5+1 with author Katy Loutzenhiser: Stand-up comedy and uncomfortable movies to watch with your parents
Her new book, The Girl Least Likely, hits stores June 29
I’m mostly an on-the-page book reader but I’m not opposed to reading via audio (and, to answer the question before it comes up, yes, I do think listening to a book counts as reading it) if the narrator feels right (it’s harder to sum up what I think makes a good narrator but Julia Whelan is one of my favorite audiobook narrators, as is Caitlin Kelly, who read my book, Gimme Everything You Got).
So, it’s a testament to how good Katy Loutzenhiser’s The Girl Least Likely is that I listened to an advance audiobook of it greedily, eagerly, despite the fact that it was read by a robot. Yep, because the final audio hadn’t been recorded, the version I listened to was called a Voice Galley, read by a “synthetic voice.”
You know a romantic comedy hits a high bar when a slightly-deadened version of Alexa is narrating it and you still laugh and pine your way though it. In The Girl Least Likely, Gretchen is a bit of a wallflower — participating only when it’s absolutely required of her (thus her semi-mandatory role on the yearbook) — and, in the tradition of many great wallflowers, an observer. This makes her a natural at comedy, but she doesn’t realize this until one night she puts on a disguise to get into a club with her older sister and finds herself taking the stage for an open-mic comedy night. She performs as her (she thinks) one-time-only alterego but a cocky male stand-up thinks she has the stuff, and Gretchen keeps up the ruse to see where this comedy thing might go.
It may be the perfect book for all of us emerging from a year-plus of enforced non-participation; not only is it laugh-out-loud funny in a way we all need but it also gets you thinking, what would I do if I wasn’t afraid, or had a disguise and a secret identity to do it under? If you love The Marvelous Miss Maisel, or stand-up comedy in general, do check it out. (It’s also set in Maine, which is less well-trod territory for YA books, and Loutzenhiser uses her setting for some excellent laughs.)
Loutzenhiser, who took classes and performed at Second City (in my hometown, Chicago) took some time before her launch next week to answer my five not-about-writing questions (and one writing one). She’s also offered up some fun TGLL swag to two winners, who I’ll be choosing and notifying in the next few weeks. She’s also running a great pre-order campaign for the book, so do that ASAP to count yourself in!
IMP: What's the most uncomfortable movie-watching experience you had alongside your parents? (I think mine was this one summer where my mom made a recording of Tequila Sunrise for herself so she could cue it to the Mel Gibson - Michelle Pfeiffer hot tub scene again and again.)
KL: To be honest, I would guess too many to count! I tended to like grownup movies more than cartoon ones as a kid, and my parents didn’t put many restrictions on what we watched, barring anything too violent. (As a four-year-old, my favorite movie was Thelma and Louise. My mom says she just distracted me through the Brad Pitt parts, and somehow I didn’t think the ending was sad?) I also requested a lot of rom-coms, which I watched repeatedly, so there’s almost no chance my parents and I didn’t sit through the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally at least once.
IMP: What yearbook superlative would you have chosen for yourself, if you could have picked any of them or made up a fresh one?
KL: I think my superlative might have been “the friendliest”? Unlike Gretchen in TGLL, I loved being around people as a teen, and while I had a few super-close friends I spent the bulk of my time with, I also bopped around from group to group—artists, athletes, brainy kids set for Harvard and Yale, stoner kids with mohawks, an actual anarchist in one case (she was nice!). The point is, I loved everybody. The social anxiety in TGLL is very real (college did a number on me) but my high school was such a positive place that I walked around believing people were mostly good. (It’s funny, I don’t think it was a dig exactly, but Kirkus Reviews did mention the “amazingly nice group of teens” in TGLL. So I guess that’s where that came from!)
IMP: I love Gretchen's makeover to become her stand-up persona in TGLL because she feels like a different person after about three adjustments. What three tweaks could you make to your usual look to render you unrecognizable to yourself?
