#amwriting With Jess & Kj

The author I’m interviewing today, Joy Imboden Overstreet, holds the distinction of having procrastinated on writing her first book longer than any previous #AmWriting guest—about 40 years. She is also the writer whose essay on her son’s unusual business venture enabled me, in my role as an editor at the NYT, to publish the paper’s first illustration of a personalized vibrator, and I will forever be grateful to her for that. But wait, I hear you saying. Forty years? Forty? How did Joy manage to make it happen? Don’t worry—that’s exactly what we talk about in the episode. The backstory: Back in 1975, Joy created a workshop program in the San Francisco Bay area on the her book’s topic: finding freedom from obsessing about food, weight and body size. When she sold the business to her partner to go to graduate school in public health in 1980, she fully intended to write a book based on her work, but—spoiler—things happened, and then more things happened (including a pretty thriving freelance career) until s