Interview: Sarah Seltzer
In her debut novel, The Singer Sisters, Sarah Seltzer chronicles the highs and lows of a family of musicians, focusing primarily on the matriarch, Judie, and her daughter, Emma. While Judie found her footing in the New York folk scene of the 1960s, Emma strikes gold with the late-’90s alternative crowd, and within their narratives, Seltzer weaves a plethora of family secrets, gender politics, and questions of artistic license.
I have known Sarah Seltzer for over a decade. We met at our MFA program, and I was a beta reader for an early draft of The Singer Sisters. As such, I was interested to talk with her about the many changes the manuscript went through over the years, as well as her ability to juggle timelines, pen fictional songs, and insert her characters into real music scenes without overburdening the reader with famous cameos.
—Benjamin Woodard
Benjamin Woodard: Let’s start by talking about the nonchronological structure of The Singer Sisters. I remember an early draft of the novel from 2018 began with a faux thesis paper, which no longer appears, though the story does still move between decades frequently, covering Judie’s career in the 1960s and Emma’s career in the 1990s. How did you decide on the final timeline as it appears in the book?
Sarah Seltzer: The novel was originally mostly chronological, with some back-and-forth at the end. I had this long break during Covid when I was on draft 3 or something like that. I had a new baby and started to think about what I wanted to do with the book when I had time to get back to it.
Something that kept coming back to me, the part that really was calling out, was the stuff in the ’90s, when Emma, who is a rebel without a cause, has this momentous day on which she has a breakthrough performance, but also stumbles onto some family secrets that maybe help explain her anger. And that day felt like the rawest, freshest, most original piece to me that I was sitting on, so I decided to move that section up front. Whereas the entire sequence in the ’60s, which is how I originally started the book, sees a talented musician run away and hang out in the Greenwich Village folk scene. That’s fun, but more well-trodden.
So one day during Covid, I said to my husband, “I need a few hours. I just need to do something with the book.” I locked myself in our tiny office space, downloaded the software Scrivener, and reordered everything. Then I had a few more months without working on the book, and when I had time to revise it again, I printed it all out to start seeing where I had to add connections, because it had been in chronological order. I had to add tension and bring in background information and exposition and suspense to sections that had been purely scene-driven beforehand.
What was fun to do until the very end was find ways to make the chapters resonate with each other as I jumped back and forth between time. A ’90s chapter would end, and the ’60s chapter would pick up in a place that felt thematically or linguistically aligned with what had just come before.
BW: The novel is also broken into four parts. How did that structure come about? Did rearranging chapters help you figure out what felt like, say, Part I versus Part II?
SS: Very much so. Each part is generally lined up with a decade or an era of time, even though the narrative jumps around in perspective. There’s a ’70s section where you spend time in the point of view of Sylvia, who’s a secondary character, and an ’80s section where you spend a lot of time with Rose, another secondary character. Back in the ’90s, the point of view goes back to being primarily Emma’s, which we saw at the beginning. Once the opening section and the back-and-forth between Emma in the ’90s and Judie in the ’60s was set in stone, with the section climactically ending with a huge fight between them, the rest of the parts fell together more naturally.
BW: You mention Sylvia and Rose as secondary characters and Judie and Emma as protagonists. Throughout the novel, you use close-third-person point of view. What went into the decision to break away from looking over just Judie’s or Emma’s shoulders to include these other women?
SS: Emma and Judie are both such intense characters. I mean, large parts of both Judie’s and Emma’s sections are in their adolescence, right? They’re not even twenty years old, and this youthfulness is one of the reasons their perspectives can feel so invigorating and so frustrating, because that’s what it is to be that age.
I’m a Jane Austen fanatic, and what I love about those books is that you’re in the characters’ heads, but also floating above them. It’s harder to do that in a contemporary novel because you don’t have a narrator directly addressing the audience and saying, “As we all know, our character is making a very foolish decision, and now let’s return to watch her make that decision.” Instead of employing that traditional narrative technique, I found it useful to air out character flaws and to examine their mistakes via these other perspectives.
So now you see Emma and Judie walking around from the point of view of people who are frustrated with them, who love them, who want to connect with them but can’t for whatever reason. These added perspectives give a balance to the interiority of their sections.
BW: As a reader, I thought, for example, that Emma was acting difficult sometimes, and it was great to hear other characters making those same observations. It seemed like they were taking on the reader’s point of view to some degree.
SS: That’s exactly the role they have, and they also make for a broader story. The novel is about people’s artistic journeys and showing that there are all kinds of intersections happening. It’s not just about Judie’s and Emma’s arcs. Sylvia and all these other folkies and singers are floating around, and their brushes with my characters are just one part of their own creative quests. It was important for me to use them all to poke a hole in each other’s myopia too; because these are artists and performers, they all share a sort of narcissism, the major and minor characters alike.
BW: As the novel revolves around music, the story is full of lyrics to fictional songs. You place these two women in recognizable musical eras: the late ’60s/’70s folk scene and the late ’90s alt-rock/folk boom. My question has to do with creating the song lyrics. Were you referencing other musicians from those times? Poets?
SS: I joke that my education for this part of the writing came from reading CD liner notes and lyrics obsessively as a teenager. That’s not something you get now when you listen to music digitally. But unfolding either my parents’ vinyl albums or my own CDs and reading the lyrics along with the music was how I listened to everything for the first time. I did study poetry writing in college, although that was a long time ago.
