My Weird Path to Becoming A Professional Writer #3: An Interview With Sarah Weinman

"Take advantage of whatever seems viable at any given moment, because it's probably going to evolve or disappear."

I talk to so many writers who express anxiety about the shape and pace of their careers or who see in other writers’ trajectories only how they themselves have fallen short. In both “Delivery & Acceptance” and TAKE IT FROM ME, I want to offer examples of people who took more circuitous paths to publication, who tried out different formats, mediums and platforms, and approached building their writing careers not as an act of credentialing but one of exploration. In what will be a regular feature in this Substack (in part by popular demand/in part because of personal interest), this week’s interview with Sarah Weinman highlights a writer with an unconventional career path. (For further inspiration, check out my interviews with Anne Helen Petersen and Hanif Abdurraqib.)

Sarah Weinman is a crime lady. The author of several acclaimed books of true crime, including THE REAL LOLITA and SCOUNDREL, a reviewer of crime and mystery books for the New York Times Book Review, an anthologist of crime fiction and a former publishing reporter, Sarah has worn and continues to wear a lot of hats, though they all share her sensibility. Read on if you’re interested in:

• Learning to use online relationships to network with other writers

• Wisdom from a publishing reporter on how to approach your own book

• Editing an anthology

• Crime, true and not-true

• Why working in a morgue isn’t always a dead-end job

Would you like to see more interviews like these? Are their types of writers you’d like to hear from or even particular writers you’d like me to track down? (My day job makes me quite adept at that.) Let me know in the comments!

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I've known you in a variety of roles, and you’ve worn so many different hats. Let's start with the broad outlines of your career. How do you understand your own origin story?

Curiosity has always guided me to whatever I'm doing currently and whatever I want to do next. It's this feeling that whatever I want to pursue, I'm going to figure out a way to do it in a manner that only I can do with my particular skillset, personality quirks, obsessions, compulsions, deep dives, and the like.

The common through line is crime. I view that in the most expansive way possible. I've always taken the tack that, be it crime fiction or true crime, it can encompass as many things as you wish. Some of that comes from reading widely, being exposed to many different art forms, and simply following what personally intrigues me.

When did it become crime for you? How old were you when you realized, "I'm really into crime?”

It started when I was as far back as eight or nine years old. I grew up in Ottawa, Canada—I bring that up because it's nice to acknowledge that I'm Canadian. Canada is seen as this bucolic, almost utopian place, but it also has had some of the worst serial killers ever. There's something about seemingly placid places where the extremities come to the forefront. When I was in my teens, young women and girls were going missing in Ontario, and it turned out they had been victims of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. This created a culture of fear as I was growing up.

I remember reading through an encyclopedia of baseball players with this weird notion of wanting to find out how they died. I couldn't tell you what my eight-year-old self was thinking. Then I’d read up on things and regaled my parents at the dinner table.

I was going to ask what your parents thought of your macabre interests.

They were sort of amused at a distance. I was very much a "good girl." I didn't rebel much, always kept to curfew, wasn't a partier. My life was quite prescribed, particularly in high school, which I saw as a means to an end.

In many ways, I was a late bloomer, and I wonder if my interest in crime was a way of sublimating all the things I wasn't doing in my day-to-day life. I could outsource my feelings and thoughts through these stories of extreme behavior and try to understand where humans step over that thin line between acceptable and extremely unacceptable behavior.

Our interests and upbringings are really parallel. I was always attracted to horror and darker stories, but I was very much a good girl, too. I had a religious upbringing, got good grades. I think being on the sidelines makes you aware of the tension between good and bad, and that people are hiding things.

Exactly. If you have a rich inner life, as creative people must, you know that what people display on the outside isn't fully reflective of who they are. They absolutely have things to hide.

When did you decide that writing was a way to explore your curiosity?

It came later than for many people. I wasn't one of those "I'm going to be a writer from day one" types, partly because my older brother was already "the writer in the family." I was the musician, the science kid. At McGill, my undergraduate degree was in biology, but then I found a listing for a master's program in forensic science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. I thought, "That's it!" I moved to New York in August 2001.

