KEEPING IT REAL WITH LESLEY KAGEN Interview by Mandy Haynes

KEEPING IT REAL WITH LESLEY KAGEN Interview by Mandy Haynes

Y’all, a few years back I picked up a copy of Lesley Kagen’s Whistling in the Dark at a local bookstore. After reading the first and middle pages of all the books I carried around the store (what I do if I find several interesting books but can’t decide which one/ones to pick), I put the other books back without a second thought. I was so excited to start reading I stopped at a restaurant on the way home for dinner instead of cooking the meal I had planned, and stayed up way too late once I got home reading. I couldn’t put it down. The story, characters, and the great writing had me reading lines out loud to my three dogs and wishing that one day I could meet the author just so I could tell her how much I enjoyed it. I got to meet Lesley a couple of years ago and let me tell you, she’s not only one of my favorite authors – but one of the coolest ladies I’ve ever met.

It's my honor to feature Lesley Kagen this month in WELL READ so let’s get started!

Lesley Kagen is an actress, sought-after speaker, and award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of nine novels. Whistling in the Dark (2007), Land of a Hundred Wonders (2008), Tomorrow River (2010), Good Graces (2011), Mare's Nest (2012), The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (2014), The Undertaking of Tessla (2014), The Mutual Admiration Society (2017), and Every Now and Then (2020).

She waited until raising her children to write her first novel, Whistling in the Dark—which was on the New York Time’s Bestseller List, received the Honor Book Award from the Midwest Booksellers Association, and was selected as a BookSense Pick for the month of May, as well as a Featured Alternate by Double Day Book Club, The Mystery Guild, and The Literary. She is the mother of two, grandmother of two, and lives in a hundred-year-old farmhouse in a small town in Wisconsin.

Before we start talking about Lesley’s books, I wanted to know more about her time before she became a published author.

“So, is it true in college you majored in radio and television?”

Lesley, “Well, I actually think I have the record at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, for the most amount of changes in terms of declaring a major. I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. I knew that I couldn't do anything that involved math, because I literally have no left side to my brain, apparently so that was out. I went to school thinking, Well, I don't know, I'll just go and see what happens.”

Lesley wanted to be a child psychologist but she didn’t think she could pass the statistics test. So she thought she’d be a teacher, until her first student teaching gig. She couldn't take it. It was in a really tough neighborhood in Milwaukee and the kids were so poor.

“I just got too sad. So I thought, I’ll do art. I like art! But I can't draw a lick, so I don't know what possessed me there and then out of the blue—I met this guy. You know how that goes.”

We laughed, because yes I do.

“He was the program director of the first underground rock and roll radio station in the country which was in Milwaukee. We fell in love and all that and then I moved in. He was a DJ and in order to be on air, he had to have an FCC license. Well, he failed. If he was going to make any money and stay at the gig I had to get my license and stay with them while he was doing his show.”

So she did. For a while she answered the phones and did some other behind the scenes work, but when the woman who was going to do the morning show defected and went to the competing radio station, Lesley was told she’d have to take her place.

“I was like, what?” Lesley laughs. “But I'll tell you, Mandy, the second I opened up that microphone I knew exactly what I wanted to do. From there it just went kind of nuts. When I moved out to Los Angeles I got hired by a huge retail record store called Licorice Pizza, which is what the movie was named after. I became the voice of Licorice Pizza and every commercial started out with, ‘Hi. It's Leslie from Licorice Pizza’ and I became one of those people you hate. You could not turn on your radio in Los Angeles during those days without hearing my voice.

I wrote all the spots, produced, and was the voice for about twenty commercials per week, and I did that for about ten years. But in the meantime I was also acting. I did lots of on camera commercials and voice overs for movies and cartoons, regular TV, and radio.”

I’d read that she was in an episode of Laverne and Shirley so I asked her about that.

“Oh, yeah, I was,” she laughed. “I was very excited when I got cast. The episode is called Take Two, They're Small. A lot of actresses weren't that excited because they called it Laverne and Surly. Penny Marshall was fantastic but Cindy Williams not so much. I did some movies of the week, little, tiny parts. Mostly I made my living doing voice overs and commercials. I have that kind of face where I'm not so gorgeous that housewives won't buy the product, but not, you know, so unattractive that people go - Don't look, Marvin!

But I was that kid who everybody thought was going to grow up to be a writer. As easy as math comes to some kids, writing came easy for me. I was not even conscious of it, to tell you the truth. I started out pretty young.”

In fourth grade, Lesley entered this poem into her Catholic school’s poetry contest:

I'm the sun, I am in the sky, and very soon I'll tell you why God made me and put me there for all of you, my life to share. I glow like emeralds in the sky, and maybe ruby's dipped and dye. I'm very hot, as you well know. God made me just ….

“Okay. So the thing is, I was a pretty cagey kid. I figured out the more time you mentioned God you're gonna do good at a Catholic school. I won a silver dollar. And I'm telling you, in 1959 that was ton of dough.”

Lesley was hooked and the following year she wrote a script for a popular TV show, 77 Sunset Strip.

“I wrote about this cat that smuggled jewels in its cat collar,” Lesley covers her face with her hands.

“Clever,” I laugh.

“Right? So, I wrote it all down, put in an envelope, took it to my mother, and asked if she could please send it to Hollywood for me. Bless her! She sent it. I spent every Friday in front of the TV waiting to see the cat with a jewel necklace. Of course, that never happened, but I did get an 8 X 10 glossy picture of Ed Cookie Burns.”

