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Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, consultant, and the creator and host of this podcast. For those of you just tuning in, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.
This episode begins with a story from Dakota Bossard, who shares how a particular novel inspired her to slow down and embrace the present moment. Here's more from Dakota.
Dakota Bossard: I'm Dakota Bossard, and I'm a writer and book reviewer. Something I read recently that made me slow down was a novel called Sam by Allegra Goodman. The story follows Sam chronologically from age seven to nineteen. When you first meet her, she's precocious and observant. As she hits puberty, she becomes unsure and, at times, lost. And by the time she nears her twenties, Goodman perfectly portrays how incredible and scary it is to be nineteen and have the whole world out in front of you.
It was one of the best portrayals of girlhood I've ever read, and it made me slow down in a couple of ways. On one hand, it was one of those books that had me sitting in my apartment in silence for hours. As I devoured the book, I didn't even know where my phone was, and my attention was solely on the story in front of me. Even as an avid reader, I find that reading experience so rare. And then, on the other hand, as I was reading about this little girl who's rushing toward womanhood as fast as she can, it had me reminiscing on my own adolescence. I related to Sam's urgency, her insistence that she was grown up long before she actually was. And I found myself reflecting on how far I've come as I enter the last year of my twenties, but at the same time, how young I still am.
Much to my relief, I came to understand it was time to slow down. It's time to release the pressure to finish my manuscript by a certain date, to find a soulmate, to even rush through a great book I'm enjoying. And suddenly, my biggest resolution for 2023 was not to write a certain number of words or to go on a hundred first dates, but to slow down and savor whatever's in front of me, despite the little girl who wants to rush toward the next thing.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Dakota for sharing. Again, the novel she mentioned is Sam by Allegra Goodman, and you can follow Dakota on social @dakotabossard. Now, here's my conversation with Allie Rowbottom.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: Who are you when no one is looking? This question came to mind when reading Allie Rowbottom's debut novel, Aesthetica. The story follows Anna, a former Instagram celebrity, on her path of reflection and redemption as she seeks to undergo a high-risk elective surgery called Aesthetica™, which is said to "reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self."
As readers bounce between Anna's past and present, Allie paints a nuanced portrait of a woman stepping into herself while she considers her relationship with fame, family, and the trappings of a landscape predicated on image and youth. But page after page, Allie's rendering of a distinct moment in culture begs the question: What will we find when we look back and move forward?
While Aesthetica is undoubtedly a work of fiction, there are parallels in Allie's own life that ultimately came to light. And in this interview, she shared more about why Aesthetica is a continued conversation from her memoir JELL-O Girls, her thoughts on privacy and pace, and the unique power of embracing womanhood.
Within the first few pages of reading Aesthetica, this much was clear to me: Allie Rowbottom was born to write. As she writes in the book: "I suspect I'll recover, return, and sometimes the wanting will, too: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved and never left. Desire like that isn't a failure, or a girlhood flight of fancy. It's a fact of every life." So without further delay, here's Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica.
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Rachel Schwartzmann: [Laughs] I, too, have a husband named John. It's good to be passionate about life with someone that you're passionate about.
Allie Rowbottom: I agree. I don't know really what I would do without him, so it's just really nice to have found a John. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. [Laughs] And he's a writer too.
Allie Rowbottom: Yes, he is. He's a novelist. His first book Body High came out in 2021, and he's working on his second one right now. It's gonna be really great. I can already tell.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Would you guys ever co-write something together?
Allie Rowbottom: Oh, we've talked about it for years. I think we would really love to collaborate on a screenplay, maybe. It's definitely a goal of ours. We always talk about taking a class, a screenplay, writing class together, and then writing ... we've had an idea for a long time, so I think it'll happen as soon as we get a minute to spare. But we also read each other's work and give each other feedback, which is a lovely thing that we can share together. I feel so lucky to have that and to have him as an early reader.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Is it ever intimidating?
Allie Rowbottom: I don't feel intimidated. I think it can sometimes be... I have a tendency to write really quickly and then—and I'm working on this—but I'll write something really quickly and feel very excited about it—almost like a child wanting to show their drawing to a parent. I will rush to John with my new draft and expect him to read it right away. And a lot of the time, he knows what I can't see, which is that it is not ready for a reader. And he will turn me down, and I'll throw a little temper tantrum and realize later that what he was saying was I need space and a boundary to work on my stuff without having to drop everything to read yours—which is completely fair. So I have been really working on letting my projects sit for a while and returning to them and then sharing them with John in a like space that we both agree upon rather than me just barging in with it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: That's really interesting. Do you think that's a sign of something good, or have you had that happen where you've rushed to show him and then later scrapped a project? I ask that, too, because I'm currently working on my first book, and I keep feeling that urgency—despite the nature of it, which is all about slowing down. But yeah, I'm trying to discern whether or not I can trust that.
