Mallary Tenore Tarpley on SLIP: How to Write Memoir with Truth, Empathy, and Vulnerability

In this episode of Traditionally Self-Published, I sit down with memoirist and journalist Mallary Tenore Tarpley to talk about her new book, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, and the craft of writing memoir with honesty and care.

We discussed:

• What inspired SLIP and what it means to write from the “middle place” of recovery
• How to tell the truth with empathy — especially when writing about loved ones
• Why contradictions belong in memoir and how Mallary holds multiple truths
• Her winding journey to a Big Five publishing deal 
• Practical tips for memoirists who want to write about trauma, healing, or lived experience
• And we finish with the Ink Starter Lightning Round and her 5 best tips for authors

About our guest: 

Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism and writing professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication and McCombs School of Business. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The Dallas Morning News, among other publications. She is the recipient of a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, which helped support her research and writing. Mallary graduated from Providence College and has a master’s of fine arts in nonfiction writing from Goucher College. She lives outside of Austin, Texas, with her husband and two children. Slip is her first book.

Where to find Mallary and her book:

•  Substack: Write at the Edge 
• Her book: SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery 

Have a publishing question? Email me at mica@micamerrillrice.com 

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Website: micamerrillrice.com 

Instagram: @micamriceauthor

Facebook: @micamriceauthor

TikTok: @micamriceauthor

"Traditionally Self-Published" theme music is written by Landon Bailey and performed and produced by LNDÖ

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

What's up, Plock Twisters, and a warm welcome to my page turner, to intrigue readers and listeners who are just stepping into the story. Whatever title you fancy today, I am so happy you're here with us. You're listening to traditionally self-published, where we unravel the chaos of self-publishing and help you write your own success story like a pro. I'm your host, Mika Merrill Rice, author with a passion for learning and sharing the love. I'm bringing you real talk with publishing pros and indie authors just like me who flipped the script and built thriving author careers on their own terms and are doing it like a pro. So whether you're a first-time author or you're a seasoned pro, you're right where you need to be. Today we are talking with journalist and professor at the University of Texas Austin, Mallory Tenori Tarpley, about her latest release SLIP, Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, and the process for writing memoirs. If you've ever wondered what it takes to engage readers with your personal story while also providing them insight, this is the episode for you. Today we will talk about her book, Slip Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, Writing Through Vulnerability, How to Craft Engaging Nonfiction, Her Journey to Landing a Big Five Deal, and then we will conclude with my Ink Starter Lightning Round and Mallory's five best tips for authors. Welcome, Mallory. It's so nice to have you here today. Thanks so much for having me. Great. All right. So we're going to be talking about your book, Slip, today. Um, and we're going to start with the about the book. So can you tell us a little bit about Slip? This is the life in the middle of eating disorder recovery and what inspired you to write it.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Yes, sure. So Slip is a memoir that really blends personal narrative and reporting and research. And so it looks at how I developed anorexia nervosa after my mom died of metastatic breast cancer. So I developed anorexia when I was 12. And the book really looks at that period of life as well as my treatment throughout my teenage years and the ups and downs of my own recovery process. And I talk a lot about what I refer to as the middle place, which is this name I've given to this liminal gray space between acute sickness and full recovery. So the book explores these key questions around what does it mean to be better, but not all better? And what does it mean to live in this world knowing that your disorder remains a vulnerability? So I explore those questions through the lens of the personal narrative. And I also bring in a lot of reporting and research. So I ended up surveying over 700 people from around the world who have lived experience with eating disorders, and then interviewed 175 survey respondents and clinicians and researchers. So I bring all of that in in a way that I hope is accessible to the average reader who may not necessarily know a whole lot about eating disorders. So as you're learning about my story, you're also hearing the narratives of other individuals from a diversity of different backgrounds who have had lived experience with an eating disorder. And you're also learning about really interesting research that's been done that can help to understand why these disorders manifest and also why they can be so hard to recover from. When I think about why I wrote it, I really felt like there weren't many books at all that explore this middle place. In fact, I don't know of any that do. And all of the books that I had read throughout the years on eating disorders were either clinical or written from the perspective of someone who was fully recovered. And I felt like there was this lack of a mirrored image where I couldn't see my own story reflected in those books. So I really wanted to write a book that explored this middle place and that gave voice to the people who are in this place because of those 700 plus people I surveyed, 85% of them said that they could identify with the middle place, and yet we're not talking about it. And it so often gets stigmatized. So I really wanted this book to help move the narrative forward and also change the narrative around how we talk about eating disorder recovery.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

That's awesome. Um, and I it brings me to another point, which I know you and I touched on before we started this, but um I wouldn't call this book self-help. And I, but it's also like a it's like memoir, it's self-help. Um, so I like I said, I I think I struggle a little bit with giving it even a genre label, but the way it's written, it it feels just so natural. It's like you're reading about your life, you're reading about these experiences that other people have gone through, and then you're also kind of peppering in the facts, you know, like you're you're peppering in some of the research too. So it made it a lot more engaging for me to read because it read more like, wow, this is like, you know, this is a story. This is a story with conversations. This is a story with, you know, you're you're you're referencing back these journal entries and these experiences that you had, and you're you're getting this conversations that other people have. So how did you like have find that balance between the two, like kind of peppering in a little bit of the research with also, you know, the life experiences?

