On Publishing My Memoir by Jody Gelb

She May Be Lying Down but She May Be Very Happy was published by Kelson Books on November 7, 2023.

The first reading was at The Corner Bookstore in New York City on November 9.

New York City had been my hometown and where my firstborn daughter Lueza survived her catastrophic birth in a private hospital that will not be named.

So, coming east from California was the way to go.

My sister had arranged the entire evening with the bookstore and sent evites, and it happened.

Friends I had known since first grade, from a local school three blocks away, showed up. Friends from Broadway shows I had done in the nineties. Friends of my parents that were still alive and still in New York. Beloved siblings. They filled the tiny bookstore.

I had no stage fright.

I have to look backward for a moment.

I was an actor who had written a micro-memoir about the life and death of my daughter Lueza, knew nothing about the publishing world, and lived inside an unpleasant hope/no-hope binary for this little creation.

The hope/no-hope binary was part of an unpleasant stew of rumination, self-judgment, intermittent gloom and neuroticism. 

For years the writing had existed as short memoir-adjacent pieces written in the third person about a woman (me) named Maddie whose daughter had been brain damaged during birth, and the terror, joy, and complications of this life.

At some point I signed up for a nonfiction workshop weekend with the writer Abigail Thomas and flew to Utah to share about ten pages with a group of strangers. It was 2009, the summer that Michael Jackson died. I remember asking Abby if it was possible to write a memoir in the third person. Yes. Keep going was her answer.

Later in that year, I sent about seven more pages to Abby (Abigail), and the word from her was that I needed to put it in the first person.

And that was correct, and I kept going.

Starting and quitting went on for about 22 years. 

It was not ideal.

Nine of those 22 years included raising my daughters, a complicated family life, occasional acting jobs in San Francisco, and eventually medical crises with Lueza, living in hospitals, and coming to terms with her extreme medical fragility. I wrote about all of it.

Before and after Lueza’s death, there were a few more weekend writing retreats with wonderful teachers.

Mark Matousek in New Mexico and Lidia Yuknavitch in California.

Editorial talks with the writer Barbara Graham in the Bay Area and with Melody Lawrence in New York.

Writing. I hated it. I loved it.

I decided to accept the torment and tell myself that this was my process as I hyperventilated and moved the piles of paper around my kitchen table as I tried to FINISH.

I read Steven Pressfield’s the WAR of ART about the resistance and inertia we must fight against to accomplish anything. 

I read the Buddhists about panic disorders and mindfulness.

At some point in 2017, I sent the manuscript to one agent in New York City, and that was the result of a favor from a literary agent/family friend who liked the pages but didn’t work with friends, and the other agent emailed back quickly with something positive, but no.

And no surprise. 

Who wants to publish a tiny grief memoir of an unknown woman of a certain age?

You’re an actor, and you’re old; why are you doing this to yourself? It’s impossible.

I decided my book wasn’t a book for agents.

It was a book that would somehow find a small independent or non-profit press. 

Somehow. 

And one day, five years later, a small publisher in the northwest, Kelson Books, reached out to the writer Meghan Daum. They were looking to publish their next nonfiction manuscript and wondered if she could recommend something.

I had taken a Zoom nonfiction writing workshop with Meghan at the beginning of 2022, and my goal was to get feedback and see if it was realistic to even imagine getting published. If not, I would self-publish. We all shared work and feedback, and I felt bolstered by their support and comments that this micro-memoir could find a place in the world. 

Four days after Christmas in 2022, Meghan reached out to see if I was interested in sending my manuscript to Kelson Books. Interested? I was almost screaming as I read her text. 

On January 13, 2023, Kelson Books emailed. 

They wanted to publish it. 

Ten months until the publication date.

The pub date.

A new lingo to learn.

Actors know words like: Sitzprobe, swing, sides, tech…

My pub date was less than a year away.

A very short amount of time, according to writers I knew, but I did not care.

We would do what we could do.

And now, about three years later, Kelson Books, like many small independent publishers, has closed.

And I am finding another home for my book.

On we go. 

—

Jody Gelb has a forty-year career acting on stage and screen. She has portrayed roles in the Tony  Award-winning Broadway plays The Who’s Tommy, Titanic, Big River, and Wicked, among others.  Gelb also played Joan of Arc’s mother in the David Byrne rock opera Joan of Arc: Into the Fire at  The Public Theater in New York and was a featured player in the premiere of Shel Silverstein’s Wild  Life with Julie Hagerty, Henderson Forsythe, William H. Macy, and Raynor Scheine. On television,  she has appeared in guest roles in Gunplay, Law & Order, and Dr. Death. Gelb now follows the  career of her daughter, Dora Jar, as she tours the USA and the world as a singer-songwriter. 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing