Austinist Interview: Blogger-Turned-Novelist Stephanie Klein

Why did you decide to move from Manhattan to Austin this year?

I was writing full time, and I figured, I could live anywhere I want, so where do I want to live? Both my husband and I have lived in Manhattan or New York all our lives, so I was ready for a change. We considered moving to Florida for the warm weather, but I realized all New Yorkers move to Florida. I wanted to meet people that didn’t live in New York during their lives. We were considering Charleston, South Carolina, and Austin. We decided on Austin, basically because we liked the homes better...the style of living better. It was really about the land, and the rolling hills here that really won us over. And, of course, the live music and the places that are just so “Texas,” like Hill’s Café, where you’re sitting outside listening to music. It’s really, really nice. It’s beautiful. I think people who live in Austin forget how beautiful it really is here.

What would be the big lifestyle difference between New York City and Austin

How to get home after a night out drinking! [Before I became pregnant], making a plan for how to get home after a night out was a big change. The fact that I have to get in my car and drive everywhere, opposed to running out in the middle of the night because I need something from the corner store, that’s certainly different. The convenience factor. I just bought a house here, in Austin, and we bought a house (around) north Austin where there’s a lot of space. We have a view of hilltops, and it’s beautiful, and it’s breathtaking. That for me outweighs staring at a brick wall in Manhattan.

Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you start Greek Tragedy?

I broke up with a boyfriend, and was crying one night in bed. I was so miserable. I felt like I kept repeating the same cycles: Breaking up with boys, being miserable and not being happy again until I found another boy to keep my interest. I thought, “This isn’t working.” I needed to figure out what was going to make me happy, the kind of happy that is, yes, very self help, but the kind of happy that no one could take away by saying to me they “need space.” For me that was writing every day, and that’s why I started the blog. It was a New Year’s resolution to myself to do something creative and write everyday. It was a creative outlet, and I didn’t say, “Oh, I want to start a blog, because I want to be published.” I wanted to start a blog because I needed to put my energy into me, instead of putting it into worrying about whether a guy is going to call and – he’s not there in the end, I am. You always end up with yourself. I figured I might as well put this time and energy into me.

You started your blog in January of 2004, so all of the good things that have emerged from it have happened relatively quickly. Can you talk about how things have transpired

That summer of 2004, The Independent in London featured my writing and my photograph on the cover of their paper. That was the really first huge thing I got. They called me “The Internet Queen of Manhattan.” That was a four-page spread and I was on the cover. From there I had publishing houses in London contacting me. I met with CEOs of a publishing company in London. They gave me a book deal. I turned it down. I worked on my book proposal for a few months, and then (my agent) sent it out to ten publishing houses on a Wednesday. By that Friday, we heard from eight of them, all of them saying they wanted it. I then had a conference call with Judith Regan – who is my publisher now – that Saturday afternoon, and then she gave me a two-book deal with television rights deal on Sunday... this all happened from Wednesday to Sunday!

The title of the blog, Greek Tragedy, was ideal in the beginning, but now that your life seems idyllic, would you ever change the name?

I wouldn’t change it, because it’s associated with me. Think about brand marketing. You would never just change Disney. (laughs) But I wouldn’t change it. I mean, the theme of Greek Tragedy is really based on rejection, because I was rejected from sororities and that’s where (it) came from. We always, in our lives, face rejection whether it’s from a friend, from a new job, from a boy. In my future, maybe preschools for my kids, other kids not wanting to play with my kids, (laughs) who knows? But we always find rejection in our lives, and I will continue to write about it.

Your book can catch even the biggest fan of your blog off guard, because it’s so much more. Can you talk about the challenges you faced adapting those blog posts into a cohesive story?

It’s harder than people would tend to think. Especially, with Straight Up & Dirty I had two arcs. I had the current arc, where the book starts, where I’m in a new apartment trying to date “a pair and a spare,” and trying to move on with my life, and then eventually getting into a serious relationship. Then figuring out what the hell is going to make me happy, and also unfolding the whole past arc. There’s the past arc of our eloping, and my ex-mother-in-law, and then catching some rogue e-mail that sort of clued me in to what was going on in my marriage.

