Interview: Ally Ferraro

Photography: Matt Weinberger

Allie Rowbottom is an American writer known for her 2018 memoir Jell-O Girls and her debut novel Aesthetica about a former Instagram model with a plastic surgery addiction.

Where are you right now?

I’m in New York right now. I lived here for a long time. But I'm just here for book events. I live in LA. 

LA? Where in LA?

I live in Malibu. My husband, Jon, is a surfer, and I am a beach person. Nothing I enjoy more than sitting out in my beach chair around twilight, popping a weed gummy and writing or reading or listening to Lana Del Rey. Our house is full of sand. The sunset looks like a tangerine. At night you see stars, constellations even. It’s heaven.

How did you start writing?

My first book, Jell-O Girls, was an enmeshment of my extended family history, a history of my mother’s illness, which she dealt with on and off for my entire life, and a wider, research-based narrative following the intersecting histories of American feminism and Jell-O. It was marketed as a memoir. I had the idea for the book because I was in a PhD program and needed to write something to serve as my creative dissertation. It was my life story, and hers, the only story I knew at the time. I was in my early twenties, in academia, on track for a teaching job, and though I wanted to publish a book, I didn’t have any familiarity with the publishing industry, nor had I outlined any real career goals, I think because it all seemed so pie in the sky. Just landing an agent seemed improbable. Then my mother died and things changed for me and for Jell-O Girls. I became hell bent on publishing the book for her. I stepped into my talent and my ambition. Afterward, and partly because the publication of Jell-O Girls was more exposing and emotionally raw than I’d known to expect, I felt hell bent on writing and publishing Aesthetica as a kind of do-over. I wanted to stretch the legs of my skill and reach a new audience. I also wanted to express some of the emotional chords I left out of Jell-O Girls. So even though Aesthetica is fiction, and I enjoyed making it up, it feels as emotionally true to me as my memoir. 

Some lines from the book came to me like, these are stories that are happening in the LA club scene. Is that how it happens, right?

I came up in New York during what's now being called the ‘indie sleaze’ era of nightlife, a time of vapid debauchery. It was easy for me to take my experiences when I was young in that scene and dramatize them to fit Los Angeles in our current time period. Living in LA, I've seen and experienced a lot. I don’t go out the way some people do here, but…I’m around, and have put myself in the way of influencer culture, partly as an anthropological, research experiment, partly because…I’m around. In LA, it’s easy to breathe in influencerdom with the exhaust of rush hour traffic. It’s a dominating force in the city.

Did you have publishing contracts before you wrote your books? 

For both my books–and this is very common in the US publishing industry–I wrote the whole book with absolutely no promise that it would sell. Once they did sell, neither book was subject to an extensive editorial process. The most marked difference between the two books in a business sense was that Jell-O Girls was bought by a big publisher very quickly and for a lot of money–it sold in an instant, actually, as my then-agent sealed the deal over text message while I was on the stairmaster at the gym, glued to my phone, watching it all go down. Aesthetica, which I think of as a more morally ambiguous and therefore mature book than Jell-O Girls, took longer to sell and landed with a smaller publisher. But already I see it as the more successful book.

You didn't have any sponsorship or anything like that.

I wish that was common. It should be common. Where has all the literary glamor gone? I’m here to revive it. So if any brands out there want to sponsor me, my DMs are open. I’m looking at you Cadillac, Versace and Starbucks. I bring to the table boobs, butt, literary prowess and a certain fuck it attitude I think could be very lucrative. 

But you are there with the most successful writers and you are so much younger than them. How does that feel?

That is very flattering. But I don’t identify as young. With all the book parties, I'm starting to feel old. I’m in my mid-thirties. In some ways that’s young to have two books. But in other ways, this industry, like all industries, privileges extreme youth, often at the expense of the experience and wisdom and mastery of craft that comes with age. But experience is everything for a writer. So is the maturity needed to process experiences, to make something larger of them. Whenever I start to feel old in a bad way, I remind myself of that. Age is power. Culture tells us that this can only be true for men, but I beg to differ. 

Did it take a lot of sacrifices to be a successful writer? You moved to LA, was it hard at the beginning? Is it still hard?

Writing is one of the least financially stable art forms, which is why–in the US at least–so many writers have day jobs or come from money. I have no judgement about that as both are true for me–my single mother died early in my life and left me, her only child, with her savings. I also teach, edit and ghostwrite other people’s writing to supplement whatever I earn from my books in a given year. It’s not an easy path. So you really have to want to write to pick it as a career. 

Do you have someone you are sharing maybe some of this?

I’m fortunate enough to be married to a writer, Jon Lindsey, and we share work with each other. It's a lovely part of our relationship. I also have a writing group composed of a couple of friends who are also professional writers. We meet once a month and talk about each other’s work, which really helps counteract some of the solitude I mentioned earlier. When I get to a more polished place with whatever it is I’m working on, I share it with my agent, Erin Harris, who has a keen editorial eye and is specific in a way I really value. 

How long does one of these workshops take? It must be fun as well, right?

Two of us, myself and Cyrus Simonoff, are in LA; two of us, Chelsea Bieker and Genevieve Hudson, are in Portland, Oregon; one of us, T Kira Madden, is in Massachusetts. So we're spread all over the country and subject to different time zones, but we convene on Zoom. We usually go for about 2 hours. It's both a professional time but also a space for us to catch up as friends. We'll chat for a while at the beginning, then get to talking about the work that someone sent in, then we'll just talk some more. It’s beyond fun, it’s soul feeding. 

You live in LA, and celebrities wander, and there are all these amazing parties with a lot of creatives, and a lot of things are coming out from that as well. 

Yea there are great parties in LA but a lot of the times the people at them are so obsessed with image that they’re at best boring at the worst, vampiric. New York can be cold, full of itself and truly laughably snobby. But because I’m a writer and the book industry is in New York, when I go out here, I get more back. Let me put this another, blunter way: New York loves you if you’re smart; LA loves you if you’re hot. But secretly, both places will hate you for being what they wanted you to be in the first place. So you have to be thick skinned and relentless to make it either way. 

What did your parents say about your books?

I only have one parent. My mom is not alive. My first book was very much about her and written for her. I think that if she had read it, she would be proud. Beyond proud. Same with Aesthetica. My dad is another story. To be completely frank, he disliked my first book. He hasn’t bought my novel. He is very threatened by my writing, and I don’t know why; I think it’s something he can’t understand so it scares him. Which doesn’t mean we don’t have a relationship, or that I don’t love him because I do, very much. But it does mean that I don’t have parents who read my work or follow my career and feel proud. They are not part of my life in that way, which is a big way. This can feel very to me.  

On the other hand, as my husband pointed out recently, I have the freedom to write without fearing that my parents are going to see it and disagree with it in some way or feel scandalized by it. I suppose that’s a silver lining. 

What else are you working on at the moment?

I’m in the early phases of writing another novel. I don't want to talk about it too much but I will say this: it's set in Los Angeles and though it takes place in a different time period and is formally very different than Aesthetica, it's also interested in fame and friendship, ultimately asking why, in the absence of artworld meritocracy, some people ‘make it’ as artists and some people of equal or greater talent, do not.