Pamela Redmond – Younger and Older

Pamela Redmond’s funny, perceptive romcom Younger is a current popular TV series – billed as “the next Sex in the City” – and now she’s back with a comical and poignant sequel called – you’ve guessed it – Older. What happens when a woman lies about her age to get a job and then where is she left when the charade has to come to an end? Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and Pamela talks about the ageism both men and women face in the workplace these days, feeling the fear and doing it anyway,  and her dream of turning Younger into a Broadway musical. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: Pamela’s years as a Glamour editor – and the controversy that followed Pamela’s latest challenge – a Broadway musical The challenge of ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’ Owning the biggest naming site on the Internet 30 things all women should know by age 30 How she can’t resist learning new things Where to find Pamela Redmond: Website: http://pamelaredmondsatran.com/ Facebook: @thepamelaredmond Twitter: @prsatran Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepamelaredmond/ What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Pamela. Hello there Pamela, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. Pamela Redmond: Thanks, Jenny. Great to be here. Pamela Redmond – Novelist Jenny Wheeler: Beginning at the beginning, we always start with this point, people love to know the answer to it. Was there a Once Upon a TIme moment when you decided, I want to write fiction? I’m aware that you’d written quite a lot of nonfiction, but when did the fiction light bulb switch on and was there a catalyst for it? Pamela Redmond: I remember wanting to write fiction as early as high school, but it was daunting to figure out how to do that and earn a living. Even though I took fiction writing classes in college and when I first moved to New York, which was in the seventies, I worked as a waitress and wrote short stories at night. I tried that for a couple of years, which seems like an embarrassingly long time now to take figuring out that that was not going to be a way to earn a living. Then I got married and had kids and had a career as a magazine journalist and started writing nonfiction books and through all that the desire to write fiction grew, but I was bedeviled how to make it a reality. It wasn’t until my youngest child started school and I had a little bit of time and a little bit of freedom in terms of my mind, that I took a fiction writing class and started trying in earnest to write a novel. Finding time as a Mom to write It’s funny because – she was a girl then, now she’s a woman – my babysitter at that time is now the age I was when I started. Her children are 4 and 6 I think, the same age that my children were, and she’s trying to write and it’s challenging. Jenny Wheeler: It is quite a common unfolding for women who have children and families. I didn’t have children of my own, I had stepchildren, but you get very consumed with family life in those middle years, the twenties and thirties, don’t you? Pamela Redmond – Younger – the novel Pamela Redmond: Yes, you have to. You don’t really have the choice, like I’ll work on my career now and deal with children when I’m in my forties or fifties or whatever. If that’s something you want, you have to get it together and do it, and then it’s sitting in the middle of your life, which is great, you’ve chosen that, you want it, it’s wonderful. But if you have to earn a living and you have children, something has got to go, and sitting and noodling over a novel is that thing for most people. Jenny Wheeler: Sure. You had a very successful career as a magazine journalist and that can also be a trap. Your own success can be a trap. But now you are a New York Times bestselling author of more than 20 fiction and nonfiction books. We want to focus on the two most recent ones, which have a lovely story to them, they are delightfully connected. Younger was ‘wish fulfillment’ Younger, which became a popular TV series of the same name, and Older, which you’ve published this year. I think listeners would almost immediately be able to see the relevance to what you’ve already said to us about your own life but tell us how Younger came to be. Pamela Redmond: As I get older myself, I realize how much Younger was wish fulfillment for me at that time. The idea came about because of reading an article about extreme plastic surgery and how you could go to the jungle in Uruguay and emerge looking like a totally different and presumably younger person. I thought, what would I do if I had that opportunity? I thought I would go back to my twenties and start my novel writing career much sooner. So, in a way the theme in the story of Younger came out of my own wish to go back. The heroine Liza is trying to return to work in her mid-forties, nobody wants to hire her and so she finally in desperation pretends to be in her twenties and gets an entry level