KL: I will admit, I wear makeup so rarely that when I do, I feel like an actual supermodel, so there’s one! I also almost never wear jewelry or jeans, unless maybe I’m doing an author event. So I guess that’s me transforming into Author Katy. I do enjoy the excuse – hopefully the events come back soon so I can start wearing something other than yoga pants!
IMP: If you could choose five items for a pandemic time capsule but none of them could be photos, what would you choose?
KL: * The hand-written list of meals my husband and I decided to learn how to cook back when we weren't leaving the apartment. We got through most of them! And by "we" I mostly mean "he." But I helped!
* The sneakers I wore down to basically nothing because I walked constantly for my health/sanity once the weather warmed up.
* The electric blanket I used all winter to hang out with family and friends outside. (Though maybe I’d just put the tag in, I want to keep that blanket!)
* The notebook I used to jot down jokes in for TGLL revisions. (Jokes felt pretty strange to write then, but I remember my editor saying it was a patriotic act trying to make people laugh at a time like that.)
* A copy of my vaccine card. Thank you, science!
IMP: Per your Instagram, you kicked off 2020 working on your knitting and over the course of the year, taught yourself Illustrator and made some really cute icons. I'm impressed because all my quarantine projects involved creation and ingestion of carbs. Did you pick up any other new skills in 2020 and are there other hobbies you're developing as we speak?
KL: Okay, I’m going to be real with you. The knitting did not last. I made two hats and scarf and then kind of forgot about it. I’m the kind of creative person who always wants to know the gist of how to do something, but never sticks around long enough to master it. (Over the years, I’ve danced, choreographed, trumpeted, sang, drawn, sculpted, painted, sewn, graphic designed, film edited, acted, directed, improvised, I could go on...) Basically, it’s a miracle I’ve stuck with writing this long! As far as new interests go, I’ve recently become a proud plant parent. I’m going to try not to bail on this!
IMP: Writing question time. What I loved about TGLL is going inside Gretchen's head as she develops her stand-up act, mining her life for good material and gradually refining her bits. While I know it can differ from book to book, what is your own revision process like, and how do you know when your jokes are working?
KL: Hands down, the revision process is my favorite part. No matter how hard I work, first drafts never click for me. If it has a beginning, middle, and an end, I call that a win. It’s the collaborative part—getting feedback from my editor and fusing that with the fuzzy picture I have inside my head—that makes the book really come alive for me. Once that happens, the comedy just feels like a natural extension of the characters I’ve created. TGLL was a unique challenge, though, because while I felt pretty confident in my ability to write funny characters and dialogue, actual jokes have never been my forte.
To complicate matters, each of Gretchen’s moments up on stage had to reflect where she was on her emotional journey, and be entertaining while not unrealistically polished for an amateur stand-up comedian. So it was a tricky needle to thread. Luckily I had readers who I could try stuff out on. And my husband is sort of my secret weapon in that department. He’s one of those people whose sarcastic voice is the same as his sincere voice, and it’s hard to get a big reaction out of him (though I will die trying!). If I tell him a joke I’ve just come up with and he very calmly says, “Yeah, that’s good,” I can be pretty sure most people will find it funny. And if he chuckles? Hilarious.
Other stuff I’m liking this week:
I pay sporadic attention to things I’d call “writers talking about writing” (not because I don’t like to read those things but because I find making a practice of it can stymie my process, whatever that process is) but I do love Julie Falatko’s semi-regular newsletter. Especially this recent edition. Sign up!
This list is short as I’ve been watching a lot of basketball, okay? But Believer editor Niela Orr’s piece on the Philadelphia 76ers as akin to an art film of indeterminate quality jibes with my current interests.
As people begin to travel again and the L.A. Times fills up with photos and dispatches from Las Vegas, I was reminded of this excellent Amanda Fortini piece on the real Las Vegas and the people who live there. It’s worth a read every time you see a story that treats the city like an endless parade of buffets, tackiness, and desperation. (Or if you’re watching Hacks, which you should be.)