![]() Heading into the 2020 publishing season, “Separation Anxiety” owned the “most anticipated” lists: Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, USA Today, Real Simple, Parade, Buzzfeed, Glamour.Īnd so it was that on the evening of her book launch at Harvard Book Store on the night of March 3, Zigman could have been the heroine in one of her own novels: She was a 50-something woman who had lost both of her parents to cancer and had fought the disease herself. The book is called “Separation Anxiety,” and it’s about a Cambridge mother and a wife whose life is unraveling, and who starts wearing her dog in a baby sling across her chest for comfort - something Zigman herself never did, she said. This time it would be about middle age - “the despair and hope of it.” Post by post, she worked her way back, until she realized she was ready to once again turn her own life into a thinly veiled novel. She wrote a movie script - a road trip story about a couple who couldn’t afford to get divorced - but she couldn’t sell it.Įventually she turned to Instagram, where the days she managed a single well-written paragraph felt like an accomplishment. ![]() ![]() She wrote 75 short, pointed sketches for two animated characters that she posted on Twitter and Facebook (among the episodes: “Comments of Self-Promoting Frenemy,” “Time to do our Couples’ Therapy Homework,” and “We Just Spent $125 on Ice Cream Cones!”). “It would be too hard, feeling like I’d failed the first time around,” she said.Īuthor Laura Zigman discussed her new book “Small World” in an interview along with author Tom Perrotta at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. “But his point was not that I was such a loser, but that I was scrappy.”įor many years during that time, Zigman assumed she would never write another book. “Even my father, in his nursing home, with a brain tumor, said, ‘Wow, you were at the top, and now look at you,’” Zigman recalled. She applied for a job she didn’t want, writing marketing copy for a major discount retailer, and wasn’t even offered an interview. She did PR for a happiness and wellness company even as she herself battled depression. ![]() With a family to support, she ghost-wrote memoirs for Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator who famously filibustered an abortion bill while wearing pink sneakers, and the comedian and actor Eddie Izzard. The only writing she had left in her was helping other people tell their stories. The downturn in her career, Zigman said, reminded her of her childhood, when she often felt “that there was nothing I could do to change my fate.’”Īlong with this feeling came a belief that the talent that drove her work from the beginning - she was a Presidential Scholar in the Arts finalist as a senior at Newton North High School - had abandoned her. ![]()
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