And much of the story isn’t part of the blog?

(Those posts are) not on my blog anymore, but were at one point. There were actually two posts. I took them off the blog once I realized, okay, I’m writing a book about this. This should probably come off, because it’s the heart, it’s a big chunk of what you’re looking for in a book. I think the thing you have to keep in mind when doing something like that is the blog is for people who have a short attention span. You have these short little snippets of thought that aren’t necessarily cohesive and people don’t necessarily know what else is going on. I think when writing the book, how I went about it was saying, “Okay, here’s the best of the blog in my mind.” Here are the things that I like about the blog that I want to include in this book. Let’s say I printed all of those out. Then I said, “How am I going to work this into the structure of the book?” In the book – and each chapter within itself should have an arc, and I kept that in mind with every chapter I wrote – there should be progression of the story. Each chapter has a theme, and I tried to cover that theme in most cases.

But it is different, and I do caution current blog writers not to think that they can just reposition a blog that already exists and put it into book form and a publisher is going to want to pick that up. From a publisher’s standpoint, “Why are people going to pay money to read something they can read for free?” I mean, let’s be real here. You cannot, as a blogger, expect, “Oh, I want to publish my blog.” It doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t. You have to realize that first of all going in and just say, “What elements of my blog would work?” For me, it’s like, okay I could make a short story, but...For example, in the book, I write about my friendships. On the blog, I don’t ever write about my friendships, really. I mean, they would deteriorate. I just had a wedding (in New York) and one of the funny things was one of my dad’s friends – who had clearly read the book – comes up to me and goes, “Which one’s Dulce?” It’s just very funny, because it is a memoir and it is real, so of course at my wedding the people I wrote about in the book are going to be there.

The magnetic attraction of your blog, and the one thing readers comment on most, is your honesty. Is that just your natural tendency, or does the anonymity of the internet allow you to open up more?

A lot of people find the cloak of anonymity, they find it very easy to become brave behind that. You have a lot of people writing honestly under pseudonyms, especially in the comments section, where they feel free to, sorry, but rip you a new asshole. They can just be as mean as they want, and they don’t put their real name behind it. I was a website, www.stephanieklein.com, which is me. I was working full-time in advertising, designing websites, and my employers, I found out, were reading my blog. I was smart. I didn’t want to get fired. I never wrote about my work. I always was very honest, but I never, ever wrote about work. I find it so hard to be embarrassed. I just feel like it’s the human condition, and we all have suffered the same. We’re embarrassed about the same things. It’s almost more powerful to take the power away from anyone else to reveal your deepest, darkest secrets and to reveal them yourself. The idea of, “Okay, what’s the worst possible thing that anyone could reveal about me?” Well, screw it! I’m gonna reveal it. That way I don’t have to live in fear.

Along with honesty, there is also a distinct playfulness in your blog.

It’s just really the way I express myself. I think I very much speak the way that I write. I find that a lot of this is just anything I would say to a friend and I just put it out there. A lot of the times you’re not politically correct, like, you’re not going to please everybody in the things that you have to say. It’s things that if I were to say them to any of my girlfriends, or my family, or my sister they’d shake their heads and totally agree. But when you have a whole internet, with an international audience, you get totally different perspectives on what you’re saying. People shaking their heads “no” not “yes,” along with you, and so I’ve gotten used to that. So, yeah, of course, it’s fun for me.

It’s an obvious question, but based on your blog posts about your relationship with your dad, and how open you both are with each other, we have to ask, “Has he read your book – the whole book?"

