewing is technique, buttons, things like that. There's not a capacity to have a zipper and buttons. We want to increase capacity. At the same time, like I mentioned, individual training accounts. We really care about the women and their development. We don't want it to end at just a job. We want them to have a career and go back to their families if they want to.

How are you going to track their progress?
Diana: Right now we have staff in Cambodia and so we've interviewed individuals from that organization, as well as other organizations we plan to work with. Right now we're getting the products over, but once we sort of have established more of a demand for the products, we can send people there to interview the women, find out what their daily per capita expenditure is, find out their stories, find out their goals, and basically create an individual development plan for themselves. Where they are now, where they are in two to three years—we can measure that, and then we can give them additional training, additional schooling, whatever they need.

Alissa: Currently there's this sense that right now the only organizations and businesses that are actually going to make it in Cambodia are foreign-run. And we'd like to see that mentality change. Culturally, Cambodians can have difficulty understanding an entrepreneurship mentality and there's a lot of undercutting that happens from the top to the bottom. There's a lot of shortcuts taken. We really do believe that with individual staff on the ground there, and with patience and time—because this really is a long-term investment—that we really can see individuals rise up and master a more viable outlook on entrepreneurship.

Kind of the teach a man, or woman, to fish theory.
Diana: Right. Another long-term objective is to target areas in India where basically half of the slaves are in India. I think there are 13 million.

Half the slaves worldwide?
Alissa: Worldwide. A lot of that is actually due to labor trafficking. If you look at research on trafficking, you'll see that entire villages or families will be quote-unquote "enslaved" or in bondage. And there are children who are born into bondage. Whether or not they are able to comprehend that, that's for them to say. But based on the definition that the State Department has, or basically anyone who's an expert on human trafficking has, these people are enslaved.

Are you identifying the women with the staff you have in Cambodia?
Diana: Currently they've already gone through the process of rehabilitation and counseling. So the non-profit that we're working with—you go through the process of healing and the process of training. What's the next step? A job. So a lot of these non-profits end up expanding their scope. [Pictured below, hair styling training.]

Alissa: A lot of people we talk to say that people know that—they know that training is the next step. It's not actually changing these women's abilities to break into the workforce. And that has to do with better training and a more diverse set of skills that you're training. On the other side, breaking the stigma of other organizations employing these women. We've talked to some organizations in the Philippines and also in India, and both of those organizations, particularly in the Philippines, have a leg up on Cambodia because of the work they've already set. It's kind of already pre-established with trying to get the organization to employ trained women. Getting the mainstream businesses to hire them.

And giving them the skills that these businesses will want.
Alissa: Exactly.

So how are you guys funding this?
Diana: Right now we have four core individuals who are constantly involved and volunteering. But we all work full-time at other jobs. So in terms of labor it's all volunteer. We have a network of about 18 individuals. Some of them are design, graphic design, different areas. These are all our friends and some colleagues. We sold the business card holders, and our friends and family members have been donating to us.

On August 15, you started selling the Buy Her Bag, Not Her Body?
Alissa: Yes. Eventually we hope to be able to make revenue off the sales of these products. One of the things we've always had in mind to do is to help nonprofits in Cambodia become more sustainable. Especially in hard economic times you can't rely on donations to get you through.

If people want to become involved through volunteering, what do you guys need volunteer-wise?
Diana: We're really trying to work with retailers. If someone works as a buyer we'd love to show them our samples and establish a pipeline of products into their store, and adopt us as a cause. There has been a major retailer that has recently adopted trafficking as a cause—the Body Shop. They've partnered with ECPAT [End Child Prostitution Pornography and Trafficking]. Second thing is raise awareness on the issue. We want to not only raise awareness but also generate income for the women. Basically, sell our products, tell your friends, go to the website, place an order. If they want to get involved, we need people with specific skills—marketing, technical skills, programming, finance. More of the business aspect, less of the programmatic aspect. They can submit info at nominetwork.org.

Alissa: We're not quite there yet, but we are very network-oriented in the sense that we like to make connections for people. If we see someone with a skill set or a passion, there is a sense that down the road we could help fit certain people to certain needs, in a larger anti-trafficking picture and really create a network with matching people to organizations who need it.

I follow Ashton Kutcher's Twitter and he and Demi Moore are super into the anti-trafficking cause. Have you guys tried to hook up with them?
Alissa: We have some organizations that we've been working closely with who have been trying to access them. And so instead of vying for their same affection we would really get it by—if they were to partner with the organization Stop Trafficking Now—they are launching a national campaign of walks, moments of solidarity across the country. They're approaching them and we feel like that would empower us as well. But in terms of looking for a celebrity endorsement, that's something that we really desire. Also—we would like to take the fashion industry by storm. But we would like to see designers who really care about the people who care about sustainable fashion and make designer products.

Diana: We've identified quite a few but unfortunately there hasn't been much progress in that area.

Alissa: It definitely generates sales and buzz to have a celebrity endorsement.

So how much time per week are you guys spending on this?
Alissa: It's like every waking hour that isn't devoted to our day jobs.

Diana: I would say 40 hours a week.

So you basically have a second full-time job.
Alissa: I think one of the things we'd like to do when we do get funding is make some of our staff full-time.

Do you guys think you'd ever want to do this full-time?
Alissa: Oh, absolutely. We talk about it all the time.

Diana: We've been talking to potential funders and that's the first thing on our list. Labor is definitely the driver of an organization and without a full-time staff it's really going to be a stretch for everybody, as it is right now.

Alissa: One of the things that I've so enjoyed about our development is looking at this issue and thinking about the capacity that people our age have to create innovative ways to affect social issues. We started this about two years ago. We think that at this moment in time there's this incredibly powerful generation that's standing on the forefront of change and technology, and there's this idea that we could really change something.

Diana: We're called a "network," and it's not a two-man show. There have been hours and hours of work put forth by multiple people. I would say that's what's really unique about this—we really are a network. And we are all volunteers.

What advice would you guys give to other young women who want to start a non-profit devoted to a cause that they're passionate about? Are there things you would have done differently, or things you did right that you want to share?
Diana: I honestly would not have done anything differently. Constantly ask for help. Be prepared to ask questions. Ask people that know more than you or even people that don't know more than you. You definitely have lots to learn. There have been mistakes that we've made but I feel like we've learned from them. You might not have the skills, you might not have the experience, but if you have the commitment the rest will come. Don't be scared of limitations—like money. We've just been like, we're going to do this, and somehow, some way, it's come.

Alissa: I would say that travel the world, and make sure you're open to the possibility of getting to know another culture. And don't rely on other people to make assumptions about the culture for you—make sure you do it yourself. The potential that I see in the people that we met with in Cambodia, from Nomi, 8 years old, to some of the women who were working there, the potential is astounding. I think that's what ultimately drives us because we know that can and should be tapped.

Diana: One more thing—set goals. I think idealists can often be like, we'll just do it. We wrote a business plan, and then from that, we're like, this is good, this is not, but we had it all down on paper. We also have a strategic plan that we initially, with our team members, seven at the time, sat down and laid out our business plan for the next year. We've done that and we've actually exceeded our benchmarks. It's good to actually see it on paper and not get overwhelmed.

I think that's good advice—be idealistic but also be realistic.

Cambodia photos: Tara Israel

Nomi Network [Nomi Network]

Previously: Why Choosing Your Own Adventure Can Really Pay Off

Thirtysomething wasn't a show I grew up watching.

In my house, prime-time TV watching was done by consensus; the only TVs in the house were in the master bedroom and in the den, and we - my brother, sister, and parents - usually crowded into my parents' room after we'd done our homework and eaten dinner. And so our list of shows in the '80s was crowd-pleasing and family-oriented. After school I could watch as much 3-2-1 Contact as I wanted, but in the evening we watched The Cosby Show and Who's the Boss and Family Ties and Silver Spoons and Punky Brewster. But never Thirtysomething - it sort of missed my family's demographic. My parents were a few years older than the adults featured in the show and I was a few years older than the kids, but perhaps more importantly, the adults in Thirtysomething - whose first season was released earlier this week on DVD - were unabashedly yuppies, children of the '80s in a way that I don't think my parents identified with.

However, I wondered whether the series would resonate with me more now that I'm pretty much exactly the age of its protagonists. Or have things changed so much in the last 22 years that their concerns would seem completely dated? (It certainly did a good enough job of entering the cultural lexicon that it was an obvious choice for the name of this column.)

In a scene in the first episode, Hope Steadman, the former lawyer and now stay-at-home mom, gets into a fight with Ellyn, her single, childless friend, when they meet for lunch. Ellyn is a total cliche of a hard-charging '80s career woman, right down to her shoulder pads. "I've been in the office til 10 every night this week," she says to Hope as they sit down. "Do you know how many people I have under me? 27!" she continues, as Hope's baby cries. Eventually, Hope has to leave because the baby won't stop wailing, much to her friend's chagrin.

Maybe, at the time, Thirtysomething was considered revolutionary because it explored the nature of female friendships through this lens, and pointed out how neither woman was truly happy. But talk about painting women with broad strokes. Either you're a self-absorbed careerist bitch, or all you can think about is feeding schedules.

But ultimately, our sympathy is supposed to lie with Hope. The stories are mostly told from her perspective; Ellyn comes across as an interloper who deigns to drop in on Hope when she feels like it, or when she feels like Hope is neglecting her. Hope is always portrayed as taking the high road—diffusing the situation by being the bigger person, placating her selfish friend who doesn't understand the rigors and responsibilities of child-rearing, because all she cares about is herself. It's what ultimately makes Thirtysomething a retro, reactionary show. Even as it shows that Hope is conflicted about the choice she made to stay at home with her daughter, the show serves to glorify its version of modern-day motherhood.

Later in the same episode, Ellyn comes to the playground where Hope is hanging out with her daughter.

"How'd you find us?" Hope asks, though it's clear that Ellyn knew exactly where to find her. "It occurs to me we haven't spoken in six days," Ellyn says. She's hurt that her friendship with Hope has changed. "Ellyn, my life! Everything is chaos," Hope responds, smiling broadly. "And you don't feel ready to do anything about it?" Ellyn says sadly. We're again led to understand that Ellyn is somehow incomplete, an unrealized version of what a real woman should be.

I found watching these episodes sort of excruciating - not because they exposed any deep essential truths about the nature of being in your thirties, or being a woman, or the choices we all have to make, but because they were cliched and, frankly, boring. So it was sort of depressing to read Katie Roiphe's article in Double X the other day, in which she excoriated feminists for not allowing themselves to admit the pleasure of infants - she writes that she's addicted to her six-week-old baby-and realize that as far as we've come, we still have a long way to go when it comes to not only respecting other women's choices, but not presenting everything as black and white. It's all too easy to set yourself up in opposition to a feminist straw woman, as Roiphe does, as though feminism is completely monolithic. Why can't Roiphe just write that she's addicted to her child (like plenty of mothers have been before her), instead of turning it into an overgeneralized commentary about the nature of feminism?

The article also made me sad because, as a woman who has yet to have kids, I dread being swept up into these debates. One aspect of being in my thirties that I've come to embrace is I'm finding myself much less prone to offer unsolicited advice about the choices my friends make. You're living with a guy I think is a turd? That's your choice, and-as I learned the hard way at some point in my twenties-nothing I say is going to make you break up with him. (Though I will feel some small bit of vindication when you do, finally, break up.) I'm hoping that I'll likewise feel disinclined to pass judgment on friends of mine who make choices that run counter to what I feel is best for myself-whether it's staying home with the kids or moving to a faraway city for a husband's career. Feminism is, I think, also about empathy, about putting yourself in someone else's shoes and acknowledging that what is best for one woman isn't necessarily the choice that every woman should make. It's a lesson that the creators of Thirtysomething should have taken to heart.

Thirtysomething: The Complete First Season [Amazon]

Related: My Newborn is a Narcotic [Double X]

Earlier: Why Sarah Haskins Turning 30 Didn't Send Me Down the Rabbit Hole

After the books, which were originally published by Bantam, went out of print, Gilligan started Chooseco in 2003. She's since reinvigorated the brand by bringing the old CYOA books back into print and starting several new series, including Fabulous Terrible, a YA series targeted to teenage girls, and Dragonlark, a series geared to younger readers. She's also bringing the CYOA books into the 21st century by developing editions for the Kindle and the iPhone. Gilligan, who's married to the series founder R.A. "Ray" Montgomery, also worked for years developing software and has written several CYOA books herself. We discussed how the Choose Your Own Adventure sausage gets made, what it's like to be in book publishing in Vermont, being a female software engineer, and the Choose Your Own Adventure "hot dog"-the red banner at the top of the book covers.

[Doree interviews interesting women every week for us. If you have a suggestion, email her.]

I was super excited to do Choose Your Own Adventure and you because, of course, I was a kid in the '80s and everyone read Choose Your Own Adventure books. I know you bought the company in 2003.

Right, 2003. Ray-R.A. Montgomery-got the remaining copyrights and trademarks in late 2002. We formed a venture thinking originally that we would simply re-license the old ones to another publisher. After about nine months of talking to publishers, we had a number of offers from all the big publishers in New York, but none of them were reality based, let's put it that way.

We had taken a hiatus from writing children's books and we had started to develop software. We'd both been evangelized by Apple in the early '90s. Apple had this very interesting program then called evangelism, which was a division started by Steve Jobs upon the introduction of the Mac around 1994. Evangelism went out to groups of people outside of typical software development channels to try to get them to develop software. So I suppose it was just a hop, skip and a jump to get people who did Choose Your Own Adventure to do this. They gave you machines and technical support. We did that for awhile and while that was going on, publishing was changing a lot. When we were fielding offers in the early 2000's, the offers were so weak. A typical offer would be 4 books over 2 years.

Wasn't Bantam publishing around a book a month for awhile??
Yes, for many years, it was more like magazine publishing. In the heyday it was quite a lot of work to get all those books lined up. There would always be at least one full time editor and a couple of stringers working on it.

There was a point that Bantam got rid of the hot dog. Was that was when things went downhill?
What a mess that was. For the last 6 or 8 titles in the late 90s, maybe in 2000-they redid Choose Your Own Adventure so it looked like Indiana Jones. Sales fell off a cliff. That was the final nail in the coffin. There's a whole host of reasons why Bantam let the series go and a lot of it has to do with corporate institutional memory. By late 1990s there was really nobody who was really shepherding the series. Everyone involved in the series had moved on. We were just this backlist orphan. I think it was a valiant attempt when they redesigned the logo, but they didn't understand that it just didn't read as Choose Your Own Adventure. We get emails every day at the website saying we didn't know you were in print.

How did you get to know R.A. Montgomery?
My dad was a printer and Ray had gotten to know him when [Ray] was a publisher before becoming a full time writer and my dad said, Oh my daughter is in film and she's looking for a job. I had just graduated from college. I said I don't know the first thing about computers. And Ray's attitude was like, great, I don't want anyone with any preconceptions.

So how old were you at this point?
22.

What year was this?
This was 1981.

So you met him right before the books sort of got huge.
They had actually already gotten huge. They had a short stint as the Adventures of You published and written by Ray in 1977-78. In '78 Bantam wanted to start wanted to start a children's division. They had an editor who was assigned temporarily to starting a list. And in that proverbial way that you read about, the agent took the Adventures of You to 14 different publishers and it was roundly rejected everywhere. And then this children's editor looked at it and said, kids will love this. They wanted six books-a series. Ray begged off writing all six. He said I want to be able to use other writers. So that was the beginning of the whole series. They changed the name to Choose Your Own Adventure. The first Bantam Choose Your Own Adventure book came out in '79. By '81 it had done really well. The first 6 months or so, sales were fine-but they weren't getting the numbers they thought they would. So they gave away 100,000 copies of the books to libraries and that is what really kickstarted it. It was very clever. Then it just sort of snowballed. So these things do reach a critical point. By the time I appeared in 1981, the series was well on its way. And for a few years it continued apace.

What led you to start ChooseCo yourselves?
The rights had reverted. At that point, in publishing in the '80s and '90s, it was typical for writers to get a rights reversion clause. If a publisher took your book out of print for longer than 6 months, the rights would revert if you went through some legal hoops. There was never a point where all 186 titles in the classic CYOA series were in print at one time. If new kids came into the series, they would buy the first couple books and then the latest books. So you would see this pattern, this inverted bell curve, where the first 10 titles always sold well and the most recent 10 titles always sold well, but the titles in between, with certain exceptions, really just fell off the cliff.

We initially thought, we'll bring out the books and we'll license other rights, because we didn't want to do everything. Another reason we'd said no to big publishing is because we wanted control of the art and the covers. We had very definite ideas based on anecdotal feedback that we got constantly from former fans. It's very non-standard in the publishing world to allow authors to have control. Now that I've had more experience with the publishing side, I think it's unfortunate that publishers don't allow writers to have more input in that process. I think it would lead to a lot of interesting developments. We knew we wanted to go with a very retro look from the original covers. Bantam had modified the covers five or six times over the 20-year run they had with the covers. And we felt like they got farther and farther from the original design. I would love to know who did that original design-it was some nameless art director in the bowels of Bantam in the late '70s. They did a brilliant job, we think, on the "hot dog" and the frame and the art. You empower kids with choices and a defined role as an adult and you give them an adult sized book. Then we just spruced it up to bring it into the 21st century.

You sort of alluded to this before when you were talking about Dungeons and Dragons, but what do you think it was about that sort of late '70s/early '80s period that led to this explosion in role playing games? CYOA books are all told in the second person so reader feels like they're going on the adventure themselves. What do you think that was about?
I'm not sure I know the complete answer. I think it's multicausal. You could say that perhaps the advent of technology was making people think differently in terms of what they could perform with technology. A lot of emphasis on the individual performing tasks that were quite complex that had previously been performed by a large number of people. Maybe the culture had gotten very self absorbed. Also, by the time Choose emerged in the early '80s there had really been 25 years of interactive fiction in various places. The first really good example of it is a play written by a really distinguished French critic and writer named Raymond Queneau. He wrote a play in the late '50s called A Story As You Like It. He was one of those French intellectuals who was much more valued as an intellectual than a bestseller. That play is probably his best-known work and it's been widely performed. The audience voted on the ending. Then in 1964 the Argentinean author Julio Cortazar wrote a book called Hopscotch, and you sort of decided where you were going to go to next in the story. That was a literary sensation. It was widely translated and published in the U.S. in 1966 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Then in early '70s, there was a 14 book series published by Corgi [now part of Random House UK] called Trackers. We've not been able to find out much about it. We tried to track down some of the authors at some point and couldn't find them. They were published in England-they were never published in the United States. You could say that it was an idea whose time had come.

I think you're right-it's part of this desire for more participatory entertainment. When you were a kid it was very exciting to feel like you were in charge of your character's destiny.
I think that it also parallels something that all children need to do and that they crave-and it's that they try on other personalities. They try on other roles. This just took it 10 steps farther, by defining the role more carefully, often putting kids into adult roles or quasi-adult roles-for some reason you're a gifted teenager who's a mountain climber. Or you're an oceanographer. You love to imagine different roles for themselves. You see on the Internet-people develop avatars for themselves, totally different identities. I think that's a part of human nature.

Can you describe the process of writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book?
I think every writer develops their own specific system, although there are aspects of the process that virtually everyone uses. A map to track your choices and endings is essential. Some writers make an arbitrary map, with a choice every certain number of pages, so many choices in a particular storyline, a certain number of total endings, etc. I often worked this way. Other writers let the story unfold and make the map follow the emerging stories. This approach is more organic, but in my case I would keep on running out of pages, or having wildly long storylines coupled with a few overly short ones. On the other hand, Ray almost always writes a book this way.

Keeping track of your page numbers is simple. A CYOA is usually between 100-110 manuscript pages. You just write the numbers 1-100 at the bottom of your map page, and as you use up the page number, you cross it off.

Those are the more practical aspects. As for content, I have found over and over that you need to choose a scenario that has enough richness and potential to generate a slew of exciting stories. For me, when I hit a writing block when I am working on a CYOA, it's often because the initial set-up wasn't juicy enough. I'll have to go back in and layer in more content —another character, some additional plot angle like a missing person or strange message, a plot angle that adds a time factor and the story tension that can be mined from a looming deadline (e.g. if you don't get the medicine to your missing partner within 72 hours, the poisoning will be irreversible, etc.). I always liked to set stories in worlds I know. Thailand, Japan, sea monsters. These were areas of my own interest and expertise and I think that knowledge and zeitgeist is communicated, often tangentially.

Over the years, we have of course developed guidelines. I suppose it's not unlike rhyme schemes in sonnets. Every book needs a certain number of endings, the choices have to occur within a certain number of pages or they don't seem as compelling or urgent. Those to factors tend to dictate how many storylines there are in a book. It's fun to play sometimes and loop different branches back in to each other. It's a writing challenge. But those are parlor tricks. At the end of the day, you are trying to write a whole bunch of really interesting fun plots that surprise the reader, and that make them think.

Over the years, we realized that there are only so many basic types of CYOA books. There are chase stories, and escape stories, search stories, and mystery stories. There are also fantastical world stories, some with a sci-fi orientation and others with more of a magical orientation. These tend to be less about a particular goal, and more about learning in a smart way that doesn't get you in trouble with the locals.

You guys have done a CYOA iPhone application, and I'm wondering if you could talk about how you've adapted to new technologies.
We think the sky's the limit. We're in discussions about developing a massive multiplayer online universe-taking the brand and crafting it into an online world. We have had a series of near deals in Hollywood. We haven't gotten just the right one but there's a tremendous amount of interest there. We've adapted two books for the iPhone in conjunction with Magnetism Studios, which is a software studio that's a couple brothers in Brooklyn. Ray recorded Abominable Snowman for the iPod. You need the video iPod-you actually click on the link and we have active links on the video screen when you make a choice so it goes to the next place. We have just done a deal to put all the books on the Kindle. That's been very interesting, because after fiddling with the Kindle interface for awhile we realized we had to redesign the books a little bit to work on the Kindle. It was a very fun process to work with the programmers at Amazon. It's definitely more complicated than basic novel on the Kindle. In-house we're developing a text-based game for the iPhone. Ray and I are both fans of text-based games, going back to '70s and early '80s.

Can you talk about the benefits and challenges of being in Vermont? You've clearly made a decision to be far away from the epicenter of publishing.
There definitely are pros and cons. I would say the pros are that we get to live in a wonderful, beautiful place with a very strong sense of community. Technology advances have allowed us to work very efficiently, both in terms of time and cost, all over the world. Right now is the absolute golden age of working in the country. We use artists from India, Romania, Argentina, as well as several in the U.S. Everything is instant. A lot less FedExing than there was in the '80s. Those are the pros. The very fact that you can run a fairly sophisticated operation in northern Vermont is a benefit. I would say one of the cons is that we probably miss a fair amount of synergy that we would enjoy if we were in New York or LA. We'd be more up to the minute with technology and stuff.

Do you find any particular challenges in being a woman and running this business?
No. I think there's the normal garden variety misogyny in publishing the way there is in the world. You have to deal with those situations as they arise and try to just handle them as best you can. Publishing is a business that's filled with a lot of very progressive minded people. It just attracts those kinds of people. As a business it's a pretty pleasant and collegial community of people to work with. What's interesting about my particular work experience is I had this seven or eight year stint in the '90s producing software. And I found there was very little sexism in the software business. When you get around really interesting technology people they don't care about anything except technology. I could have been a green frog. They kind of got beyond it. I have talked to women in the field who have not had that experience. At the highest levels of programming there's not a lot of women. I know it's better than it used to be but I know there are challenges for women engineers. My experience has been pretty great.

Also, I think I do a service keeping a feminine perspective in at least some of the books, because I do think for whatever reason CYOA wears a masculine face. It's been very popular with girls too, but when boys stop reading they don't stop reading CYOA. It's really identified in the publishing business as a boys' series. So it's kind of great for me that girls are involved too.

We had talked about doing a princess series that was really girly. I've got a bunch of great women who work with us and we were excited about the idea. But as we narrowed choices and investigated it, what we kept seeing were teen and adult romance series that were really poorly done. We started to develop an interactive teen series but as we started to work on it we realized there was something about the teen girl novel-the choices in the storylines were getting so complex and convoluted, that it sort of didn't work for the genre. But by this point we had very interesting characters and a very interesting scenario, and I love the second person-I love that voice. So I said, let's do a teen girl series-Fabulous Terrible-where "you" are the main character. We wanted the "you" to be highly identified. I got an email this year from a girl who was writing a book report and she said, My teacher told me to find the name of the character. I told her, it's really you. It's to the point where we were very careful not to give indications of skin color or hair color, anything like that. You do learn in the second book that your hair is dark, but that's all you know. We tried very hard to make it be something neutral enough that they could project themselves onto it.

What is your favorite CYOA book?
I think I would have to say I like Journey Under the Sea a lot. It was an early one and it's a classic. It's a lot of fun. I like a book called Inca Gold by one of our writers named Jim Beckett. It's set in the Andes and you're in search of the Lost City of Gold. I love Mystery of the Maya. Those are my three favorites. All the books with the word haunted or ghost in the titles outsell them. I am genuinely proud of Fabulous Terrible: The Adventures of You. The title was a wink back to the original Choose Your Own Adventure series.

I loved Sarah Haskins' new video, which is all about turning 30. As she says, now that she's "old," she's paying more attention to commercials for incontinence and osteoporosis. (She also wears a really heinous pantsuit throughout the entire video.) At the end, when she takes all the pills at once, she suddenly finds herself wanting to go to clubs and do young people things. (She's still wearing the pantsuit.)

I reached that milestone 2 years ago (the 30 milestone, not the incontinence or pantsuit milestones-fortunately, I have yet to hit those), and it's funny: Before I turned 30 I certainly thought of it as a turning point. When I was, say, 25, I was sure that 30 was going to be this magical turning point when I suddenly got all my shit together. I wouldn't feel "old," per se, but I'd feel more content, secure. Life would be less of an emotional rollercoaster. I'd probably even be completely done with my quarterlife crisis!

And in fact, turning 30 was sort of a relief. I threw a big karaoke party and got drunk and felt, looking back, that my twenties were all about highs and lows, and my thirties would be about security and really getting to know myself.

Then I turned 31 and thought, oh, fuck, it's really happening.

I first moved to New York ten years ago, after graduating from college, into a teensy two-bedroom apartment on Allen and Houston streets, on the Lower East Side. I had the smaller bedroom; it fit a full-size bed and a dresser, and not much else. I paid $850 a month, which was tough since I was making $25,000 a year working as a sales assistant at a magazine. I remember my take-home pay every two weeks was $712. (That's me, below, around that age, hamming it up in a supermarket.)





By the fall I had a new job and a new life plan: I was going to go back to school and get a PhD, and become a professor. It's funny when I think back on that year-I was 22 and everything seemed so slow. In college, everything changes every four months and I was discovering that it takes longer for things to change in the real world. I was at my first job for three and a half months, which felt like an eternity. I'd been at my second job for only a couple of months when I decided to apply to grad school.

I have a file cabinet in my apartment now that's like an archive of my life from the late nineties to the mid-aughts: bank statements, contracts from long-forgotten freelance gigs, back issues of the newspaper I worked for in Philadelphia. I was rooting through the cabinet a couple weeks ago, in an eventually abandoned attempt to clean it out (a shredder would probably be helpful, here), and I found a journal I'd kept for a few months in 1999. It's a spiral-bound 80-page Mead notebook, with the $2.29 price sticker from Duane Reade still affixed in the upper right hand corner. Anyway. I guess on the night of November 15, 1999 I was feeling restless, because I filled four pages with lists of what I wanted to be doing or have achieved in ten years, three years, one year, and one month. (Note: This is not a task I perform regularly. I must have read an article in a women's magazine or something that this was "helpful" when one is "floundering.") This is part of what I wrote in the ten-year goal list:

- have a PhD [nope]
- be married [nope]
- have a child [nope]
- have a dog [yes!]
- live in a big apartment in Brooklyn or Philadelphia or Boston or San Francisco [sort of—I live in Brooklyn, but no one would call my apartment "big"]
- be working on my second book [sort of! I did write one book, with ex-Jezebeler Jessica Grose, and would love to write another one, if anyone has any great ideas]
- know another language [again, sort of—in graduate school I took German and Italian, but I can't really communicate in either one now]
- have a garden [and once more, sort of—we have a backyard but our landlord tends to the garden]
- have really good friends [yes!]
- know how to knit [I learned how to knit soon after this and still have not finished the scarf I started around the year 2000]
- know how to sew [barely]
- be in the middle of reading a really great novel [not at the moment, no! But if you haven't already, I highly recommend Zoe Heller's new one, The Believers]
- have an article published in The New Yorker [why, yes! I wrote a Talk of the Town last month, thereby getting in just under the wire]

Strangely, my list of things I wanted to be doing in ten years is actually, and strangely, more accurate to real life than the lists I made for what I wanted to be doing in three years and one year and actually even one month.
Looking back on the list after ten years is also funny because it neatly glosses over all of the highs and lows of being in your twenties. I went to grad school, dropped out after an agonizing year of going back and forth about whether or not I should drop out, worked for a couple years at an alt-weekly, and then went back to school. I dated a string of wrong guys and a couple right guys. I became an intern at the age of 28, which was horrible and humiliating and turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

When I was 22, though, if you'd told me I was going to be an intern when I was 28 I probably would've just crumpled to the floor and sobbed.

I hesitate to use the term "quarterlife crisis" because I think it's vague and sort of pointless—it's called "growing up," really—but there was definitely a time, around age 25 or 26 or so, where it seemed like nothing was going right and whatever decision I made was going to be the wrong one, and I was letting everyone down, and nothing would ever get better, even if I did finally finish that scarf. Not to mention that for years, 30 seemed like it was so far off. That was when people officially became adults, after all, age 30. I remember when I was 22 looking at some of the people I worked with, who were, like, 27 and 28, and thinking they were so immature because they still partied with us 22-year-olds, and shouldn't they be married and settled down by now?

Needless to say, when I was 27 I wasn't settled down. And I laughed hysterically at Sarah Haskins' video, but there was, nestled in there among the jokes, a small kernel of truth. I don't go to clubs in pantsuits or take incontinence medication, but I am starting to feel like I've entered a different phase of my life.

Along with four others, Amanda-who has a BA from Cornell, a master's in education from the University of Michigan, and a law degree from Wayne State University-is working on opening the Boggs Educational Center, which the founders hope will be open by the 2011-2012 school year. I spoke with Amanda by phone while she was on her way back to Detroit from a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest with her son about the challenges of teaching in the inner city, how education can be fixed, and urban gardening.

[Doree will be interviewing interesting women every week for us. If you have someone you'd like to suggest, email her.]

How'd you get involved with the Boggs Educational Center?
A friend named Nate Walker. This is sort of his pet project that he's been wanting to do for a long time. So he brought four of us in on it. The way we all came to know about it for the most part was through the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, it's basically called the Boggs Center. It was founded in the name of Grace Lee Boggs and Jimmy Boggs, who are Detroit activists. Jimmy is no longer with us but Grace Lee is 94 years old and she is the most amazing person. She's worked with us a lot. And we've had a lot of conversations on our educational philosophies. The five of us decided to get together and put them into action, so the school's named after her, just to keep her legacy around. She's been an inspiration to the five of us.

You've been teaching since 1999.
I came back from studying abroad in East Africa, in Kenya and Zanzibar. I hadn't gone to college thinking I was going to become a teacher-they don't even have a teacher education program where I went. But I had a great professor who taught a class called the Sociology of the African-American Experience and it dealt mostly with issues of education in urban areas. So when I came back from Africa, I ended up living in Detroit and I decided to try and find a job in the schools, for an uncertified something or other. And I ended up as an emergency sub without a teaching certification, in a Catholic school. And it was a really amazing, wonderful experience. So I went back to school and got certified and got my master's degree and became a full-fledged teacher.

Are you from the Detroit area?
I'm from the suburbs of Detroit.

What were you teaching when you were an emergency sub?
I taught all subjects to third graders.

You said it was an amazing experience-what was particularly compelling about it?
There were cultural differences that I was really unaware of. And working with kids who are so open and honest and innocent, they made those differences really apparent to me. I learned a lot about the students I was working with. I learned a lot about another culture within my own community. We had so much fun together. We learned so much on both sides and so I really wanted to keep working with students.

