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Q&A With Julie Fingersh

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Q&A With Julie Fingersh 

Before the end of 2024, I finished reading a memoir titled Stay: A Story of Family, Love & Other Traumas by author & freelance journalist Julie Fingersh. STAY is Julie’s first book & it’s been featured in People Magazine! 

Q: Julie, for those who haven’t read Stay, can you give a brief description of the memoir? 

A: I’m going to let my publishers speak for me on this one since it’s been worked on so many times! 

“Julie Fingersh’s Stay is so rich, wise, funny, and beautifully written. It’s hard to put down once you start.”
Anne Lamott, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Called “Profound, funny, and masterfully told by” by #1 New York Times bestselling author Gretchen Rubin, StayA Story of Family, Love, and Other Traumas captures the joyous and painful complexity of family love and loyalty, the cost of family secrets, the grief and promise of mid-life, and the quest to help the people we love most without losing our own way. It’s also a rare window into two of the biggest epidemics gripping society today: mental illness and chronic illness and the ways in which they affect relationships, personal identity, and the blueprint of our lives.

Told through the eyes of the author as both a young sibling and a mid-life parent, Julie Fingersh seamlessly weaves together present and past, unlocking the puzzle of her early adulthood with her struggling brother from the vantage point of a mid-life parent on the verge of an empty nest and her next chapter, just as her college-bound daughter’s life suddenly careens off track. 

Sparkling with warmth, wit, and lyrical prose, Fingersh provides insight and sustenance for everyone wrestling with mid-life’s ghosts, parenting adult children, and the twin pillagers of fear and the inner critic. Above all, Stay is for readers who want to think, feel, laugh, cry, and perhaps see their own life’s trajectory and path forward with new eyes.


Q: How long did it take you to write Stay & why was now the right time to write it?

A: It took me six years to write the book but pretty much in spurts, or what I call binge writing. I’d leave my life four or five days at a time, hole up in a little Airbnb, and just write. No candles, no cozy scarves, no artsy writing rituals—just me, my laptop, and my brain, which is often very hard to harness into focus. 

Btw, it took me most of my life to figure out that there really is no such thing as “A Real Way to Write” – turned out, I wasn’t one of those writers who could sit at the same desk every morning with a cup of tea, wearing a magic scarf and saying a mantra. My brain needed space, literally and figuratively. 

So, if you’re a writer, my advice is: don’t get sucked into feeling like you must write in a certain way. There really is no right way. The right way is the way that you can write! 

As for why now was the right time? … It started with what I lovingly refer to as my “secret mental breakdown.” My daughter was a senior in high school, and while I was thrilled for her, I was also overwhelmed by this gut-punch of grief, mixed in with this horrible feeling of envy for this moment of her life. It wasn’t just about her leaving; it was this primal feeling of loss and shame. To be exact, it was this: 

 “Guilt wrapped around my good fortune with slimy, muscled tentacles: who was I to be unhappy? But I was. Behind the rosy skin of my happy family, I’d been sinking into a river of dread and anxiety, and the source of it was a mystery.”

The opening scene of the book captures this—on a run with a friend, I confessed that I was jealous of my daughter. She was about to head off to college, and I saw my younger self in her: all the dreams, the hope, the vision of what my life was supposed to be. And I felt like I’d lost the thread somewhere along the way. That midlife reckoning is real—especially if you’ve spent years at home with your kids. When they leave, you’re left trying to figure out what’s next and, if you want to try to reclaim any semblance of the career you left behind, you’re faced with re-integrating into a world you’ve not been in for decades. 

Q: Which scenes were your favorite to write about? Which scenes did you have a hard time writing down and reminiscing all over again? My favorite scenes were when you went to the Haven Writing Retreats in Montana and Laura Munson was there who I also did a Q&A, & Authors in The Media Q&A with & who I will do a Behind The Book Q&A with this year discussing her upcoming book The Wild Why. I also enjoyed the passage about how important it is to be there for others. We are entitled to our own lives and dreams and that we can be there for those we love & try to help but we can’t save them. 

A: I would say my favorite scenes to write were the playful ones that had humor and a lot of dialogue, and a lot of visual language. For instance, the book opens with me staging my 50th birthday as a secret strategy to get to the meaning of life. Everyone came thinking they were just going to be having margaritas and chatting it up, but I forced them into this Wisdom Circle and asked them all kinds of questions about the meaning of life and all the things they left behind. 

I loved writing it because it kind of set the tone and context for the book about how powerful truth is — how women who had known each other for so many years could sit around a circle and learn things about each other that they never would’ve guessed. I loved going back to that time in my mind and remembering those moments of raw honesty and how it changed the dynamic between us. 

