CR 017: Sophie Brickman on Her Delightful New Satire, ‘Plays Well With Others’
The journalist and author discusses her debut novel and how she made the transition from nonfiction to fiction.
Sophie Brickman is all too familiar with the at-times maddening world of parenting. The longtime journalist and mother of three has written about the topic for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Yorker, among other outlets. Her first book, Baby, Unplugged, garnered rave reviews from The Boston Globe and Publishers Weekly, which referred to it as “equal parts informative and entertaining.” But when it came time to work on her second book, Brickman couldn’t bring herself to tackle yet another journalistic exploration of the parenting space.
“I had an idea for another nonfiction book,” she says. “As I was writing the proposal for that, I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to sustain my interest for the year or so of reporting I’ll have to do. Maybe I can try something different.’ I thought I’d write something serious about education. I banged my head against the wall for two weeks, and was like, ‘This isn’t coming. Maybe I can make it funny.’ And that was a lightbulb moment. I thought, ‘I can just make fun of all of these things.’ And it came way more naturally to me.”
The result is the recently published Plays Well With Others, a funny, fictional account of a mother who attempts to maintain her sanity as she participates in the cutthroat world of New York City’s private preschool admissions process.
Over a recent Zoom call, I chatted with Brickman about the transition from journalism to writing fiction, her advice for new parents, and what she learned from her father, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Marshall Brickman.
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SANDRA EBEJER: Congratulations on your book! How does it feel now that it’s published and out in the world?
SOPHIE BRICKMAN: It feels crazy. The process feels extremely protracted and very fast at the same time.
Like parenting?
Yeah, totally. It seems to be resonating with people and making them laugh, which was my goal with all of this.
Like the novel’s protagonist, you’re a mom of three, living in New York City, and navigating the city’s education system. How much did you pull from your own life when writing this book?
Not that much, except for what you said there, which is, the protagonist has three kids, she works in journalism, and she’s married to somebody who’s in venture capital. This is my first novel. I haven’t written fiction since college. I’ve been a journalist, so I wanted to [create] a world that I understood and could pull from, but beyond that, this is entirely fictionalized and satirized.
That’s a good segue to my next question, because I know how daunting it can be to transition from the non-fiction realm to writing fiction. What was the process like for you?
It was very scary in the beginning and then became enormously fun. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be, and I didn’t think anybody else was ever going to read it. The scary part that then became fun is, in journalism, you can’t make anything up. You do interviews with people, and you want them to say the thing that would be the perfect kicker, and they don’t do it, but you can’t make it up. With fiction, you can make it up. That’s your whole job.
For example, the nemesis character, Belinda Brenner—I wanted her to have a very intimidating career. I was like, “What’s intimidating to somebody who’s a journalist and writes about the arts? Cryptocurrency! I’ll make her a cryptocurrency mogul.” And then halfway through writing it, I was like, “I don’t know anything about cryptocurrency. Maybe I can make her a divorce attorney. That seems more fun.” And it’s not like I know the day-to-day of a divorce attorney any more than I do a crypto person, but I found some articles and profiles of celebrity divorce attorneys that were fun because they want to crush their opponent in court. So I changed this person’s career halfway through the book. You can do that in fiction. I’m sure I reinvented the wheel. I’m sure a seasoned fiction writer would be like, “Why did you go through that many pages of this thing and then change it?” But that was my process. It ended up being extremely fun for me. It felt like playing a bit, which you don’t exactly do in the kind of reporting that I usually do.
How long did you spend actually writing the book?
I have three children, and I was writing for The Guardian at the time, so I was juggling a lot of balls, but I would give myself the morning to write. I would go to the library across town, and I would go into the stacks, and it was cold and dark and the Wi-Fi didn’t work that well. It was an uncomfortable little chair and uncomfortable school desk that had salacious things written on the inside. And I would write for about three hours, which was my max. When you’re reporting, you can report and research for a long time and the writing process can take a certain number of hours. But creating and generating stuff—after three hours, I would have to come blinking out into the light of the street and be like, “Okay, now I need to go do something else and let my brain rejigger.” When I started rolling, I had a draft in three months. It changed, but that was the draft that my agents sold and that my editor bought, and we worked on it after that period. But it was mostly a push for three months that was wildly fun, which I hope comes out on the page, how much fun I had writing it.
In reading your bio, it looks as though you did not go to school for journalism or for writing. Is that correct?
I always loved writing. I went to a liberal arts college at Harvard and I studied social theory, essentially. But I think I should have been an English major. That’s probably what I wanted to do, but I felt like it was more serious to read Marx and Freud and Nietzsche, so I would plow through these very dense philosophical texts. My roommate was an English major, and I was like, “God, I wish I had done that.” I guess I felt like I couldn’t let myself. It was less serious, which is obviously bullshit—it’s just as serious. Then very soon after college, I got a job working at the San Francisco Chronicle, and that was a big aha moment. It was amazing. I loved that process of going out and reporting and meeting people and writing on deadline and having the back and forth with my editor. Then that led to me editing, and then led to me writing my first book, and then led to this. But I always gravitate towards words and reading and writing. It’s something that brings me a lot of joy.
Your father, Marshall, is a screenwriter and you thanked him in the acknowledgements for the “mini master classes in storytelling.” What did you learn from him?
Loads, but he’s a master of his craft. We would go for walks in the park. I remember walking with him after the first two weeks of banging my head against the wall. I was like, “I think I want to write about a woman who’s losing her mind and who’s going a little bit crazy.” And he was like, “That’s great!” That gave me the confidence to be like, “Okay, let me try. Let me go in that route.” I had always wanted to explore that feeling of feeling unhinged when you’re a new parent, from exhaustion and hormones and love and confusion. He gave me the confidence to do that.
One big difference between journalism and fiction is dialogue. [With fiction], you have to generate your own dialogue. You’re not overhearing something; you’re not having a conversation and steering the person to try to say the thing that you’re hoping they’re going to say or giving them the platform to say something great. You have to come up with it on your own. I remember talking to my dad about that. I was like, “I don’t know how to do it. This is so intimidating.” And he’s like, “You’ve been talking and having conversations your whole life. It’s just conversations.” There was something very comforting about that. It’s not rocket science. And I feel like we are all much better readers than we are writers, even if you are a professional writer. So when you write something that doesn’t work, you know it. You know that it doesn’t sound right. It took me a while to feel confident making dialogue up, but he was very helpful with that, mostly just by saying, “You know dialogue. Just write how somebody would say something.”
I literally Googled, how do you structure a novel? There’s a two-act structure, there’s a three-act structure. My dad knows all that like the back of his hand, but he’s like, “You have three people. Two of them want the same thing, and the other one doesn’t. The main character needs to want something that she can’t get. And then she has to try to get it.” And you’re like, “Oh, yeah. Of course. That’s what every book is.” When you start looking at things analytically, it’s like, every story is basically the same story.
There are many different forms of writing in this book—text messages, emails, letters, advice columns, even an op-ed written by the protagonist. Why write the book that way rather than just a straightforward narrative?
I think there are two answers. One is more practical, and one ended up being core to the novel. The first is that when I started out, the idea of writing a novel felt crazy. So I was like, “Maybe I can just write parts of things and see if they fit together.” So, there’s going to be WhatsApp chains. There’s going to be an email between [the protagonist] and a friend who’s going to be the voice of reason. Writing those felt way less daunting when I sat down. And satirizing journalism is something that is very easy to me, because I’ve written 800 to 1,200-word stories a million times.
I think there are two or three newspaper articles [in the book] and that stuff I was like, “I can bang this out in a morning and feel like I’ve done something and I’ve moved the needle on how many words I’ve written that week.” I rarely had writer’s block, because I was like, “If I can’t write the scene, I’m just going to write this little thing here.” Like what goes into a school application—there’s going to be some essay, there’s going to be a couple handouts from the preschool. A lot of that stuff ended up on the cutting room floor, but it was a way of continuing to generate material and keep me in that world.
What ended up happening is that I was able to capture something about modern parenthood, which is this feeling of being inundated by information and zinging from one thing to the next. There are WhatsApp [chains] coming, there’s emails, you’re checking your news feed, you have to interact with actual people, and you’re in your phone again. There’s this maelstrom of incoming and inbound information. I wanted to try to capture that, because I think that drives many of us crazy.
Did you turn to any specific writers or books for inspiration when you were working on this?
So, your agent writes a little pitch letter that they’ll send to people. They sent it to me, and they’re like, “Does this sound right?” ‘It’s a mixture of Where’d You Go, Bernadette’” and something else. And Where’d You Go, Bernadette, for me, is so beautifully and brilliantly done. It’s by a woman named Maria Semple. And where I worked in the library—I picked that place because it was on the second floor, one little desk kind of hidden away, and in the fiction section, and it happens to be near the S’s. So I would not know what to do, and I would pick up her book and look at it and it really served as a North Star because she has such a distinct voice. It’s so fast paced and funny, but it’s also very human. Underneath all the satire and the humor, there’s a real story about a woman and her daughter, and she’s trying to navigate this community and she’s trying to figure out her career. It feels profound and very human. So in my wildest dreams, this book would be compared to that book. But in terms of humor and satire, that particular book spoke to me a lot in this process.
I often ask authors what advice they would give to aspiring novelists, but I have a slightly different question for you based on the topic of your books. Parenting is hard, and we seem to want to complicate it even more by heaping pressure on ourselves and our children. It’s like if we don’t do the right thing in the first few years, we’re going to set our kids up for a life of failure. What is your advice to parents about navigating peer pressure, unsolicited advice, and the like?
I’m a reporter by nature, and when you’re reporting on parenting, it’s hard. You can basically find experts that conflict all the time, which I think means there’s often no right answer. But when I was reporting my first book, which is about technology and parenting, almost everybody I spoke to said that for younger children, boredom is a wonderful thing. If they’re sitting on the rug and they’re looking at you, and they’re like, “I want you to play with me,” if you let them be and let them find the magic around them, it’s much better for them. They need to run around, they need to interact, they need to be read to, but boredom is not something to quash. Boredom is a thing to strive for. And if you can internalize it, which is hard to do, it’s very freeing for a parent. Because you can say, “I’m doing my part to make you more resilient, more creative, more confident. You need me some of the time, but not all of the time.” I think if you know developmental psychologists say that’s what you should strive for, it might let you stop being so anxious.
I spoke to a wonderful developmental psychologist named Alison Gopnik, who runs a lab in Berkeley. She was like, “We think as parents that these small decisions that we’re making, like nursing, pacifier, no pacifier, sleeping in a crib, co-sleeping are going to have a real impact on the child. They’re mostly who they are when they come out.” These little decisions that you agonize over, it’s more about control than anything else. That’s how I view it. It’s like, you’re petrified—should I get them out of the crib when they’re crying, or let them cry? And there are studies that say XYZ thing will happen, but by and large, you’re not going to wildly change the trajectory of your child’s success and happiness and career. Love them and give them a little space, and they will become who they’re meant to become.
To learn more about Sophie Brickman, visit her website.
To purchase Plays Well With Others, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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