The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #51: Jonathan Lerner

"People are rarely as shocked as you fear they might be. If your writing is true to yourself and believable, they'll accept it. Or, most will."

Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

Here’s the 51st installment, featuring Jonathan Lerner, author of Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid. -Sari Botton

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Jonathan Lerner. Portrait by Franco Vogt.

Jonathan Lerner is a novelist and memoirist, and a journalist focusing mainly on urban design and environmental issues. He is a longtime contributing editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine. He lives with his husband the philanthropic leader and community advocate Peter Frank in New York's Hudson Valley. His website is www.jonathanlerner.info.

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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?

I am 76. I began writing as an activist in the radical student movement of the late sixties. My earliest work was published in "underground" newspapers, and in the publication of Students for a Democratic Society, New Left Notes, of which I became the last editor before that organization collapsed in 1969.

What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?

Performance Anxiety: The Headlong Adolescence of a Mid-Century Kid. It was published in September, 2024.

What number book is this for you?

Depends how you count. In addition to Performance Anxiety, there is the memoir Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary, and the novels Lily Narcissus, Alex Underground, and Caught in a Still Place. So that makes five. I was also co-editor of Voices from Wounded Knee, about the 1973 confrontation on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, but that was an oral and photographic history, so the core material didn't originate with me.

How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?

It's a memoir, in a traditional sense, although it's not linear or chronological. But it has certainly made me think about autofiction. I realized that while I wasn't making anything up, in the process of selecting what to include and how to frame that material—as well as the work I am doing now to promote the book, which means promoting myself—I have inevitably fashioned a character named Jonathan Lerner who is separate from me. Everything about him is true of me, but everything about me is not true of him.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

He is sixteen in 1964. He has friends. He has fun. He smokes unfiltered Luckies. He loses his virginity. He gets his first car, and drives with reckless abandon. He is growing up as fast as he can, if not as fast as he wants. A white boy from the suburbs, he goes into the Black city to see the Motown Revue, and to listen to jazz in smokey clubs. Inspired by the non-violent civil rights movement, he embarks on an activist path that in a few years will place him in the militant Weather Underground. He has sex with girls, to obscure the unmentionable fact that he is gay. His father is checked out while his mother is dying—another thing that may not be discussed. The boy pretends he doesn't care. He projects himself as a worldly proto-adult. He is a scared kid.

Performance Anxiety is a memoir, in a traditional sense, although it's not linear or chronological. But it has certainly made me think about autofiction. I realized that while I wasn't making anything up, in the process of selecting what to include and how to frame that material—as well as the work I am doing now to promote the book, which means promoting myself—I have inevitably fashioned a character named Jonathan Lerner who is separate from me. Everything about him is true of me, but everything about me is not true of him.

What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?

One book somehow leads to another in my experience, although the path can be mighty convoluted. I finished my first novel, Caught in a Still Place, in the mid-eighties. It caught the attention of a then-young editor, John Oakes, who was working at the storied Grove Press. He offered me a contract. Grove shortly went under. John got a job at Henry Holt and took my book with him, so I was given a second contract (and a second advance—those were the days). John then lost his job at Holt. When I inquired what was happening with my book, I was told that nobody there was interested in it and I could have the rights back (and again keep the advance—this must sound like pure fantasy to young writers of today).

When I told John that Holt had backed out, he suggested I send Still Place to an edgy new press in the U.K., Serpent's Tail, who bought and published it in 1989. When Serpent's Tail's founder Pete Ayrton learned that I had been in the Weather Underground, he offered me a contract to write a memoir about that experience. I produced several versions, all unpublishable. I was still too conflicted about the history and angry at some of my ex-comrades. I couldn't get a handle on the story.

After the September 11 attack in 2001, I wrote an essay for the Washington Post Magazine exploring the impulse to terrorism through the lens of my experience as an ultra-militant in the Weather Underground. I thought it would be my last word about all that. Then a few years later I woke up one morning with the complete arc of a novel in mind. It would be based on my story of activism and reckless decisions, central to which in my view was my internal conflict about being gay. That was Alex Underground. Two different agents each spent two years trying to place it. The stock response was, "The gay novel is dead." (Tell that to today's legions of queer novelists.) So I self-published it, in 2009. Now I knew I had uttered my last word about the radical underground.

In 2016 I was shopping around Lily Narcissus, a novel drawing somewhat on my family's experience in the Foreign Service when I was a kid. By this time John Oakes had co-founded ORBooks. I sent him the manuscript. He replied that they weren't doing much fiction, but that given the moment's polarization and radicalization—Black Lives Matter,  Trump's candidacy, right and left militance—it would be valuable for me to write "a contemplative memoir of my experience in the Weather Underground." When an editor offers you a contract, even for a story you thought you were done telling, what do you say? ORBooks published Swords in the Hands of Children in 2017.