job and a young lover and a whole new fake life that’s wonderful, except it’s not real. It’s a fairy tale for middle aged women. If you could do it over again, what would you do? A fairy tale for middle aged women Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s a great question. There is a lot of delightful comedy in the way the two generations interact. It takes the boyfriend quite a while to realize what the full story is and there’s some delightful, generational interaction going on there. That became a very popular TV series, as we’ve said, but it was quite a few years after you had first published I believe, wasn’t it? Pamela Redmond: Yes, the TV series debuted in 2015 and the book was originally published in 2005, so that was 10 whole years. It had been optioned a lot but never got made until Darren Star, who made Sex and the City, came along and turned it into a really wonderful TV show. Younger – The final – Season 7 of the show being filmed now Then of course the show went beyond the original book and brought in new characters and Liza’s pretense is exposed. For a long time, it was difficult for me to see how you could do a sequel because the story was still so vibrant and ongoing on television, as it still is. They’re shooting right now, the final season, and I don’t know what the story is going to be Jenny Wheeler: That’s amazing. Your research in those years, it’s obviously nearly 20 years ago, what were the generational differences that struck you, that became your points of conflict or fun in those years? Pamela Redmond: At that time, in 2005, my daughter was 23, she’s the oldest of three children. Being with her and being around her friends was an education in what it was like to be 40 something hanging out with, or not hanging out with, but at least being in the same atmosphere. And I was writing for a lot of women’s magazines and my editors for the most part were much younger. Funny generational differences So obvious things like slang or language, musical references, television references, all those things are awkward and funny, but I think the famous scene in the book that made it onto television was when Liza gets invited to go to an exercise class with her younger colleagues and they’re in the locker room and Liza hasn’t gotten the memo, I’m waxing, and one of the characters says, it looks like my mother’s. Things like that. Women who are older, once you get out of that whole age group and that whole social world, you don’t get the memo. You don’t find out what happens on dates and what people expect sexually and how revealing they are about their lives, their thoughts, their relationships. That’s a big adjustment. Jenny Wheeler: In Older you revisit what happens in Younger and there must be a certain autobiographical aspect to that because it’s really funny. You have a story about an older woman who’s written something like Younger and is now doing the follow-up. What was the genesis for that? A show within a book within a show Pamela Redmond: The genesis for that was I had written another book I didn’t sell and I realized there was an element in the book, which was the character having her life adapted as a TV show, that really belonged in a sequel to Younger. That realization gave me this whole idea for Liza who’s a novelist at the end of Younger. Of course, she would write the book about her time pretending to be a millennial and of course Hilary Duff, aka Kelsey, would want to make that book into a television show. Of course, it is a successful television vision show. That whole idea of the show within the book, within the show, felt like a very adventurous way to write a sequel that harkened back to the original and the characters that have become so beloved from the show, while taking the story to a new and adventurous level for me as a writer. Jenny Wheeler: In your sequel she’s decided she’s going to totally own up to her age, she’s going to move into the real life that’s there for her, and she’s challenged in the things that have to occur for that to happen. Has there been any interest in turning this one into a TV series as well? Younger – Season 7 of popular show Pamela Redmond: Darren Star and Viacom own the rights to this stuff. When they bought Younger, it included the film and television rights to the characters and the situation. I think it would be an amazing television movie or limited series. I’m not sure I see it as a serious series but I have a fantasy about them, as long as they’re shooting the last season, why not stay for an extra few weeks and shoot a little movie. That’s a fantasy of mine. And now – the Broadway musical Last weekend I spent the weekend working on a proposal to turn Younger into a Broadway musical. That’s something I own the rights to, and I think would be such a natural way to take it in a different direction, from the television show, from the book, that Cinderella story on stage. And Sutton Foster, who stars in the show, is a musical theater star on Broadway. Jenny Wheeler: What a great idea. There would be wonderful music in it too. Pamela Redmond: I know. I have been taking a class in book writing for musical theater and in lyric writing which I have never, ever done before. My classmates are literally a third of my age and they all are theater nuts and they’re wonderful composers and lyricists. I seem a horsey and a ducky, I just don’t know anything. I wrote my first song a few weeks ago and the teacher really liked it and I haven’t felt so good about anything in a long, long time. Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Just a technical aside – how did you write it? Do you have a keyboard there or a guitar? Pamela Redmond: No, I just wrote the lyrics. Apparently one can do this. You write the lyrics and then we’re going to give the lyrics to the composing class and have the composers put the music to it. Some of my classmates do both, but not me. How not to look and sound old. . . Jenny Wheeler: It sounds wonderful. I love it. You are an expert in the field of aging gracefully because you wrote a couple of nonfiction books on that topic. Looking at Older again, what kind of advice would you give to say, a woman in her late forties, early fifties who was wanting to really inhabit her life in a more wholehearted way. What would you say to her? Ageing gracefully – comic advice Pamela Redmond: In some ways Younger is a cheat because Liza deals with ageism by passing as someone young. It is like the old story which we’ve been reading more about lately, of black people a hundred years ago who dealt with racism by passing as white and the sacrifices in terms of their soul they had to make in order to get that benefit. I think Liza is up against the same thing. As much as it’s fun and a fairy tale and a fantasy, in the end it’s not a solution to ageism in society and it’s not a solution to restarting your career in life, because in Older Liza doesn’t really have any choice. She doesn’t want to fake it anymore, but she couldn’t. I mean, I couldn’t have, even at 44 I couldn’t have and at 50 I definitely couldn’t have. In that case, there will be ageism. It is there, whether it’s in your face or not. You have to accept that and figure out how to be tough around it and that is not easy. I think that’s more daunting than the professional piece or making the contacts or whatever – going back into the workforce and realizing that nobody wants you there. If you were already there, there are so many professional people, men and women, who are 50 or 55 or 60, who are cast aside and marginalized and demoted because of their age, so somebody who’s been out of things for 10 or 20 years and is trying to get back in, that is really tough. Be the captain of your own ship My advice would be start a business, be the captain of your own ship. Not easy either, but I would rather do that. I told a friend today, it’s like you’re still auditioning for the basketball team, and you need to invent your own sport and be the captain of your own team because you’re not going to get on the team. It’s not happening. Jenny Wheeler: It’s a bleak thing to have to acknowledge, but certainly in some industries, and journalism is one of them, I have a bit of a sympathy with it as well. If somebody has been editor of a magazine for 20 years, it’s so very hard to retain freshness over that time and you can imagine the employers thinking, anybody, just fresh blood, would be better than the same old, same old. Is there a way you can refresh yourself in your head? A lot of it is within your own mind, isn’t it, the battle you’re fighting. Pamela Redmond: Yes. I think one of the supposed benefits of age is that you feel more secure and more comfortable with knowing how to do things and doing them that way. Part of starting new or being fresher is not knowing as much. You have to let go of those patterns and let go of your security, which is very uncomfortable. 30 Things – Advice for grown women I do love taking classes. I think that’s a great way with relatively low stakes to put yourself in a position to practice being ignorant. You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because being fresh and being new and bringing a new viewpoint is going to be uncomfortable. Jenny Wheeler: It’s that cliché about doing something that frightens you or not being afraid of failure, that kind of approach. Pamela Redmond: I think so, because if you’re doing something new and trying to do something different, that means by definition you’re taking more risks, and risk is frightening. We tend to pull away from it, especially as we get older and we feel like we have an alternative. I can do this nice comfy thing that I know how to do, that I’m good at. Meeting the challenges of life My life is just like everybody else’s.  