Meet the Writers Featured in "Ramona"
"I like animals. They're so much nicer than writers," -- Ramona Lee
I love writers! Some of my best friends are writers; I married a writer; I wrote a movie about a writer. Because Ramona is a fancy-literary-Columbia-MFA-writer-with-a-capital-W, we felt strongly about populating her world with peers.
So it gives me great pleasure to introduce: Sari Botton, Tim Murphy, Hillary Jordan and Natasha Joukovsky (Natasha has a fun cameo just before the credits roll!). Also featured in the movie are books by Rebecca Walker and Zibby Owens, who lent her lovely voice as our podcaster.
Writers, introduce yourself to Ramona’s readers…
Sari Botton: I’m the author of And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. I also edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. I publish and edit Oldster Magazine, Memoir Land, and Adventures in *Journalism* on Substack.
Tim Murphy: I’m the author of five novels—Getting Off Clean, The Breeders Box, Christodora, Correspondents and Speech Team and a freelance journalist for almost 30 years, mainly in the area of HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ health and other issues. I also do a Substack called The Caftan Chronicles in which I do a very long, deep interview with a gay man who is usually well-known and also usually over the age of 60.
Natasha Joukovsky: I’m the author of the novel The Portrait of a Mirror and a Substack newsletter fondly titled quite useless after Wilde’s epigram, “All art is quite useless.” I also write the occasional essay, most recently "Prom" for Still Alive Magazine.
[Editor’s note: For what it’s worth, The Portrait of a Mirror forever changed the way I think about Theory cocktail dresses.]
Hillary Jordan: I’m a novelist, screenwriter, writing teacher, and occasional essayist. I have a BA from Wellesley and MFA from Columbia. I grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and currently live in Brooklyn, along with half the writers in America.
BB: Were you always a writer? Or did your writing evolve from something, somewhere else?
Sari Botton: I've been a writer since I was a little girl, journaling to understand why I felt different from everyone else around me. I didn't become a writer because I was inspired by other writers. I became a writer because I wanted to understand my own somewhat different mind and heart.
Tim Murphy: I have wanted to be a writer, and have actually been a writer, since I was about eight years old when I had a poem called "Nightfall" in the town paper and saw my own words and my name in print. I know that sounds narcissistic, but it was intoxicating. And I think the bigger reason I wanted to be a writer was that, from the earliest age, I was such a voracious reader and I wanted to be as amazing on a page as my idols were, whether they were Judy Blume or F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edith Wharton or John Cheever or James Baldwin or whichever writer I was worshipping at a certain stage of my life.
Natasha Joukovsky: I’m admittedly a beneficiary of immense “literary privilege”—my father was an English Professor who specialized in 18th-century British literature, specifically Thomas Love Peacock, but also Jane Austen. We started reading her novels together when I was ten, and I cannot overstate the multidimensional impact this had and continues to have on my life.
Hilary Jordan: I was writing and making up stories from the time I was very young. In high school I cowrote a play with Doug Wright, Pulitzer-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife, about three secretaries who take over a baby bottle factory (years later, when 9 to 5 came out, we had a good laugh). After college I had a successful career as an advertising copywriter. But I’d always had the dream of being a novelist, and in my mid-30s I divorced, applied to MFA programs, and got into Columbia. It was there that I started writing both Mudbound and my second novel, When She Woke. After Mudbound was made into a film, I became a screenwriter as well.
Tell our readers about the book featured in Ramona At Midlife.
Sari Botton: And You May Find Yourself is a midlife coming-of-age memoir-in-essays. It's about recognizing in my 40s how much of my life I'd lived inauthentically as a way to fit in or be who others wanted me to be, then finding the courage to shed those false identities. It's about literally finding myself, and then owning the weirdo I am instead of pretending to be someone more "normal."
Tim Murphy: The book of mine featured is Christodora, which is about three generations of a blended NYC family as they navigate the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s and all the trauma, addiction and fallout from it in the subsequent decades.
Natasha Joukovsky: The Portrait of a Mirror is a retelling of the myth of Narcissus as a modern novel of manners, set in the summer of 2015. The book is in love with itself. Perhaps this is what’s made it a bit polarizing?
Hillary Jordan: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and I co-edited an anthology of literary erotica called Anonymous Sex.