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yes. Well, thank you so much for that. That's exactly the type of reaction I was hoping readers would have when they read it. And I really was trying to figure out how do I make this work because the book is really equal parts personal narrative and reporting/slash research. So the way that I thought about this was to really kind of hone in on structure and think about how do I want to structure a book that has all these different elements without giving readers whiplash as they move from one to the other. And so the structural device that I came up with was what I came to call a split chapter approach. And essentially each chapter is unified by a central theme. So, for instance, if we take the chapter that looks at my treatment for anorexia, in the first half of that chapter, I'm delving really deep into my personal narrative and exploring what it was like to be hospitalized at age 13 for anorexia. And I'm bringing in those source materials of the journals and medical records and therapy workbooks. And then it shifts to a second part of the chapter, which is marked by an infinity symbol. And that's where I'm then talking from my present-day perspective and bringing in the latest research on eating disorder care. I'm bringing in perspectives from other people who have been treated more recently. Um, and so those two halves are both about treatment, but they're told from different perspectives. One is told from the perspective of my younger self, the other from the perspective of my present-day self. So, in a lot of ways, that structure enabled me to really go deep into the narrative and then to go deep into the research and to also find these marriage moments where I could talk about how the research informed the narrative and vice versa. So the structure was really what helped me to be able to arrive at a sense of clarity around how I could weave all those elements together in a way that would make sense to the reader.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I read the physical book, of course, and I noticed these little infinities in there. And in the fiction world, we just they're just chapter breaks, you know, where like we're breaking from like one scene to another, but I didn't really like correlate. Well, I just thought it was like a pretty design. So that's good to know.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Yes, we felt like we needed some sort of visual marker to kind of clue the reader into the pattern of the structure.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Very nice. All right. So you you went through a few years of treat, you know, you did the treatment, you've gone through this experience. What was the moment that you decided you wanted to use this experience and knowledge that you gained along the way to help other people?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

So I have always known that I wanted to write a book ever since I was a child. And so I kept really meticulous journals when I was in treatment, as if I knew that I'd one day want to write about my eating disorder. And when I left treatment, I in fact did write a very early iteration of a quote unquote memoir when I was 17 years old. And so I'm glad that never saw the light of day. But it was really the foundation for what would eventually become the book, Slip. And every few years I would write different iterations or I would add to previous versions. And it was always something I knew I wanted to do. But I met my husband, I had kids, and I was really just immersed in my personal life and work. And at a certain point, I felt like I wasn't really working on the book, and it was just this backburner project that I wasn't really tending to. And so I decided in 2020 to go back and get my master's degree. I got a master's in fine arts and creative nonfiction. And I knew as part of that program, I was going to have to work on a thesis, which would be essentially the first third of a book. And so I went through that program. And it was while I was getting the MFA that I realized that this could be a really meaningful book. I for a long time thought that I could not publish this book until I was fully recovered. But it occurred to me when I was in the program that I could actually write this book from a truer and more authentic standpoint of being someone who is in recovery in this middle place that I mentioned. And it was a New York Times article that I wrote that really solidified that for me. When I was getting my MFA, I had written a piece for the New York Times about losing my taste and my sense of smell when I was diagnosed with COVID. And I wrote about how that was really triggering for me because I didn't um really have a desire to eat because I couldn't taste anything. And so I wrote about what this experience was like. And I had so many people reaching out to me saying, Oh my gosh, I'm struggling with the same thing as someone in eating disorder recovery. No one's talking about this. I really appreciate that you're talking about this slip that you had, even though you've been in recovery for so long. And so that just clued me into the fact that there was an audience for this type of really honest and raw content around the messiness and imperfections of eating disorder recovery. So that then set me on this path toward writing this version of the book. But all of those earlier iterations I still have. And so they were very much stepping stones to the final product.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

That's great. Yeah, we, I mean, you could look at it, I guess, as like a zero draft, the first of you know what you were gonna eventually write. Not never, it's never a waste, I guess. Very interesting too about the triggers that you you had when COVID came around and you lost that that sense of taste or smell. I mean, recovery, um, in many ways, in depending on the form, you know, it it is constant. It's constantly working at this recovery. But I would have never thought about like eating disorders and a slip. There's always that possibility that you could come back to that. I guess I've always assumed like once you're done with the eating disorder, you know, maybe it's just like a kid thing, you know, and I think you talk about that a little bit in the book, that it can it can come back in your adult years too. So that's that's great that you were terrible that you went through it, but also good that you were able to provide some support to others who understood exactly what you were experiencing. So let's talk about a little bit about that vulnerability and how you you write through that. So you wrote this book obviously as a way to help people navigate this recovery. Um, and you also include obviously some personal stories which required so much of your honesty. So, how did you navigate like sharing those personal parts of your life and still protect yourself emotionally?

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Yeah, so I really thought a lot about this because in so many ways I felt as though I had to reinhabit my younger self to write about my past authentically. And at the same time, I didn't want to get stuck in that younger self or stuck in the past. And so part of what I did to re-inhabit that younger self was to do a lot of revisitations. So I went back to the childhood home that I had grown up in. I walked the same sort of path that I had taken the day after my mom died when I walked to school alone. So I walked from my house to the middle school around the same time of year that I would have done it back in 1997 when I lost my mom. I revisited all of the treatment centers that I'd been in, even though one of them was shuttered, but even just walking the grounds was still very effective. And so these revisitations were really helpful. But in a lot of cases, I would do them with someone else because I found that revisiting was really beautiful in terms of just helping me to corroborate memory and helping me to put together pieces of the past. But also it was challenging having to go back to these places where I had lived out some of the most painful parts of my life. And so when I went back to the residential treatment facility, for instance, I had my father go with me. Um, when I went back to Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, where I'd been in and out of the hospital on many occasions, I went with a medical provider who I'd gotten to know through the process of writing this book. And so just having someone else with me made that process easier and gave me a little bit more of a safety net. Um, I also recognized that there were a lot of painful parts that I had to really write about. And I wanted to make sure that in doing so, I wasn't re-engaging in the behaviors that I was writing about. So at one point I was writing about a period in which I fell into binge eating, and I found myself actually binge eating as I was writing that part of the chapter. And I thought, okay, I can't do this, right? I need to be able to write about these behaviors without falling back into them. So that was this moment of realization in terms of thinking about how else do I recreate specific scenes or moments without feeling like I need to actually relive them. And so in those instances, I sometimes relied on revisitations, other times I would rely on journal entries, interviews with people. And those sort of helped me to piece together those parts of the past without feeling like I needed to mire myself in those experiences in a way that could potentially harm me. The last thing I will say is I also made a conscious effort to go back to therapy when I started working on the book because I knew it would be such a vulnerable undertaking. So going to therapy was helpful in terms of helping me to just think through all of the interviews I was doing, all of the writing I was doing, and to really be able to then come to the page with a greater sense of clarity about what I wanted to put in the book and um and how I could do so in a way that still kept self-care in mind as hard as it was.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yeah. Well, so speaking about that, because you you obviously you had a lot of support along the way. You brought people with you back to these places that you went to go visit. You went back to therapy, know that you need to protect your, you know, your emotional state. But there maybe there are parts of you that you hesitated and that you ended up maybe not, you know, including in the story. You know, it's sometimes it requires us to go very deep into these places that maybe we don't want to deal with. So, how did you make that decision about, all right, this I'm going to include, or maybe this I just I can't visit right now. I'm not including this in the story. How did you make that decision?