So I was here for 9/11 and that was incredibly formative. Many of my classmates worked at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, identifying human remains. I saw the effects that had on them—my first major exposure to post-traumatic stress disorder. And I was in the morgue every day that summer, but I was also talking to people who were still in the process of identifying bodies. I really got kind of a crash course in the human toll.

Concurrently with grad school, I was working a shift each week at a wonderful mystery bookshop called Partners in Crime in the West Village. That grew out of my interest in crime fiction, which had sprung up in high school but flowered in college.

Who were you reading at that time?

Robert Crais, Lee Child, Laura Lippman, S.J. Rozan, Harlan Coben, Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid. There was a wonderful website called Tart City focused on women in crime fiction writing about strong, somewhat transgressive female characters. There was this whole flourishing online community for crime fiction fandom.

This is interesting; even though the genres are different, many writers I've spoken to found their careers through fan communities. Hanif [Abdurraqib] started writing through zines, and I just interviewed Lee Stein, who started on Tumblr boards. When did you feel like you could do this professionally?

After finishing grad school and spending time in London, I returned to Ottawa because I couldn't afford to stay in New York. While supposedly working on my thesis, I started reading blogs like Gawker and Maud Newton's site^[1]. It got me thinking, "Why is there no blog devoted to crime fiction?"

So I started one—fancifully titled "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind."

Not inaccurate.

Well, my mind definitely remains idiosyncratic! It was about getting in the practice of writing every day, sometimes multiple times a day. It developed a robust comments section and became a water cooler for people in the genre.

From that blog, I got my first professional reviewing gig at the Washington Post in 2004. That led to other freelance assignments, and by the end of that year, I had a book review column for crime fiction in the Baltimore Sun. It was a little less than a year after starting the blog. But you could do that then. Now the avenues are so different.

What do you think a writer today, now that blogs aren't what they were, might learn from this path that you took?

Take advantage of whatever seems viable at any given moment, because it's probably going to evolve or disappear. Nothing has a permanent shelf life anymore. The trick is to be as nimble as possible—try something and see what happens.

Don't go in thinking you'll automatically get an audience, because people quickly detect if you're just trying to promote yourself. They want to sense that you have a voice, something to say, that you're authentic in how you say it.

Could you talk about developing that voice? What changed as you evolved from emerging Sarah to who you became?

I learned that you just write and write and write, and the things you think aren't settled when you're in your mid to late 20s—you're really just beginning. I was also learning to be entrepreneurial. I moved back to New York in 2005 and eventually had to scramble when my full-time job disappeared.

I started writing for Media Bistro's publishing blog, GalleyCat—about 10 posts a day at $15 a post. I did that for two years and burned out, but I learned a ton about covering the book business. I remember sitting in court watching publishing industry legal cases unfold.

It must have been such a fun intersection of your interest in crime and your interest in publishing.

Oh my God, it was! And doing GalleyCat made me further interested in the book business, which had started when I was a bookseller. I never knew what a distributor did until I was a bookseller, and it definitely put me off ever owning a bookstore. I thought, "No, I now know too much. I can see under the hood." But it didn't put me off covering the book business.

I think I knew you first as a byline on reviews, but also as a publishing reporter. How did being a publishing reporter shape how you thought about your career as a writer?

I don't think I would be the book writer I am without having worked at Publishers Marketplace and GalleyCat. Counterintuitively, it made me protect my own creative vision even more, because I saw how little control any author actually has.

Working at Publishers Marketplace taught me to never be satisfied professionally—there were always new questions to ask and avenues to explore. I learned to be not just a publishing reporter but a business reporter. I learned how to read SEC filings, look at quarterly reports, and who the actual power players were in the industry. The mainstream coverage often focuses on the glamour of agents, editors, and authors, but you can't really talk about the business without talking about marketing, operations, and the business side.

This feeds back into my first publishing project, an anthology called Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, a collection of short stories by women crime writers from the '40s to the '70s. I did it for a stupidly small advance, but to me, it was about learning how to publish a book in a low-risk way. And unlike many people, I enjoy handling permissions.

When you transitioned to writing your own books, how did your "protect your creative vision" mentality inform that process?

When I look back at The Real Lolita, that would be impossible to replicate. I started the magazine piece for Hazlitt in March of 2014. The piece landed in November, and it went mega-viral. I knew, even as I was working on it, that I had more to say, not just about Sally Horner, but also the relationship between art and life through Nabokov's writings.