BB: Do you recognize Ramona, her community, her struggles as a midlife writer? How has your own work evolved over time? How has your sense of community or fellowship evolved?
Sari Botton: Very much. I've struggled similarly as a woman writer, and the older I get, the harder it is. However, another thing that has occurred with age is that my writing is better, and my confidence is up, and I'm finding and building the community I need to keep going.
Tim Murphy: I certainly identify with the struggles of a midlife writer who hasn't exactly gotten a critical or monetary windfall from my writing—yet! As I've aged, I've definitely developed more of an empathy for other working writers, because, let's face it, few of us get rich or wildly successful from this work. We keep doing it because we love it and perhaps because we have to, so I've really come to love cheering on my writing peers to keep at it, and to celebrate the achievements when they happen, such as selling a new book.
Natasha Joukovsky: From what I saw the day I spent on set, the book party scene was just right—gravely petty and awash in mimetic thrall. As to writerly evolution: of my work, I did a deep-dive recently, which you can find here. Of community/fellowship? I’m still pretty monkish, though I ever-increasingly value my individual relationships with writer-friends, and especially those around the same stage of life (I'm 39).
Hillary Jordan: As someone who rethought my life and career in my mid-to-late 30s, I really related to Ramona. The film depicts a woman in all her complexity and tells her story with love and humor—which, as I grow older, are the two things that get me by.
BB: What inspires you?
Sari Botton: I'm moved by the many stories shared with me and my Oldster Magazine community about women and others achieving goals in midlife and later in life. The culture wants to tell me I'm done; these contributors keep telling me that's not true, that there is a lot of rich, creative life after 40, 50, 60, 70…and on.
Tim Murphy: I think I'm inspired by other people's storytelling because I am also a great, great lover of theater, film and sometimes TV if it's really good. Often it's others' works that has compelled me to get back on the horse and keep writing because I'm reminded of how amazing and moving and artful writing or storytelling can be. With Christodora, for example, I hadn't really written fiction in nearly a decade when I started it, but over the course of that decade, certain novels like The Corrections, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Veronica and The Emperor's Children —and certain movies like Gosford Park and Y Tu Mama Tambien— were so emotionally and artistically powerful to me that they made me want to get back into the storytelling ring.
Natasha Joukovsky: The Western Canon, especially Ovid and Austen; “Beauty, truth, and rarity”; visual art, fashion, technology, and contemporary life; messy rich people.
Hillary Jordan: I’m inspired by gorgeous, compelling writing. I often get this itchy feeling, while reading a great book, to put it down and go work on my own stuff.
BB: What are you working on now?
Sari Botton: In October (2024) I turned 59, and I've been freaking out about turning 60. I'm trying to make sense of my fear, and grapple with it, in a new series I launched at Oldster called “On the Path to 60.” It's possible this (or some of it) will become my next book.
Tim Murphy: I am working on trying to find a new publisher for a completed novel because, to be perfectly frank, my current publisher just dropped me when my last novel, Speech Team, didn't do well for what they paid for it. So I'm back to Square One. But I've been here before, so that's okay. I also literally have just written the first ten pages of what could evolve into yet another novel but I'll also admit I don't have the speed mojo at the moment I've had in the past. Maybe that will change as the narrative picks up speed!
[Editor’s note: As a former speech team kid, Speech Team delighted me. It brought back the good, the bad, the ugly of speech team in the late 80’s. You should all read it at once.]
Natasha Joukovsky: I’m in the final stages of preparing my second novel for submission to editors. It’s about probability and basketball, and again a retelling. This time: the story of a modern Icarus, told by a modern Cassandra.
Hillary Jordan: I’m currently working on a dark-funny novel about our fractured politics, revising my adaptation of When She Woke for a new director, and writing the script for a comedic sendup of the wellness industry.
One last thing: we are still raising money for the February digital launch of Ramona at Midlife. We are nearly two-thirds of the way to our goal of $15K due to your generosity and commitment to independent cinema, womens’ voices and midlife stories.
It’s not too late to get a 2024 tax deduction for any donation made before midnight December 31. Click here to support the film.
See you in 2025, dear readers. I wish for you a beautiful close to this year and an even more beautiful start to the next.
Love,
Brooke
Thank you for including me, Brooke, in "Ramona at Midlife," and here!