Allie Rowbottom: I think that that urgency is really valuable, and it, for me, a lot of the times, the best things that I write come from that place of urgency where I just sit down at the computer, and I need to get something out, and it comes fast and furious, and so it's a good thing. At the same time, I think then putting it away and keeping it private is also a good skill. So I would say that urgency is what fuels me, and I'm learning to sit with it on my own and to trust myself because I have had the experience—and I had the experience with Aesthetica early in its life—where I would show it to John too quickly, and he would be like, this isn't good yet, and I would feel very hurt. But it's just the fact of the matter that it does take time to make something good. And sometimes it's worth keeping private and keeping it in your own little world because other people telling you the truth, which is what you want, can also be really devastating when you're not ready for it. So I would say the urgency is extremely valuable, and also, it's okay to keep it private for a while.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I've been thinking about privacy a lot, and I'm sure a lot of these impulses are a result of social media and this constant need to share and perform. And I actually just finished writing a piece for Literary Hub about Amelia's Notebook. Do you remember that book?
Allie Rowbottom: No, I don't.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, it was a ‘90s children's book, and basically, this nine-year-old girl documents a new move in school in her notebook. And it was a classic in my childhood, but my John gave it to me because I was struggling a little bit with writer's block, and I just started to think about all of the diaristic impulses attached to everything we do now—this need to share constantly. I mean, I've shared a lot of myself online, but I've made it a point to treat my writing a lot more sacredly than I do anything else. So yeah, that's a bit of a tangent, but that just made me think of learning that privacy muscle a little bit more.
Allie Rowbottom: I think that's really wise when it comes to writing because, and I see this a lot with my students or younger writers, that there is this sense of urgency can manifest in publishing work before it's ready or just wanting to have a book so badly that it doesn't receive the time and edits that it maybe needs. And then later, it feels like, oh, I wish I hadn't rushed so much. I wish I had been a little more careful before I put this thing out in the world because now it's out there, and I can't take it back.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that's a good segue into talking about pace a little bit. Whether it pertains to your writing practice or literally how you move through the world, how would you describe your relationship with pace?
Allie Rowbottom: I think it's evolving. I find that right now, I'm at an interesting point in my life where I feel myself growing, and I can feel myself maturing in a really lovely way. And I feel really grateful for that. It's an interesting sort of partner to the book in as much as I'm coming to an age—and I'm aging in a way—that's allowing me to mature and develop in such a way. But I think that in the fairly recent past, I've been very anxious, and I've rushed myself, my work, and my life a lot.
This, to me, has everything to do with losing my mom at the end of my twenties, right as I was getting married right as I got married. And then making a series of decisions—about where to live and what to work on, and how to structure my life—that were all informed by grief. And I don't mean that as a bad thing; it's just what it was. And so I just found myself rushing and feeling anxious and sad and scared and making decisions from that point for a while. Now, blissfully, I feel much more grounded and more calm, and I'm able to take a slower approach to a lot of things in my life, including my writing. Part of that is just having learned that rushing myself in any way and rushing my work, in particular, doesn't yield the results that I want. So returning to a calmer sense of pace and sense of self is something that I'm actively doing right now.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, it's a lifelong practice, especially in the landscape that we're both in terms of just being pulled online and offline.
You know, Slow Stories was born at a time in my life when I was reconciling what it means to find a happy medium between my values and the realities of living, working, and creating now. And I was constantly looking to movements like slow fashion and slow food and wondering, why aren't we adopting those values or approaches in our digital lives? And I'm curious if you have a definition or what comes to mind when you hear the words "slow storytelling?" How does that factor into your writing practice online and off?
Allie Rowbottom: When you said slow storytelling, I thought of books immediately. As we all know, there are myriad modes of storytelling now in our current culture, and a lot of them rely on instant gratification. And books are inherently slow in comparison to a lot of those storytelling modes. There's a lot of anxiety that can come with that for writers about being left behind, about books being a sort of disappearing medium. But I think that there's so much value in sticking with a book and having a story told to you over at least a series of hours. So I guess I immediately think of books, and I think of just the pleasure of returning to a book every night for a week or two weeks, or however long it takes to finish the book and what that means when a story enmeshes itself in your life over a period of time and how valuable that can be.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It's interesting to think about the notion that books are disappearing from a reading perspective. I feel incredibly hopeful. I feel overwhelmed by how many amazing books have come out in the last couple of years!
I don't know if you'll be able to answer this, but how was your relationship with reading in New York when you were living in New York versus LA?