To clarify—you knew while writing the piece that you had more to say, but you weren't yet sure it was going to be a book?

I was pretty sure that I wanted to turn it into a book proposal, but you just never know. Of all the things I had worked on to date, this one felt like a book project. I had published pieces in The New York Times Magazine and The New York Observer, but those didn't feel like book projects. They felt like magazine stories. This one felt like, "Oh, there's more here."

A lot of writers struggle with knowing what is a book project versus a magazine story. How were you thinking about that?

A story feels self-contained, with one central question to answer in a few thousand words. A book has multiple questions. The first question I always ask is, "Why has nobody looked at this before?" Then come deeper questions.

For The Real Lolita, it was: what is the relationship between art and life, and what responsibility does an artist have towards someone's real-life trauma? With Scoundrel, it was about misogyny and who we put our belief in—why white men of a certain kind are more adept at stoking belief, and what consequences result from that.

When the essay version of "Real Lolita" was published, it became the top-viewed story on Hazlitt's website. When writing the book proposal, I had quantifiable information about its potential impact, audience, and response.

You were a high-information writer. How did knowing what you knew influence how you went about finding a publisher?

I'd had an agent since 2007—first Shana Cohen at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, then David Patterson at the same agency after Shana left the business. When I had my "Real Lolita" idea, we developed the proposal through multiple rounds before showing it to publishers in spring 2016.

I had confidence I'd get a publisher because I knew people would read it, but I knew it had to be as good as I could make it. It was a pleasant surprise when it went to auction.

Interestingly, when I chose Ecco, I didn't go with the highest bidder. This is where industry knowledge helped. I asked: who would most likely still be around in their current form when my book was done? Where would my editor still be my editor? Where would there be multiple advocates at the imprint?

I felt that immediately in my meeting with Ecco. Nine years later, Ecco is still my publisher.

That's so helpful. I keep thinking about this former book editor who once said to me, "I don't think any book should take more than a year to write."^[3]

I have many thoughts on this! Books that take 10+ years to write usually should take less time. I'll never be one of those writers because at a certain point, perfect becomes the enemy of good. You have to accept you'll never get everything into a particular book—it's just a snapshot of where you are at that point.

With The Real Lolita, I discovered material after publication that became an afterword for the paperback. With Scoundrel when late information came in, I thought, "Someone else can run with this." I later learned Sam Tanenhaus used some of that material in his forthcoming William F. Buckley biography, which is great.

Political headwinds can shift, taste can shift, and the timelines for nonfiction are different than fiction. Publishers sometimes follow trends like "Gone Girl is the big thing" or "they want something about a hotel because 'White Lotus' is on TV"—and this may not be what they usually do.

I couldn't agree more. And I also think there's so much anxiety around AI, some of which I think is misplaced. But if anything makes you impervious to AI, it's your own curiosity and idiosyncrasies.

AI can find information, but it doesn't know how to ask questions. As a nonfiction writer working in archives or conducting interviews, questions are crucial—they guide me to what I'm looking for. Sources often apologize for not being helpful, but every little thing is helpful because it's up to me to determine the narrative.

Before we finish, I want to hear about your forthcoming book, which I heard is now available for pre-order.

The book is called Without Consent: The Landmark Case in the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime. Ecco is publishing it on November 11. It's about the first major American marital rape case, which happened in Salem, Oregon in December 1978. Greta Rideout, while still living with her husband John, accused him of rape. It became possibly the first rape trial televised nationally.

In 1978, only four states had made marital rape illegal. Think about it—in 1974, it was perfectly legal for someone to rape their spouse in the United States, Canada, and many other countries. But rape reform laws and second-wave feminism had started to change that.

This case featured a very young, conventionally attractive couple in a government town completely over its head, creating a huge media circus. Though he was acquitted, the trial led to major legislative changes over the next 15 years. By 1993, every state had criminalized spousal rape.

But I never wanted to forget this was about real people, particularly Greta and her experience reclaiming her privacy.

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^[1] Newton ran a popular eponymous publishing news site in the early aughts.

^[3] And that is when I decided never to sell this editor any of my authors’ books.

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