SPEAKER_00 15:35

So I thought about it a lot, and this was particularly true when I was writing about being at Boston Children's Hospital because I was hospitalized there five times, twice on the medical unit and three times on the psychiatric ward. I was on the psychiatric ward because I was not only struggling with anorexia, but also extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety and depression, which are very common comorbidities of eating disorders. But when I was on the ward, I found that there was a lot of social contagion among myself and the other eating disorder patients. And very often we would be sharing tips about how to be better at our eating disorder. And I wrote about that social contagion, but I wanted to be careful not to include these toxic tips in the book. I had to sort of go back through my journal entries and excavate just pieces of the past through memory. And I thought through all of the different tips. And so I needed to remember them so that I could figure out does it make sense to actually include these in the book? And ultimately, I really did not want this to be a guidebook for how to be better at your eating disorder. So I really made sure that I was talking about the social contagion, but not getting into the specific tips. Uh, also, when I was on the ward, very medicated. Um, I was on a lot of different medications, so much so that every night I would not be able to wake up. And so very often I would wet the bed. Now, I thought to myself, do I need to be talking about wetting the bed in this book, right? I was imagining as a professor my college students reading this and others. Um, but I just so vividly remember that whenever I would sort of soil the bed sheets, I would be so ashamed. And I would stick these soiled sheets in the closet in my bedroom. And at one point, my grandmother, who took care of me at the time, she visited me on the ward and she was just sickened by the stench of the clothes. And she did not really know how to care for me. I was away from home. I was so sick at the time, but she took those clothes and she brought them home and she washed them for me and she brought them back freshly pressed. And that to me meant so much at the time. And it was this real symbol of love and a show of kind of caretaking in a moment when my grandmother felt like she really couldn't care for me or provide me with the help that I needed. And so I always made these conscious choices around what should I reveal, what should I conceal? And with that, I decided I was going to reveal that because for me it was important to the narrative. One to show just how sick I was and how medicated I was, but also to show that I was receiving love and care. And that was how my grandmother could illustrate that. So it ended up being this really moving scene, but it did require some vulnerability, right? And mind you, I was writing about a time when I was 13 years old too. So I mean, sometimes it can be easier to write about some of those vulnerable moments if it's not something that we're experiencing right now. Um, so that was part of it as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Wow, that's incredible. Um, and I think too, just like reading through the book as somebody who is, I have not experienced anorexia and nervous personally. Like not, I did not go through it, but as I'm reading through this and I'm reading through that this piece of it and all the other pieces of your book, you know, from an outside perspective, it's interesting how like you're trying to help somebody and you don't think that you're actually helping, but in your case, your grandmother is helping you. She might not know it at the time, but she is. It's these little things, tokens of appreciation and love, things that we do that help us. So that's great that she was there for you. All right. Um, so writing, obviously, you know, you talk about the things that you don't want to include, and maybe you didn't include that for your personal reason, these the places that you didn't want to visit or that you thought wouldn't help the narrative. But what about things that you want to include that might hurt somebody else? Like you think it might hurt somebody else's feelings. I think this is very common with people who are writing about their truths, things that have happened to them in the past. How is this going to impact, you know, so and so in my life? Or, you know, I don't want to hurt their feelings. So, did you run into any of that? You know, like were you nervous about exposing some of your family past the dynamics, anything like that?