Allie Rowbottom: Well, interestingly, when I was living in New York full-time, I was in school, in college, so I was reading a lot whether or not I wanted to. And it was a time when Instagram wasn't around; social media wasn't as much of a thing. Now I'm in New York maybe 40% of the time, and I think I'll probably cut back on that after Aesthetica comes out.
Weirdly, actually, I'm so busy in the city, and yet I have trouble sleeping here, much more so than in LA. So I stay up and read, or when I can't sleep, I read, and I end up reading more in New York than I read in Los Angeles because, in Los Angeles, I'm so relaxed that when I get into bed at the end of the day to read my book, I fall asleep almost immediately. I will say when I read during the day in LA. I am reading at my desk ... I'll read a craft book or a novel that feels like a great companion to whatever I'm working on. It feels more like reading for work.
So I guess that's the circuitous answer. But in New York, I end up reading more for pleasure, and I read late into the night. And in LA, I read at my desk more, and I read for work, or I'll be reading for my writing group or something like that. But I would imagine it to be the opposite because LA is a much more relaxed space for me. But I do find in New York—maybe it's almost that my life in New York is very variable—my schedule's very variable, and books are this constant thing that I can turn to to keep my company when I can't really manage the variability of that schedule. [Laughs]
Rachel Schwartzmann: Makes sense. And I definitely connect with reading at night. It seems to be the only time where I can really sink into a story.
Allie Rowbottom: Mm-hmm.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Were you a reader or a writer first?
Allie Rowbottom: I was a reader first. In particular, my mother read to me a lot as a kid. It was our thing. And I am really only remembering that lately. I'm not quite sure why, but we read for hours every night—or she read for hours every night, which somehow feels like reading to me. And then, from there, I took it on myself, but I was definitely a reader first. I would say that in my late teens and twenties, I started writing more, but I was also reading at the same time. So reading has been a constant. Writing has been, I think, a relatively recent development for me.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that's nice for some listeners to hear myself included, just to know that you can step into that role or that part of your life at any time.
Allie Rowbottom: Yeah, I didn't study writing until my senior year of college, and that was when I realized, oh, I could do this, and I'm good at this, and I feel very in the moment when I'm doing this in a way that feels worth investing in further. I also was about to graduate in 2009 when there were absolutely no jobs. So I went to get an MFA—almost by necessity. I just felt like, let me get this degree that will help me teach—which it ended up not being a terminal degree, but I thought, why not just keep going and investing in this art form? ... not only am I good at it, but it merges my love of reading with my lifelong passion for self-expression and exploring my emotions. And so it came from that, I guess
Rachel Schwartzmann: Generally, you've been writing about family in your recent books, and although your memoir was obviously nonfiction, I'm wondering what ideas you had to leave behind in order to write Anna's story.
Allie Rowbottom: I think I had to leave behind the idea that I had to leave behind a mother-daughter narrative in order to write this novel. I felt when I started it that I couldn't write anything similar to what I had written in JELL-O Girls. At the same time, I deeply needed to process some of the stuff that didn't make it into JELL-O Girls. So for a long time in the early stages of Aesthetica, I was resisting writing another mother-daughter or family narrative. And the book clicked into place when I just accepted that it's okay to repeat yourself sometimes. It's okay to write about similar themes over the course of your career. In fact, a lot of writers do that, and it makes complete sense because the questions in your writing are the questions in your life, a lot of times.
So I think that's sort of a strange answer to that question, but I needed to let go of some of my own self-limiting beliefs about what the book should be about and just accept that what I needed to say had similar threads to what I needed to say in JELL-O Girls. It's a continuation of a conversation. It's not a brand-new conversation.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I think that's the human experience. We've gotten so good at compartmentalizing, but to be able to accept that through-line—and embrace it—is probably a relief, I would imagine.
Allie Rowbottom: Yes.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I definitely want to talk more about Aesthetica, but I first wanted to mention that I just finished reading Deborah Levy's third living autobiography called Real Estate. Have you read that series or her work?
Allie Rowbottom: I haven't read that series, no.
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think it might have changed my life a little bit. And in real estate, you know, she explores themes around desire, home belonging, and [she] catalogs what she calls her "unreal real estate" and an inventory of what's inside her house or her desired house. For some reason, I kind of thought it was akin to social media because, at one point, she writes:
"If real estate is a self-portrait and a class portrait, it is also a body arranging its limbs to seduce. Actually, I couldn't work out why real estate wasn't flirting with me so intensely, its swooning eyes making me all kinds of offers I couldn't refuse."
