Forgiving Yourself: A Conversation with Andrea Stein
Andrea J. Stein is an author, book publicist, and mother of 2, ages 18 and 15. She makes melding the three professions appear easy. In the midst of shuttling kids to tennis and debate tournaments and overseeing college applications, Stein creates time to foster a successful career and maintains high book sales for Typecast, her debut novel.
We met at a Chester Authors’ Day at the Chester, New Jersey library, where Stein sat at a Typecast book promotion table. Her approachable nature led us to connect, and I was drawn to read her novel, suspecting I’d be swept away to another time and place. Stein’s book doesn’t center on motherhood. The protagonist, Callie, hasn’t found “the one” yet, questions her breakup with her college boyfriend 10 years earlier, and is too wound up in getting her life on track to think about future steps. That’s what makes the journey delicious. Typecast exceeded my expectations by providing a clever mix of ingredients: a strong and intelligent heroine (although she might not realize it), a messy plot, and, my favorite, a healthy dose of 90s nostalgia. These elements converged, coaxing me to get lost in another world. Finding oneself, making difficult choices, and accepting people for who they are, are strong themes that resonate throughout Typecast. Mother readers will appreciate the novel for its ability to inspire reflection on our yesteryears, the paths we’ve chosen, and the ones we haven’t.
I spoke with Andrea Stein via Zoom and we had a fun, inspiring conversation while also discovering we had commonalities along the way. Our interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Holly Rizzuto Palker: I thought you captured the voice of Callie’s young niece and her preschool students particularly well. Did your parenting inspire the younger characters in the book?
Andrea Stein: My parenting inspired many of the characters. The original first line of the book (now the first line of chapter two), “Do you know what I have in my pants? A green snake!” was inspired by one of my boys. I made the main character, Callie, a preschool teacher because, when I was developing her, my younger son had recently graduated from kindergarten at our preschool, where I had spent a lot of time over the prior seven years. So it was a familiar setting. I also have a cousin who teaches early childhood education and we had talked a lot about it. I don’t pretend to be a teacher or understand what it really takes to be a good one, but I felt it was a job I could give Callie that I could identify with. I also liked the idea of creating a character who was helping families. I have an enormous respect for teachers. They are undervalued in our society.
HRP: How did your relationship with your children and your mothering instincts affect your novel?
AS: Callie’s love of children is interesting because I was not someone who grew up knowing I definitely wanted to have children. Now, of course, I cannot imagine my life without them. When my kids were young, I loved spending time in their classrooms, and given that I wasn’t born a lover of children, it was amazing to me that I could actually see myself working in a preschool. Callie’s love for kids, her joy in spending time with them, and her ability to build an environment where they thrive came from having children of my own.
HRP: What are you trying to say in the novel about Callie’s lack of a path toward marriage and motherhood?
AS: I’m not trying to say that marriage and motherhood is the only path in life, because it’s not. I think on some level, Callie is telling the truth when she says, “I’m good the way I am.” She likes her job, she’s got friends, and she has a passion for art. But she also loves kids and, in the back of her mind, probably always assumed she’d find a spouse and have kids. And so for Callie, that hurdle, where she wasn’t very happy with herself because of the choices she’d made, was getting in the way of her loving herself. So, of course, she couldn’t find someone else who would love her. Once she was able to forgive herself, then she was open to a relationship with a great guy.
HRP: What can you say about forgiveness and acceptance in families since these are big themes in Typecast?
AS: Inevitably, challenging situations happen in families. Feelings get hurt and people get caught up in roles that were the right roles at one stage of their lives but have evolved. I’m thinking about birth order. The younger child is one way, or the older child is another, and if someone doesn’t stick to their role, people can get their noses out of joint. There is a critical point at which you have to learn to meet people where they are and accept what they can give, as long as their heart is in the right place. To maintain your relationships, you have to accept some things that you don’t necessarily love about people. With Typecast, it’s about forgiving not just other people but forgiving yourself. We make the choices we make at the time with the best information we have and who we are as people. Maybe looking back 10 years later, you’re kicking yourself. But, you couldn’t have been a different person at the time. In an ideal world, we all grow, evolve, and become better people.
