I am very excited to be speaking to American writer Kate Feiffer about her latest novel, Morning Pages, which I found extremely funny and realistic about the challenging roles women often play midlife. The main character in Morning Pages, Elise Hellman, is a female playwright struggling with writer’s block who is trying to write a play on a tight deadline. She’s also juggling taking care of her stoner 18-year-old son and her octogenarian mother who is showing early signs of dementia.
You’ll notice the three books I’m recommending this month are funny. Yes, I need funny right now. And I’m guessing you do too.
Morning Page is Kate’s first novel targeting adults. She is the author of 11 highly acclaimed books for children.She has worked as a writer, illustrator, television producer, photo editor, and ice cream scooper. She also is the event producer for the Martha Vineyard-based writers festival Islanders Write. Kate lives between Martha’s Vineyard and New York City.
Kate’s father is the award-winning illustrator, cartoonist, and writer Jules Feiffer. And her mother, Judy Feiffer, was a writer, photographer, and book editor who helped foster two best-selling memoirs, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings by then novice author, Maya Angelou and Mommy Dearest by Christine Crawford. And Kate’s sister, Hallie Feiffer, is a playwright. So, a very talented family indeed.
Below is an edited, abbreviated version of our Q&A. You can listen to our entire chat here on Elena Meets the Author. Or you can tune into this episode wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Elena: Hello Kate, welcome to the show.
Elena, it’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. You do such amazing research on these shows, and I’m just delighted to be here.
Elena: I listened to Morning Pages before I read it, and I couldn’t stop laughing, especially when the inappropriate, eccentric octogenarian mother was talking, who dare I say, reminded me of my own TMI mother. I never realized there was only one narrator for all the different characters. She deserves an Oscar for your Audible if such a thing exists.
In one interview, you describe your book as a coming-of-age story for the sandwich generation.
Yes. I think there’s something like 50 percent of women in their forties and fifties who are caring for children and aging parents. We tend to be the caretakers. We are dealing with all sorts of stuff while trying to tend to our own needs and often our own needs get lost in the shuffle.
And as a writer or an artist of any kind, it’s really easy, if you don’t have a day job to forget who you are and forget what you’re doing.
My mother was in the early stages of dementia, I didn’t know it at the time when I started writing this book. Elise’s mother is very much inspired by my own mother, who was eccentric and beautiful and had boundary issues.
Like I would invite friends over and she would ask them about their sex lives. And this would happen even before they had sex lives. So when her eccentricity became more erratic, I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I knew things were off.
At the same time, I had been writing children’s books. I had written eleven children’s books. Some of them were quite popular, but I was having a hard time getting a book published, getting my 12th book published.
So, I decided that Elise, the main character, would not be a children’s book author, she would be a playwright, but she was dealing with these same career issues that I was facing, the erosion of self-confidence, and still dealing with all these life issues.
Elena: Very hard. And midlife.
Right, and she’s recently divorced and, everything was going great for her early on and suddenly her life doesn’t make sense in the way she thought it would.
Elena: Each chapter is named after the day in which Elise writes her morning pages. So there’s day one, day two, and so on as we approach day 65, the deadline for Elise’s play, Deja New. Not only is that a clever writing device, but you scatter excerpts from Deja New throughout your book. A story within a story.
And that play, in many ways, mirrors the main plot. An adult daughter struggling with her divorced parents who still hate each other. In the play, the divorced parents fall back in love again. In the main story, not so much. I’m wondering about your writing process. Did you write the entire play, Deja New, or just those excerpts that we see in the book?
Well, at one point I thought, you know, if I’m writing a play about a playwright, I need to write a play. So, I took a playwriting class, I read a ton of plays, and I wrote scenes from the play. And then I wrote the entire play. The entire play is actually in the book.
It has a plot, a story arc and an ending and some unexpected scenes. So, it really does read as a story within the story. Originally, I wasn’t planning to have any scenes of the play in the book. I had just written the play as an exercise because I thought it was important. But then when we were going through the edits of the book, I told my editor I have the play. She asked to see scenes, and we started putting them in, then more and more, until the entire play is in the book. So, it’s a substory.