And again, this kind of made me think about Anna and the connection between the spaces we inhabit online and offline and how they impact who we become. And so I wonder if we can talk a little bit about the connection between spaces and selves because so much of what Anna seems to look for is agency and ownership over a space that she can curate or feel safe in, and Instagram plays into that. But you also render so many incredible moments of physical spaces she inhabits—from the doctor's offices and hospital to the mansion where Jake and Anna attend a party. The list goes on. But basically, I would love to get your thoughts on, you know, how tangible spaces influence social spaces.
Allie Rowbottom: That's so interesting. Well, I think one of my goals in taking her to so many different federal, physical places was to highlight the disconnect between some really real—for lack of a better word—and unglamorous spaces such as the hospital and what we see or how we see those spaces represented on social media. And again, with her home in Houston or the mansions where she parties, I felt that some discordance was really valuable to the book. But I do think, despite all that, social media has a way of glossing everything over and making it all look desirable in some way simply because it's when we're looking at something on Instagram, it's not ours, and it's not what we are living. And so it almost has to embody that grass is always greener [idea]. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but that's what I was thinking of when I was placing her in so many different literal physical spaces in the book. Just the sort of glossing over that Instagram does to so many different spaces, good and bad.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, think of it as a form of real estate too. It's a place where you can kind of collect your most valued possessions, literally on your body or in your house. Later in that passage in Real Estate, Levy also asks, what was I going to do with all of this wanting? And it brought me back to Anna's story just because her attention and desires are constantly pulled in so many different directions in the book.
We can save this question for the end of the interview, but I also wanted to ask you what you want for Anna by the end. But maybe first, we can have you read the first chapter of Aesthetica so listeners can get a feel for how the book begins.
Allie Rowbottom: Yes. Chapter one.
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Allie Rowbottom: Well, I think an influencer is someone who makes a living influencing other people to purchase or consume in some way, either a product or an ideal that said influencer is performing on their Instagram. I, in some ways, think of an Instagram model as something different, and I’m not sure if that’s how other people think about it. But an Instagram model to me is someone who primarily posts on their Instagram pictures of themselves—oftentimes, really beautiful pictures of themselves without products attached. And then, once in a while, they’ll influence and sell you something. But most of their content is almost free editorial photos. And I think that they oftentimes are posting those as Anna is in an attempt to gain more serious work as a model.
I think that this landscape has changed since writing Aesthetica and since, in some portions of the book, it’s set in 2017, which I saw as a particularly interesting and strong moment for influencers on Instagram. And it was a pre-Me Too moment also, so I think that felt important [to Aesthetica] that there wasn’t as much language around some of the power imbalances that we see in the book. But I think that now the marketplace on Instagram for influencers is much more saturated. There are more people with more followers. It’s not particularly unique to have over a hundred thousand followers or a verified account in the way that it was in the recent past. And because of that, it’s harder to stand out. It’s harder to make a living. It’s harder to feel relevant or unique on an app where there are just so many people doing this thing, which is influencing. So finding a voice and finding a niche and a perspective that people are going to gravitate toward is extra hard now.
I think also people are—we’ll see how this plays out—moving away from Instagram and toward TikTok or whatever’s going to come next simply because that’s the way that these apps seem to go. People gravitate towards them for a while and then move on to the next thing. So I’m hearing that engagement is down, and influencers are trying out new apps in an attempt to stay relevant and keep their careers afloat.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it’s definitely a volatile landscape, and [I] really don’t have any answers in terms of what’s next just because the world’s changing so quickly. But as you mentioned, a lot changed between the date that the book takes place versus now. And I wonder if there were any unexpected challenges that arose for you in terms of capturing the experience of influencing or Anna’s story in writing—or any unexpected lessons that writing a character of this nature revealed.
Allie Rowbottom: Yeah, I think that the biggest challenge was maintaining depth and creating depth for this character, which was my goal from the beginning was to write about a superficial topic or a sort of low-brow subject matter in a serious, thoughtful, emotional way. And that turned out to be the big challenge of the book. Also because figuring out where she was coming from and how she was approaching self-objectification on this app took a while. I think I made her really passive at first because I couldn’t quite figure out why she wanted to do this thing and what she was hoping to get from it. And the key, of course, was in the mother-daughter side of the story. But I think that another challenge was obviously relevant. How to write about an app that feels in some ways ephemeral and of a specific moment in history that we will move away from soon?
I think that the challenge—or what I realized—was that the app is something that, in some ways, represents something that will always remain true or relevant in as much as image, culture and image as currency will remain relevant even if Instagram falls by the wayside. And so finding a way to address that, the timelessness of some elements felt useful. And then also, focusing on the emotional beats of the story rather than the more literal beats of something like Instagram was really helpful as well.
Rachel Schwartzmann: As you were writing about topics that were so based on performance and publicity, really, did you start to feel more protective of your own story or experiences? How was your relationship with social [media] changing as the book progressed?