Lily Narcissus was published, after several rewrites, in 2022 by Unsolicited Press, an obscure collective of under-resourced writers—you take what you can get in publishing these days and I was grateful. Meanwhile, I had pandemic time on my hands. Writing Swords had been surprisingly fun, and I was very happy with the result. It occurred to me that maybe memoir was my true calling. So I got to work on another one, and that is Performance Anxiety.

Order the book…

What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?

I'd already divulged many regrettable and potentially shocking things I'd done, in my previous memoir. So I somehow got over being bashful about telling raw truths. But there's a lot in the new book about my family's trauma—my mother's death, our inability to talk about it, and my father's abdication of responsibility to his four kids. Getting that right, especially articulating my relationship with him, was hard. It will be interesting to hear what my three siblings think of my telling, and how much their versions would differ.

Getting it published has been almost ridiculously smooth and quick. I pitched the book to about 40 small or smallish literary presses. All of them are quirky. Within a few weeks I was offered a contract by Wipf and Stock, which is idiosyncratic too, but very efficient. Exactly six months later I was holding the book in my hands. Unheard of!

How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested? 

In almost all cases I just used people's real first names only. Surprisingly there was virtually no duplication of first names among the many folks I mention. I was in touch with only a couple of them. (Several high school friends whom I searched for turned out to have died within weeks of my looking for them.) I only checked and corrected my memories of scenes with two people  who had been close friends, because I wanted to get those anecdotes right, not because I wanted their approval. Almost all of the many people I talk about in the book will not have seen it in advance. I used real identifying details throughout, and only used pseudonyms a couple of times because I was describing situations that could be deeply embarrassing to the people mentioned.

I'd already divulged many regrettable and potentially shocking things I'd done, in my previous memoir. So I somehow got over being bashful about telling raw truths. But there's a lot in the new book about my family's trauma—my mother's death, our inability to talk about it, and my father's abdication of responsibility to his four kids. Getting that right, especially articulating my relationship with him, was hard. It will be interesting to hear what my three siblings think of my telling, and how much their versions would differ.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?

OK, you're naturally scared of telling your secrets, or of portraying people in ways that are true to you but might seem wrong or unkind to them. But everybody actually knows that life is weird, we all makes mistakes, and relationships come and go. People are rarely as shocked as you fear they might be. If your writing is true to yourself and believable, they'll accept it. Or, most will. The ones who don't—what can you do?

What do you love about writing? 

My journalism career has allowed me to travel to many places in this country and the world, to meet fascinating people,  see wondrous sights—and work with great editors who taught me the craft. It's a different kind of writing but many of the skills are transferable, such as knowing how to be economical. Fiction is great fun because I get to make characters be and do what I want. Memoir gives a different kind of pleasure, of self-absorption and reflection. That might be purely selfish if my goal weren't to use my own life to reveal something valuable about the world and other people.

What frustrates you about writing?

Never getting enough attention for my books. They should all be Netflix series.

What about writing surprises you?

I am amazed at how many zillions of people are writing today, especially because it's nearly impossible to make a living doing it. I've never made money from my books (aside from those advances on the first one, way back before publishing changed so much) and I won't make any money from this one (unless Netflix finally calls). But I was fortunate to build my journalism career at a time when I could survive well enough at it. For almost every aspiring writer, that's over.

Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times? 

In the past there were periods when I routinely got up early, did a little meditation and exercise, drank a lot of coffee, and wrote for two or three or four hours. I'm much less disciplined now—I'm also working much less hard—but in a looser way I do generally write early in the day, while I'm fresher in the head.

I'm surprised to say that right now I'm really enjoying promoting the new book—figuring out how to have a presence online, how to pitch to blogs and podcasts and reviewers. It feels like solving a puzzle. I have very modest and I think realistic expectations for these efforts, so every little success is a pleasure.

Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?

I cook most days, and always have. It's so opposite to writing, sensory not cerebral, active not sedentary—a good balance.

What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?

I'm surprised to say that right now I'm really enjoying promoting the new book—figuring out how to have a presence online, how to pitch to blogs and podcasts and reviewers. It feels like solving a puzzle. I have very modest and I think realistic expectations for these efforts, so every little success is a pleasure. Another book? Maybe a meditation on memory and its diminishing with age? That would be scary to focus on, since it's happening, but if I just constantly took notes about things I forget or get confused about, it shouldn't be that hard.

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Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.