SPEAKER_00 19:58

I was. And this was particularly true when I was writing about my father, because I wrote in the earlier parts of the book about how my dad really just sent me to school the day after my mom died. He went to work. Um, so I walked to middle school alone. I didn't tell anyone my mom had died, and I just put on a happy face because that was what my father had suggested we do. Let's just sort of normalize things, let's go about our day. And I read the eulogy at my mom's funeral without crying. Uh, but behind that happy facade, I was crumbling. And yet my father couldn't see that, even though he was a loving parent, and he really did not know how to handle this traumatic loss. And so for a long time, I blamed him for that. I thought, how could you have let me go to school? Why weren't you concerned when I was not crying? Did you think it was weird that I was putting on a happy face after my mother had died? Um, and so I felt really a lot of blame and anger for many years, but it was actually through the process of writing this memoir that I decided I needed to dig into that deeper. I had already let myself feel those emotions. And I always say, you never really want to write something for public consumption from a place of blame or anger, because readers can often see that. I really wanted to be able to say that I had felt those things, but then get my dad's input. And so I think that interviewing is a really powerful tool for understanding why a family member may have made a certain choice and also for giving them a voice in the book. So I had many interviews with my father where I asked him about these parts of my past and got a better understanding of what he was grappling with and why it was hard for him to know what to do in those moments. And he really thought he was doing what was best. And so I talked with him. And as I was writing this part of the book, I decided to frame it as dialogue rather than me just summarizing our conversation. I had recorded it. And so in the book, I am talking about how I spoke with my father about these difficult questions. And I have my questions and his responses. And I felt like that was a really fair way of approaching it. So I think dialogue can actually be a really creative tool for giving yourself a voice, but also giving that other family member a voice so that readers can then draw their own conclusions about how they want to interpret that family member's decisions or motives. So that was how I grappled with it. And I did show the book to my dad before it was published. And fortunately, he thought that I had treated him really fairly. So that made me deep breathe a deep sigh of relief.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Yeah. Um, and I think, you know, as a reader, the dialogue, like I said, it definitely helped elevate the story even more than I think it would have been. You know, like you said, it wasn't just you, you know, recalling like this is how he felt and this is how I felt. This is actual like real engaging conversation. And I really enjoyed that dialogue part of this story. So when you're going back now, you've finished your your zero draft or your first draft before you take it over to your publisher. Um, you probably went through it, you read through it a few times. So, how did you, when you're going back to edit your piece, kind of emotionally distance yourself from that part, you know, reading through these parts of you yet again? And I'm sure you did it a couple of times before you, you know, maybe got it off to your agent. So, how did you kind of distance yourself from this now that you've gone back to read your personal parts of the book during the editing phase?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Yes, I went back through it so many times because we had four passes, and then I was reading it in between those passes. So with each pass, it was a new, newly edited PDF version of the typeset book. And so I was fortunate that they let me look at it for each of these passes. Um, I was also reminded that I am very much a perfectionist. And so every time I would look through it, I would have to sit on my hands in certain cases because the farther along you get and the closer you are to publication, the fewer changes you can actually make once the book has been typeset. And so I had to really be careful that any changes I was suggesting were really necessary. Uh, but I did reread it, and many times people would say, Oh, are are you sick of it by now? And I thought, I'm not sick of it at all. And I don't know what that says about me, but I loved having the chance to just read through it. And there are often just these sometimes new connections I would make, or I would just see parts that um that I was proud of. And so I think that for me that was actually really great because when I was sick with anorexia, I was always so down on myself. And I just really loathed myself. And so to be able to go through this book and read it over and over again and to actually feel some pride was really just this beautiful kind of recognition of recovery and how far I have come to be able to look at my story, share it on the page, reread it over and over again, and feel like I've accomplished something that I've always wanted to. And so it wasn't really difficult for me emotionally so much. It was more of just this realization that I have grown a lot in my recovery. And sometimes day to day, it's hard to remember that. Um, but writing this book really helped me to do so.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Great. All right, let's talk about nonfiction. So I read fiction, I read nonfiction, I read through all kinds of different things. One of the things that I love about nonfiction that never ceases to surprise me is that there's always this element of, you know, pay like it has a good pace, it has tension, you know, depending on what you're reading. Those types of nonfictions I tend to gravitate towards. Um, and I think that a lot of authors, I hope, that they they build books just like you've built here. They read a lot like fiction, um, again, with that emotion. So, how did you approach this craft side of your storytelling?

SPEAKER_00 25:58

I really wanted to bring in some of the best elements of fiction, like character development, plot, scene, things of that nature, driving questions, right? All of the elements that we traditionally talk about with regard to fiction. And so, one of the ways I really thought about that was through scene development and thinking about rather than just telling people about my experiences, how can I oscillate between telling and showing? That old adage of show, don't tell is important when we're younger. But in reality, when we're writing, we really need to do both. And so I was thinking about the fact that I wanted to be able to tell people about the experience and tell them the facts, but then also show them what that looked like. So for me, the scenes were incredibly helpful. And a lot of times I would kind of sketch out particular scenes that I wanted to write about. And then sometimes I would do interviews with people who were part of those moments or experiences. And I would look at the drawing with them and I would say, hmm, can you help me fill in the gaps? Can we talk about what happened in this scene or in this setting? And that was a really helpful way of being able to fill in some of my memories' gaps, but then also to just think more vividly about that particular setting or scene. And in talking about it and sort of getting out of my own head, I was then able to think more clearly about how I wanted to write about it. So the scene development was really important, as well as character development. I remember I had a professor at one point who said, I can't see your dad. I don't know if your dad is short and stout. I don't know if he's tall and thin. What does your dad look like? And so I recognized that that was an area of growth for me as a writer. So I also tried to think about how do I visually represent the characters in the book in a way that is still sensitive to, knowing that I'm writing about bodies, right? And different shapes and sizes of bodies. So I thought through a lot of that as I was writing the book.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

How did you decide what details belong belonged in your book ultimately versus what you left out?

SPEAKER_00 28:04

It was a lot of editing out certain details because I tend to be more of a putter-inner. Um, and so I tend to get a lot of details. And when I'm interviewing people, I'm asking so many questions. And I think about how I have a kind of metaphorical box of crayons, and I want to be able to fill that box with as many crayons as possible during the interview process. Um, then when I sit down to write the piece, then I think to myself, okay, I've got all these crayons I could potentially use. I can't possibly use every single crayon in my drawing or in my story, but I like knowing that I have the ability to, right? I like knowing that they're there. And so sometimes I would end up writing a scene that was a bit too colorful or flowery. And so I would think, okay, I needed to just write about that initially in that way so that I could see the details that I had to work with and then figure out what was going to be most germane. And whenever I would look at that through the editing process, I would ask myself, what details are in service of the story, which details are driving the narrative forward, um, and which ones aren't, right? Which ones are potentially distracting. If they were distracting, I would take those out. And sometimes I would have other people read through it as well, right? And see sort of which details really shined and stood out the most to them. And those were clues as to which ones really needed to belong in those scenes.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

That's great. I like that. I like the way that you approach that with the box of crayons. That's a good way to look at it too. Um, whether you're writing fiction or you're you're writing nonfiction, to think about that overall picture. And you, okay, so you did also um you did a lot of interviews, obviously, you did interviews with people you knew, people you didn't through your surveys, but you also had to speak to industry professionals. And this is something that I struggle with. I think a lot of people do, even in the fiction world, if you're trying to, you know, make sure that something is, you know, accurate. Or you're trying to get information, reaching out to people is difficult. So, how did you approach them to ask for their expertise?