HRP: At times, Callie’s relationship with her sister, Nina, felt mother-daughter-ish. What could you tell me about their relationship? What about sibling relationships?
AS: I think for anybody you know really well, you start to see your picture of them rather than who they are. There is a fairly big age gap. Eight years. I think because of that and because of who they are as people, Nina continues to see Callie as the baby sister. Given that Callie still lives in their parents’ house, Nina believes the parents are babying her. As a result, she doesn’t see that, although Callie may be stalled in one aspect of her life, she is also a successful professional, although not in a field that Nina completely respects. They’ve gotten caught up in these roles of how they view each other. From Callie’s perspective, she often hears what Nina says to her as a criticism. Maybe it isn’t what Nina means, but she hears it that way because she is so used to their dynamic. I think neither sister sees the other as a whole person.
HRP: How do you find time to write with your co-existing obligations as a mother and book publicist?
AS: When I’m in the midst of writing a book, I commit to myself to write every day. If I don’t, then I’ll lose momentum. The longer I go without writing, the harder it is to get back into it. I commit to writing for two hours every day. If I expect myself to do more, I will probably fail and that’s not productive. As long as I can get half a page down, I’m happy. Sometimes it’s four pages. When I wrote Typecast, my kids were in elementary school so I wrote during the school day. My other “work” hours are devoted to being a book publicist. It took me six months to write the first draft. But from the first word to the debut, it was almost seven years. Some of that time was spent making revisions, but much more time was spent with my agent submitting to publishers and getting rejections. You know, that whole thing.
HRP: And how was the submission process?
AS: I survived. It was hard not to be discouraged. I read a lot and I know the industry, and I certainly felt like Typecast was in the realm of what was being published. So many of the editors who rejected the book said that they loved the writing and the characters—which was both great to hear and also incredibly frustrating. Ultimately, I believed in the book and I kept going. I’m obviously thrilled that Typecast is now out in the world, and I love my publisher. But the part that is especially gratifying to me is that I once heard one of my kids tell someone how proud they were that I didn’t give up. And that’s a great lesson.
HRP: What haven’t you been asked about the book that you wish someone had asked?
AS: I haven’t been asked too much about my life as a writer versus my life as a reader and how they inform each other. I haven’t been asked why I mention other books in Typecast, either. I love books. I love reading; I love the written word. It’s hard for me to imagine creating a character who doesn’t read. And I loved being able to give a shout-out to a few children’s books I had particularly loved and thought weren’t well-known.
HRP: What about your next book?
AS: I just finished the first draft of Dear Eliza. It’s about a 26-year-old woman who, when the book opens, is at her father’s shiva. He has just died unexpectedly, and Eliza had lost her mother 10 years earlier to cancer. At the shiva, her mother’s sister gives her a letter that her mother had written to her before she died, to be given to her after her father’s death, and the letter has a secret in it. Dear Eliza deals with some tougher issues than Typecast. There is working through the grief and the loss of parents. That said, my goal, which hopefully I’ve achieved, is that it has a similar feel. Eliza, my main character, has humor in her voice. It’s not meant to be a sad book. It’s a coming-of-age story. I have absolutely no idea what’s going to come after that. Maybe I’ll write about a woman who’s an empty nester, which I’m not—yet!
HRP: Do you have advice for other mama authors, with self, hybrid, or traditionally published books? Maybe a way to maintain book sales and keep their titles alive in the zeitgeist?
AS: Be willing to “sell” yourself. Talk to the staff in every bookstore you go into. Keep up your social media presence. Reach out to bookstagrammers—those amazing people who post about books on Instagram. Send out newsy emails on a monthly basis. Remind your friends to post reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. If you don’t toot your own horn, no one will.