Lesley continued to write through high school and college, mostly skits, and then commercials for the radio station. Once Lesley’s children left the nest, she decided to write a novel. When it was ready to send out she realized there were some major differences between the entertainment business and publishing business.

“Back then you had to go through a traditional house to get published, which meant you had to have an agent. I had agents my entire life. So I was like, Oh, okay, no big deal. I thought - Oh, what a breeze! I'll get one immediately. Never had a problem getting an agent before,” Lesley laughs.

“Whistling was rejected one hundred and fifty-one times before I landed an agent. I was used to getting rejected for commercials or an acting job. It wasn't that big a deal to me, because so much of it is based on specific looks and I know I'm talented. I also know I'm a really fantastic writer - I know the stuff I'm not good at either - but when my book got rejected for representation, I was devastated. The rejection factor that I learned to cope with acting did not apply to writing. At first I didn't understand why, and then I realized it was because my heart was in the pages of the novel. The rejection devastated me until I just reached a certain point, and then you know what? We can only absorb so much pain. But I did have that point where I thought, okay, when should I stop torturing myself? I guess at agent 151.”

We went on to talk about the flip side of what it’s like being an author. The business part that no one really talks about.

“It is very difficult to be an independent contractor. You know, we are small business owners. I mean, yes, there's lots of freedom, and it's wonderful, but there is not a guaranteed paycheck. It's always a hustle and a lot of work. Yes, there are elements of it that are wonderful. I mean, I got to be creative my entire life. That's pretty cool, but also it's scary as hell.I want everybody to write. I truly do, but I don't want everybody to publish. I don't. It's not for the faint of heart. I can remember way back when I read Ann Lamott’s, Bird by Bird, which is one of my favorite writing books. She has a sentence in the book that says, ‘Listen, don't be too excited about getting published. It's really not what it's cracked up to be.’I thought that just can't be true. It can't possibly be – but it is. It's really, really true.

Quite honestly, Mandy, nobody in this entire business knows exactly what's going on. Publishing is one of the worst business models I've ever been exposed to in my life.

They give some people huge advances – but what about all the other writers? I had a friend who received an obscene advance and then they didn't bother at all to really advertise or market the book. How does work? How does that make sense?

That would be like opening a restaurant and then not telling anybody about it – not giving them the address. That is not a good business model, it's horrendous.”

Lesley has some great advice for writers who decide to self-publish, “Be happy that you created something. To be a really successful self-publisher, you have to know an awful lot about marketing. It costs a huge amount of money, and on top of that you’ve got to understand how many books are out there now. It's really impossible, I think, in many ways, for people to do well financially. Just know that going in.”

Lesley says the misconceived ideas that people have are heartbreaking. “I’ve published every possible way. I've even self-published, and I've also gone with a boutique publisher. I've gotten to the point now where if somebody comes to me and asks about a publisher, I'm not gonna lie to them. My allegiance is more to a sister writer than it is to a publisher.”

“We need more people like you,” I told Lesley.

“Well, we might need more honesty amongst writers,” was Lesley’s reply.

“It's a hard, cold, cruel world, yet I want everybody to write because that's where the payoff is, and that's what people don't realize. It’s the writing that means something. Not being rich and famous.

I’ll write commercials to make money but writing fiction…that’s for me.”

Lesley also keeps it honest in her writing even when she has to fight for it. In Whistling there is a peripheral character who is gay. The novel is set in 1959 and the two main characters, two young girls, repeat what they’ve heard and refer to the character as a homo. They have no idea what the word means they’re just repeating what they heard. Lesley’s editor told her she couldn’t use the word because it wasn’t politically correct.

“I asked her, what would you like the girls to call Bob? She said they should refer to him as gay. Well, that’s absurd and it's historically inaccurate. That's something I feel very strongly about, the let's rewrite history bullshit. Am I real pleased with the stuff, Robert E. Lee, did? No, but guess what – it happened. You can't pretend he didn't do it. You can't pretend that didn't happen. I mean, that's absurd. I finally wore the editor down and she changed it back. So, I get another copy of the story back. Well, there's another point in the book where the girls are swinging on a tire swing, and the character said, Oh, we were having a gay old time now. When the editor went back, she pressed replace all. So in the new script it says the girls were having a homo old time. I started laughing so hard, Mandy. I thought I can't even be mad about this, I just laughed and thought, well, that puts a different slant on the story.”

What is Lesley reading?

“Yellow Face by R. F Kuang. Every writer on the planet should read it. It says it's a satire of the publishing business, but I don't find that it's satirical. I find it pretty spot on.”

She goes on to say, “I know that I'm not diverse; diversity is the thing now, and I'm very happy for diverse people, and I'm very happy for everybody getting that shot. But the thing you’ve got to understand is that you could write the next To Kill a Mockingbird, and it would be pretty tough to get a book deal.

I'm writing something new that I know is not popular right now. Romance is popular. I want the opposite end, books written for people who don't care about romance anymore, you know, who don't look at people getting married and go awwww but look at people getting married and shout - run!” another great Lesley laugh.

“I want to write books for those people. The kind of books that mean something to me, books about what people are feeling, not so much what people are doing.”

Catch the full interview on WELL READ Magazine's BETWEEN THE PAGES youtube.com/@wellreadmagazine