Lyric building was the most fun part of writing. Much of it was messing around and playing and then a little bit of refining. Most of the songs have a couple of other real songs that I think of as reference points, but there’s not a one-to-one comparison. Just like the characters all have multiple musical reference points, the songs in the novel are that way too. There’s the road song, the seduction song, and the angry ’90s song.
BW: Do you hear the songs? Is there music in your head for some of them?
SS: I do hear them, and I have a friend who has put music to two of them. It was surprising to hear my friend’s versions because they are different from how they sound in my head, but it was also incredibly moving and exciting. What I hear are mostly melodies that are already out there, superimposed onto my lyrics.
BW: Since you set your novel in these recognizable musical scenes, how did you go about navigating what names of real musicians to add, or figuring out how much is too much when crafting a fictional story within these confines?
SS: Initially, I had a lot of famous names in there, but I took them out. Then my agent, during her round of revisions, had me put a few of them back in because she felt that it was important—and she was right—to ground the characters in real musical scenes. I added in a lot of small bands that weren’t super famous. My characters in the ’60s weren’t hanging out with Bob Dylan, although Dylan is everywhere in the book on some level, since they’re listening to his music and thinking about him. Particularly in the ’90s sections, I include a lot of references to one-hit wonders and groups that were briefly big, because there was such a constant conversation then about who was successful. I wanted the chatter to feel like the way actual musicians would talk.
The advantage I had going in was being such a giant pop culture nerd and knowing all these little anecdotes and facts about so many different figures. I could throw in a little Carly Simon reference without it being obvious or one-to-one.
BW: Most of your previously published writing has been in feminist and political journalism. How did that part of your life come into play while drafting the novel?
SS: As writers, we think about projects being so different from each other. The first draft of this novel poured out of me in an organic way, which is in fact how all my first drafts tend to go. But it was also different because with journalism, I’m writing a first draft in a few hours and then revising for maybe four days. Whereas drafting the novel felt so creative and raw continually for months, like the muse was speaking to me.
But when I read the first draft, I found this whole section in a journalistic voice! I ended up scrapping that section, but that voice is what comes naturally to me. And the feminist angle is how I think of everything. It was fun to have these female characters who are complicated and at times difficult and frustrating, but who are also debating women’s roles. They’re not talking about “the patriarchy,” and it was so great to not have to use any of the jargon: second wave versus third wave. But they are still talking about equality.
BW: I know that, like for most authors, this is your first published book but it’s not necessarily the first manuscript you wrote. Could you talk about what you were able to take from previous attempts at publishing and apply to The Singer Sisters?
SS: I have two manuscripts in a drawer. The first was a novel from my twenties that was a straight-up modern retelling of a Jane Austen story about expats in France. Writing it was what prompted me to get my MFA, because I felt that while I was able to write the whole book, there was something missing. I needed to study the craft of fiction. And so I went to my MFA program and read short stories intensely. I wrote a manuscript that was interconnected short stories, because that was in at the time: A Visit from the Goon Squad and Olive Kitteridge. I thought, “I can do that, you know?”
Now, it almost feels like those manuscripts were two halves of a whole. The first was the plot of a novel without the depth and the technique. The second saw me experimenting with deeper themes and ideas—and different literary techniques—in a series of short stories that didn’t have enough of a compelling through line. The Singer Sisters kind of combined the two, and I think both previous manuscripts were necessary to write to understand how to approach this book.
BW: Once The Singer Sisters got to your agent and then to your publisher, what kind of revision process occurred? I feel like that’s something that doesn’t get talked about that much.
SS: The novel existed for five years before I had an agent, and I had been working on it for three. I didn’t work on it for two years during Covid. It was a year of drafting, a year of tinkering, two years of Covid, and then a year of seriously revising before I got the agent. Then with my agent, Susanna Einstein, we did one sustained round of revisions. She sent me the manuscript with micro and macro suggestions. A lot said, “We need less of this and more of this.” I had written Sylvia’s sections in first person and Susanna had me change them to third person to make the style uniform. I added an Emma scene here or there because there was too much time without seeing Emma. It was all pretty straightforward. She and I did a couple more rounds of copy and line edits. My husband did an intensive proofread before we sent it out on submission.
And then after it sold to Flatiron, my editor Megan Lynch sent me an edit letter with line edits and some big sections she wanted me to cut. There were also a few small structural things she wanted me to move to add a little more conflict and suspense.
BW: Did it hurt to cut chunks out?
SS: I’m very pragmatic about these things. There were a couple spots where I thought, “Oh that was a nice scene.” But I always find when an editor returns my work, ninety-five percent of the time or more, the suggestions are correct. And five percent of the time or less, maybe I push back. I always tell writers that when you first get those notes, you’re going to want to just listen. Save your arguments for the five percent that really matter to you. I’m a big believer in writer and editor synergy and the editorial process. So it was not too painful for me.
SARAH SELTZER has been a feminist journalist and cultural critic for more than a decade. Her lively writing for publications including The New York Times, TIME, Jezebel, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, and many other places has shaped the discourse on subjects ranging from Hollywood casting, to abortion rights, to Jane Austen, and beyond. A native and lifelong New Yorker, Sarah is currently the executive editor at Lilith Magazine. The Singer Sisters is her debut novel. Find her on Instagram @sarahmseltzer.
BENJAMIN WOODARD’s fiction has appeared in Joyland, F(r)iction, HAD, and SmokeLong Quarterly, as well as Best Microfiction 2019 and 2021. His literary criticism regularly appears in venues such as Publishers Weekly, Words Without Borders, and On the Seawall. He is editor in chief at Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine. Find him on Instagram @woodardwriter.
