The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #144: Susan Ostrov

"There are many men who paraded through my long love life, and I gave them pseudonyms in alphabetical order, to keep them straight. This worked well, though I didn’t make it to Z."

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 144th installment, featuring Susan Ostrov, author most recently of Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction. - Sari Botton

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

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Susan Ostrov

Susan Ostrov is Professor Emerita of English at Adelphi University. As a scholar, her specialty is classic romance literature, and her present writing is most often about romantic love. See susanostrov.com for her blog on all things romantic and anti-romantic. She is a proud citizen of New York City, born and raised in ungentrified Brooklyn.

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

I’m too old to specify my age! But I’m old enough to look back at all I’ve seen and done without judging myself and others as I would have earlier in my life. I could not have written this book in middle age.

I’ve been writing since I was able to read books on my own; I still have the first chapters of two novels, written in big block letters when I was in early elementary school. I abandoned both these books, as I never have been able to write fiction.

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

My book Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction was published in 2024 by Blackwater Press.

Usually hybrid memoirs add journalism and/or research, but in my case it’s commentary on romantic fictions, classic and contemporary, as well as our contradictory views of romance. I weave these literary influences and cultural ideas into the story of my complicated life as a romantic.

What number book is this for you?

As an English professor, I published four academic books, including two edited anthologies and two monographs on women and romantic fiction, classic and popular. The most recent scholarly book was The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories. My memoir Loveland is my first trade book, which brings the number to five.

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

My book is a hybrid memoir, blending traditional memoir with other material. Usually hybrid memoirs add journalism and/or research, but in my case it’s commentary on romantic fictions, classic and contemporary, as well as our contradictory views of romance. I weave these literary influences and cultural ideas into the story of my complicated life as a romantic.

What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?

My memoir, Loveland: A Memoir of Romance and Fiction, blends personal storytelling with cultural commentary about romantic love. As a scholar of romantic literature, I explore how love stories -- from fairy tales to Austen to contemporary fiction and film -- shape our confusing expectations of romance and the stories we live. By weaving my own romantic experiences with reflections on ideals rooted in the Victorian age, I ask what it means to love with both heart and mind.

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?

For most of my writing life as a professor, I published books and articles analyzing the concept of romantic love in literature. Then in 2018, I wrote an article contrasting my own view of love with that of a more traditional woman I had interviewed. It was the first time I’d published writing in the first person and discussed my own experience. This led me to wonder if I could write an entire book about my own life in romance. Then I had an idea: why not utilize my expertise in this subject as I wrote about my life?

It was exciting to narrate my own story in Loveland. My perception of romantic love from childhood was formed by the great literature of romance, definitions that became deep-seated beliefs. I show how my view of what we mean by romance evolved as I grew from a small child taking in my mother’s stories, through the phases of adolescent reading, early marriage, middle-age divorce, difficult love affairs, dating as an older woman, and where I am now.

Order the book…

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

A few agents and editors were put off by my arguments about romance, sex, marriage, and fidelity, opinions derived from my study of these subjects and my lived experience. Their view was that discussing these subjects as concepts would make the book hard to categorize, and therefore harder to sell. One agent liked my writing but advised me to cut all the ideas and focus on “making the memoir very dramatic,” or else ditch the memoir form entirely and write an “expert” book about modern romance, with a personal anecdote here and there. It was probably good advice, if financial gain had been my chief purpose! But I preferred to publish the book I had envisioned, because it meant a lot to me.

As it happened, the editors at Blackwater, an independent press, understood and liked the idea of the book, and Loveland was eventually published in 2024. I had wonderful editors who worked closely with me, and I’ve never regretted the decision.

For most of my writing life as a professor, I published books and articles analyzing the concept of romantic love in literature. Then in 2018, I wrote an article contrasting my own view of love with that of a more traditional woman I had interviewed. It was the first time I’d published writing in the first person and discussed my own experience. This led me to wonder if I could write an entire book about my own life in romance. Then I had an idea: why not utilize my expertise in this subject as I wrote about my life?