Elena: Interesting. You tell us in the acknowledgements that your spirited mother, Judy Feiffer, used to tell you, ‘I’ve given you the material, you should use it.’ So, obviously, Trudy is very much based on your mother. What about your father? Is he here too?
There’s a character named Larry in the play, and while Larry is not my father, there are many aspects of my father. I really wanted to explore the relationships we have as adults with our parents when those are complicated relationships, and the hold our parents continue to have on us, even when we’re in our thirties, forties, fifties.
I really was fascinated by this relationship between adult children and their aging adult parents and how the relationships, during our tumultuous teenage years can continue. I have had complicated relationships with both my parents and was really interested in exploring those issues.
Elena: It’s such a good point. It’s very difficult. I heard you say in one interview, that caregivers told you that you should never give your mother a bath. Something would be triggering for you, for any daughter. It’s hard to separate the person that they were from the person that they are.
Writer’s block is a big theme in Morning Pages. Elise struggles with what to write, so she resorts to writing about what’s going on in her actual life. Do you get writer’s block? And if so, how do you deal with it? And did having such successful parents impact your ability to write at all?
Second question first, yes, absolutely. It was very inhibiting, even though they were incredibly supportive. Both of them were absolutely 100 percent supportive of all my artistic endeavours. It was incredibly inhibiting.
Elena: Your father won a Pulitzer.
My father’s won a trillion awards. My father is absolutely brilliant and had this amazing career.
But like I said, (my writer’s block) was all self-imposed. I’m not blocked at beginnings. I am pretty good with middles. My block is a finishing block, an ending block.
Elena: Writer’s end block.
That’s got to be a thing, right?
Elena: Guess so. I think, in terms of writer’s block, that sounds like not a bad one. Because at least you get started and you get to the middle. But, so did you struggle with the endings in your book, the one in Deja New, and in Elise’s real life?
Struggled with both of them. Then I was taking a walk, I’m a big walker. In fact, there’s a lot of walking that happens in Morning Pages. Suddenly the ending came to me clearly. It was one of those epiphanies.
Elena: It’s very good because your ending, it’s not tied in a perfect bow. The book is written in the first person. Was that an easy decision?
Yes, because I knew I wanted to use this device of morning pages So obviously you can’t get into the heads of other people. The hardest part was writing something in her voice, without making it too whiney. The humour was really important to me. The story unfolds in 65 days. I wanted each of the days to be its own little routine. It was basically like writing 65 little stories.
Elena How about transitioning from writing children’s books to book for adults? Was that a challenge or not really?
It was fun. You can use language. One of the things about writing children’s books, is it’s a marriage of pictures and words. I think very visually, but there aren’t long diescriptions since it’s in first person. You have to lose description about where you are, what people look like, but I still hope it’s visual.
Elena: It is. You have Elise’s reactions to what people are wearing, etc so you see things though her eyes. You dedicate your book to two writers groups. Can you tell us about those groups and how they helped you?
I have a long-time writers group in Martha’s Vineyard. We all love each other. I started to get worried because they were a great audience. I’d read them stuff. They’d laugh. They’d love it. But I really wanted to to have a writer’s group where people didn’t love me and people didn’t know me.
And so, I started spending more time in New York once my daughter went off to college and I formed a writer’s group in the city. It was four women working on first novels (first adult novel for me). We were all trying to share sections from our books together. They were also responding really well, and I was like, ‘oh great, they don’t love me and they still love the book.’
Elena:. Are you working on something now?
I have ideas for something. I’m working on a children’s book that I want to illustrate, and I think it’s funny and clever. I have an idea for another book, but I haven’t really started it yet.
Elena: For adults.
Adults, yes.
Elena: The Divorced Virgins.
The Divorced Virgins.
Elena: That’s an inside joke for those who haven’t read the book. Anyway, that’s it for my questions. Thank you so much. I want everybody to read this book or listen to the Audible or both. It’s relevant and it’s very funny.
November, 2024
