Laura Zigman the novelist is now also Laura Zigman the therapist. But with a twist: Zigman treats writers and writers’ problems exclusively. If you’re a writer with daddy issues, take those up with your other therapist. (And let’s face it—if you’re a writer, there’s always another therapist.)
But if you are a writer with problems endemic to your profession—doubting your character development, fighting through writer’s block, contending with an agent who probably hates you—you might want Zigman on speed dial.
“I’ve been therapized to death,” says the novelist Kimberly Elkins, who has been seeing Zigman for several months. “But I don’t need someone with a Ph.D. in psychology. I need deep empathy and understanding of a very particular set of problems.”
Zigman is intuitive, deeply curious, and naturally empathetic. But she’s also informed by a mountain of experience in the business of publishing as well as the craft—and she has worked through her own crushing challenges.
In 1994, as a publicist at Random House by day, she was writing her first novel by night. A Very Famous Author she was taking on a cross-country book tour heard through a mutual friend that she was working on a book. He offered to read it. Zigman was thrilled.
Forty-eight hours after she’d handed over the manuscript, her benefactor returned it to her with passages circled in black Sharpie, littered with notes such as “I’M BORED” and “THIS SUCKS” and “I AM DYING OF BOREDOM.” He also circled “ghost words,” as he called them, words he hated, words that meant nothing.
“I sat down, lit a cigarette, read what he said, and thought I was going to vomit,” Zigman says. “I knew, like, that was it. I wasn’t a writer. What had I been thinking?” She shoved the manuscript into a drawer, started taking antidepressants, and didn’t look at it again for two years.
But the reworked manuscript eventually became Animal Husbandry, a best-seller that was made into a 2001 movie, Someone Like You, starring Ashley Judd and Greg Kinnear. Five novels later, Zigman has had her share of hits and misses: books optioned and then dropped, great reviews, tepid reviews, terrors both physical and financial. Try keeping your writing life going when, in relatively quick succession, you are diagnosed with breast cancer, both parents die, your husband has health struggles that prevent him from working, and your son grapples with learning issues. This was Zigman’s lot.
Even after times of great critical success (The Washington Post called her latest, Small World—about what happens to a family when a child dies—“as poignant as it is funny”), that initial pain of rejection, the feeling of being stuck, never left her.
During the decade where she felt incapable of writing fiction, Zigman would turn to P.R. projects and ghostwriting to support her family. (Among them: Texas state senator and abortion-rights activist Wendy Davis’s Forgetting to Be Afraid and Eddie Izzard’s Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens.) Most successful novelists would feel being a pen for hire was a letdown. Zigman saw it differently: she found a strength she didn’t know she had.
“The writing was easy,” she says. “The hard part was getting someone to trust you so you could figure out who they are, and sometimes what their core wound is, so their book would be real.” To break the dam for her return to fiction, she says, “talking with various writer friends about not-writing helped, but what I really wished for was therapy for my writing with someone who was a writer.... It’s like when they tell you to write the book you want to read: I started doing the thing I wished existed.” She realized she had a gift for writer therapy, especially after her friends started calling her and asking, only half-jokingly, “Can I have a session?”
“There are people who can get your manuscript in the right place, but there aren’t that many who can get your head in the right place,” says her friend the writer Ann Leary, whose latest historical novel, The Foundling, was just optioned by Lionsgate. “She asks you so many questions, which help you see a character or a plot problem in a new light.”
If you want a coach or an editor to work on your manuscript, Zigman can send along some names. If you want someone to deal with the very specific emotional issues of writing and not writing and feeling helpless and ashamed, you hire her at the rate of $250 an hour. (She doesn’t accept insurance.) Zigman recognizes that her clients differ in terms of their talent. “But I am not there to evaluate,” she says. “There will be plenty of time for that. When you’re in the middle of working, all you want to hear is something positive.... Anything else could shut you down, or stop you cold.
“Typically, clients come to me with trauma,” she continues. “They just had a publication and it didn’t go well. They didn’t get good reviews. Their agent was disappointed. They just turned in a manuscript and their agent doesn’t like it. The publisher passed. They have stopped writing altogether.”
“There are people who can get your manuscript in the right place, but there aren’t that many who can get your head in the right place.”
Sometimes, the mere dread of what is to come brings writers through her door. Over the past decade, consolidations, staff cuts, and concentration on an ever dwindling number of Big Books has made the publishing industry increasingly fraught for all but a handful of writers.
“Three of the first clients I had all said the same thing to me,” Zigman explains. “They were all published novelists who were about to turn in new work. But they didn’t want to finish because they knew the minute they did, they had to go into the publishing eco-system.” That means merciless edits, absentee agents, and disinterested marketing departments. “Like, that’s how bad it is.”
Many clients come for the cheerleading and stay for the mental health. “I’m used to getting the 800-word piece rejected. That happens all the time,” says Janine Annett, a humor writer for The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. “But then, for someone to say sorry to your 75,000 words …. that’s a whole other level of rejection.”
For Pierre Valette, it was moving from being a successful writer of children’s television to trying to write a memoir about his daughter’s abduction and rape. “For someone whose work you really respect to tell you your story is worth telling was very affirming,” he says.
Zigman is currently working on her seventh novel, and when she’s not doing that, she’s seeing clients. She’d love to be a “perk” offered by publishers to writers in crisis—and, in fact, a publisher recently approached her about doing just that for first-time authors.
But her greatest hope is pretty simple: She wants you to ditch the shame and put pen to paper. “I can’t promise you that what you are working on will sell or be successful,” she says. “But I can promise that you’ll finish.”
Judith Newman is a New York–based writer and the author of To Siri with Love