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?

It was challenging to draw portraits of my parents, my husband, and the three men I’ve truly loved. I wanted to be both honest and fair, no matter how I felt about my experience with them. My parents died long ago, or I probably would not have risked hurting them by describing their marriage as I saw it. My husband and other important men in my life were tricky to depict, but I tried to show the ways I contributed to these relationships, rather than simply blame it all on them. After all, I chose these men myself. I’ve seen memoirs by well-known writers in which the husband is a villain throughout. It seems unlikely to me that troubled marriages are entirely one person’s “fault,” since a relationship is a dynamic between people. I was aware that the men I wrote about would tell very different stories that would feel true to them.

I did not show my manuscript to my ex-husband, much less ask for his opinion, as I didn’t feel I owed him that, 35 years after we divorced. But I did run relevant passages by two of the most important men in my love life, both for factual accuracy and also to see if they wanted changes. Neither found inaccuracies in description, but one asked for small changes to protect his privacy, and I was fine with that. The other signed off cheerfully and did not ask for revisions; actually, he seemed to love what I wrote. This made me sigh with relief, as I’d worried that they might have been upset by the intimate detail.

As for real names, there are many men who paraded through my long love life, and I gave them pseudonyms in alphabetical order, to keep them straight. This worked well, though I didn’t make it to Z.

Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)

I completely fell in love with Jane Austen and the Brontes when I was an adolescent, so that was where my fascination with literary romance began, which plays a part in my memoir Loveland. In fact, I wrote about these great authors in my scholarly articles and books, I’ve lectured to both The Jane Austen Society and The Bronte Society, and I’ve written Introductions to editions of Austen’s Persuasion and Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In Loveland, I referenced Jane Austen and all the Brontes so often that my editor pleaded with me to rein in the number of comments on them!

I love certain memoir writers for their distinct styles: Zora Neal Hurston for her vivid language of feeling, Joan Didion for her elegance and clarity, Maggie Nelson for her intellectuality. But the most helpful to me in writing was Annie Ernaux’s autofiction, especially A Simple Passion. Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022, is especially dear to me because she’s never afraid to say what she feels in describing passion, whether it’s out of bounds or not, and doesn’t portray herself as either heroine or victim. Ernaux doesn’t try to uplift you or heal you; she doesn’t play the role of therapist or her own best friend. She just tells what happened and how she reacted at the time, though of course she selects the observations and shapes the story. Though I have a different style, this method is thrilling to me, especially in a world where judgement is pervasive.

Increasingly, many memoirs seem to have the structure and tone of self-help books, in that their purpose is inspirational and the story is there to show how to overcome adversity, heal from trauma or grief, or help you have a happy ending to your life story. There’s a problem, and that problem is overcome by the end. That type of memoir, and novel as well, has a huge audience, and that works for those authors and readers. But this is not what or why I write. My problems with love shifted and merged with other problems as my situation changed; there were plenty of problems, but no simple “answer.”

What I most wanted to do was take the reader on a journey to understand the stories of love we are told and that we tell ourselves. What fascinates me is the how and why of what happens, the desires and fears and obsessions we have and why we have them. In my writing about romantic love, I want to explore the way we define ideas like “romance” or “cheating,” how the shared definitions of culture in particular historical moments affect us and contributes to defining ourselves to ourselves.

That is inspired by what Annie Ernaux does, but it’s also close to what I do in a classroom, digging into ideas we assume are universal in order to unpack them. I don’t presume that ordinary beliefs about “real” love, or “healthy” relationships, or infidelity as unquestionably a moral outrage, are necessarily obvious truths.