What did you teach after you got your certification?
After I got certified I went into Detroit Public Schools and I taught fifth grade for three years. During that time I was laid off once and transferred twice. I loved my school in Detroit Public Schools, I loved my principal, I loved the people I worked with and the students there, but I actually got pregnant in my third year and it became difficult to get two weeks' notice of not having a job so I did go work at a charter school in Detroit.

How many years were you there?
I'm still at the charter school. This will be my fifth year.

What are some of the challenges of being a single mom?
Well, I'm single and I'm a mother. He spends a couple nights a week with his dad. His dad lives right near by us. He stays with my parents once in awhile, once a week even. It can be challenging financially a little bit. As far as the upbringing, we're definitely trying to create a village mentality for him. We're co-parenting, we're a pretty good team. I'm still friends with my ex-he's actually one of the five of us starting the school, Alfred [DeFreece].

You guys aren't sure exactly what kind of school it's going to be. It could be a charter school, a regular public school, or a private school. Can you talk a little bit about what the thought processes are for all those different options?
I would think most likely it's going to be a charter school because it's just sort of the most practical method for us to open a school in an efficient manner. Making it an independent school would be difficult for our population because we're low socioeconomically. And being just a regular old public school through a district would be major-it probably just wouldn't work out. Most likely we do want to be a charter but the reason it's vague on the website is we really are just trying to focus on our principles and our mission, and start formulating everything on top of that. We want to come in with a really solid base on what we wanted the school to be and focus on, and then build from that. We're now just sort of starting to build the logistics into the mission and the vision.

What will the selection process be?
For a charter school in Michigan it has to be completely random. We have to go by a general lottery. We can't be selective. We'll start with a few, maybe two to three, kindergarten classes with a small set size undetermined as yet, and add a new kindergarten cohort each year.

What are some of the issues of being a white teacher in a majority black school?
For the most part it's really a learning experience on both sides, I think. There have been things that come up where one side, whether it's a parent or me, feels like there's cultural insensitivity coming from the other side. In my experience we can approach each other and talk about these things. There have been some more slightly accusatory types of things from time to time but they're usually worked out with some discussion. We have a lot to learn from each other. I think the real pitfall is white teachers going into schools with mostly black students and acting like they really understand the black students' experience and try to be down with them. I think that's a pitfall. The students see through that. I don't think it creates a trusting environment.

Can you sum up how this school is going to be different from other schools, or other schools you've taught at?
I've had really great experiences at the schools I've taught at, so I don't think it's going to be totally different. All of us are bringing in experiences from where we come from. I think within big districts the focus has moved from-there are obsolete systems. There were systems that were preparing kids for factory jobs, or jobs period, and there aren't jobs to be prepared for. So we're trying to move toward the question of what does it mean to be a human being and an active member of society and not to minimize the importance of jobs and survival, because that will certainly be a goal, but our focus we want to be on the question, and it's a Grace Lee Boggs question, of what does it mean to be a human being. We formulated four guiding principles based on that question. One, creativity. Two, multiple literacy.

What does that mean?
Not just reading and writing but creative expression, verbal expression, expression through the arts, anything you can think of. Ways of understanding your environment and expressing your opinions. Third, community involvement, which is especially important to me, and fourth, critical thinking skills.

Can you go into a little bit of what you're envisioning for the community involvement portion?
We definitely plan on having a strong urban gardening, or even urban farming, component. One of the five of us, Frank Donner, is a big urban farmer and we want to work on teaching kids about sustainable living. How can we produce for ourselves, put our resources back into our community, not be in isolation from the community but work within it. So urban gardens would be one way to do that. We're just starting with the kindergarten and adding a grade every year. So with the kids, what we hope to be able to do is identify problems or at least needs within the community, and use those as lessons for problem-solving but building in academic skills or meet needs of the community.

I know that's kind of a hot topic right now, getting kids in urban areas to learn about how to eat better and making good food choices. Are you at the stage where you're talking about school lunches or other kinds of ways to encourage kids to eat healthily and make good food choices?
We're not there yet but that's definitely on the horizon. A friend of ours, Greg Willerer, has created a little business with his students where they grow their own food-they grew tomatoes and peppers and learned how to make it into Tabasco sauce, sold it at the Eastern Market in Detroit, put the money back into their business, they were attempting to sell their produce to the schools for lunches-that was going to be the next phase. So that is definitely something we'd like to consider, but we haven't formulated that yet.

How are you going to start the critical thinking component at the kindergarten level?
We're just getting started at formulating our curriculum. We're going on a retreat this weekend together to sort of start. We plan to have our curriculum based on higher order thinking skills. The schools have become so test-oriented that there's a lot of delivery of material and information and it's not the schools' fault so much, it's mandated. But we're going to figure out how we're going to work in the testing system that we have to participate in but encourage higher order thinking and critical thinking where students can not just regurgitate, but create their own questions and address them with the skills we want them to build while they're with us.

What are some of the things that could be done on the federal level to make a difference in urban education?
No Child Left Behind makes things extremely difficult with AYP-Adequate Yearly Progress. A major component of No Child Left Behind is that-and I don't claim to be an expert on No Child Left Behind-every school has to make Adequate Yearly Progress, and that's the big buzz term. So whatever our state testing scores are, each school has to make a certain percentage improvement in every subject based on-I don't even know, it's sheer madness. If you don't make it you go onto a level 2 where you're being observed, and if you don't make it that year you go into a level 3, and there are all these levels. And you get to a point where your school is completely reconstituted and all the teachers are like, oh... It's very stressful. It's stressful for the kids. I think it discourages the love of learning. It's our job to make them understand it's important to us because it's important to our school staying alive but it really doesn't affect them personally, and it's really hard to get them to understand that we really just need them to do their best. It takes two weeks of instructional time to administer the test, time when we could be doing other stuff. It's just a major hindrance on teachers and it takes away so many opportunities in our classrooms, where we have to spend so much time preparing for this stuff. That's a really big thing. Then as far as I understand, No Child Left Behind is underfunded. So whatever they're mandating for the states to do, they're not paying for what they're supposed to be. It's a major drain on resources and time and students' energy, and it does teach useful information but it does not in any way encourage critical thinking.

What are some of the common misconceptions about day to day life in an urban school?
I don't know if they're misconceptions because I've only worked in the schools that I've worked in. But I think people see fights, teachers doing nothing, administrators doing nothing, people just enjoying their jobs because their unions have them put in place solidly-and in the schools I've been in it's certainly not true. In the Detroit Public Schools, in the Catholic school, in the charter school I'm in now I am constantly impressed every day by the people around me, how hard everyone works. Sometimes people like to blame the parents-it is what it is. We all show up every day, kids, parents, administrators, and just work really really hard.

What's on your wish list for urban education, if someone could wave their magic wand?
That's what we're trying to do, wave our magic wand and make a school. Definitely having a smaller class size is beautiful. At this school I work at right now our class size is 16. And that's the limit. So everything is very personalized for the students. We become very close with their families as well. In elementary school we have them for at least two years, so we get to know each student very well and can address their needs and their strengths. More money is always good for some creative positions, especially working with struggling students-there's always a shortage for those students. We want our school to be intergenerational, where we have the community involved, from the grandparents down to the children, with everyone bringing what they love into the place of learning. Just schools taking a whole different approach to learning-not necessarily breaking the day up into little compartmentalized classes but really being able to do organic genuine projects that integrate all the skills that we want our students to come out with.

You sort of alluded to this earlier when you said that a lot of the urban schools in Detroit were kind of created to prepare students for jobs that no longer exist. Can you talk about some of the challenges that are unique to Detroit?
I mean obviously we have major issues with the auto industry. Everybody has either lost a job in their family or knows someone who knows someone close to them who has lost a job. It's frustrating and it's just painful to sort of put up the front that if you work hard and do your best you'll come out with what you want and you'll meet your goals, because that's not a given anymore. You can work as hard as you want and there just aren't any jobs. So that's difficult. But having said that, besides the challenges in Detroit there are just so many unique opportunities in Detroit for the same reason. We have an opportunity to do this because the schools are struggling so much that we have the opportunity to provide an alternative. Another example is there are so many burned out lots and destroyed properties that urban gardening could be this major movement. I can't imagine there's another city where you have, in the middle of the city, one house on the block. It's not really a pretty sight but a lot of people have been taking over these city-owned lots and using them for sustainable farming.