Allie Rowbottom: That’s a great question. I didn’t feel more protective, but now that the book is out, I’m feeling more protective of my story. I find that I’m being asked a lot about my personal relationship to social media and plastic surgery, which I expected. But I’m also being asked if the book is autofiction, which decidedly is not. I made it up. There’s really nothing in the book that’s real ... it’s making me feel, yes, more protective of my personal life and my personal story, and the differences—the extreme differences—between this book and my personal story. I think also some of that is it seems unavoidable in some ways to be a woman on Instagram and to be putting yourself out there in such a way and not receive some backlash and some questions or comments that feel really violating; it seems part of the landscape which the book addresses.
So I’m not surprised by it, but I am feeling more protective of myself, and I’ve had moments where—which happened with my first book, too—I question decisions that I made to put myself out there or put this picture out there or agree to this interview or whatever it is. But the fact is, is that there are really very few ways to do it a hundred percent correctly or to win as a woman on a public platform like Instagram. So yes, I’m feeling more protective, and I do have moments where I feel disappointed in myself, or I wish I’d made a different decision, but it’s impossible to do it right all the time.
Rachel Schwartzmann: It’s always interesting. I think with all of the novelists that I’ve interviewed, that seems to be a recurring theme where people want to know if it’s based in some sort of reality, and I wonder why that’s our impulse to always go to that place to justify why a story has to be told. Were any of the questions you were receiving different from inquiries you got when you published JELL-O Girls? It seems like people might just be interested in your story overall. It’s funny that this was coming up with a novel, too.
Allie Rowbottom: I think the questions feel very different from JELL-O Girls. One of the reasons I wanted to write a novel was because I had put myself out there in such an extremely personal way with my memoir. In some ways, very naively, I think I didn’t anticipate that so many people would be so judgmental about that. I think we all have a tendency to remember or focus on the negatives as a mode of self-protection. But I was so bummed out, honestly, by the amount of people who would say terrible things about my dead mother on the internet. I thought, oh, I don’t wanna have to go through that again, so I’ll write a novel.
The questions are very different. I’m open to talking about this for sure, but people assume, simply because I’ve written about Instagram and plastic surgery, that I have a relationship... I mean, anyone can see on my Instagram that I have a relationship to Instagram, but I’m happy to talk about my relationship to plastic surgery, also. But it feels a little bit beside the point to me sometimes. Some of that feels gendered. I think that there’s a tendency to think of women who put themselves out there as open people. People who will willingly talk about anything or can be asked anything. But I have been a little surprised by being asked so many personal questions when I wrote a novel. It’s not autofiction. It’s not a memoir. I did make it up.
I also think culturally, because of reality television, for example, there is more of a popular conception that anything you see or read or consume is at least partially real. And part of the pleasure of watching or reading is trying to figure out what is real about the creator or the characters and what isn’t. And in some ways, I think, when it comes to a form like autofiction, that can keep readers reading to just sort of try to figure out what’s real. It’s sort of a mystery, but in some ways, also when it comes to fiction, we forget that some things are just completely made up, and they can feel emotionally true to the writer, but that doesn’t mean that they’re true in any literal way.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I think another interesting thing—and I’m sorry that you’ve been getting such invasive questions that’s gotta be emotionally draining—but it seems like we’ve gotten to this place where people feel like they’re owed those answers too. You put out a book, and then they take everything. [Laughs] It’s interesting, and I think that was a decision Anna ultimately had to make in terms of when she was gonna draw that line.
I really connected with your explorations of power and those power dynamics that cross a threshold from imbalance to violence. And so I want to talk about power for a moment. This is actually a question that’s come up a lot in my author interviews—and I think it’s relevant to Anna’s story and maybe how you approached writing it—but I’m curious if writing about grief is the same as writing about power or in what ways there’s crossover there? Because I think, ultimately, Anna’s grief allowed her to transcend these expectations about who she was supposed to be and kind of reset. But I do think there is a connection between the two, and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Allie Rowbottom: That’s so interesting. I think that there is a way that grief—or the experience of loss—does obviously change and, in some ways, strengthen a person. It can. For me, when I think about Anna and her relationship to power, her relationship to what she’s lost, it feels very much that—at least in the book—for so long (or in the future tense section of the book), she has been trying to return and to revoke and to freeze herself in some ways at a period of time where she could experience power without some of the negative repercussions that happened to her along her life path. So she’s trying to sort of go back to that early—some might say naive—place where she was at the age of nineteen when she first moved to LA prior to really getting into Instagram when her mother was her mother in this—I don’t want to spoil anything—really whole and present way.
