OM: How do you see the difference in attitudes around mental health and wellness? I think wellness in New York is very different from wellness in LA – as an item of vocabulary, the associations are different.
EK: Wellness in LA is very much a lifestyle that’s almost something to be bought and sold, which feels different to New York. You’re very conscious of body image here, which isn’t necessarily what I would call mentally healthy.

OM: No. [laughs]
EK: Each city comes with its own set of issues.

OM: I totally agree. Being alone was uncomfortable when I lived in New York and it was very easy to immediately shift out of that discomfort. I think LA can be a very isolating place, and certainly during the pandemic, if I hadn’t been living with my husband I don’t know how I could have possibly survived that. Tell me about your work, how many other people does it involve?
EK: It depends. I’m usually working on several projects at once. I produced a short film this year about mental health, about a parent of a school shooter [His Mother, directed by Maia Scalia], I have my podcast and I used to write a blog. I used to do a lot of public speaking too. I’ve never been confined by a set schedule, I always try to be open. When you’re working on a book do you give yourself a schedule?

OM: Yeah. I do that no matter what I’m working on because I’m both very ADD and also extremely workaholic, and those don’t always go together. So it really helps me to plan my day, like any day, even if there’s nothing happening. It’s important for me to designate ‘these hours are for this’, whether it’s taking the dogs out on a hike, going to the post office, and then going back to work for this many hours. Because working alone nobody can see the progress I’m making but me, and sometimes the progress I make – especially in novel writing – looks like subtraction instead of addition. So time is the only thing that I can really control in that process.
EK: Do you base your protagonists and plots on experiences you have gone through yourself?

OM: I don’t think that they’re really based on me, however, I think they are parts of me that I have not yet fully explored. Not that I necessarily feel that I am a character when I’m writing, but you do have to really method act your way into knowing what it would feel like to be the characters. So it’s a little bit like I’m discovering parts of myself but also creating them imaginatively, which is generative and different but also a total reflection of what I think and what I can imagine. It’s also a reflection of what I’m taking in from the world and knitting into the sense of a different person. My experiences during the writing process – people, places, major events, health issues – anything that is happening is going to influence my book. So it becomes a process of really being attentive to what the universe is showing you and finding inspiration in that for this other character’s life. Writing a book is this very weird, reflective trip.
EK: I ask because I feel like a lot of the themes in your work are ones I relate to, or [that] have come up in my work. Obviously, I don’t write books, but I have experience with a lot of mental health issues and that really informs my work. How I got started was by talking about anxiety from first-hand experience. In your books where those themes come up, like addiction or body image, does it feel like a way to be vulnerable about things that you’ve experienced as well?

OM: Yes and no, because when I’m writing I’m honing something and also controlling it. Feeling anxiety is a separate activity from let’s say, writing a screenplay in which one of the characters is extremely anxious. So I might understand that when I’m anxious I do weird self-soothing things or whatever and I might instinctively go, “OK, the guy is going to be playing with this little bit of paper in this interview.” So I can get involved, but it’s sort of like you were saying, when you hit upon a challenge, a problem, it directs you where to go down the life path. I feel the same way with writing. I know this experience of insomnia, for example, and I can use this. This is something that I now have a deeper understanding of. I’ve experienced it personally and therefore I’m a better authority on this other character who is not me and has a totally different personality [or] life situation but is going through the same human thing.
EK: I find it fascinating. I started my podcast after I had spent half a year in a psychiatric unit, and I was at a place where I had yet to accept what I had just gone through. I think I felt a lot of internal shame. “All my friends are doing X, Y, and Z and I’m sitting here in this unit feeling very confused like, “This is not where I should be in my life.”” It was easier to talk to other people about their shit than it was to share my own. That’s how it started. There was comfort and safety in talking to other people about like, “Hey, what are you going through? What was that time when you had very severe insomnia or that time when you were struggling with a very severe eating disorder?” Then very slowly I began talking more about my experiences. There’s something courageous about being vulnerable and talking about these things. It’s still very taboo.

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