When did you get a law degree?
I did the evening program at Wayne State University while I was teaching. I was in Detroit Public Schools at the time and I kept getting laid off, and I was just thinking, you know, I won't teach anywhere but the city, so if the city can't keep me I need to start thinking about something else. The charter schools weren't super popular at that point. I just figured it could only open doors, it wasn't going to hurt anything. I decided just to try it and I really fell in love with the law, so I decided to just stick with it.

How does that kind of inform your teaching?
It's funny because it definitely informs how I teach problem solving and analysis of literacy, just because studying law is digging into things in a different way than we're taught in school. Also I like to work with my students on advocating-so just as a classroom activity, we'll work on taking a side and advocating for one side or the other, or picking an actual issue in the world and advocating for it. And just to provide an example for my students because they think it's really interesting. Some of them have come to class with me before. They just think being a lawyer's really cool.

Is there anything else you want to add about either the school or about yourself?
One thing is that part of the impetus for the school is that three out of the five of us have kids and we all live in Detroit, so we're all trying to create the opportunity that we want for our own kids.

Related: Boggs Educational Center [Official Site]

There were the sudden job changes, the crazy stories about the famous people he'd met, his total estrangement from his family. But it wasn't until she was in college and discovered that he'd opened several credit cards in her name, running up thousands of dollars in debt and ruining her credit, that she realized that her father's deceptions might run deeper than a few tall tales.

(Images from 'The Impostor's Daughter'; click any image to enlarge.)

The story of how Laurie unraveled her father's lifetime of lies is the basis of her new, amazing graphic novel, The Impostor's Daughter, in which she weaves together the story of her childhood, the discovery of her father's lies, her journalism career and her issues with men, which culminated in a stay at a rehab center recommended to her by one of her interview subjects, Ashley Judd. I couldn't put down her book, so when I met up with Laurie at a cafe in Brooklyn (we coincidentally live in the same neighborhood), I had lots of questions-about her book, about her dad, and about her career interviewing celebrities.

[Doree will be interviewing interesting women every week for us. If you have a suggestion, email her.]

Why did you want to do it as a graphic novel?
I did it first as a memoir. I wrote a 350-page memoir. And that was my original intention-it started originally as an essay for Esquire, which I published anonymously in 2003. But that essay ended on all of these questions. I ended it saying, I don't know who he is or what he does, is it this, is it this, is it this? I felt that as much as a writer, I felt as a daughter that I had to get to the truth, to the bottom of things. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I went to writers' colonies, and I think the story was unfolding as I wrote. It made it difficult to have the proper perspective. It made it difficult to have the emotional truths and that was why I turned back to cartooning, because I'd always cartooned about my dad, and I discovered this box of childhood cartoons.

I'm going to put more of them up on my website. I have hundreds. I looked at those cartoons and realized how fearless they were. I realized I wasn't being that fearless in the memoir, and so I decided to try it as a graphic novel. And it was almost easy for me emotionally to talk about him that way.

I know it's hard to think about this in retrospect, but do you think even at that time you felt like there was something off about your dad?
Oh, yeah. My childhood cartoons were so observant. I knew every single thing that was going on in my house, and my father knew I knew every single thing that was going on in my house because I gave them to him as gifts, and he loved them. In a way he loved that I knew.

It fed his ego in some way.
Yeah. It fed his ego, exactly. I think it was very exciting for him that I sort of saw what he was doing.

In some ways your book reminded me of David Carr's memoir Night of the Gun-
I haven't read it but I really want to.

Because he uses his training as a journalist to go back and recreate these years he basically lost because he was a drug addict, but he's using his tools as a journalist to do it. I thought that was really interesting how you kind of interplay what you're doing as a journalist with your discovery of what your dad was doing. It did seem like it was all related.
Absolutely. My mother constantly bemoans, like, why did I have to have a daughter who's a writer? My mother just very much wanted to keep the family intact and the story a secret, even to herself. I became a writer for this very reason. I didn't set out to become a writer. My father created a writer. He created a digger.

You have that bit in the book where you find out about the credit cards and you write what you wanted to say to him, and you wonder, if you had confronted him at that time, what would have happened.

It was the first real piece of physical evidence really. There were little bits and pieces, little hints. It was the first, direct-not affront, but direct betrayal. And I tell you, even now, 38 years old, I've written a published a book about this, and I still am afraid of my father, I'm afraid of him hurting me, I'm afraid of him hurting himself, and I'm still afraid of losing his love even though I've already lost it. And that stuff is so potent, as a daughter.

He seems really lonely.
He is. He's a total lone wolf. And always has been. No connection to his family at all. Very, very few friends. But the thing is, I feel like if my father were to say something like, I made some mistakes, I own it.

It seemed like he always had some excuse or some rationalization. It was always the other person that was crazy, or he was misunderstood.
Exactly. In a way I wonder if this period of time, to some extent, I wonder if he's enjoying it. He's getting a lot of attention. My sisters and my mother are really sort of rallying around him. So that would be in keeping with his, I hate to say it, with his narcissistic makeup.

You write that this whole experience with your father made you a better interviewer-somehow more empathic with people. How did you discover that?
I think it was my very first in-person cover interview. My very first interview was a telephone interview with Penelope Cruz. That was my first cover story. My first in-person interview was Ashley Judd. And I was really floundering and I didn't know what I was doing, and I was a little bit starstruck at the time. It was a fashion story, and I could tell immediately she had no interest in fashion. She kept trying to flip the interview back to her charity work. I wasn't, at the time, a seasoned interviewer and I didn't know what to do. I had 40 questions about fashion and I just kind of threw away my questions and I just started to talk about my dad, and she was just so drawn in by the story, and I just started a correspondence with her after that. It wasn't like I deliberately said, aha, I'm going to use this, but it became very quickly clear to me that I had always kind of in a way bonded with people over this story. So it was no different in a way than what I had been doing all along, except it was with celebrities.

You come into a celebrity interview with a preconceived concept of who this person is, that's been put together by the press. There's no way to get around that. And there's this whole thing of projection going on with celebrities. And that goes on with my father. I definitely say he was my first celebrity. He was this larger-than-life, shape-shifting, identity-shifting person, and that's what celebrities are. So as much as I got starstruck by them as much as I got starstruck by my father, I also felt at ease in their company. I can do this, that was sort of the feeling.

It was almost like, no one could intimidate you as much as your father could intimidate you.
Exactly. No one could intimidate me as much as my father had intimidated me. I'll repeat that so you can use it in my words. That's really good.

Do you ever feel like you have to tell a certain story at Glamour?
Well, they have certain themes that they're interested in. It's very different doing a Q&A format from a running text story. If I were doing a running text celebrity interview, I would have lots of observations that I would make that I don't have the chance to make in a Glamour interview. On the other hand, you get to hear their voice and it's their voice. Yeah, the Glamour audience has certain interests so I try to stick to those interests, but obviously Glamour's also interested in breaking news and scoops and so I try to do that too.

It's hard with a monthly.
Yeah. It's very hard with a monthly to do that kind of thing. But what I've learned is that celebrities are so media savvy. They're more media savvy than anyone you can imagine. So if there's going to be breaking news, it's breaking news they're going to give you, essentially. The Ashley Judd thing-the rehab story, which was one of our biggest selling issues ever-she decided to tell me.

Because she felt like she had this relationship with you?
I think it was because she felt like she had a relationship with me, and because she decided that she wanted that story in Glamour. A lot of celebrities will decide, I want this story in Vanity Fair. They're very media savvy. It's not like I'm going to crack them. Once in awhile I guess it can happen.

I feel like especially with actors-I feel like when people claim they're getting the "real" Reese Witherspoon-it's like, she's an actress.
And she's a very good actress, on top of that.

Yeah.
I actually try very hard in my celebrity interviews to in a way throw out my questions. The skill that I learned from my father literally is the only time I've ever gotten anything new or interesting from a celebrity-when I just talk to them and they like me as a person. If they like me as a person, and I'm not saying they're going to tell me about how their heart was broken that you don't know about-it's not that. It's just that what they talk about is going to be more authentic and interesting and you'll hear something new. If you just sort of stick to the typical celebrity interview format, you're going to get a pat and boring celebrity interview.

