Eva Hagberg Fisher is the author of How To Be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: What impact did writing the memoir have on you?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I’m a very slow real-time emotional processor, so I didn’t have a TON of feelings while I was writing it - though when I first drafted the first 100 pages (which we ended up cutting, it was like 99 percent relationship drama that didn’t need to be in the book!) I had a hard time distinguishing between the past and the present and got a little torn up and ashamed.
After that, the impact was overwhelmingly positive. The book started feeling like my friend. My editor was the only other person who was reading it, and it felt like this very intimate secret project that I got to do whenever I wanted to, which was often.
I had a fantasy that I was going to write by holing up in a cabin somewhere, but instead I was very pragmatic about just writing for an hour here or there, going over scenes, seeing if they worked.
I feel like I became a much better writer by working with my editor - it mostly felt like a really intense technical challenge; I knew the pitfalls I wanted to avoid and the emotional notes that I wanted to hit. And then feeling like I’d done that was really gratifying.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope they feel like...[read on]