Interview with Ilana Masad
The WRITE Prompt had a chance to talk with Ilana Masad, queer Israeli-American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism (and one of our favorite debut authors of 2020!).
Ilana’s critiques, essays, and short stories have been featured in the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, the Paris Review, NPR, Buzzfeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and several others. She is also the founder and host of The Other Stories podcast.
Ilana’s debut novel, All My Mother’s Lovers, has gained loads of praise and has us impatiently waiting for her next foray into the fiction realm.
All My Mother’s Lovers
Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause—despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss—until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris’s will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of.
In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris—who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter’s sexuality—Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris’s second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents’ perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall?
Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, All My Mother’s Lovers is a unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, challenging us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.
TWP: You have published a ton of non-fiction work. Do you think that helped in your bid to get your book picked up?
Ilana Masad: I don’t really know, to be honest.
I do know that having bylines might have encouraged (consciously or unconsciously) some agents to take a look at my pages, or may have done that for their assistants who pass things along to their bosses.
What I can’t know is: if I’d written this book without the career I was already in the midst of, would it have gotten picked up? I hope so, but it’s impossible to tell.
TWP: How did you end up finding representation with Eric Siminoff?
Ilana Masad: I queried him!
I’d queried agents for three other books before the one that I sold, and I’d queried Eric with one of those.
I was working for a literary agent at the time and she thought he might be a good fit for the book I was querying. So he was one of the few agents that I’d gotten a personal introduction to.
He passed on that project, but did so kindly and told me my writing was very good, which was encouraging. When I was querying AMML, I made a list of all the agents that had rejected previous books of mine in some personal or semi-personal way. Many of them were people I felt would be a good fit for this new book.
Writers need community just like everyone else, and it’s our communities that often help us to get better as writers.
I also added some other names of agents I’d learned about since my last time out, or whose work I was really excited about because they were new.
When I queried agents who had kindly rejected me before, I reminded them that I’d been in touch a couple of years back and they’d liked my writing if not the particular book that I’d sent then.
Eric wrote me really early in the process – he was one of two agents who offered me representation within a week or so. I had a conversation with him and it just felt very right, and we signed!
TWP: What was the process like for getting your book published?
Ilana Masad: The process was actually abnormally fast for me. As I said, I worked for several years for a wonderful agent, Leigh Feldman, who has her own agency, and I’d seen firsthand how long the process can be between finding an agent and selling a book.
But – and maybe this was some kind of universe-giving-back situation because I’d had three full novels out to agents before only to start all over again – for us the process was quite fast.
Eric gave me notes on the manuscript, I worked on it, and within a month or so he sent it out to publishers. And then THAT process was abnormally fast. People responded to him very quickly asking to see the MS and just as quickly they rejected it for various reasons.
He sent the book to, I think, 24 editors, and within like eight days 22 of them had said no. The last two were at the same publisher, which meant they couldn’t auction over it or anything, they just had to see who was going to offer more money and then the other would bow out.
So then I had one offer, really (though we would have, presumably, gone out on another round of editors if we hadn’t sold it then) and I had a conversation with the editor and it felt amazing and right and we went with her.
But this kind of speed really and truly is so so so abnormal.
TWP: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers hoping to one day become published authors?
Ilana Masad: Oh, oodles, but most of it probably wouldn’t be useful because my path was just one kind of path.
What I will say is, for authors who want to get agents and be published in that traditional route: research how to query and learn how to do it!
Personalize your queries! Querying is a skill that has almost nothing to do with your creative writing and so it needs to be honed in a different way.
But also, there are many routes to publication, many kinds of ways to be published, and many ways in which the different routes might work for different writers. If anyone ever tries to tell you that here is the single correct way (and usually, that lesson comes with a dollar sign attached), I’d distrust them.
Finally, remember that while it looks like writers do things alone a lot of the time, it’s not true. The myth of the lonely creative genius is terrible and dangerous.
Writers need community just like everyone else, and it’s our communities that often help us to get better as writers and also often help us with the professional aspects.
Enjoy This Excerpt from All My Mother’s Lovers
This latest excursion—a boutique wine maker conference—had been relatively simple, but she was relieved to be home. She had a whole week ahead of her without traveling, a rare treat, and she meant to take advantage of it. Peter was already up and at it when she got out of bed—she could tell because the house smelled deliciously of coffee, the hazelnut kind he indulged in on weekends. Ariel was still asleep, she was pretty certain. She hoped so—she didn’t feel like getting fully dressed yet, and she knew that her bralessness inside one of the many ratty t-shirts she slept in made him uncomfortable. She’d noticed him averting his gaze before. It was heartbreaking, how she’d become old and repulsive to him at some point, her body’s existence embarrassing him. She wasn’t sure when it had happened, and she knew it was normal, but she still felt a twinge of pain when he looked away from her like that. A reminder that the last link of intimacy between their bodies, once babushka-dolled one inside the other, was severed for good. She put her hand on Ariel’s shut and locked door and silently bid him to sleep a little longer, just until she had the energy to get dressed.
“Hello, sleepyhead,” Peter said when she passed his office. Iris waved but kept going to the kitchen and coffee. He followed her there and hugged her from behind as she poured herself a mug.
“Mmph,” she said, elbowing him to let her go, and got the milk from the fridge. He put his hands up, surrendering with a grin. “It’s Sunday, and it’s morning, stop being so perky,” she groaned at him. But she didn’t mean it. This was Peter, and she loved how unfairly upbeat he was.
“What are you up to today?” he asked, leaning against the kitchen island. Without waiting, he went on, “I have some errands to do, and I’m catching up on that project for the museum, they’ve asked for some more adjustments, but—”
Read more here.
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