
What’s the best way to navigate dating life in modern times? Are happiness and marriage the same thing? What’s it like to be a dating memoirist when family members are interested readers?
Learn the answers to these questions and more in this interview with DC-area author (as well as my friend and market booth partner) Jana Eisenstein. This post is part of a *NEW* category on this blog for the discerning reader called Author Interviews. Posts in this category will highlight fabulous authors, mostly in the DC area, whom I know personally, and whose books I want to tell the world about because they are so great.
Ghosted: Dating & Other Paramoural Experiences is a memoir about Jana Eisenstein’s dating experiences. Ghosted has received awards from the Independent Authors Network, The Wishing Shelf, and The Bookfest in the areas of humor and nonfiction.
I especially appreciate Jana’s sense of humor, which snuck up on me at surprising moments. Her sense of humor shines through not only her book, but also her real-life personality and her interview answers below. I hope you enjoy this author interview with Jana Eisenstein, and do pick up a copy of her book if you’re interested in a humorous, tell-all story about dating and the single life, set in the DC area.
What prompted you to write a memoir about your dating experiences?
Are you looking for an answer other than, “I couldn’t afford therapy”?
I actually didn’t set out to write a book. Writing is my way of processing what’s happening in my life, so I started writing about my dates as they happened. I hoped that by writing out my failures in real time, I’d be able to make sense of them and maybe identify the problem. (Spoiler alert: It’s me.)
After just a few years I collected enough bad dating stories to fill a book. Not to brag, but I have a lot of failed relationships. And then, once I was brave enough to actually read through them without cringing, I began to notice some themes—among them, that I consistently dated men with whom I was clearly incompatible. As I teased out those threads they coalesced into a central arc, and I realized I had the makings of a book. Or, the manifesto of a sad, lonely lady.
One of my favorite things about Ghosted is the breezy assertiveness of your writerly voice, even while writing about your, at times, lack of confidence in your dating life. How did you attain such a confident writerly voice? Did the process of writing and publishing the memoir affect your overall life confidence?
My book focuses on how lost I was during that period of my life—dating the wrong men, struggling with an eating disorder, moving from city to city and job to job. The one thing I was confident about was that I was getting it all wrong. I’m glad that comes through so well to the reader! It’s in knowing how to turn things around and make my life better that I was lacking the confidence. Ability. Awareness. Desire. Self-efficacy. Choose your noun.
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And I will say that seeing all your personal shortcomings laid out back-to-back really does help you pinpoint what needs to be fixed. The process of writing was what ultimately what led me to figuring out how to make myself healthier, physically and mentally. So, if like young Jana you can’t afford therapy and have a decade to spare, I highly suggest you write your own book. It’s extremely therapeutic.
Interestingly, I think the years of being rejected in my dating life actually fortified me against the rejection I experienced in the agenting/publishing process. And, agents and publishers usually responded with kind, if generic reasons for not taking on my project. If anything, the publishing process has made me soft.
Something else I love about Ghosted is the many references to the DMV (for any readers who need a translation, that’s DC, Maryland, and Virginia). It seems like one in every two books is set in either New York City or Paris, and it was so refreshing to read a book set in my city! What do you love about living in the DC area? Why did you decide to stay here, despite being from Connecticut originally and also having lived in Boston and Atlanta?
I’ve ping-ponged around the eastern U.S. for so long, but I keep coming back to DC. The weather’s way better than Boston or Atlanta, it’s pedestrian friendly (though the Metro keeps trying to prove me wrong), the food scene is fantastic, there’s culture and music and bars with minigolf. Honestly, what more could you want in a city? It also has a great social scene for people of all ages. My friends from the other cities eventually moved out to the burbs, got married, and had kids. I ended up attending every social activity after 7pm alone. In DC, I have an entire group of people in their 40s who have house parties and go out dancing and spend whole weekends designing their RenFest costumes.
And, as an oft single person, there are so many great places to have great dates, terrible dates, and mediocre hookups (e.g., the park at Dupont Circle, E Street Cinema, Rock Bottom bar, the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Heaven & Hell Nightclub, Taco Bamba—I’ll let you figure out which is which). I’ve formed a deep connection with this city. These days walking around the DMV is a mixed bag of emotional baggage.
I admire your willingness to “put yourself out there,” as they say, and write about personal and intimate experiences, even the potentially embarrassing ones. What gave you the courage to go through with publication? Did you have any moments of doubt? What advice would you give someone who hopes to publish a piece of writing about their own personal experiences?
I think I just got tired of reading books about dating and relationships that ended one of two ways—if you fix yourself your perfect partner will magically find you, or you need to swear off dating because it’s the reason you’re miserable. I wanted to write the story that so many of us have—the story about putting in the hard work to resolve your own issues through grueling trial and error and make-outs with strangers and coming out the other end better and happier and potentially still single. Not alone, just sans partner. At that point you’ve accidentally made your life about something more than finding a partner. And once you get there, that’s when you can really enjoy dating as an experience, rather than a means to an end or a social media relationship status update.
When I work book fairs or makers markets I inevitably have at least one person who asks if I’m happy and married now. I use my book to show people that those are two very separate questions.
To other memoirists, I will add that if you’re gonna write about your personal experiences, warts and all, you need to be completely honest (with your reader and yourself) about your role in your own story. Something I learned from my years of being a drunk party girl (see part 1 of my book) is that people really connect with you when they can laugh either with or at you. No one wants to know how perfect you are, or how people are out to get you. They wanna know about all the red flags you ignored with the dude who said he was a top-secret physicist who was only available at night and didn’t have cell service on weekends, or that you used to hang out with a guy who platonically sucked your toes.
Oh, also, your family’s gonna wanna read whatever you write, so keep that in mind when you’re writing about blow jobs. Wish someone had given me that advice when I started. . . .
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Are you working on a new book or another creative project? Can we look forward to a sequel?
My dating life is actually pretty satisfying these days, which is great for my personal life, not so great for my writing life.
I am in the very early phases of a new book idea—a dark comedy about the day-to-day of living with binge eating disorder. I touch on my eating disorder briefly in Ghosted, but I don’t delve into the daily impact it’s had on my life. There’s definitely some sad humor in those moments of fishing food out of the garbage at work or eating a baby’s smash cake at his 1st birthday party. It’s proving to be a bit trickier than writing about dating because, turns out, eating disorders are kind of a bummer. But, if I do my job well, I’ll bring some levity to an otherwise weighty topic. And, if nothing else, my therapist is gonna love it.
And I have continued to date the occasional weirdo/ghoster/semi-professional dodgeball player. Purely for research purposes.
Jana Eisenstein is a writer. You can visit her website or shout her out on Facebook or Instagram, which might actually get her to check her accounts more often.
Relationships are easy, not difficult. Be a loving person by showing your partner you love them. Could be little things, notes, buying his favorite beer once in awhile, do crazy things, rough house, play.
Men want to be cherished loved as much as women do. They won’t tell you that. And you shouldn’t ask. But always ask yourself, am I showing him or her that I love them in my life
Easy? Maybe, but it does take real effort, as you point out. I’m curious why you say “you shouldn’t ask.” Why not ask?
Great interview, Liza. I really enjoyed it.
I’m glad you liked it! She is a great writer 🙂