Why are people so fascinated with who celebrities are dating?
Every celebrity I interview asks me the same question.

On a fundamental level, it's gossip. In high school, you gossip about, Oh, Laurie broke up with Dan, oh my God.
I think it's because we mistakenly believe that we know them and we mistakenly believe they're one of our friends. I think we really do believe they're part of our circle in our minds. So they're part of our circle to discuss and pick apart and to bring them down and to have them be human like us.

Or we think, like, we could be friends. Like if it just so happened that I met Taylor Swift at the mall, she'd probably like me and we'd be friends.
Exactly. It's totally true. And even I've had that starstruck moment with certain celebrities. I wouldn't say I'm starstruck, like nervous, to meet any of them, but there are certain celebrities that for whatever reason-like Sarah Jessica Parker-who I just have a girlcrush on. So when I interviewed her, I thought that we were going to get along, and maybe we'll be friends. And I met her and she was completely unlike anything that I had imagined. Very reserved and not like her persona.

You expect her to be Carrie Bradshaw.
I did. I kind of did. Which is ridiculous. I mean, I should know better after all these years of doing these interviews.

But also, because she always plays that character.
She always plays that. She projects that in every film, in every character. So I was like, I'm going to like this woman, I know who she is. And she was very kind of reserved, and sort of serious, and so I walked away feeling like I really admired her, really respected her, really liked her, but there was no pretension that we were going to be friends. And really it would be part of my job to not be friends with the people I interview.

You do have this sort of bond with Ashley Judd.
Yeah. It went above and beyond the interview. She recommended the rehab center.

She saved your life.
Yes, you could say that, absolutely.

Has she seen the book?
To be honest, I didn't want to just use her name if I didn't have her permission for the book. So I sent her the text. She hasn't seen the drawings yet. She read the text and she approved it. I was actually surprised-she didn't make any changes, she was fine with it.

Ben. Or "Ben." [Laurie's ex-boyfriend, whose name is changed in her book.] Has he seen the book?
I actually sent him the entire manuscript. Like Ashley Judd, I sent him the entire manuscript and gave him the option to change his name. Because originally I didn't change his name. And I also changed a couple of details about him to make him less recognizable and he said yes, please change my name.

Is he a well-known person?
Yes. He is not famous, but he's known. He's a director, which I say in the book. I asked if he wanted me to change that detail, but he said no.

Is he with anyone now?
I have no idea. He didn't want to be friends. I would have been friends but he didn't want to. He wrote a film about me and I don't know what's going on with that. I have nothing bad to say about him, but for whatever reason I wasn't in love with him.

Do you think you can be in love?
With anyone? No. I was in love, but with the worst people. So can I be in love? No. I mean I'd like to say that's not true because I've done lots of therapy and I'm very much at a point in my life where I very much want the real thing. I'd like to find a stable relationship. But I so far have not been capable of being in love. I was thinking about my next book potentially being called Commitmentphobe, about female commitmentphobia. It's amazing to me because just like the next person, I want it as much as the next person does, but once I'm in it, I feel like I'm in a claustrophobic elevator and can't breathe. Look at the father I had. It's very hard to overcome that. It kind of sucks. I got at least a great career out of my dad, out of growing up that way, but it's completely been a problem in my love life.

And how are you doing with all the stuff you went to rehab for?

Sober for three years. So that stuff has been great. I'd kind of like to be able to have a glass of wine. I didn't go there for alcohol but there's this concept of cross-addiction and when you're an addict, you're an addict. Plus I think to get through all this stuff about my dad and have a healthy relationship at some point I think it would be good for me not to turn to the chemicals.

What about the religion stuff you talk about in the book?
It's funny-a couple people have said, oh, you became religious. No, I did not become religious. I am not religious. I opened myself to the possibility of spirituality and God. I've been a lifelong atheist. So I'm sort of saying, I would like to believe in God, but inside I'm sort of like, come on. It's very hard for me to accept that concept. The thing that I mentioned in my book that I think is true is that my father was really God to me. And once I sort of removed him from the equation, at the very least I'm able to open my mind and say, you know what, maybe I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I'm able to maybe say I don't know what's out there, and maybe there is and maybe there isn't. So not religious and would marry a non-Jewish guy and all of that, but I'm definitely into the idea of spirituality with a pinch of God.

The Impostor's Daughter [Amazon]

It's risky territory, as there's a fine line between crushing and actual jealousy. And Shafrir acknowledges that the cultivation of a girl crush isn't always simple. She writes,

[A]s we grow older, finding women to look up to becomes, like everything else, a trickier minefield to navigate. As a journalist in New York City, I've found that media is an especially fraught industry for these kinds of relationships. Looking for a formal "mentor" seems forced; worshiping someone from afar, creepy; deciding one of your friends or co-workers is really cool and doing everything she does, single white female-y. And frenemies and backstabbers lurk behind every door. The intern you thought was interested in learning the ropes from you is actually just interested in taking your job.

However, the bulk of her article turns out to be, not a Lucinda Rosenfeld-style envy-fest, but a sweet exploration of women's admiration for other women. She quotes attorney Jasmine Moy, who says, a girl crush is "pretty much any woman who is funny and smart and talented and successful and pretty. Crushes are the things you get if you're not the 'I'm jealous, therefore I hate them' kind of person." Several women she interviews report crushes on author/illustrator Luann Shapton. Shapton is an art director at The New York Times, a novelist, an Elle columnist, and the co-owner, with her fiance, of "a beautifully restored farmhouse in North Salem, N.Y." There are plenty of ingredients for haterade here, but Shafrir's interviewees offer only love. "She just seems to have a really lovely life," says one Shapton admirer.

Shapton, for her part, is gracious in crush-dom. She says,

I've received a few emails from younger women which is nice, but weird since I certainly don't feel like I have anything figured out. If they ask for career advice, I try to explain that I didn't really plan a career-I was able to make up my jobs along the way, and I advise them to do the same. I didn't ever decide on a single course of action. But that basically makes you-for a long time-broke, obscure, somewhat unreliable and scattered. Trying to answer the question 'What do you do?' would give me hives.

It wouldn't be that hard to make fun of this, to imagine Shapton lounging around her farmhouse, saying "oh, this old thing?" But one of the great canards of armchair sociology is the idea that women don't help each other, that the glass ceiling stays in place because women are busy catfighting each other beneath it. So it's nice to read about women being nice, and not fake-nice either, but actually sincerely in awe of and respectful of one another.

If I had to pick a celebrity girl crush, it would probably be Zadie Smith — fantastically successful young novelist, married to another successful young novelist, beautiful, likes Fawlty Towers, and once toured with They Might Be Giants. But one of my biggest girl crushes was not on a celebrity — it was on a girl who transferred to my college when I was a senior. She had complicated, impressive hair, dressed like a visitor from a more awesome universe, had her own website, published a zine as a teenager, wrote fiction, took photos, and after graduation moved into an apartment with her boyfriend (now husband), where they read Eliot to one another and covered the walls with art by their friends. I was sure she was too cool to ever be friends with me. Years later, after we'd already become close, she confessed she had thought the same thing about me. Now we both have our own websites, and although I think she still has better hair, I get to give her advice about teaching and making clam pasta. Sometimes the best girl crushes go both ways.

Fantasy Girl Crushes [Daily Beast]

…To give you advice on all your mom-related problems, that is.

When Doree and I started our website, Postcards From Yo Momma, soliciting emails, texts, IMs and all manner of virtual motherly communications almost exactly a year ago, we never realized how much collected wisdom was out there floating in the internet ether. From matters of the heart ("Here are Mom's three rules for a new relationship (the three "N's"): Don't nag; Don't be needy; Don't be neurotic.") to matters of the wardrobe ("DO NOT GET SPANX…get something comfortable and not tight that will just smooth you up and down."), our mothers generally have an opinion on everything, and even though it's completely infuriating, at the end of the day they're usually right, and they always have our best interests in mind.