The other scene that was actually fun to write was about my 25th high school reunion where I went back and had to face all the people who I had last seen decades before when those very people had voted me Most Likely to Succeed. I had to break it to them that, nope, wrong! Didn’t succeed! Instead, I was a stay-at-home mom with a minivan and a baby and every possible cliché around that including heading up to PTA fundraising. 

I would say the most challenging scenes to write were those about my brother, Danny, and his struggle with depression. One of the hardest to write was the one about visiting him at Menninger’s psychiatric hospital, which many readers remark on to me. It just was such a moment of pain and love and hope, and such a demonstration of how hard we all struggle in life but how the love sustains us. 

Each scene was its own journey, but to me the key was to wrap each scene in both humor and heartbreak, because that’s really what life is. 

Q: What lessons do you hope readers learn after reading STAY? I was reminded reading the book that it’s not my job to fix people or solve their issues and I learned this last year as I was praying a rosary one beautiful August morning last year. I learned that being there for those we love, doesn’t mean putting dreams on the back burner. That passage resonated with me so much and how you wrote it is beautiful!

A: Thank you, Bianca! So many lessons I hope people will learn, but here’s maybe my top few. 

  • Take the time to step back and become conscious about the life you are choosing. We all have many roles in life. We are sisters and brothers and daughters and sons and parents and friends. But we are also SELVES – our own people with our own secret life and dreams.


  • It’s so important to step back from our lives and see what roles each of those themselves play and how they influence the way we spend our time. Basically, it’s the lesson of stepping back from your life and being sure, you are living it in the way that you want, in the way that is most meaningful. 


I realize a lot of that has to do with privilege and what you have the space to think about and what you have agency over. But we all have some level of choice in our lives of where we put our energy and time and focus. The trick is to make sure you are in the driver seat of that. That is a constant struggle for me because the easiest thing in the world is to just make up a big list and live by the satisfaction of checking all the boxes without really looking at what the boxes are. Even now, as I write this, I think wow, I am so smart! If only I could follow my own advice!

I guess this is why I have a Substack newsletter called. Take my advice. I’m not using it. Sign up for amazing advice that I’m trying to follow!


  • What you mentioned – that we cannot save the people we love. Most of us spend our whole lives learning that one! I think my book is a training manual for that, because the reader sees the impact of that dance between ourselves and others as parents, siblings, and children.


  • I really hope people come away from this book inspired to invest in their own lives and their own creative lives. To deal with whatever traumas and family patterns are holding them back so that they can discover a part of themselves that may be buried and waiting for them if only they would give it attention. I highly recommend to people that they do whatever they can to take a week a few days a class a few hours to get away from the environment that currently defines them and reconnect with the person underneath all that.

Q: I know while we were messaging each other, we were discussing how you were working on some ideas for the next book but haven’t written it yet. Have you settled on an idea or are you still brainstorming? 

A:  As I think about what’s next for me as a writer, I’m trying to follow my own advice: stay open and follow the breadcrumbs. Readers are having such a powerful reaction to this book, and I want to figure out how to serve that reaction as a writer.

My instinct is to rush to the next shiny thing, but instead, I’m focusing on connecting with the audiences and organizations that could really benefit from this story—families grappling with chronic or mental illness, midlife parents figuring out what’s next, or creatives feeling blocked by unseen traumas or patterns.

One thing they don’t tell you about publishing is that writing the book is just the start. For a story with personal growth at its core, the real work is getting it into the hands of people who need it most. So, if you’re part of a big book club or an organization that might benefit from this story, let me know—I’d love to connect!

Q: Congratulations again for your memoir Stay being featured in People Magazine! That’s truly an honor! How does it feel having your book featured in People Magazine?

A: It’s crazy! Totally surreal! First People named it as #1 book for October 2024, and then they featured it in the print version of the sexiest man alive issue, naming it as one of the best books of the year and picturing it in between the memoirs of Share and Bill Clinton. I couldn’t help but laugh, imagining Share and Bill Clinton opening up the Magazine and thinking to themselves who in the world is Julie Fingersh? I think it’s proof to all the writers out there that anything is possible!

I want writers to know that I had been away from writing for 30 years before writing this book. No website, no audience, nothing. I look at my website now, and it’s a reflection of my journey back to myself. And as I wrote up my 2024 round up of press and reviews, to me and such evidence that it’s never too late to uncover the person you are underneath your current life circumstances!

Also….. Please know that the future of a writer’s career depends on algorithms. Isn’t that depressing? But it’s true! So I would ask readers to please check out STAY: A Story of Family, Love, and Other Traumas – it comes in hardback, Kindle, or audiobook, which I narrated myself and was one of the most fun parts of the journey – and if you do read it, please take a few minutes to leave even a 1 sentence review on Amazon. It makes a huge difference in the trajectory of an author’s career in this day and age!

 

THANK YOU SO MUCH BIANCA!!!