The power that she arrives at is the power of realizing that no procedure, no pill, no person, nothing in life can really effectively freeze you in time. The power is in absorbing what you’ve lost and then moving forward and allowing yourself to age and mature and step into what is, I think, a truer, more lasting form of power that comes with adult womanhood rather than the sort of transient power that girlhood is afforded in this culture. In as much as we privilege youth as a kind of currency, and that carries with it power. But I think a lot of the time, as many of us know, it’s a slippery and somewhat hollow power that fades quickly and oftentimes leaves negativity in its wake. So I’m not sure if that’s answering the question, but it feels to me like womanhood—if it can be arrived at and if it can be stepped into and allowed—carries with it a true power that is so strong that we really try to suppress it culturally because it represents something that I think a lot of us are very afraid of.
Rachel Schwartzmann: In the middle of the book, Anna remarks:
“Choice is a power I am well aware is mine to wield. A feminist, post-feminist right. To give my story, or keep it to myself, keep myself hidden and safe. My choice to surgically alter my body, impregnante my body, stay natural, stay alive, stop living.”
I think that’s when we start to see that Anna is aware of power in a more holistic way. It was interesting to kind of be in her mind as she was going through the motions of deciding to do this procedure and also have a little bit more hindsight while reflecting. I think that quote comes from a passage that might be worth sharing if you’re open to reading. It’s chapter seven.
Allie Rowbottom: So this is from the middle of chapter seven, I think to close the end.
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Allie Rowbottom: Yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Could you talk a little bit about writing Aesthetica [the procedure]—how you envisioned it? Was it ever called anything else, and how it changed your perception of beauty? If it did?
Allie Rowbottom: Yes, totally. So yes, Aesthetica was one of the last things to sort of make its way into the book. Prior to that, I had had Anna in the hotel room as she is now, but I was struggling to figure out why exactly she was there. And I had imagined that she was there to speak with this reporter and then had backed out, but it didn't quite feel rich enough, and it didn't feel unique enough. I knew—and had known for a long time—with this book that I wanted to develop the plastic surgery threads more. But I was nervous too because I thought that they would make the book a difficult sell, which in some ways I think maybe it did. But I was talking with my agent, Erin Harris, and we were sort of brainstorming how to develop the novel, and I was like, I have this idea; it's a little crazy. And I pitched what was then called the Aurora Lift to Erin, and she was into it.
From there, I developed it, but I called it the Aurora Lift for a couple of reasons. One of which there is that there's this sort of fairytale thread in the book, and Aurora is the name of the princess in "Sleeping Beauty" who awakens from slumber, basically. And also because in my research for this book, I noticed on Instagram how many plastic surgeons were patenting facelift techniques or patenting any kind of plastic surgery technique and confusing people in the process because what is basically just a facelift or liposuction is being called something else with a little trademark emoji attached or whatever. So I thought that was interesting and wanted to play with it a little bit. Then the procedure became Aesthetica when I changed the title of the book, which I had to sort of do for legal reasons.
But yeah, I think I was looking and searching for a way not only to bring more plastic surgery into the book but to really encapsulate what I think is the emotional core of the book, which is sort of longing to return, at the same time, a longing to grow and to learn and to enter womanhood. Anna is torn throughout by this desire to go back and redo what she sees as a difficult relationship with her mother or mistakes that she made in her relationship with Jake, her manager, and a yearning—as she says at the beginning—to become a woman who is maybe more situated in herself and more empowered in what Anna sees as a lasting form of empowerment. Not a superficial form of empowerment, but a true and fundamental sense of self from which she can then make decisions and make these choices that she's aware feminism has imbued choice and imbued her with the power of choice. But how then to make it and how to really step into that power? I think that's her question, and that's her quest.
Rachel Schwartzmann:And it seems like to recalibrate her definition of what it means to be seen both literally and on a deeper level. And I think what's really interesting there is how she's seen by her mother, Naurene.
Early in the novel, Anna mentions:
"I held my phone at arm's length. I was going to cry but didn't want to. Nor did I want to block my mother. Nor did I want to call her and listen to her anger, her fear, her threats. But I needed to make her comments stop."
I think that tug of war between wanting her and not wanting her to see the choices that she's making was so palpable. And by the end [of the book], we start to see Anna see, as you mentioned, the kind of ramifications of those choices. But yeah, let's talk a little bit about the dynamic between Anna and her mother and the considerations you had to make when building their relationship on the page.
Allie Rowbottom: I think that this is the primary way in which this book is a sort of continuation of some of the conversations I started in JELL-O Girls. One thing that I felt was somewhat missing from JELL-O Girls was the amount of resentment that I had as a young person with a sick, chronically ill mother; caretaking and having to caretake in some ways because she was a single parent, and I was her only child, and that was just the reality of the situation. But I had so much regret after she died and even after JELL-O Girls published about not just how I reacted to her at times during her illness when I was young, and she was needy, and I didn't feel ready to sort of parent my parent in that way, but also resentment because we hadn't had the time to fully repair and to sort of develop our relationship in a different way.