Speaking of opinions, we were on the radio the other day, and a listener shared her feeling that the entire premise of the book was sexist. "As usual moms are understood as anxious, worry-warts, with nothing better to do than bother their children, and express frustration about their husbands," the listener said. "It's as though moms don't have other roles in the world other than as caretakers." However, if she read the book, she would know that while mothers do show themselves as caretakers (and really is there anything wrong with that?), the moms we feature — like our own mothers — are intelligent, competent, and thoughtful. They have their own lives and interests, and that's what makes the emails so compelling! Certainly, fathers write their own heartfelt missives, but in our experiences, and the experiences of most of our readers, it's mom who dominates the lines of communication.

In that spirit, we invite you to ask all manners of mom-related queries in the comments. Doree and I — along with our moms — will answer some of them in a post on Thursday. My mother is a shrink and Doree's mom is a professor, so they have years of experience giving advice to strangers! We can tell you what to do if your mom starts a Facebook page, how to get her to stop nagging you about joining J-Date and how to navigate a difficult mother-in-law. So post away! Our mommas are listening.

Love, Mom [Amazon]
Postcards From Yo Momma

Earlier: Momma Mia!

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, New York Observer reporter, blogger and Postcards From Yo Momma co-creator Doree Shafrir rereads 'The Chocolate War,' Robert Cormier's 1974 novel about a 14-year-old boy who stands up to the bullies at his high school.

Cheery stuff! But that was the world that Cormier portrayed, a world divided into those who challenged authority (which was usually wrong, bordering on evil) and those who quietly submitted.

Indeed, the protagonist of The Chocolate War is a freshman named Jerry Renault who defies tradition at his high school by refusing to sell boxes of chocolates as part of the annual fundraiser. Jerry's mom is dead (cancer) and his dad works late at the pharmacy, and they live in a small third-floor apartment in a nameless town.

Rereading Cormier's book, I was struck by not only just how very '70s this all felt — the latchkey kid heating up some Campbell's Soup in front of the TV and putting himself to bed — but also how Cormier portrays a world that's decidedly working or middle class, and that's a world that's pretty gray and grim. There's little happiness here; the book opens with Jerry getting pummeled at football practice, and — in contrast to the almost-expected happy endings of today — ends on a really discordant, violent note. (The book has long been on the American Library Association's list of most-banned young adult books for its violence and sexual graphicness, though this mostly involves descriptions of masturbation, you know, like a kid getting caught yanking it in the boys' bathroom with his pants around his ankles.)

Even Archie Connor, the leader of a shady gang called The Vigils, who act as a sort of secret fraternity at the school and keep underclassmen in line through sadistic "assignments," seems like a loser; he has the school in the palm of his hand, but he's failing English. It's also a world that's almost exclusively male. The only women who show up are Jerry's mom, who's dead, and a couple objects of desire, one of whom makes a cameo when Jerry looks her name up in the phone book and cold-calls her. It doesn't go well, which is kind of the theme of this whole book: Life sucks, and then you die. Another student reflects on his parents:

He thought of his own parents and their useless lives — his father collapsing into his nap every night after supper and his mother looking tired and dragged-out all the time. What the hell were they living for? ... How could he tell [his mom] that he hated the house, that his mother and father were dead and didn't know it, that if it wasn't for television the place would be like a tomb.

At the beginning of the book, Jerry gets caught staring as he waits for the bus at a group of hippies who hang out at a park in town. One of them confronts him and says, "Go get on your bus, square boy. Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus." So Jerry gets on the bus and thinks "of his life — going to school and coming home. Even though his tie was loose, dangling on his shirt, he yanked it off." Oho! The anti-establishment rebel! So, I thought, let's settle in and enjoy a ride through anti-authoritarianism... Except it doesn't exactly work out like that.

Throughout the book, Cormier carefully sets Jerry up as a rebel, the lone voice willing to challenge the oppression of Brother Leon, the acting headmaster, who has allegedly embezzled money and thus must make up for it by selling thousands of boxes of chocolates; and Archie, who makes a deal with Brother Leon that the Vigils will ensure that the chocolate sale goes smoothly. So when Jerry refuses to sell the chocolates, he's taking on not only the school, but also the school bullies. Like the scene with the hippies, Cormier continues on the heavy-handed symbolism route thereafter — Jerry has a poster in his locker of a lone man on a beach with a quote from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" at the bottom, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Get it? He's an iconoclast! He might even singlehandedly bring about change. How very '60s of him!

Alas. If the '60s were the decade of challenging authority and protesting and civil disobedience, the '70s were the decade when everyone came blinking into the sunlight and realized that there were limits to what they could change about the world. And so Cormier takes us all the way there, and then ends The Chocolate War with a violent boxing match between Jerry and a thuggish senior named Emile, and Archie and Brother Leon both return to their rightful (perhaps) place in the world order. One of Jerry's last thoughts of the book is about his friend Goober (no one names their characters Goober anymore!), the one boy in school who stood by him — until he gets "sick" for three days just when Jerry really could've used some help:

"It'll be all right, Jerry."

No it won't. He recognized Goober's voice and it was important to share the discovery with Goober. He had to tell Goober to play ball, to play football, to run, to make the team, to sell the chocolates, the sell whatever they wanted you to sell, to do whatever they wanted you to do. He tried to voice the words but there was something wrong with his mouth, his teeth, his face. But he went ahead anyway, telling Goober what he needed to know. They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, too. It's a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.

Seltzer's whiteness is also coming up in the morning-after commentary: Seltzer's personal experiences gave her the authenticity readers desire in a memoir, while her whiteness arguably made white readers feel more at ease with her "urban" story. On her blog, Gawker alum Doree Shafrir, makes a number of salient points about Seltzer's race in relationship to the press she received. "We — the New York publishing industry, the media, my blog — wanted to believe Margaret Jones because she was a white girl who had lived with black people. Like a spy! And so she came back and reported to us what life there was really like...I don't see Sarah McGrath [Seltzer's editor] or [New York Times book critic] Michiko Kakutani or me or you buying the books they sell at the Fulton Mall or 125th Street, which are arguably more 'real' than anything Margaret Jones/Seltzer wrote, which is funny because we're supposedly so obsessed with 'reality' and 'authenticity.'"

Shafrir, of course, is not the only blogger to focus on the benefits Seltzer's race afforded her. Undercover Black Man is righteously pissed at Peggy for co-opting black experience, and his ire extends to Sarah McGrath and all the way back to Penguin publishing. "Seltzer's ignorant, tone-deaf editor - Sarah McGrath - owes an apology to the black community of South Los Angeles. McGrath's bosses at the Penguin Group should make some gesture of contrition and good will also. They were probably already counting the money they expected to make... peddling black pain and death to white readers," UBM writes. Adds the LA Times:

"There's a long American tradition of fake ethnic autobiographies that goes back to fake slave narratives in the 1840s," said Laura Browder, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of "Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities."

"I think some of the authors of these memoirs have pain and suffering they don't know how to name, so they attach them to something that's universally associated with suffering," like race.

Said black L.A. novelist Gary Phillips, "We know if it were a black girl, that's not exotic, that's just another story from the hood. That's not sexy. There is no movie."

The Lure Of Made-up Memoirs [Los Angeles Times]
Bogus Memoir Sparks Criticism Of Publishing Industry [LA Times]
Tracking The Fallout Of (Another) Literary Fraud [NY Times]
Clearly This Is All I Am Going To Be Thinking About Today [The Doree Chronicles]
Fucking Liar [Undercover Black Man]

Earlier: Female Gang-Banging Memoirist Is More Fiction Than Fact
Susanna Sonnenberg Adds Another Chapter To The Unhinged Mother Canon

Not everyone interviewed, however, seemed to enjoy getting buddy-buddy with his or her instructor. One woman quit a yoga class because everyone there was too into the teacher. "He would come into the room and there would be a trail of greetings wafting around him," the student said. "After class I would want to ask him a question because I was returning to yoga after not practicing for a few years, and I would have to wait for 10 minutes while these women did small talk with him after class."

Sounds annoying. Personally, I like my gym classes like I like my sex: With minimal talking involved. I remember that, at a yoga class once, the instructor kept asking me why I wasn't smiling, and while I wanted to say "Because you've been making me hold this pose for a really long time and I'd rather punch you in the face," instead I smiled wanly and said nothing. I also wanted to punch all the other particpants in class who were ever-so-chipper and giggled incessantly at his smiling entreaties. Are you a hater like me, or do you like to get chatty with your athletic supporters?

Gym Pets [Observer]