Author Jen Lancaster Comes to the Dunes Club on June 22

It isn’t often that you can turn a huge pile of lemons – say, losing your job to the tech bubble and then selling pretty much everything you own in an effort to evade homelessness – into a giant pitcher of New York Times bestselling lemonade. But, that’s exactly what Jen Lancaster did. Her blog about surviving the economic bust of the early aughts became Bitter is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smart-Ass, or Why You Should Never Carry a Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office. Her following books, honest and self-effacing memoirs like The Tao of Martha: My year of LIVING, or Why I’m Never Getting all of That Glitter Off the Dog and novels like Twisted Sisters, have made her a fixture on nightstands all over the country (including, obviously, this writer’s). On June 22, Jen comes to Narragansett’s Dunes Club for Summer With Robin, a writers and readers love-fest organized by Robin Kall Homonoff of Reading with Robin that also includes literary stars like Curtis Sittenfeld, Emma Straub and Beatriz Williams. Jen’s newest novel, By the Numbers, comes out on June 21.

By the Numbers feels very different to me than your other novels.
This is a little bit of a departure for me. I’m used to working with sort of unpleasant characters. I’m all about the anti-hero usually, and this is the first time I actually started off making a character likeable. I wanted to strip away the magical realism that I’ve used in other books because I wanted to start with something solid and relatable. I’ve seen and read so much about my generation being the sandwich generation, with elderly parents and kids coming back home, and I thought it would be fun to explore that.

Is this the first time you’ve written a character who’s a mother?
I had to talk to a lot of my friends to just find out what it felt like to be a mom, because I don’t have kids. The closest I have is dogs, and you can just leave them at home and not have the police be called. I read a million mommy blogs, and I tried to imagine myself in that position. I’ve had to put myself in that position before with fiction, coming up with professions that people have had and creating the characters, but I wanted this to feel real.

This character, Penny, seemed to me much more relatable. She felt like a whole person who was very complicated emotionally and I really related to that, even though I’m not in her shoes. It felt evolved in your prose, and emotionally complex.
Before I wrote novels, I would read and see and hear a lot of authors saying “the characters told me where they wanted to go,” and I thought, well, get over yourself. It happened in this book. I didn’t want the husband Chris to be so likeable, but in him being likeable, it helped me to take Penny to another place, to really get into what happens when there’s an affair. That seems like it’s very black and white, but I don’t think that it is. The ending isn’t what I expected. I wanted her to have a happy ending, but this isn’t the ending that I started off intending to write. 

I felt that way about the husband, and I felt that way about the daughter Jessica, too. I didn’t want to like either one of them, but then they started doing these things that were so emotionally mature, but didn’t feel like gimmicks. I love that it happened in this book. It felt so refreshing.
I think the biggest difference in writing this book was me. This was about a year and a half ago, and I had just started to lose weight, and I ruptured my Achilles. That really changed my entire life. It’s a little injury that has big consequences. I couldn’t walk for almost three months. What I learned from this whole process is just what a gift movement is. Before this I was the biggest anti-gym person. I was like I don’t want to work out, my weight is fine, I’m good the way I am. But because I didn’t have the opportunity to move and to use my leg, when I did get that back, I have really embraced it. This is the first book I’ve ever written when I’ve worked out every single day and I think that that honestly made a difference in my writing. I would do my gym stuff every morning – I’ve lost about 90 pounds now – and I honestly think that when I sat down I was calm, I was centered, I was in a really good place, so I could think about who these people were and what their motivations were without any of the other noise. I had enough endorphins going on that things came out very different. Just being able to go to the gym gave me an insight into Penny that this was something that made her feel better.

You already had six memoirs out before you finished your first novel. Where did that transition come from?
When I started thinking about writing novels – my publisher had said “have you thought about this? You could do the transition pretty well” – my husband and I were looking for houses in the Chicago suburbs. I realized that there wasn’t anything in my budget that I wanted to live in. I thought, if I wrote two books a year, I could buy more house. Once I started doing it, I have to tell you… I like coming up with fiction far more than memoir at this point. At this point I’m really ready to begin to take my life back. I haven’t done anything that exceptional. There’s only so much I can write about my life. In fiction, you have unlimited worlds.

I’ve been reading your books and your blog forever. I imagine there are a lot of people like me, who know a lot about your personal life. I’m sure every single fan you meet is like, we should be best friends.
I think it’s neat. It’s hard to become friends [with people] who already know everything about you, not because I don’t like it and don’t appreciate it, but when you get to know someone, there’s give and take. I’ll meet someone new and tell them about something that happened to Fletch and me, and they’ll be like yeah yeah yeah, we know. It’s not bad, but it is sometimes a stumbling block for meeting new people. It’s strange for me to say “I have dogs,” and someone to say you have Libby, and you have Loki, and you have Hambone. I definitely love meeting readers, and live events are my favorite, favorite thing. I’m doing a cruise to Turks and Caicos with readers and it’s going to be so fun.

So is this going to be your first time in Rhode Island?
I grew up on the East Coast, so I’ve been through Rhode Island a million times, but it’s my first time going to Rhode Island specifically. When Robin put together this event, I saw all these famous authors, and I said, “Can you have someone less smart on the panel so I can have someone to talk to?” These are all really accomplished authors. This isn’t chick lit, this is women’s fiction.

The nearly sold-out Summer with Robin is happening June 22 at the Dunes Club in Narragansett. For more, visit www.ReadingWithRobin.com