By Laren Rusin
Even if you're 22 years old and a published author, life outside of Oberlin can be tough.
Thea Joselow, OC '96, drew from her life experiences before college and wrote a book on divorce from a kid's point of view.
As a private reading project her junior year, Joselow started writing the book, she said, on how kids can cope with divorce.
"It was written mostly at 3 a.m.," said Joselow, who lived in Keep the majority of the time she was writing. She majored in English and said the writing process didn't differ that much from writing for classes. "It's a lot of my yammering on the subject, which is what you do in papers anyway," she laughed.
Joselow, originally from Washington, D.C., transferred to Oberlin her second sophomore semester from Goucher College outside of Baltimore, Md. She lives in Boston right now, and is searching for a job. She's doing some freelance writing, and is writing pamphlets for a women's health group. Having already published a book hasn't helped her along with her career &emdash; surprisingly.
"It means that I started everything backwards. I busted right out there, and no one will accept it," she said.
Joselow signed a publishing contract before she started writing. She worked with her mother, who is a college teacher as well as a writer. Her mother wrote a book for women going through divorce, and had experience with both the topic and the publisher.
She wrote some of the rough draft, sent it to her mother for editing, and then her mother sent it back for Joselow to approve. Then it went to the publisher, who edited it and sent it back to Joselow, who gave it a final go-over before it went to get published.
Joselow and her mother talked to students from Oberlin and the college where her mother teaches, offering them dinner if they'd talk into a tape recorder about their parents' divorce. They interviewed people between the ages of 16 and 28, and then Joselow tied the interviews together with her own narrative. They were never turned down by people they asked to talked to; "there were no notable no's," Joselow said.
She agreed with much of what the interviewees said, which made the book easier to write. She said that most of the interviewees were thoughtful, and since it had been years since the divorces happened, most had worked issues out and reconciled with their parents.
Over the course of the interview Joselow said that everyone she interviewed said that things got better in the family after the divorce, and no one regretted what had happened. "No one said they wished things would go back to the way things were," said Joselow. "If you think about it, it makes sense, I just didn' t think that way before."
Even though she was writing about her own parents' divorce, Joselow didn't have a problem working with her mother. "She's really easy to work with from 400 miles away," she laughed.
Her father was worried the book would be an opportunity for Joselow and her mother to gang up against him, but Joselow emphasized that that wasn't the idea. "We're not telling people to hate their parents," she said.
When she first told her father that she was writing the book, "he got a little pissy," she said. Joselow was honest with both her parents throughout the writing process, which helped them accept it.
'"It's not male bashing or dad bashing," Joselow said. "The stories belong to other people." She has two younger brothers, who "liked [parts of the book] okay." She doesn't know if her brothers have read the whole book, though, so she can't say how they have reacted, but both were involved in the process of writing it. Ethan, the older of the two brothers, helped come up with section headings.
"I'm not a good judge over whether it will help people or not," Joselow said. She emphasized that it's not an authoritative text. "I've gotten good feedback from strangers, though. They've said it was useful."