SPEAKER_00 30:09

So, I would always let them know that I was working on a book and I would explain why I wanted to talk to them specifically. So, in a lot of cases, I was talking with researchers and clinicians. And whenever I would reach out to a researcher, for instance, I would let them know that I had read their work and I would cite a specific study or two so that they would think, okay, she's actually serious about this. She's read my work. And then I would let them know that I really wanted to help their research reach a wider audience. And I wanted to understand it deeper and in a more meaningful way. And so I would let them know I wanted to talk with them. And um, and that often just showing that genuine interest and showing them that I'd done my homework very often would lead to responses. Many times I would have to follow up once or twice. And so I always say that there's the art of being pleasantly persistent. And so silence from the first email does not mean a no, right? I tend to be very persistent until I get a yes. Usually I'm not sending any more than three emails, right? And then I'll kind of move on to someone else. But whenever I talked with researchers, clinicians, I would also let them know that I was interviewing a wide array of people and I wasn't yet sure how or who would end up in the book, right? Because I didn't want to set the expectation that just because I was interviewing them, that that would then mean that they were going to be for sure included in the story. So I always sort of couch my interviews by saying that, but I would then say that every interview I do still broadens my scope of understanding and your input is really valuable from that standpoint. So I think part of it was just the tone, right? And just letting them know why their voice in particular mattered. It also helped too, once I did get a book deal, to be able to say, this is for a book that is going to be published by Simon and Schuster via their Simon Element imprint. So that gave it a little bit more credibility, if you will. Um, but certainly I was interviewing people even before I'd gotten a book deal. Um, so that was how I typically handled it.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

And speaking about um just going out and you're you're pitching these industry pros, you have this very comprehensive list of endnotes in the back of the book. I mean, it's a several pages long where you're, you know, putting in these particular quotes and where you got it from. So how did you how did you organize that along the way? Because I think that'd be very important for writers who are interested in in doing the same thing that you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

Yeah, so I really wanted to include those endnotes. And I do have a lot. It's about 10,000 words of endnotes. So it's more than the typical book has, um, particularly memoirs. But I, as I was writing, I would always ask myself, okay, what theme am I writing about? And what is the latest research on this theme? And also what is some of the older research and how has our understanding of this particular theme or topic evolved over time? And so I very often would look up research. Fortunately, I'm a professor, so I had a lot of really great free access to tons of research. And so I would look at the research, see what was most compelling. I would usually print it out, which I know is not environmentally friendly, but I'd print out the research and I would highlight what was interesting because research can be so dense. And sometimes when I say research, I think, oh, people are going to just roll their eyes and think, oh, I don't want to read about that. Other people really love research. But my job as the journalist was really to think about how do I take this research and write about it in a really accessible and sort of user-friendly way, if you will, reader-friendly way. And doing the interviews was a big part of being able to understand the research at a deeper level so that I could really write about it in a comprehensible way. But as I went, I would write out these footnotes in the Word document that I was using for my manuscript. And I made sure to just be really diligent about keeping those footnotes. Um, and that was incredibly helpful because I've talked with some authors who just after they finished writing the book, they had to go back and find all that research and then create the endnotes. But I was really glad that I had just kept those footnotes along the way because even though I had done that, there was still a lot of work because I then had to format those footnotes accordingly and create the endnotes myself. And those endnotes needed to be formatted formatted in a very specific way. So that process took quite a while. So I was glad that I didn't also have to then go back and you know try to find all of this research that I had consulted along the way.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Yeah, I could see how that would be extremely overwhelming. So good for you for being organized early in the process. All right. So let's talk about the overall process. You obviously ended up with Simon and Schuster, but early on in this book, you know, in this writing phase, did you consult with anybody, like a developmental editor or maybe a writing coach, just to see like, do you think this would work, you know, for a reader?

SPEAKER_00 35:06

Yeah, so I was fortunate to have a really great literary agent who I am still with. And she was one of my kind of early readers, particularly in the sample chapters I included in my proposal. So she was someone who I would often bounce ideas off of. But then once I got the book deal, I actually did end up hiring a freelance editor as well. So I loved my in-house editor, but she was the one who suggested that I take this split chapter approach that I was talking about earlier. And I didn't know and still don't know of any other books that take this structural approach. And so it felt like a big undertaking. And I didn't necessarily have a roadmap for how to do it. So I felt like I needed some additional support. Um, oftentimes, editors of publishing houses just have a lot of books, a lot of writers they're working with. And so they're not necessarily able to provide month-to-month feedback or week-to-week feedback. But I was fortunate in that I had a great editor at Simon and Schuster and also this freelance editor who could really give me more frequent feedback. So I would send her my chapters at least once a month and she'd get back to me right away. And then I could sort of work with her and just have more support along the way. And then sort of, you know, halfway through the process, and then at the end, I was sharing the manuscript with the Simon and Schuster editor. So I think had I not had that additional support, it may have felt a little bit harder to navigate this structure and just this book that includes so many different elements. So I was glad that I went with this editor, someone I've known for 20 plus years who I trusted a lot. Um, so it just made sense in that case to um to seek her support.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Yeah. It's I I love that you said that because it's something that I've been thinking about a lot, even with my own writing, and it's something that I recommend to other people. It's that when you're going through this editing phase or, you know, just to bounce ideas off people you trust and who people who you have a relationship with that you feel comfortable, like, hey, you know, I like this, but does this resonate? You know, do you think this is gonna hit? Do you think it's not gonna hit? So very cool that you had somebody that you knew that could help you with that. All right, let's talk about the big five deal. All right, so obviously, my show, I we talk to a lot of indie authors, we talk to indie pros, we also talk to traditional authors like yourself, because I think that every way that you can publish is a tool for our toolbox, right? Whether you know you're maybe into indie publishing this book, maybe you're doing a hybrid with another one, or you're doing a trad deal with something else. So that's why I really wanted to have you here and I wanted you to talk through this, you know, landing the big five deal. So talk to me about how this like publishing journey went towards getting that deal with Simon and Schuster.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

