Interview with Jancee Dunn

I couldn't resist a memoir entitled: But Enough About Me: How A Small-Town Girl Went From The Shag Carpet To The Red Carpet. The title grabbed me; the book entranced me. Jancee Dunn (read the book and find out why her parents gave her that name) was a small town girl from the suburbs of New Jersey when she met somebody, handed her a copy of her resume and became a reporter for Rolling Stone. Nothing can be that simple. Nothing.

When I had the opportunity to do an email interview with Jancee, I had to find out if it was a really an accident of fate that gave her this opportunity:

It was a complete accident. I had hoped since I was a kid to work at a
magazine, but there would have been no way that I would have had the
gumption, or the ego, to apply for a job at a national magazine. I had
a half-finished state school education, middling grades, and while at
the time, I thought my giant Jersey girl perm looked fantastic, I also
knew that there was no way I could ever pass as a New Yorker.
I probably would have ended up as a reporter for a local paper, at most.

I always find it weird when people say they took an English class their last semester in college and decided then that they should become a writer. Fortunately...

I did, even as a kid (is that creepy?) From about the age of six
onward, I have always been writing things in my head. I don’t know
where it comes from, exactly. And I definitely want to be read, too – I
don’t want to write just for my own gratification. A few months ago, I
saw a woman reading my book once on the subway and I burst into tears!
This is all I ever wanted. When I was writing this book, I would wake
up in the morning, put on my ratty ‘writing sweatpants,’ get a mug of
coffee and begin. It was the happiest I’ve ever been.

Originally Jancee was going to emphasis her many celebrity interviews. She was talked into writing a family memoir. I wondered if her parents tried to talk her out of this.

My parents tried to, but I would say to them, "Look, you people need to help me sell my book. You're retired now. Let's think about elder care. If you want me to foot that bill down the line, play ball." When they would balk about some story, I would say, "Do you want the Platinum Plan, the Gold, or the Bronze? Do you want a private nurse when the time comes, or a state-run facility?" That shut them up.

Jancee did have an edge when she decided to write her memoir:

My edge was my celebrity encounters. I knew that was my way into publishing. I resisted pimping out those stories for a long time but finally realized that I had to do it. There's such a ravenous hunger for behind-the-scenes celebrity stories.

Fortunately Jancee's publisher's wanted to emphasis the family aspects. But she did have all those years of writing for Rolling Stone. As Jancee's so close to her family I asked what her parents thought about her spending so much time with rock stars.

They were concerned, especially when I began to get really caught up in the whole scene. At its apex, I had three pairs of leather pants – black, brown and white. How I wish I were kidding. And I lost a lot of weight, and stayed out all night, and at family gatherings my family would corral me and try to talk some sense into me. There are a few family pictures where they look like the Brady Bunch and I look like I crawled out of a crypt, with these dark eye bags and grey skin. Fortunately I eventually realized that like it or not, I, too, was a Brady, and I threw out the leather pants.

Having a younger sister, I had to ask Jancee about her relationships with her sisters:

Oh, there was definitely some rivalry when we were younger but being the domineering oldest sibling who did everything first, I didn’t feel it as acutely. And my parents really did a good job of parceling out parental attention fairly. They were almost obsessive about making sure that everyone got their share so that no one felt left out. Plus as we were growing up, my parents were so strict - I mean, it was like something out of the Victorian era, so we kids needed to band together.

I come from the hippie generation. Jancee is Gen X,Gen Y, all these generation tags make me nuts, and her bad boyfriend stories sounded positively tame to me. Comparing herself to a Brady, not even a Partidge:

I'll tell you, when I was putting the book together, I was asked constantly if I had some juicier stories – did I do harder drugs? Did I sleep with any celebrity? (No, I didn't, nor did I date any of them.) Sometimes I wished I had stories that were more hardcore, but I didn't. So I just tried to find some sort of interesting or relatable bit with the hand I was dealt. I tried to tell myself that it was a writing challenge that I didn't have a dysfunction to exploit. I exploited my kooky family instead.

Certain friends of mine used to make fun of me for being close to my parents while still maintaining a "hip veneer." Now the same friends have older teenage children. They ask for family stories and sometimes even advice. I found myself adoring and relating to Jancee's family:

It's funny - people relate to my family in a retro way, as if they're from a bygone era, which they sort of are. My parents have been married 35 years and still hold hands. My dad was a freakin' Eagle scout and my mom was a cheerleader! No wonder I did drugs. But I'm so glad you could relate to them. The most gratifying thing in the world has been having people come up to me and say, 'my father is as paranoid and safety-obsessed as yours' or 'I talk to my sister on the phone fourteen times a day, too."

I found myself intrigued by her mother, who she would bring to some interviews:

I'm telling you, if I'm able, I'm bringing that woman to every single interview. If you were a celebrity, wouldn't you relax a little, knowing that someone's mom was in on the proceeding. My mother has a pin shaped like a radish, because she likes to garden. I'm going to make her wear that for every encounter, because what's more disarming than a radish pin? And she's very outgoing, more so than I am. She'll talk to anyone. And I don't get quite as nervous if Mom is there.

I was amazed by Jancee's dialogue. I felt as if I were listening into great conversation:

For certain scenes I would call my sisters or my parents and we would sort of go over it again -sort of like play-acting. That made it more authentic and God love them, they were always willing to do it.

It was the same with my best friend, Julie, who was always willing to, as we called it, 'run some dialogue.' I would give her the setup and the scene and we'd be off.

Jancee's writing a novel. Of course I asked her about it:

It's familiar territory – it's set in New Jersey and so forth. Lord knows I'm not a skilled enough writer to suddenly bust out with a novel set in sixteenth-century France.

But I did find it easier to write a novel. I loved every minute of it. I can hardly believe that I might be able to do this for a living. Is that too nauseatingly gee-whiz?

And the premise is based on a real situation: my sister Heather moved back home with my folks last year, after she and her husband opened a restaurant that didn't do too well. She's 36 and she has two kids, and the whole gang moved in with my parents for six months. Well, she began to regress in the funniest way – playing old mixed tapes, driving too fast (as only a Jersey girl can) and listening in on my conversation when I would call home, as she had when she was a kid. So she handed my plot. Thank you, Heather.

The novel will be out in June of next year from Random House and it's called In Between Days.

(Yes, after the Cure song!) I think there is a small movement of people moving back home in their late thirties - not the 'boomerang' generation of 25-year-olds but people who have financial problems and their folks are doing better than they are. My folks' generation saved like crazy but my generation is more willing to take risks and follow their happiness and all of that, as my dad calls it, "nonsense." And as a result I know two close friends aside from my sister who moved home very, very late in life.

I must editorialize here for a second, and say thanks, Jancee, for finding it easier to write a novel. Non-writers or even writers who have never written a memoir and aren't totally ego-driven, don't understand how truly difficult it is to dig so deep into yourself, and much more...  but enough.

Article Author: piaSavage

I write. I blog @ courtingdestiny.com. Once it was a Technorati "A" ranked blog but I gave up my life and paid for the privilege. Now I live. I moved from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to SC recently. I go back to NY too often to miss it. …

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