JOURNAL CULTURE
There she goes again Best-selling author Jen SO YOU KNOW Lancaster, known for WHAT: Fiction Addiction’s Book Your Lunch memoirs, says her fiction is WHO: Jen Lancaster, New York Times bestselling author far removed from her life WHEN: Jan. 31, noon
Jen Lancaster finds humor in everything – even unemployment that put her and her husband on the verge of eviction. As the time the former associate vice president of a dot-com company was without a job stretched from weeks to months and then over a year, Lancaster started a website and began complaining about being unemployed. “It was a real miserable time for me, and writing was the only thing where I thought I was in control,” she said. As it turned out, blogging (although she had no idea that was what she was doing) helped Lancaster turn writing into a new career. A New York Times best-selling author, Lancaster will be in Greenville on Jan. 31 to talk about her new book, “Here I Go Again,” for Fiction Addiction’s Book Your Lunch Program. The book is Lancaster’s second work of fiction. Her first books were memoirs. Lancaster’s career as an author started without her writing a single query letter. “After two years of rejection in the job market, I feared rejection,” she said. “I couldn’t face rejection in the very thing that allowed me to escape.” Instead, Lancaster wrote every day. She put links to her best pieces on sites where she thought literary agents would see them. “I didn’t go to literary agents. I wanted them to come to me,” she said. And they did. She soon turned moments in her life into hilarious snarky memoirs – with titles such as “Bitter in the New Black” and “Such a Pretty Fat” – about living plus-size, chronicling wardrobe and fashion and her addiction to reality TV and hamburgers. Two years ago, Lancaster made the
WHERE: The Lazy Goat TICKETS: $55 for one person; includes one copy of Lancaster’s new book, “Here I Go Again.” $80 for two people, includes one book Tickets must be purchased in advance at www.bookyourlunch.com or by calling 864-675-0540
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leap to fiction when her first novel, “If You Were Here,” hit the New York Times best-seller list. “The best thing about going from memoirs to fiction is bad things don’t have to happen to me,” Lancaster said. “I still do memoirs when something bad happens or I find myself in a bad situation. But unlike most people who try to extricate themselves from a bad situation, I don’t. I stick around to see what’s going to happen.” Her first novel, “If You Were Here,” was about two new homeowners with a “fixerupper” on their hands. The problem was Lancaster and her husband were moving to the suburbs, too. “But we made good choices,” she said, so the book was filled with what could have gone wrong. The problem, Lancaster said, was that her fans couldn’t tell what was real and what was not. For “Here I Go Again,” Lancaster said she made sure that the characters were “clearly not us.” She grew up in the ’80s; the book is set in the 1990s. “The characters are so far removed from my life,” she said. “Everybody knew a mean girl in school but no one ever had an understanding of why she was. This has an explanation of why the mean girl was the mean girl. Most of them were just hungry.” Contact Cindy Landrum at clandrum@communityjournals.com.
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By CINDY LANDRUM | staff
In cooperation with Rogers Financial Group and BNC Bank
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JANUARY 25, 2013 | THE JOURNAL 27