Sure. So it was a very circuitous path to publication, I will say. Um, I found my agent, and fortunately, it did not take me long to get agent support. I found my agent through my MFA program, and so I didn't have to do any querying. Um, and my agent was wonderful. She worked with me on my proposal. Um, so that was a much more involved process than I imagined. My proposal was about 85 pages. Um, and for nonfiction, as you know, you don't have to have the book finished. You just need a proposal. So the proposal included some sample chapters. My agent sent it out to about 16 different editors. And over the course of a few months, uh essentially every editor rejected the proposal. And uh that just made me feel really crestfallen, as you can imagine, especially when it's memoir and it's so personal. So a lot of the feedback was that it's just really hard to sell memoir these days. And I had framed it as a literary memoir, and they said literary memoir is just not really selling as much these days. You don't have a big enough platform. Um, it's something that we don't think we could really get beyond modest sales. So it was a lot of commentary in that vein. And so I thought, okay, I just felt really embarrassed, right? I remember telling my husband that I felt so embarrassed that I even thought that this book would one day see the light of day. And I thought, oh my gosh, I've wasted my agent's time. So I took a few weeks to cry and just um figure out what I wanted to do, but I did not want to give up on this book. And so around the same time, there was this new genre emerging called memoir plus. It's the idea that to get a book deal with a big five publisher, um, if you're not famous and you don't have a big platform, you need to think about writing a book that is memoir plus investigation or memoir plus social commentary, memoir plus reporting. And so I thought, well, as a journalist by trade, my plus could be reporting. I can do a lot of interviews. And so I spent the next year doing a lot of interviews. That's when I launched my survey. Um, and I tried to do as much reporting as I could. And then a year later, I had been reworking the proposal and my agent sent it back out on submission to another whole cast of editors, about 16. Um, and so we got some more rejections, ultimately ended up with about 15 other rejections, um, but finally got a yes from a Simon and Schuster imprint, um, which is the one that I signed. And there were other editors who were interested along the way, but unfortunately, even if you're somewhat high up in a big five publishing house, um, you still need to get buy-in from your superiors. And so a lot of times I would have maybe an editor who was interested in who I'd had a call with, but ultimately they couldn't get buy-in from the top down. Um, and so that is something that I didn't really expect. But I got all these rejections. And then sometimes along the way, people would say, Well, we would think that this would sell better if you co-authored it with a medical doctor. And there were points where I really had to say, that's not true to my vision, right? I was willing to pivot and include all this additional reporting, but I knew I didn't want to share authorship. I knew I didn't want this to be a clinical book. So ultimately I found an editor in a publishing house that really believed in this book, but it took 32 rejections to get to that final yes. And so um, I used to be really sheepish about that, but now I think it's important to talk about because rejections are par for the course and we don't necessarily expect them all the time, particularly if we have good representation from an agent. But I think it's important to normalize them because it doesn't mean that you can't ultimately get that book deal that you really want.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Yeah, I think that is extremely important. And just, you know, showing that vulner vulnerable side, it goes back to what you are already doing. It's probably came very natural to you just to just share that piece of you as well. So you talked about your agent. Um, you obviously you knew your agent before, but what was when you said, all right, this is what I want to do, was your book already sort of done at that point? Um, and you were, because you said that with the the nonfiction, you don't necessarily have to have like a completed book, but did you already have this particular one completed and then you sent it in and then you had to change it?

SPEAKER_00 42:13

No. So I had written about 35,000 words as part of my thesis for my MFA program, but I ended up totally doing away with that. I mean, I used some different elements of it ultimately in the finished book, but um, but really when I worked with my agent, I was working on specific sample chapters that were different from the thesis. And then when we had to rework the proposal, I was creating new sample chapters because I had to show that I'd done all this reporting. And so I had to bring those in and kind of rewrite those sample chapters. And um initially that was what I had was some sample chapters when I got the book deal. And so originally we were going to have um a sort of year in the contract, but I asked for a year and a half to work on the book because I knew I needed to do more reporting. And so it was really in that year and a half that I really wrote the book. Um, because even when I had started writing some chapters, my editor looked at them and then suggested that split chapter approach. So I had to go back and rewrite the first three chapters. So I mean, I really did so much writing and reporting in that year and a half after I got the book deal. So that's really when the book began to sort of crystallize and take the shape that it is now.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

And what do you think helped Slip stand out in the crowded market?

SPEAKER_00 43:32

It's important to consider this, particularly for memoir. And one of the things is certainly the blending of different materials, the personal narrative plus all of the reporting, all of the research. I think it was really important to show that this was not going to be a book that was written by another thin white woman, right? Like that that wasn't going to be the only narrative. And um it's it's it's funny when I say it, but it's it's one of those things where so many books on eating disorders are written by people who look like me. And in many ways, it perpetuates the stereotype that eating disorders only affect young, thin white women of middle to upper class. And we know that that's just not true. And so, in doing all of this reporting and interviewing people of all different backgrounds who have eating disorders, I could really show the ways in which these disorders manifest in different populations and different genders, ages, body types. And so to be able to make that argument in the proposal was certainly something that made the book stand out. And I will also say the middle place was something that really helped because I was able to make the argument that there were no other books that really gave a name to this place or that explored it. And so, so often people would say, Well, there's so many books on eating disorders. And I would think, well, one, there's not that many, but two, this book is going to be different than what's already out there. And anytime you can make the case for that and then really follow through in the writing is going to be super beneficial.

SPEAKER_01 45:03

Yeah. All right. So you get your book done. You're now you're finally got your you've spent that year and a half really working it out. You walk it in, send it in to the editorial team. What is it like? Did you walk in like a big room with a bunch of editors with big red pens, or is it just like, here's my manuscript over email, just let me know what you need to change? Like, how does that work?