I think this is really common when a parent dies, and their child is not yet fully an adult in some ways. There's no opportunity to take the relationship into a more mature place and a place where you can really connect and value your parent from an adult standpoint and as an adult. So I didn't feel like enough of that got into JELL-O Girls for some reason, and maybe it's in there, and I just have to go back and look. I haven't looked at that book for some time. I also think that when you don't look at something that you've read or written for a long time, it sort of becomes something else. Sometimes it helps to go back and look and be like, oh no, it's in there. But I had that feeling about JELL-O Girls and wanted to explore my own sense of guilt for how resentful I felt of my mom and also how natural I think that is in a situation like that. That desperation to individuate, I think, was something that got into Aesthetica pretty well.
Rachel Schwartzmann:Well, if you're talking about it in this way, then it must not have been written in the way that you needed it to be. I'm a really big believer in timing, and you have to be ready to kind of meet your story where it's at, if that makes sense.
Allie Rowbottom: That's a great point, yeah.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Were you afraid?
Allie Rowbottom: No, I think I was ready. Aesthetica, as I say, it's a novel, and it's all made up, but it's also the product of a lot of time in therapy. I started going to therapy with a therapist that I felt was a really great match for me, and that hadn't been something that I had found before. And I started going to therapy maybe in the first six months of writing Aesthetic and actually my first therapy appointment... I was querying agents with this book. I was transitioning from one agent to another. I was querying agents with basically a first draft of this book and just been rejected by one after I thought she was going to sign me, and I barged into my first therapy session with this therapist and just burst into tears. And from there, our work began. [Laughs]
But I'll just say I feel like working with her really prepared me to process a lot of what's in Aesthetica, and I wasn't afraid I was ready to do it. I think that's why I started therapy when I did because I was truly ready, and Aesthetica is in many ways—this is in the Acknowledgements section as well—born of that work, and I just felt really, really grateful for it.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you for verbalizing that. I mean, that's a private space, and again, I think in this landscape where you're promoting a book or promoting yourself, you don't owe that explanation always. It's a fine balance to navigate. So always appreciate it when people go there.
Allie Rowbottom: Well, it's funny because I do love to go there ... as you say, it's a fine balance. I am a very open person in some ways, and then when something doesn't feel right, it feels very wrong. So it's not always easy to navigate, and it's oftentimes, I overshare and then regret it later. But I'm not saying that's what I'm doing now! But it has been an interesting thing to learn how to navigate.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it changes with age and changes with relationships. And you know, speaking of sharing, I was so taken with your essay for Joyland, which deals with mothers and mothering and grief. But there was one line I wanted to ask you about where you said:
"I am inarguably a woman, a writer, though I rarely feel like it. I do feel driven. To create and publish, create and nurture. What's the difference between a baby and a book?"
I don't know if you've returned to that after writing it, but how does that sit with you?
Allie Rowbottom: Yes, I have. As you were reading, and this goes for a lot of my writing, I could recite a lot of things that I've written from memory just because I tend to really labor over them before they go out into the world. So the only thing that feels—well, there's a lot that feels different to me now about that sentiment. When I was writing that [[iece] it was set in 2020, I was really in the thick of it with, I think, a yearning to—like Anna—step into womanhood and a fear of letting go of what I think was a big struggle for me in the first years after my mother's death, which was a) being thrust immediately back into caretaking my husband's mother and b), feeling like such a little girl in the wake of my mother's death. So being forced in some ways into this hyper-adult situation immediately after having just lost my mom. And then also just really wanting to hide in bed with the sheets over my head and have someone take care of me, and no one was coming. Now I do feel like a woman. I do feel like a writer, and I think a lot of that has to do with really pushing for Aesthetica to come out and fighting for it and taking my career into my own hands in a really empowering way.
What's the difference between a baby and a book? Maybe I'll find out. [Laughs] That remains a resounding question, and I think it does for a lot of my friends who are women of a certain age and writers. But I'm so glad that that essay has struck such a chord. It was a piece of writing that flowed out of me and one that I really, really wanted to write. So I'm just so glad that it's out and people are responding to it. I've been really floored by the amount of readers for that piece. It feels great.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you feel closer to motherhood?
