Sara Lippmann – Doll Palace

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Erika Anderson

This week Erika speaks with New York City-based author Sara Lippmann. Sara has an MFA from The New School in Manhattan and has taught writing, written for national magazines, and now hosts a regular reading series in the East Village, Sunday Salon.

Listen to the full episode here:

The two women talk (and crack each other up) about “the writing life,” the likability of unlikeable characters, being a Brooklynite in Texas, the novel that Sara is working on, and who Sara Lippmann was before and after having a book published.

In this excerpt, Sara describes the struggle to write as a young mother (which Erika summarizes as, “stop showering, stop cleaning, WRITE”):

I was trying to get back to writing, my daughter was really young and I had these very short windows in which to work. It was either, you know, take a shower or try to write for thirty minutes while she slept. I sort of had to trick myself into getting to the page, so I would say, ‘Try to tell a story in a hundred words or five hundred words or a thousand words,’ because anything longer seemed far too daunting for me, and I didn’t feel like I could- It was hard enough for me to hold a complete sentence in my head at that time, let alone a narrative of any substantial length. A lot of them were really short, a lot of them subsequently fell out of the collection. The later stories are the longer stories, because my kids were in school by then. You should’ve seen my apartment at that time, it was a bathrobe-ridden, dishes in the sink time. Something’s gotta go. Or many things….

PURCHASE DOLL PALACE HERE.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

SARA LIPPMANN is the author of the story collection, Doll Palace (Dock Street Press). Her fiction has been published in The Good Men Project, Wigleaf, Slice magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Joyland and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2012 fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she co-hosts the Sunday Salon, a longstanding reading series in the East Village. For more, visit: saralippmann.com