Julie Fingersh is the author of the new memoir Stay: A Story of Family, Love, & Other Traumas. Also a journalist, she lives in Marin County, California.
Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?
A: I’ll be honest with you – it was less about inspiration than it was me trying to write myself out of a private state of mental anguish. I’m pretty sure that’s the origin story of a lot of memoirs!
The trick was to then make it into a book that would inspire and enrich and maybe light the way for other who’ve walked similar roads or are in this particular middle place in their lives.
But in a larger sense, what inspired me––and what always inspires me––is the meaning of life. As a 14-year-old kid from Kansas City, I walked around with a legal pad interviewing people, pretending I was writing an article for our school newspaper.
I wanted to know -- how were we supposed to live life? What was the point? What mattered in the end? Where was the manual? It just seemed like everyone was following all these rules and I wanted to know where they came from, if they were the right ones, and if I was doing it right.
Those questions have guided and inspired and tortured and lifted me all my life. So when I started having kind of a psychic meltdown on the eve of turning 50, the clichéd mid-life crisis moment, I realized there was something larger at work inside of me that was going to suffocate me if I didn’t turn towards it.
And once I started writing, life started taking these crazy turns. It was as if life was delivering a series of events that were so intense, so challenging and unexpected, that I had to face them – and I just knew that the only way to figure out my way through it was to write, even though I hadn’t written in so many years, which was another part of the problem. So that’s what I did.
It took six years to slog through the writing/publishing odyssey, and to make it into a book that wasn’t just for me, but that was valuable and maybe even a mirror for other people and their own life experiences.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Not to sound like a “scary adult Swiftie” as my niece likes to call people like me, but you know how Taylor Swift drops these “Easter eggs” in her music and then you discover what the signs meant later?
The title of my book, Stay, is like that. It means something very specific and profound to me, but every reader is going to come to understand it differently based on the lives they lead and the choices they make. The title is a conscious part of my offering to readers. They’ll figure it out as they go.
Q: The writer Kelly Corrigan said of the book, “Julie Fingersh’s invaluable and highly readable memoir is asking us who we thought we were, how that squares with who we’ve become and what we might want to do about it. Questions every woman I know is asking right about now.” What do you think of that description?
A: I’m honored by it. It’s a sign, I hope, that I’ve managed to address the questions that women have been asking for many years, but especially now.
This book is the culmination of my very long and torturous way back to a part of myself I’d left behind three decades ago – that of a writer. We all have many identities, and like many women who had the privilege of choice when my children were born of whether to keep working, I pretty much relinquished my professional identity to stay home with my children.
As the empty nest loomed, that relinquishing of those other parts of myself came home to roost. How was anything going to be as meaningful as raising my kids – as crazy and ambivalent as I often was about being a stay-at-home mom?
There’s a whole generation of women now facing the long-term consequences of leaving our creative and/or professional selves behind. Many of us left our jobs and careers because work seemed no more than an indulgence since our salaries would barely cover child care costs.
And although we were immensely grateful for the opportunity to be the primary caretaker of our kids, leaving the workforce came at a personal cost that most of us didn’t appreciate at the time.
No matter how educated or how high-powered our careers used to be, since we’d been out of the game for so long, we found that all we were qualified to do was be a nanny or a caretaker of another sort.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from your story?
A: Most of all, I hope they come away with greater clarity of some kind – about themselves, about their choices, about the early patterns or traumas that they may be unconsciously carrying, or even about how they evaluate the next part of their lives.
This story seems to bring people into a headspace where they start asking themselves the same questions I grapple with. It seems like some are questions they’ve not asked themselves before.
The book is also about how our past often lives inside our present. It’s also about the inner life of families, particularly the complex and profound and enduring impact of the illness of one member on the family system.
People seem to connect with the book in personal ways depending on where they are in their lives and who they’ve shaped up to be through their choices and personal history, whether as parents or siblings or creatives or dog owners.
What I most hope is that the book will stir up a part of themselves that has been unconscious, because that’s the key to moving differently in your life.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m mulling over some freelance pitches and ideas potentially for a book of essays or journalistic nonfiction, but mostly, I’m trying to stay present to all the experiences that writing this book is offering me, both for myself and in service to others.
I’ve recently started writing a Substack newsletter called “Take my advice. I’m Not Using It.” It’s a midlife sequel to a column that I wrote when I was in my 20s in New York City. That’s fun and might be the start of a book.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: For one thing, I’m in the middle of creating some way that readers can connect with one another after reading the so they have a place to process it all.
Lots is being stirred up for people – parents, siblings, empty nesters, family members of struggling loved ones. So people should check my website for details on that, but I’m thinking of making a private Facebook page for Stay for a kind of ongoing reader discussion.
Second thing is, people always ask, so what’s your book about? Even after all this time, I still find it hard to sum up in a two-liner.
So let me just say this: Stay is about a younger sister trying to help her brother, as a midlife woman trying to reconcile the primal desire to emotionally nurture others – especially when they struggle––with the tiny voice inside all of us self-actualization.
The story is told from a number of perspectives: a parent of a young adult on the cusp of independence, a person in a society that worships at the altar of productivity, a wife, a daughter of aging parents, someone trying to work their way through what I called the Project Grief of losing someone––see how that’s more than two sentences? The book is about all of it. Everything all at once.
And then there’s the meta of it, which I am gratified to see is finding a lot of resonance for others. It’s about our willingness to live consciously in a world of distraction. It’s about being willing to ask ourselves the biggest questions, the choices life asks us to make. And how those choices are often guided the blueprint of our past.
And how those early experiences with our siblings and parents often cast our futures and relationships and patterns, often without our ever realizing it.
The most gratifying part of this tortuous journey has been hearing from people that they fall into the grips of this very personal story about someone else, and unexpectedly find themselves face-to-face with their own lives and identities and choices and the possibilities that await them.
As my great aunt Etty used to say, we only come this way once. But if you do it right, once is enough! I hope this book will help people get closer to what that means for them.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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