Yeah, my dad did read the book, actually not until recently did he read the whole book. I remember he called me one afternoon and he (said), “I want you to know I just read the book – I think it’s very good. I like the second half a lot more than the first.” But, oh my god, there are probably three moments where I’m like, “Dad, you probably shouldn’t read this.” The Pam cooking spray scene, the mushroom scene in the first half, I almost wanted him to skip the whole first chapter. Then there was a line about a guy who asked me to kiss him the way I wanted him to go down on me. I’m like, “Oh my god! My father is reading this!” Then there was the scene with the metrosexual. I think that’s just about it in terms of embarrassment.

You just cannot write a book honestly with thoughts in your head about who might be reading it. You stop being true to yourself. I always wrote as if I was confiding in a close girlfriend and that is being true to myself. Whoever can’t deal with it, I’ll deal with it when the time comes, but I have to be true to my voice and what I want to tell. So, when my father read it, he stepped away and looked at it as a writer telling a story, not as his daughter.

As part of your two-book deal you are writing a book about your childhood adventures at fat camp. Can you talk about that?

Sure! I’m writing it right now. I just finished chapter six. My publisher’s deadline is January 30th, so it will be out in 2007. I’m loving writing it. As of right now it documents one summer of my life at fat camp. I’ve actually spent five summers at fat camp, both as a camper and a counselor, so I still flash forward to summers later. I think, essentially, the structure of this book is what happens before I go away to fat camp, and then going away to fat camp, what happens when I come back. It’s fun, because it’s everything from putting your face in a lake for the first time, swim tests and the signed pillow case at the end of the summer. But you have the weight loss component of counselors smelling your breath before you go to bed at night to make sure you haven’t cheated, to weighing you on meat scales, before and after pictures, to also the dynamic of even though you’re at fat camp – where everyone supposedly is there to lose weight – there’s a popularity system there where even among the fat, the thinner you were at fat camp, the more popular you were. You were still ostracized for being fat at fat camp, which is like the one place where you shouldn’t be. Now, to be writing it while I’m pregnant, while my body is expanding, while the numbers on the scale are going up, it just brings back all the memories all the more. The clothes not fitting, you know, all of it.

You had a “get to know your friends through this e-mail questionnaire” on your blog at one point (January 11, 2006). One of the questions was, “What’s a question no one has ever asked you?” You responded with, “What have you learned about yourself writing your blog?” So, now we’re asking!

I learned that I’m not always necessarily as strong as I want to believe, that sometimes the really nasty stuff does hurt as much as I don’t want it to. I realized that there’s stuff that can give me anxiety, like the thought of people attacking me over the internet. These people could be losers, who have no lives, no jobs, pathetic, but still their words can be very caustic and can hurt. And I learned that about myself, because overall I very much have an attitude of “I don’t care. I’m going to be true to myself,” but it does make me think twice about myself. On the blog, the other thing I learned about myself was that, um, yeah, okay, I am narcissistic, and I think that that’s okay. I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world. It’s a blog about MY life, and I hear over and over again, “Oh, blogs are so narcissistic.” In general, it’s their very nature, just blogs in general. And, yeah, so, why is that such a bad thing? I don’t understand. I also learned that it takes discipline to write all the time. There are some times that I really don’t want to, but I feel like I have to. You do at a certain point realize that you have an audience and a market, whereas before, I wouldn’t care. If I went two weeks without posting I wouldn’t care, but now that would just never happen.

You’ve certainly hit the “trifecta” of writing: Internet, books, now TV. It’s three careers, not one.

It is all very different writing, different audiences and you have to keep all of that in mind. I’m also a photographer, and I think when I first spoke to Judith Regan (publisher and executive producer of the TV sitcom), she said to me, “Are you a writer, or are you a photographer?” I said to her, “I’m just a storyteller.” I don’t care what the medium is, look at me. Look at what I do (for a living) – I design websites, I do (the blog), but for me it is all about telling stories using the right medium. For television, it is a combination of writing and visuals, so it feels a little easier for me, just because of my background with photography. But I obviously didn’t know what the hell I was doing in terms of screenwriting. They said, “Have you ever written for TV before,” and I said, “No, but I’ll be good at it.” If I set my mind to anything, I will do it.

Photos courtesy Stephanie Klein.