I was really impressed by the range of genres and authors signing up for this Sukkot indie week. Hilary Zaid is the first literary writer I’ve interviewed for the blog and it was a delight! Read on to learn more about small press, writing plots that just so happen to be extremely timely, and the wonders of cake.
Bookishly Jewish: Can you describe your publishing journey and how you ended up with your publisher?
Hilary Zaid: FORGET I TOLD YOU THIS is my second novel. You might think that the publishing journey gets easier the second time around, but sometimes it’s just like starting over! I was looking for a new agent, which can be a very long process, when I happened to receive my weekly email from The Practicing Writer, a wonderful and expansive list of opportunities for writers curated by Dr. Erika Dreifus (who also curates a list of Jewish literary links). I saw a call for manuscripts from a new, LGBTQ+ imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, Zero Street Fiction. I was intrigued. It felt like a perfect fit. Knowing that manuscript submissions can take a very long time to process, I decided to submit, while continuing my agent querying process. I couldn’t have been more surprised to hear from Timothy Schaffert at Zero Street not too long after, telling me that he loved my book and wanted to publish it.
BookishlyJewish: What is it like working with a small press?
Hilary Zaid: This is my second book with a small press, and small presses are great. I think overall there’s more of a sense of a shared project that has to do with the love of a book, rather than just an attempt to make money out of a product that happens to be a book. (I’m sure that most of the people working at Big 5 publishers also love books! But the Profit & Loss statement is real. And now one of the Big 5 is being taking over by a hedge fund, so…)
BookishlyJewish: FORGET I TOLD YOU THIS feels very timely both in terms of the theme of ghosts and the big data/social media presence in the book. Did this happen organically or did real life events inspire the book?
Hilary Zaid: Well, writing novels takes a lot of time, so I would never want to write one with the intention of hitting just the right moment. On the other hand, you are so right! FORGET I TOLD YOU THIS is grappling with Big Data and the role of AI at a moment when these concerns are very much in the news. That timeliness is just luck. But, when I started writing the novel seven years ago, concerns about data privacy and surveillance capitalism were very much on my mind as a growing concern.
I think when you’re writing contemporary fiction that engages with social issues, there’s always a tension between choosing the moment in which the book is set and watching events play out in the real world, in the news. My first novel, PAPER IS WHITE, which is set in the late 90s and which was written in the early 2000s, is about the legacy of Holocaust survivors and the future of marriage equality. As I was writing that novel, survivors were getting old and dying and marriage equality was all over the place in the news. It was a bit of a white knuckler!
BookishlyJewish: What has been the biggest surprise for you on this journey?
Hilary Zaid: For my book launch at the JCC East Bay in Berkeley, we had a huge cake with the book cover on it and —not gonna lie— having cake leftover all weekend was pretty sweet. They call it a “book birthday” but it’s a bit more like a “B mitzvah,” is it not? I still miss opening the freezer and finding cake.
BookishlyJewish: I notice you have published work in Lilith, a wonderful Jewish feminist publication. How does being Jewish inform your writing, if at all?
Hilary Zaid: SO MUCH!!!!! I feel like you’re asking a goldfish “How does water inform your worldview?” Right? I am a Reform Jew of the largely cultural variety, but that cultural worldview informs everything. Amy, the protagonist and narrator of FORGET I TOLD YOU THIS, is much more conflicted in her Jewish identity than I am, much more uncertain about whether it’s hers to claim. But the worldview in which she has been created — the lens on the world reflected in the novel— is very Jewish.
BookishlyJewish: What do you hope readers take away from your work?
Hilary Zaid: I hope readers come away from FORGET I TOLD YOU THIS with a closer relationship to the world we live in — both a clearer eye on the challenges we face, and also an enriched sense that the everyday world we live in is magical, if you’re paying attention.
BookishlyJewish: I always end by asking if you have a favorite Jewish Book
Hilary Zaid: I recently answered this question in Hey, Alma with one of my all-time favorite books ever, Laurie Colwin’s Goodbye Without Leaving. I love it as a piece of writing, and I love it more and more for the way in which it is Jewish—which is not apparently Jewish at all.
Hilary’s bio: Hilary Zaid has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a James D. Houston Fellow at the Community of Writers and two-time attendee of Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, Ecotone, Day One,Lilith and elsewhere. Long-listed for the 2018 Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Award for Fiction, her novel Paper is White is a 2018 Foreword Indies silver medalist and the winner of the 2018 Independent Publishers’ Book Awards (IPPY) in LGBT+ Fiction. Her novel Forget I Told You This, is the inaugural winner of the Barbara DiBernard Award.
Find Hilary’s Books: