Born in Brooklyn and educated in New York City public schools, Brooklyn College, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Michelle Herman is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction. She taught creative writing and literature for many years at the Ohio State University, where she was a founder of the MFA program in creative writing and was the longtime director of an innovative graduate interdisciplinary program for artists. Since 2019 she has been dispensing relationship and family advice every Sunday as a columnist for Slate. She divides her time between New York City and Columbus, Ohio.
Nick: I’ve been thinking a lot about you as an advice-giver. Both in life and in your writing, and not only in the Care & Feeding advice column you write for Slate, but also in your essays. Some of your best essays, it seems to me, delve into advice for living—or at least I feel I’m getting advice for living. So could you talk a little bit about yourself as an advice-giver?
Michelle: I do not remember myself as someone who gave advice throughout her life, but I’ve always had a lot of opinions. Even as a child I had opinions I felt very certain of, but I think this habit went underground as I got older, as I recognized that my outspokenness, which up till then I had been proud of, wasn’t doing me any favors socially. For sure, by the time I was a teenager, I mostly kept my big personality under wraps.
Nick: Until…?
Michelle: I guess until I started teaching? I walked into a classroom to stand in front of it for the first time, and I thought, Oh! I love this. This is where I belong. And I think this is when I understood myself as an advice-giver. When I began to actively, intentionally, mentor and advise my students.
Nick: And does this relate to your beginning to write creative nonfiction?
Michelle: That was much later, in my mid-40s. By then I had been writing fiction in a serious way for over 20 years, and it was a surprise to me, writing my first essay. I had come to feel that I had something to say about the world and myself in the world that might be meaningful to other people. But when I first started writing nonfiction, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was just writing what I could. It was an accident that this writing became my first essay.
Nick: But how did that happen?
Michelle Herman: In the weeks and then the months following 9/11, I couldn’t write at all. For the first time in my life, writing felt pointless. I suppose I was in shock. We were all in shock—we were all so twisted up, so anxious and afraid. I was putting one foot in front of the other, going down to campus to teach, preaching the gospel of fiction-writing, but I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t even look at the novel I’d been in the middle of. I kept thinking, Who cares? Why should I care, why should anyone care, about made-up people having made-up experiences and thoughts and feelings and conversations? But, you know, writers write. And I had never in my life, since I was seven years old, not written. I started feeling that I had to write something. I didn’t think, I’m going to write an essay. I only thought, Maybe if I write down some true things, some real things, writing won’t feel so ridiculous, so irrelevant.
Nick: So what did you write about?
Michelle: I remember asking myself, well, what do I actually know about? What do I have a lot to say about? And the only possible answer to that question at that point was, I am embarrassed to say, my own romantic history. I started writing what was essentially an annotated list of every time I’d ever fallen in love, starting in childhood. So what eventually became my first essay—it was called “Superstar”—started out as a history of my love life.
Nick: And ended up as something else, then?
Michelle: It ended up an essay about trying to teach my eight-year-old daughter what love was. I credit Lee Martin with this. We were teaching colleagues, and he told me what the “essay” was about and where it should begin. He plucked something out from the middle of it and said, “Why don’t you start here, with your daughter?” He also told me what he didn’t think belonged in it, what might itself be another essay. Or maybe two more essays. And then, I guess, I was off and running. One essay begat two, which begat three. Which became my first nonfiction book, The Middle of Everything.
Nick: Truly, your writing is like a Russian doll. There’s something seated inside something seated inside something else. I like the digressions! But I find myself wondering how this translates to your weekly Care & Feeding advice column for Slate, where you can’t digress. How do you focus on the particular problem you’re being asked to solve, and do that concisely? How does this kind of writing work alongside the novels and nonfiction you continue to write? Do they affect each other?
Michelle: I like to think that the column has a kind of literary sensibility—that while it’s a parenting and family and relationship advice column, because it’s being written by a novelist and essayist it’s not just “here’s what to do,” it’s a literary endeavor. But you’re right, it’s not a digressive form, which is partly a function of writing on a deadline. Come hell or high water, I turn in about 2500 words every Wednesday night.
Nick: You are a person of great certainty! And we can go as broad as we want here, but what I’m thinking is, well, we’re living in very uncertain times and it’s hard to find any kind of certainty. Do you have any advice to those of us who are feeling terribly uncertain?
Michelle: I’m like a serial monogamist about certainty. I’ll be certain about something, and then I’ll be certain about something else. I’m always going back and feeling uncertain again, then quickly finding a way to be certain again. I don’t like to live in that space of uncertainty. So I live there for very brief periods—I dip into uncertainty! I’m never interested in sitting down and writing anything if I already understand it, if I feel anything remotely resembling sure about it. But by the end of an essay? That’s how I know I’m done, when I feel that—however fleeting—moment of certainty.
This is really what the title essay in the new book is about. In the essay “If You Say So,” I’m finding things out, I’m cataloging what I now know…and also coming to terms with the fact that there is so much I’ll never know. That kind of certainty—I am certain I will never understand this, or I am certain I can never know the whole truth—doesn’t make me uneasy at all. It lets me be.