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Pretty much the latter, at least for me. Um, so my publisher is in New York City and I'm in Austin, Texas. So I sent in my manuscript on June 1st, I remember, of 2024. And to my editor's great credit, she said she was going to read it in the month, and she did. Uh, so she read it over the course of a month and then sent me back feedback. Um, but it was still another several months of editing. Um, there were some line edits I needed to do after that um initial round of feedback, but then there was just a lot of copy editing. And then I had gotten a grant as part of my work on this book. So I hired a fact checker, I hired a science advisor to look at the science research in the book. I hired a sensitivity reader. So, and then I also had about half a dozen early readers. So I had all of these different people looking at it and making suggestions, and then I had to figure out which ones do I actually want to incorporate. Um, so it was another probably nine months of editing, even after that. And that was even with um sort of just the kind of just understanding that I didn't have to make a lot of line edits, right? So it was a lot of kind of these like smaller edits that just took a while. Um, but it was a very collaborative process, which I really appreciated. And so I never felt like I was alone in the editing process. So that made it feel a little bit like less of a heavy lift.

SPEAKER_01 46:46

All right. And then for the indie authors listening, what lessons or lesson from the traditional publishing world can help them? What do you think you like the biggest takeaway from all of that experience going through the Simon and Schuster uh deal, do you think you could give to an indie author to help them elevate their writing?

SPEAKER_00 47:05

So, really thinking about what does make your book uh distinct and how can you carve out new territory in your writing? So I never think of myself as a risk taker, but I did take some creative risks with this book. And I think that that is partly what helped me to get a book deal, but it also is what I hope will help the book to stand out in the market. And when you think about indie publishing, that's always something that you want to do, right? How do you think about making your book stand out from all the others out there? And so you can do that in different ways. You can do it certainly through the actual narrative and the story you're telling, but you can also do it through structure and form. So what since this book has come out, a lot of people have said, oh, you're carving out this new genre or this new territory. And that feels exciting as someone who doesn't consider herself a risk taker, right? But I created this new structure in this book and blending together all these materials. And I mean, just in doing that and in giving a name to this middle place, it feels like, ooh, like these things are helping this book to really stand out. And so it's really important to think about how do you do that for yourself so that your book is easier to market, right? And easier to publicize because it's not like all the other ones out there. And those different elements that are born of risk taking can help you when you're going to pitch marketers and publicists. Because a lot of times when you are with an indie publisher or you're self-publishing, um, you have to do a lot of that work on your own. And so you have to make the case for, you know, how does your book really stand apart from the others in the genre?

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Yeah, and you just touched on something that being that writing is a lonely process. And this is one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, specifically with your writing. You know, I, of course, write fiction. You write non, you've written a nonfiction book. Did you have a community that you could lean on? Maybe friends that kind of do the same thing, or you know, some kind of community that you kind of leaned on during this process, so you didn't feel that loneliness.

SPEAKER_00 49:09

Yes, and it was a piecemeal community, I would say. I mean, I really relied on my husband a lot. He was my first reader on everything, and so he read different iterations of this book along the way. And then I had some early readers. So I had about a half dozen early readers who were very helpful and they were people I really trusted. And so they were part of it. Um, but I also belong to this great group of female writers here in Austin, Texas. And it's a group of just authors and writers who identify as female, and they're wonderful. I mean, we're not sharing copy with each other, but we meet once a month. We have a listserv, and just being in community with other people who could ask me about the book and in some ways hold me accountable was really great. And I love being part of this supportive, robust community because they introduced me to other writers. They helped me to feel like I was part of something bigger. And so I loved that aspect of writing this book and knowing I had the backing of that community. I will also just say, too, that reporting really helped me to feel like I had a community. I mean, when I was in that year in between having gotten those rejections from the first round of submissions leading up to the second round of submissions to publishers, um, I just kept reporting. I sometimes felt like it was hard to do a lot of writing because I thought, I don't know if this book is actually going to land a deal and I don't know if it's going to get published, but I'm going to keep interviewing people. And that was really helpful at a time when I felt a little isolated after all those rejections. And so doing the reporting enabled me to create this community of support. And many of the people I interviewed during that time are now promoting the book. They're sharing it with clients. So that community has persisted even post-publication.

SPEAKER_01 50:57

That's fantastic. Yeah, I think that's super important. My journey started off very alone. I didn't seek out anybody. I was so scared. And um, I've never felt so alone. It really, really impacted me. So the second time around, my second manuscript, which I haven't published yet, I was very particular. I'm like, okay, I just published a book for the entire world to see, like anybody could pick this up. So I don't know why I can't just like approach people to say, we need to just be my writing friend, please. So that's fantastic that you had that early on. All right. How did sharing your story publicly change you and your relationship with yourself and maybe like the readers around you?

SPEAKER_00 51:35

It definitely has helped me to just be a lot more open and honest about my experiences. For a long time, I would tell people I was fully recovered because I was ashamed to admit that I wasn't. And it was just easier to say, I'm recovered with a capital R. But now I don't say that at all. I say that I'm in recovery and I'm navigating progress in the middle place. And I talk about the middle place, and I'm very open about that. And I find that it is just helped me to be more authentic. It's also in some ways held me more accountable for when I do slip. So the reason I titled the book slip was because I want to remove the shame and stigma that often accompany slips in the recovery process. And as I've been out in the world talking about the book, I've encouraged people to really normalize slips, but also speak truth to them rather than hiding them. And so I never want to be hypocritical in my messaging. And so I have found that I still do slip in my recovery, even though I've been in recovery for 20 years. And so I've really thought about how do I make sure that I am talking about those slips and then I'm finding ways to get back up again, particularly during a time that is very chaotic in the best ways possible. But post-publication is a very hectic stretch, especially when you're on book tour and working full-time and have two little kids. Um, but it really, I think, in some ways is an act of courage to write a book when you're still navigating something. It's much easier in some ways to write a book and say, I'm over this, I'm better, right? And that feels more protective. It feels more vulnerable when you say, I'm still working through this. But ultimately, that type of book, I think, can be more relatable for folks, particularly when we think about how societally we have always really held up books with protagonists who prevail. And so to write something uh that runs contrary to that can feel scary, but I think ultimately it can invite more honest storytelling from other people. And I have found that since publishing my book, I've had so many people reach out to me to say, I'm in the middle place too. And I appreciate that you've given me just the space and the permission to speak truth to that.

SPEAKER_01 53:45

Yeah, for sure. And I think it's great. Like I said, I think it's great that you brought it up. I think this is how, you know, our culture is just going. We want to find people who we can relate to, these people like you, or you know, anybody else who's gone through this, whatever it is, so that, you know, like, hey, I'm not alone. Like, this person has gone through this too. And I'm really happy that you wrote this because I think it's gonna reach a ton of readers who really, really need it. So, all right, here we go. Ink starter lightning round. We have made it, Mallory. We are down to four questions. I am gonna ask you. You are gonna give me your rapid-fire response. The first question I had for you is a book you wish you could read again for the first time.

SPEAKER_00 54:30

A little princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

SPEAKER_01 54:33

Very good. All right, one word that describes your writing process fluid, morning pages or midnight sprints. Oh, I am a 4 a.m. get up and write girl. Yes, girl, that's us too. We like it. All right, a truth about writing memoirs or memoir plus that no one tells you.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

When you write a memoir, you may find that you also end up feeling like a therapist because lots of people will come up to you and say, I need advice. I'm struggling with this. How can you help? So just something to keep in mind uh so you can figure out how do you protect yourself and also still have this spirit of generosity.

SPEAKER_01 55:17

That's pretty funny because I'm I'm pretty sure that I said that before we even started this. I'm like, you're probably gonna have to hold my hair while I cry at the end of this call and give me that therapy session. So that's fantastic. All right. So at the end of my podcast, I always ask the people that I'm interviewing, what are your five best tips for authors? This is any way that we could elevate our writing, something that a tip that we can use like right now after this podcast, that's just gonna take us to the next level. So go ahead and give me your five best tips.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

Okay. So one, I would say embrace white space. White space on the page can signify a passage of time. It also just allows for more breathing room on the page, particularly when you're writing about heavy topics. Two, I would say outline. So outlining is something that some people hate doing. And I used to be one of those people, but when writing my book, I started to outline and I really came to love it. And I found a playful way of going about it where I use post-it notes and pieces of origami paper and I lay them all out. Uh, but road uh outlines really provide a roadmap, and you just want to make sure you provide that roadmap, but also give yourself some space to roam as well. The third thing that I would say is to read your work out loud. So it's really important to read your stories out loud so that one, you can more easily catch mistakes that you may not see if you're just reading it on the page. But two, it's also a way to really just amplify your own writing voice and to kind of train your ear to hear your voice as a writer. So really good practice to get into. Um, I would also say that it is very important to think about emphatic word order, which is just a fancy term to describe that you want to order words for emphasis. And this is particularly when you start thinking about editing at the sentence level. So if you take, for instance, this famous line from Shakespeare's Macbeth, um, it says, The queen, my lord, is dead. Dead is the most important part of that sentence. And so Shakespeare waited to put that at the end. The my lord is the least important, and that's sort of hidden in the middle. And so sometimes the ways in which we order words can actually be quite powerful in terms of the overall effect that that sentence has. And then lastly, I would say get the name of the dog. So this is a tip that one of my old mentors, Roy Peter Clark, uh, taught me years ago. But it's this idea that you always want to get at a deeper level of detail. So get the name of the dog, get the make and model of the car, get the brand of the t-shirt that the person is wearing. And again, you may not use all of those details. You may not use all those crayons in the box, but if you don't get them in the first place, then you won't have the opportunity to use them.

SPEAKER_01 57:58

Fantastic. We're gonna close out with what do you hope readers will take away from SLIP?

SPEAKER_00 58:04

I hope that they will realize that it is okay to embrace the messiness and the imperfections of recovery, whether you're recovering from a mental illness, a physical one, whether you're recovering from a traumatic loss, right? Thinking about how do you really move through these imperfections and not see slips as grounds for failure, but instead opportunities for growth. Because that word slip suggests some sort of movement because you can't slip if you're standing still. So rather than shaming yourself when you slip in this messy middle of recovery, recognizing that that is a normal part of the process, you can get back up again. And it's okay to talk about that, right? The whole sort of book is about giving ourselves permission to talk about the messiness.

SPEAKER_01 58:51

And where can listeners find your book and learn more about you?

SPEAKER_00 58:54

Yes, I hope your listeners will check it out. So it's available wherever you buy books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your local independent bookstore, Target. Um, so you can find it online um and in a lot of brick and mortars. And then I am on Substack, so I have a Substack. It's just my first name, M-A-L-L-A-R-Y.substack.com, and it's a weekly newsletter where I share writing tips. And then I'm pretty active on Instagram as well, and that's just my full name, Mallory Tenori Tarpley. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 59:25

And then any final piece of advice for authors interested in writing nonfiction who are still finding the courage to tell their story.

SPEAKER_00 59:32

I would say that you don't have to rush to tell your story. You can think about what parts do you feel most comfortable writing now. And I would encourage you to think about writing a personal essay. So writing a personal essay that you actually get published can be a really nice way of gauging interest and of building an audience. And it also helps you to figure out what you want to lean into and what you might want to explore more potentially in a book lane. Piece of work.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:01

Fantastic. Well, Mallory, thank you so much for joining me today. I've had so much fun. I've learned a ton. This is gonna be so helpful for so many people. Um, for anybody interested, again, you can find Slip anywhere. I highly recommend um reading this. Anyone, if you're a writer, you're a reader, check it out. Um, and thank you again for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:22

Thank you so much for having me. This has been lovely.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:24

Thanks. Thank you for listening to this episode of Traditionally Self-Published. If this episode helped you, subscribe, leave a review, and share with your author and reader friends alike. And be sure to check the first episode where I share a bit about how this all came to be and why building a helpful community is so important. Until next time, be bold, write smart, and keep turning those pages.