I have the same challenges as a woman in my sixties in LA. I got divorced after 33 years, I moved here on my own. I had been here for a couple of days, total. I didn’t know anybody at work, and it was really hard. I would ask people to go for coffee and people would be like, no, I have enough friends. No thanks. I tried to start writing for the television industry and they definitely think 40 is elderly. Nobody was scooting over for me, no matter what kind of works I had to my credit, no matter how many books or how much experience. It still totally sucks, but I’ve learned a lot about how to brush that off. I love Taylor Swift. Brush it off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FpCPzwNa7Y ‘Brush it Off’ – Taylor Swift. Pamela applauds the sentiment. Jenny Wheeler: One of those nonfiction books I mentioned was called 30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She’s 30. It was based on lots of famous women giving their advice. It was through Glamour magazine. Can you tell us, what do you think is the most important bit of advice that those famous women gave? Was there something that still stands out and is relevant today? Pamela Redmond: There was something in there about not taking rejection personally which I think, especially for women, is really difficult. It’s very difficult for me. But the more you can do that and the more you can keep going anyway, I think is a really good piece of advice. ‘Maya Angelou’s Best Poem Ever’ It’s funny because what became that book started as a column in Glamour magazine and it became known as Maya Angelou’s Best Poem Ever. My name fell off it, it became this viral email that women sent to each other. and I was bedeviled. How will I get my credit back for this? Famous advice in Pamela Redmond’s ‘Glamour’ list. I finally wrote a piece for Huffington Post called ‘I Wrote Maya Angelou’s Best Poem Ever.’  So whenever anybody Googles Maya Angelou’s Best Poem Ever, they get my piece about how it’s not really her best poem ever, it’s really written by me. And in the ultimate betrayal, Glamour magazine had it on their site for years with my name on it, with the story, my name is on the book obviously, and recently they took my name off it. It says by Glamour. So Glamour, I wrote to you, I said how dare you do this to me? Nobody responded. Jenny Wheeler: Did you ever get any money out of it? Pamela Redmond: Not really. Jenny Wheeler: You got paid to do the initial story, I suppose. Pamela Redmond: Exactly. Jenny Wheeler: How did you land that job at Glamour magazine? Pamela Redmond: I was an editor at Glamour in the eighties. I was a fashion editor who got my job through one of those weird New York somebody knew somebody connections. Then I became Fashion Features Editor and I left to write my first name book in 1986. Then I got a contract to write articles and eventually this column, which was called the Glamour list, that I wrote for many, many years. What Pamela likes to read Jenny Wheeler: You’ve had a fascinating life, but moving away from that to talking a little bit more about your taste in books, because we’re into The Joys of Binge Reading, what do you like to read and has it changed over the years? Pamela Redmond: I think it changes over the months. I remember when my kids were little, I loved to read mysteries because I didn’t have the bandwidth to read anything more subtle. Lately, thanks to my wonderful new Zoom life, I’ve been able to reconnect with a group of writer friends in New York. We read books in the context of our own and talk about them in the context of our writing, which is so interesting. Alice McDermott’s 2017 novel The Ninth Hour They are all novelists and it’s a much more ambitious literary reading than I’ve done since my twenties. For instance, we read all of E.M. Forster and now we’re reading all of Alice McDermott. These are people who I read and loved in my twenties and it’s so great to be rediscovering them now. I’ve been very inspired with my own writing to be more ambitious and experimental and soulful, maybe. Jenny Wheeler: Great but this is binge reading. What do you like to binge read or do you have no time for binge reading these days? Pamela Redmond: I’m more of a binge writer, I really am. I think I might be getting that disease like graphomania where you write, write, write, write, write. I probably write a lot more than I read and I don’t have much time to read anything that’s not part of my group. Binge writing instead Jenny Wheeler: What do you write in your binge writing? Pamela Redmond: I’ve been working on a new novel and I wrote a new TV pilot. I spent the whole weekend writing a one-page proposal for Younger, the Broadway musical. I took me 25 hours maybe to write that one page. I’m a writer who loves the process of writing. Some people say I want to have written, but that’s not me. It would be disingenuous for me to say I would be happy if nothing ever got published, but if it didn’t, I would still write. Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. What do you think is the best and the worst advice people give to starting out writers these days, no matter what age they might be, as a beginner writer? Pamela Redmond: That’s a great question. I would say one of the worst pieces of advice to my mind in the way I write, is to just sit down and start writing and let the page speak to you. I tried to do that for literally decades and it doesn’t work. A novel is too big and complicated a piece of work to approach that way. Best advice for new writers That’s the worst. My best advice changes a lot depending on if I’m taking a class or I’m reading a book, but I’ve been reading this book called The 90-Day Novel and he has this amazing process where you write a novel in 90 days. The first 30 days of the process is devoted to doing exercises that force you to think about your characters and story in really innovative ways. My group of novelists is reading that and talking about it. We love it, and these are people who’ve written probably 50 books among them. It looks like a kind of semi cheesy little ‘how to get rich quick’ book, but it’s awesome. Jenny Wheeler: That’s great because I was going to say, when you said the worst advice was just start writing, you probably aren’t a total plotter though. You probably do like to leave some space in the middle, so how do you approach it in terms of those two ends of the spectrum they talk about – the plotter and the pantser? Plotters and pantsers revealed Pamela Redmond: The plotter and the pantser? Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Have you heard that phrase? Pamela Redmond: No, I love it. Jenny Wheeler: It’s probably more romance writers that talk that way. Elizabeth George – advice on writing Pamela Redmond: That’s funny. I took a class back in 2000, during this time when I was really starting to write novels, with the mystery writer Elizabeth George, who wrote the Detective Lynley novels. I was huge fan of hers and she has a process and a book about it that I took to heart and really informed me. I’m definitely a plotter but it doesn’t start with the plot. It starts with the characters and creating the characters. The 90-day novel does this too, thinking in a very free flowing creative way about who your characters are and then your settings and then your themes. There is a question in an exercise in the 90-day novel which is, what is your book about? That question is a very deep question. I wrote five hours one day about that, trying to find out for myself, what is this really about? You know, it’s about this woman who has a business and she wants to leave it to her son, but it’s really about feeling like you’re still an effective person in the world. As you get older it’s really about feeling like you have to do what you want before the clock runs out, but what do you really want? Enriching creativity with questions Those are big, exciting questions to me and if you think about those kinds of questions before you start writing, it will help you create a much richer book. Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like a great book. Is that one that’s coming? Pamela Redmond: It’s out now, and apparently quite famous, although I never heard it before. Here’s another example of an exercise. Write down every fear you have about writing the book you’re thinking about writing, and then give those fears to your character. It sounds very simple, but I did that. Really try to be honest – I’m afraid people won’t think I’m any good, I’m afraid people will think I’m just doing the same old thing. You realize how resonant those fears are for you or any kind of artist or any level of artist and how getting in touch with that can not only help you deal with them, but can help you enrich your character Jenny Wheeler: I was actually referring to the book you were talking about. Is that one you’ve published yet? Pamela Redmond: No, I haven’t published that yet. In fact, I wrote about a hundred pages of it and my editor looked at it and said, I don’t think this is your next book. I think this is the book after your next book. I think you need a bridge between Older and this book, which is very big and sweeping. High concept ideas So I have a new idea now that she loves that I’m at the very beginning of developing. It has a high concept idea behind it like Younger did. It’s like, who are these characters and what is this book really about? I’m at that stage. Jenny Wheeler: That’s great because we are starting to run out of time together but that brings us to the question of what is next for Pamela the writer? You’ve got so much on but tell us what you’re hoping to achieve in the next 12 months. Pamela Redmond: Haven’t all our plans been upended? Besides being a plotter, I’m a big planner and I always have a word of the year. This year I was having trouble coming up with my word, it was so interesting. I thought strong – no, that’s not really it. I couldn’t come up with the word. Then recently I thought of my word and my word is big. The idea behind this is that everything you do or every decision you make should relate back to that word. I feel like I want to be bolder and more ambitious now, more adventurous, not those old fears, it’s time for them all to go. Where to next for Pamela I’d love to be working on Younger the musical and I’d love to have this new novel sold and on schedule with my publisher. I own a business, Nameberry, which is a big part of how I spend my time. We have a new project for that I’m excited about launching in the new year. That probably takes me through maybe until the end of the pandemic. Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a little bit about Nameberry because we didn’t mention it, but it’s the world’s largest baby naming website, isn’t it? Pamela Redmond: Yes. As a kid I was a little name nerd and I had these notebooks and special pens and I would create these families and name them. My family thought I was insane. Before the internet, if you had a weird interest, how are you ever going to know, I guess I’m the only one in the world. So it’s very gratifying. A ‘name nerd’ from birth Nameberry is based on ten books about names I co-wrote with Linda Rosenkrantz. One element of the site is a big forum where name lovers meet and talk to each other. It’s very gratifying for me to think of people who have this passion, teenagers finding each other and talking about, what do you like better, Rosie or Romie? Those are big questions to a name nerd. Jenny Wheeler: How do you go about naming your characters in your books then? Is it a painful process? The challenges of naming Pamela Redmond: I feel like I’m the shoemaker’s daughter or something. (Being a names expert who has difficulty naming her own characters – Ed Note,) I have to really get better at this. But someone recently said to me, you’re not really naming your characters, you’re deciding what their parents would have named them. So, like soap operas on TV, the characters always have names that are completely anachronistic. They’re currently fashionable baby names like Kennedy and Kylo. Nobody had those names thirty years ago. Jenny Wheeler: I’m fascinated by Skylar. That seems to have popped up from somewhere. I don’t know how, but it’s everywhere. Pamela Redmond: With an ‘a’ at the end? Jenny Wheeler: No, ‘lar’. Skylar. Pamela Redmond: I know. They’re all variations of that. Jenny Wheeler: One other question I like to ask everyone I talk to – at this stage of your career, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change, and if so, what would that be? A second time round choice Pamela Redmond: I would definitely start writing novels a lot earlier because that was my true ambition all along and I feel like I didn’t honor it. That was the thing I wanted and assumed I couldn’t get. So I went after all these other things down here – well, I can get this, I can get that. Now I wish I had gone after the thing I really wanted. And been less afraid. Yes, it was hard to get that thing and maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it, but a lot of the reason I didn’t go after it is that I was afraid. Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. It’s a takeaway for people listening to not let your fears get in the way of the thing you really want to do. Pamela Redmond: It’s very hard, it really is. But from this point of view, I realize that a lot of the fears were meaningless and rather than letting the fear stop me or using it to justify my own non-performance, I should have worked on dealing with the fears. I went to therapy, but it didn’t help. I mean, it helped, but it didn’t make me not afraid. Maybe I just needed to get older. There is something about getting older where you realize that, yes it’s scary, but it’s not going to bite you. Jenny Wheeler: You’re not going to die of it. Pamela Redmond: Exactly. Where to find Pamela online Jenny Wheeler: Where can your readers find you online? Pamela Redmond: They can go to pamelaredmond.com. That includes links to the books and information about everything I do. Jenny Wheeler: Are you active on social media? Do you have a Facebook page? Pamela Redmond: Thank you for asking and reminding me. Yes, I’m on Instagram @thepamelaredmond. Jenny Wheeler: Great. Do you like taking photographs? Pamela Redmond: I do not like taking photographs. One of the editors from Nameberry who does Nameberry’s Instagram has been helping me with my Instagram. I told her at one point, I have discovered that I HATE looking through old photographs and looking at photographs of myself. HATE. It’s painful for me. Jenny Wheeler: It’s been wonderful talking. I really am going to hopefully look out for this musical. Pamela Redmond: Oh, yes, I know. It definitely needs a Wellington premiere. Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. Thank you so much for being willing to take part today and give us your time. Pamela Redmond: Jenny, thank you. I loved meeting you and talking with you. If you enjoyed Pamela …. Catherine Isaac’s funny but poignant emotional family stories of women facing mid life challenge might be just the thing you are looking for… LISTEN TO CATHERINE Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. 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