But if you’re asking me to apply this to processing the world we’re living in now, I don’t know how to do that. Everything has just gone completely haywire. When life is as chaotic and dangerous as it is right now, what I have learned I can do is focus on helping the people I can help. Right now, that’s working with men who are incarcerated and who want to write. It’s a concrete thing I can do to be helpful. And that’s how I cope, insofar as I’m coping. Is that advice?
Nick: I think it is. What is the best advice you’ve ever given? And what is the worst advice you’ve ever given? In writing and in life?
Michelle: The great writer Lore Segal, who was my colleague and friend and the closest thing I’ve ever had to a mentor, once told me she felt I was trying too hard to charm my reader. She mentioned a few things she’d noticed—certain turns of phrase, specific words, punctuation—but the one that really struck a chord was how much I used italics, how much I relied on emphasizing certain words, trying to control the way readers read a line. In the years since, I have always checked myself for italics. I subject every use of them on the page to a series of questions. Am I trying too hard? Am I trying to be lovable? Am I performing?
One of the best pieces of life advice I’ve gotten was from a therapist my then six-year-old daughter was seeing. My daughter had gone through a really difficult period, and I was trying to help her get to the other end of it. Her therapist told me to pause and ask myself, before acting, whose need I was trying to meet. If she was distressed, before I rushed in to comfort her and remove the source of distress, for example, I was to stop and ask myself if this would actually serve her, or if doing that was what I needed. I can’t begin to tell you what a difference that ended up making.
My daughter has also given me great advice. When she left home for college 500 miles away, she said, “Join a choir.” It sounded ridiculous to me. But I did as she said—she’d said it with such absolute certainty! That choir I joined—I’ve been part of it now for going on 15 years—has had more impact on my life than almost anything else I’ve ever done.
Nick: Almost anything else?
Michelle: Now you’re teasing me. Because I know you know that the biggest overall effect on my happiness has been adding dance to my daily life. I did that without advice from anyone—but within a year after I started taking daily ballet classes, I had the opportunity to perform in a contemporary piece. I said no at first. But my daughter, who was still working in theater then—she used to be a stage director and deviser of immersive theater—said, “Mama, you would not believe how much working toward a performance is motivating. You’ll enjoy your classes even more.” And I’ve been performing regularly ever since, multiple times a year for the last seven-plus years. And as you know, I recently co-choreographed a piece and danced in it with ten other dancers.
Nick: I saw it! It was amazing!. Now are you ready to tell me the worst advice you’ve ever gotten?
Michelle: Sure. Another writer once urged me not to have a child until I had published my second book. She thought it was good advice, but I knew, even as she said it, that it wasn’t good advice for me. It’s clear in retrospect that it was indeed not the right advice for me because not only did I not stop writing, I became a better writer, I wrote more, I became less precious about my writing. Having my daughter turned out to be the single best thing I could have done for my work. I’d been putting all my eggs in one basket, and then I couldn’t—I had at least two baskets to fill.
Nick: Are you ready to tell me the best and worst advice you’ve given?
Michelle: The best is probably—and this is something I’ve said a million times, usually but not always to young people, to people on the precipice of making a change or a change being forced on them—oh, but this is going to be a two-part answer!
Nick: I’d expect no less.
Michelle: Part one is: Don’t worry about what you’re going to do for the rest of your life. Don’t worry about the big picture. Just ask yourself what’s next? Then do that. And after that, you can ask yourself again: What’s next now? Put one foot in front of the other. Eventually you’ll get where you’re going. You’ll find out where you’re going.
Part two is this: Very few decisions are irrevocable. You can say yes to a job and then later say, nope, this is not for me. You can say no to getting an MFA and then later decide to go back to school and get one. These are the kinds of things students come to me asking about. But this advice is applicable to all sorts of situations. Whatever you decide, you can almost always undecide.
Nick: That is good advice. So what’s the worst advice you’ve ever given?
Michelle: I’ve been made aware that some people think the advice in my column is terrible. They hate when I call family estrangement a last resort, or suggest an honest conversation, or remind people that we can’t change others’ behaviors, only what we do in response. They hate it when I seem to be equivocating, or ask the person seeking advice to take a look at their own part in what’s going on or examine their feelings about it. But I really do believe that the deep connections we forge with other human beings are so meaningful and so important that we should only sever them when we truly reach the point at which we have no choice, when there’s just nothing else to be done.
Nick: I’d like to end with two questions about your new book, If You Say So. Why should someone read it? Who should read it?
Michelle: Read it if you’re interested in the subject of friendship, community, family. Fathers and daughters. Loss. Grief. Read it if you’re interested in dance—not in dance critique or technique necessarily, but in getting inside the experience of dance, especially ballet. Or if you’ve had or wish to have a new passion in your life, something that dramatically changes your life for the better, makes your life bigger. I talk a lot about love in this book, too. I’m not as interested in romantic love as I was when I was younger, but I’m even more interested in other kinds of love—the love we have for our pets, for the houses or apartments and places we live in, and for the people with whom we surround ourselves. If you’ve ever tried to know someone completely and recognized that you can’t, ever, not really. If you’ve wanted desperately to be completely known.
