Go All In in Memoir with Maria Konnikova

Prompt #1: Taking Risks

What is the scariest thing you’ve ever done, on purpose?

Maybe you took a major risk in your life or your personal relationships. Maybe it was a physical risk. Maybe, you were perfectly safe but, emotionally, everything felt at stake.

Describe the experience in a scene. What was it? Why did you find yourself there? What were you feeling? Did you know it for what it was at the time, or is it only later that you understood what was at stake?

Prompt #2: People of Importance

Think about someone who has played a significant role in your life. It could be a teacher, a parent, a friend, a mentor, a sibling.

Describe one single interaction that highlights why this person is important to you. Show us who they are through a unified, active scene.

It can help readers understand your relationship through actual dialogue: how does this person sound? How do you sound when you’re with them? What do they bring out in you? Make us feel like we’re there, with you, in one very specific moment in time.

Prompt #3: Power and Permanence

Write about one object that holds power over you.

Maybe it’s a memento from the past. Maybe it’s something you’re fascinated by from afar. Maybe it’s a lucky charm. Or maybe it’s something altogether different.

Describe the object in a way that highlights the nature of its personal significance. A phone or computer, for instance, holds power over most of us: the grip of technology. Try to find something that is unique to you and your own experience.

Q&A with Maria Konnikova

What does naming a chapter establish for the reader that not naming might not? 

That’s a really interesting question because this was a choice that I had to make— to decide, you know, am I going to number my chapters or am I just going to have beginnings? Am I just going to have the date and the place the way that I do now, or just a chapter title?

I decided on the latter, and I don’t have that, I don’t think, definitely not in my first book. In my second book I do because I have parts of the book that are parts of a con, so that just actually shows where we are in the structure of the con.

For this book, the choice to ultimately name the chapters helped establish a tone and a mood and an expectation of what people might get from this particular chapter. I have a chapter called “The Art of Losing,” so you’ll know something about what you’ll be reading or where you are in the story, even if you haven’t yet read a word.

I actually made two choices in this book— I don’t just have the name of the chapter, I also have a quote to open up every single chapter. So, for instance, here’s one—just because I opened to it—called “The Mind of a Strategist”.  It says the date, and then it has a quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, because that’s something that I was thinking about and I was inspired by as I was writing this chapter, so it tells you a little bit about where my mind was at the time. I think it’s really interesting that you ask this, and I do think it’s something that I wasn’t considering in an explicit way. But it’s a choice you have to make, and a lot of times when you’re structuring a book, when you’re figuring out how to tell a story, you do have to make these sorts of choices that seem very simple, but they do make a difference. I could’ve chosen to go another way, and I think the book would have been slightly different. 

How did you go from being a bartender to being a TV producer?

Fascinating question— I have no idea! Like I said earlier, I went through about five jobs, and I didn’t go through all of the jobs I had. When I was a bartender, it became very clear very early on in my bartending career that I was not cut out to be a bartender, that I was just always exhausted and then it was also emotionally exhausting for me. I’m a writer, I’m an introvert. I’m someone for who it’s very draining to always be around people, and I need my alone time.

As a bartender, you really don’t have your alone time. Especially as a female bartender, because you also have to smile and flirt, otherwise you’re not gonna get tips, and it’s a really fine line to walk, and I wasn’t enjoying it for that reason. I just started asking everyone if they knew anything and looking at all the job lists that I could find. This particular one was an alumni connection. There was an alumni list for grads who were in New York, and I saw this posting for a personal assistant on a TV show, and even though I had no desire to be a personal assistant, I ended up getting an interview. When I got to the final interview, I basically said that I didn’t actually want this job, but aren’t I wonderful and don’t you want to hire me as a something else? Not quite, but I basically said, I don’t want to be a personal assistant, but I want to work on the show. I wasn’t hired as a producer, I was hired as an editorial assistant, and then I ended up stepping up and producing major things for them when someone else dropped the ball. I was made a producer within a year of joining. So that was the story.

Do you think you’ll write fiction later on?

Yeah, I’d love to. I actually have written a novel, which was a desk drawer novel— I think that most first novels are destined to be desk drawer novels. I never submitted it to anyone, I know it’s not very good, but I wanted to get it out and I’m glad that I did that.

I would eventually really like to go back to that. One of the things I loved the most about writing The Biggest Bluff is that I got to tell a story and a narrative and I got to structure it kind of as one big thing, which was not the case for my other books. I really enjoyed the storytelling. It brought me back to fiction even though it’s nonfiction.

I’m actually starting to exercise some of  those muscles now. It never seemed like the right time because my career was really taking off in the nonfiction realm, and it can be risky to really change tracks completely. But I’m actually about to start a job on a television show, doing TV writing and creating a new TV show, and that’s fiction. That will be a completely fictional story based on a real-life thing, so that’ll be my first foray into fiction. After that, maybe we’ll take it to the written page as well, because I do love fiction.

In any interesting life, there’s comedy, tragedy, and a full spectrum in between. So how do you settle upon a tone for a memoir?

You don’t. The tone settles on you, eventually. I just wrote. I had no idea if people would like my voice, or how I sounded, and I was just terrified. I’m someone who doesn’t share drafts with anyone, and I don’t like anyone checking in on my writing, so the first time my editor saw The Biggest Bluff was the first full draft of it. And no one had read it, zero people except for me, or had seen any part of it whatsoever, until that moment.

After I hit send on that Word document, I was just prepared to be terrified for weeks, and luckily my editor’s a fast reader and got back to me in, like, 4 days. So that was really wonderful, and he really liked it. Obviously you never turn in a perfect first draft, so we worked hard and there were lots of changes. But the fact that he liked the voice was really important to me. I just tried to be me, and sometimes that was funny, sometimes that was really sad, sometimes I was really scared. I tried to go back and recreate the person I was at any given point in time and to just talk like myself, and write like myself.

Can you talk about fact-checking and being a journalist writing memoir? Is there ever a time you can fill in details with imagination or is memory too hazy?

This is a personal choice that people have to make when they’re writing memoir. I definitely filled in details in the sense of, I couldn’t remember how the exact conversation was, but I had enough conversations with this person that I was able to recreate the spirit of the conversation. But I never made anything up, and that was something that was really important to me. Because I am a journalist, and I am someone who has worked for a long time with New Yorker fact-checkers, so to me, it’s very, very important to get things as right as I possibly can.

That said, inevitably, you will get some things wrong. Because sometimes memory is wrong, and you’ll be sure that you remember something correctly, and someone else who was there will say, “No, actually, it was like this.” Or, “No, actually, this person wasn’t there. You’re inserting them from another time that we had dinner.”

You’ll sometimes make mistakes like that, and I think that’s perfectly forgivable. What’s less forgivable is if you actually just make something up that makes the story better but that really isn’t true. I personally don’t think that you should be changing things so that it’s a better story. The story’s going be what it’s going to be, and if something is not as smooth as you want it to be, so be it. But I do think you need to be true to life to the best of your abilities, and take responsibility when you make a mistake. I’ve definitely made mistakes, I’ve definitely had to issue corrections, both in my magazine pieces and in books. It happens, and just have to own it.

Can you talk a little bit more about how you feel your PhD has helped you in your writing career?

I almost didn’t get my PhD, actually. I almost didn’t finish it, because my first book was out and I had gone on a leave of absence to finish writing it. It came out, it became a bestseller, and I was like, “I don’t need my PhD, I can be a writer, I can earn money as a writer, yay, this is wonderful!” And my mom—moms are always right—my mom was like, “No. Get the degree. You’re a woman, you want those three letters behind your name, so that you can put it in the faces of the men who are going to question what right you have to write about the things you write about.” 

If you go on Twitter and look at some of the replies I get to my stories, so many people will be like, “Well, actually“. And by people, I mean men, because women hardly ever do it. They’ll be like, “Well, actually, it’s really blah blah blah”, and this is someone who has never studied psychology, but has read a book or something. And I can be like, “Well, no, actually, I have a PhD in this, and this was my dissertation, so I know what I’m talking about.”

It’s really helped me that way. But it’s also helped me be a better journalist, because I know how to read academic papers, I know how to look to see if a study is good or not, I can very quickly evaluate to see if something is worth writing about or not. Those skills have made me able to be faster and more precise and have more of a background to add context to a lot of things. I think knowing any subject deeply can never hurt you, it can just help you. Pursuing a PhD is a wonderful thing, go for it, but know why you’re doing it. And don’t get sucked up by the academic hamster wheel, which is very easy to get caught up in. Just do it for the right reasons.

This event was originally recorded on August 6th, 2020.