#amwriting With Jess & Kj

We’re interviewing Julie Lythcott-Haims this week and you won’t want to miss it, because 1) she wrote an amazing, best-selling book called How to Raise an Adult and then followed THAT up with a memoir, Real American, that the New York Times Book Review pretty much thought was amazing and is now drafting the sequel to Adult very much on her own terms; and 2) she could very easily have become Jess’s arch-nemesis, and vice versa. If they had been totally different people. If they had been less open, less willing to see possibility in a scary-sounding situation. If they’d let fear and jealousy win. But they didn’t. So two writers with authority, each releasing a book on raising children to be independent in nearly exactly the same moment turned out to be a recipe for collaboration, not catastrophe. The lesson? In books, it’s really almost never winner-takes-all. We talk about how they pulled it off, how Julie transcended expectations with her memoir and why it’s so important to resist the call to writ