Haili Blassingame

That's how I got my agent based off of that modern love essay.

And so I always do tell writers like, get yourself out there.

You don't know what is going to be the thing.

So we'd started working on a memoir because that was sort of the pipeline.

You'd write a modern love essay and then you'd write a memoir.

Bell Burden did that, but she's a unique case.

I think that pipeline has kind of dried up a little.

Memoir is very difficult if you're not a celebrity.

So, but like back then in 2021, I think we were kind of at the tail end of it, but, but still, it still existed.

So I started working on a memoir and I was just like, I'm 25, who cares?

Like, I just didn't feel like I had anything to say in the memoir form.

I had already had that novel I had started working on right before the pandemic.

And so I revisited that and I was like, I can really funnel these questions into that in a more interesting way.

I'm not bound to the events of my life.

And so that's essentially what I did.

I revised it for years because again, I wrote the novel while I had an agent, which means she got the first draft from a 25 year old writer who had never revised.

I'd written books and I was like that person who wrote a book and was like, okay, I'm done.

I don't know what to do now.

So I had, you know, all those starter novels that I never revised.

And that was really when I learned to revise, which is kind of what makes you a writer, an author.