Allie Rowbottom: Yes. I'm considering it. I'm still thinking about it. But I do feel ... I said this in that essay for so long, my fear about motherhood, and I think it was a well-founded fear, was being tasked with caretaking when all I wanted was someone to take care of me. What I now have that I didn't have then was a stronger faith in my ability to caretake myself and a sense of peace with the fact that it is my job to take care of myself. Sometimes that feels harsh, but one thing that my therapist did teach me is almost immediately, she started saying this phrase which she repeated a lot, which is no adult is coming. [Laughs] Which sounds harsh and might tell you something about the kind of therapy I respond to, but it's true. And a big challenge for me has been stepping into my role as an adult and as my own mother in some ways and feeling like that's not a burden. It's, in some ways, a freedom, and it can be empowering.
So yes, I feel closer to motherhood. I feel close to my role as my own mother and the keeper of my mother's spirit. And from that place, I think that I could—or have a better ability to—consider motherhood less as a totally dark and undesirable role and more as something that I might like to try.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. It's so interesting. It seems like your acceptance of adulthood and motherhood is a slow story in itself.
Allie Rowbottom: Definitely.
Rachel Schwartzmann: On the subject of the unknowns around motherhood, I wonder if there's a question that you hope people start asking you more often about this phase of your life, writing, [or] connection?
Allie Rowbottom: This isn't really a single question, but I do love, and I have been really privileged to be asked these questions, and I think that was a really repairing experience for me versus JELL-O Girls where I wasn't asked these questions, but I love being asked questions about craft. I think because I think and read a lot about the art of writing and writing as craft, I love those nerdy questions about sentences and plot and structure and all those sorts of funny writer questions that, again, I didn't really get asked with JELL-O Girls and I think now I'm really privileged being asked. So that! I mean, it's already happening, but I love to be asked about how I make sentences and that kind of thing.
Rachel Schwartzmann: How do you want to make sentences in your next book? What do you want to push?
Allie Rowbottom: In Aesthetica, I augmented my writing style quite a bit to perform algorithm a little bit and to sort of mirror the nature of Instagram and social media in general. And also, I think that I was doing that because I was figuring out and really strengthening my relationship to plot and structure, which has come less naturally to me than lyricism and sentence writing. So in my next novel, I'm hoping to open my hand a little bit now that I have some faith in my ability to plot and structure a novel. I think that taking some of that anxiety of Will I be able to do this? out of the picture or placing it gently to the side, I'm excited to open my hand a little bit and bring some more of my natural knack for lyricism back onto the page. Early in my writing life, I wrote a lot of lyric essays and very lush poetic prose, but they didn't really go anywhere. So I had to focus then for a long time on how to make my writing move forward, how to generate propulsion, and how to really say something with my sentences. Now that I figured that out, I think I can sort of return to my first love in some ways, which is poetry and lyricism on a sentence level, and then merge the two. That's my goal. We'll see what happens!
Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that's what I'm going through right now. I think you just put that into words cause I felt a little stunted lately. I'm excited to read whatever you come up with there. [Laughs]
Allie Rowbottom: [Laughs] Likewise.
Rachel Schwartzmann: We've covered so much in this conversation, and I want to have you read a final passage from Aesthetica, but before you do, I have one more question. I think Aesthetica ends on a hopeful note, an open note. I want to have us close there as well and have you share what is making you hopeful these days and what you're feeling connected to and want to connect with more.
Allie Rowbottom: That's a great question. I'm feeling very hopeful. The amount of readers who are reaching out to me and connecting with this novel is making me feel really hopeful and really inspired to write the next one. I'm also feeling very connected to my sense of intuition about what works for me in my writing. I feel very validated is another way of saying that.
I also just moved [with]in Los Angeles. My husband and I are now closer to the water. I'm in New York now, but when I go home, it will be to fully move in and settle into that new space. That makes me feel really hopeful and excited to sort of paint and do some DIY projects and nest a little in a way that feels exciting and hopeful.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So comforting.
Allie Rowbottom: It is comforting! And on the subject of stepping into adulthood, I also really never liked to do that kind of stuff, but I find now that I do. [Laughs] So that's great. I feel hopeful about our ability to really make that space our own.
Rachel Schwartzmann: You definitely need to read Real Estate.
Allie Rowbottom: Okay. I do want to. It was sort of making me think of even looking at real estate apps and how that, for many people, takes the place of Instagram in some ways. Just sort of scrolling houses or dating apps; it's a form of future tripping and dream casting that can be really distracting in a nice way.
Rachel Schwartzmann: Zillow over Instagram. That'll be the move, I guess. [Laughs]
Well. I've really enjoyed this conversation and would love to have you take us out with a passage from chapter twenty-one.
Allie Rowbottom: You got it.
PASSAGE READ BY ALLIE ROWBOTTOM ︎ PURCHASE AESTHETICA ︎︎︎
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Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica. You can purchase Aesthetica anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Allie on social @allierowbottom. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, and you’ve been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.