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

By nature, I’m very persistent when I have a goal in mind, and I think persistence, while no guarantee, is a quality that helps any author. Sometimes my dogged persistence hasn’t served me well, as when I persisted in hoping for a life with certain men, though it was clear it wasn’t going to happen! But it was productive in this case: I just kept going and going, looking for better ways to write about my subject, and pursuing the publication of this book. I had many moments when I thought all my efforts would not work out…but went on with it anyway.

What do you love about writing?

I have loved books since my mother read me Mother Goose, and writing seems natural to me as the other side of the same coin. But I also came from a family that talked a lot but didn’t listen, where there was no real outlet for expressing what I was feeling and thinking. The journals I’ve kept on and off all my life were a way of understanding myself by listening to myself. Private writing that no one sees allows me to be who I honestly am, and that never fails to make me feel better and understand better. In that way it’s like reading; the wonderful communication of thoughts and emotions transmitted between writer and reader is deeply gratifying, and in writing my journal, I am both writer and reader.

What frustrates you about writing?

The act of writing doesn’t frustrate me at all; in fact, it’s so joyful that time seems to dissolve when I’m in the zone of writing, even writing this! But it’s frustrating what a writer must do to publicize in order to have readers. I loathe self-marketing, and in our time it’s often necessary even if you pay someone else to do it. For me, writing is pure pleasure and editing is interesting, but publicity is nothing but stressful.

What about writing surprises you?

The way in which writing is a form of thinking, i.e. how the process develops what’s deeply inside you and makes it live outside your head. The act of writing can open a perspective you haven’t had before. For example, an early reader of my manuscript said he was shocked that I didn’t provide a “guide to healthy relationships.” Advice doesn’t interest me; in fact, I dislike those endless books and articles telling you how to have a “healthy” relationship. “Healthy” isn’t even a term I think is useful, because what seems healthy to me might not work for you, and vice versa. I had not thought about this until I began writing the manuscript.

By nature, I’m very persistent when I have a goal in mind, and I think persistence, while no guarantee, is a quality that helps any author. Sometimes my dogged persistence hasn’t served me well, as when I persisted in hoping for a life with certain men, though it was clear it wasn’t going to happen! But it was productive in this case: I just kept going and going, looking for better ways to write about my subject, and pursuing the publication of this book. I had many moments when I thought all my efforts would not work out…but went on with it anyway.

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

No! I’m thankful not to need prompts, schedules or routines at all. I write very easily and at any time when I’m interested in the subject, though afterward I need many, many drafts. What I must have is absolute quiet, which is not always easy to find. It’s more about place for me than anything else: I like to get out of my apartment to write, but cafes can be noisy with talk and background music. My ideal writing location is the grand library at Columbia University, where I have access as an alum. It’s beautiful, it’s quiet, there’s a cafe if hunger sets in, and not least, clean bathrooms (this is important for an old lady)! I have written all my published work in Butler Library, from my graduate school papers in the Eighties to my most recent book and essays, so I’m very attached to it.

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?

My imagination is stirred by reading widely, both fiction and non-fiction, and by watching actors perform on screen and stage. I love performance in almost any medium. Since I’m quite an emotional person, reading the journals I’ve kept for many decades is not always fun (it involves a lot of cringing), but it gives me the broad picture I didn’t see or understand at the time. When I’m discouraged or upset, I like to predict what I think will happen in the future in my journal, and looking back, it’s instructive to see how often I was wrong. That’s not unlike reading the twisty plot of a novel.

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

A humor piece called “I Now Pronounce You,” a horrid warning to a fictional future boyfriend, is forthcoming in Alternative Loving Arrangements, edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel Hood. Not long ago, I had the idea of working with Nan, who has published ten collections of essays focused on relationships, on a new project tentatively called Stepping Out: Writings on Infidelity. We are now in the stage of gathering and reading submissions. I thought of the theme of infidelity because it’s a fascinating and complex subject that’s often taken for granted as an idea. There are many great novels and even more magazine articles about adulterous affairs, but the varied experiences and feelings of ordinary people in real life have rarely been gathered in a volume.

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