Julia C. Johnson

Julia Claiborne Johnson grew up on a farm in Tennessee, and as so often happens, went from there to working in magazines in New York City. After marrying a tv-comedy-writer, she moved to Los Angeles and had two children. Her first novel, Be Frank with Me, a national bestseller, was one of six finalists for the American Booksellers Association's Best Debut of 2017. The audiobook, performed by Tavia Gilbert, won an Audie Award for Best Female Narrator. Her second novel comes out in January from Custom House/Harper Collins.

Twitter: @JuliaClaiborneJ

Instagram: @JuliaClaiborneJ

Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome?

I certainly have! I started writing my first novel when I was fifty. Unbidden, a good idea struck me one day when I was walking down my street. I’d been a magazine writer in my youth, so I thought, “Hey, that’s a book I’d like to read. Why don’t I write it?” Hahahahaha. What was I thinking? Oy. I did it, though, in secret, instead of talking about writing it, which I think is a trap a lot of people fall into. From start to store shelves it took me five years. Within six hours of finishing the first draft, the very fancy agent I emailed a query letter to wrote me back and asked to see my manuscript. A week later she was my agent. After a couple of big revisions, my agent sold the book pronto to a major publisher. The book came out and did really well. As in, on best-seller lists. Reviewed in national newspapers and magazines. People who are not related to me are still buying and reading it. If all these things wouldn’t make a person feel like an imposter, I don’t know what would. My second novel is coming out next January, a fact that is also unbelievable to me. Even though, lord knows, I’ve been chained to my desk for years—just three this time!—suffering and weeping, and missing out on all the fun my friends have been having. And now that I can finally come out to play a little, nobody can! Dang.

What’s your favorite non-reading activity

Most definitely sleeping. I don’t get enough of it, for starters—although now that I really can’t go anywhere, I get more than I used to. What’s lucky for me is that I have a very active dream life. I figured out while I was writing #1 that my brain would sort out issues I was having with my manuscript if I slept on it. So it became a part of my work day—I’d take my smallish children to school, write like a crazy person until 2 p.m., and then take a half-hour nap before I left to pick them up from school. I solved many thorny issues with my narrative that way.

Not all books are for all readers. When you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long before you bail?

Sometimes after I read the first page? But that’s usually in the bookstore, before I buy it. I’m a big believer in the compelling opener. Probably a holdover from my days working in the fiction department at Mademoiselle magazine. I had to read 10,000 short-story manuscripts a year, on top of doing my day job. Back then I’d read the first page, the middle page, and the last, and if I wasn’t hooked by the potential after that, I moved on. I had to! Now once I’ve started a book, if I get to page 100 and hate it, I like to think I’ll bail. But writing books is so hard, one that you can read in a day might have taken the author years, and I just want to believe!  But then I’m mad at myself for persevering. There are so many books in the world to read that there’s no way to get to all of them. Why waste time with one that’s not a fit? And yet I do it.

Is there another profession you’d like to try?

I wish I had gone to medical school. My mother was a small-town doctor, a GP, one of only two women in her medical school class in the early 1950s. I was always so proud of her, though my father always said we could be lying disemboweled on the floor and she’d step over us on her way out the door to the hospital. My mother wished I’d gone to medical school, too—she always said I had the right personality to make a good doctor. What I didn’t have was the right brain—high school Chemistry all but killed me. So I’ve done my version of “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.” The narrator in my second novel is a doctor.

Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew, paint, Draw? Knit? Dance?

I am very handy. I can sort of do all of those things, except dance. When I was a magazine writer I used to write for lots of house magazines and my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none thing stood me in good stead. When I was interviewing a pro to write an article about, say, installing bead-board siding, I could look at the list of steps masters of the trade sent me and say, “Hey, don’t you need to install a furring strip around the room to screw the siding into?” and the professional would say, “Yes, but everybody knows that.” No, everybody doesn’t. I wrote a piece for Martha Stewart Living once where the best plasterers in New York City taught me how to do it right, in a penthouse the size of the farmhouse I grew up in. I think about that all the time, and have plastered many a hovel I’ve lived in since. It’s very soothing. Maybe I should have been a plasterer, come to think of it. Oh, well.