EDGE Providence

Five years ago, Pamela Ribon and I would have never met, but thanks to the blogging revolution, we were brought together - virtually, at least - by three degrees of separation: the boyfriend of a friend of mine was sort of "e-stalking" Pam’s gay best friend, which led me to the gay best friend’s blog, which is hosted on Pam’s web site, Pamie.com. At that point, I realized I had been reading Pamie for years as one of the funniest voices of the hilarious Television Without Pity web site, and that I’d even read some of her earlier blog-works when her site was known as better known as "squishy". She had a new novel coming out, and she was looking for reviewers, so I figured "hey, what better way to get to know someone you’ve admired for years than by interviewing her?" Thankfully, she agreed. An edited version of our month-long email correspondence follows:

EDGE: We’re doing the 21st-century internet-interview thing, but if we were to doggedly track you down anywhere in the world to get this story, where would you most want to be caught for an interview?

PAMELA RIBON: I’d most likely be caught at a coffee shop. And I’d probably want you to interview me there so that I can have a good excuse to put off working for a little while. But if you’re asking where I go to escape, I’m not telling you, because I don’t want you to try to interview me when I’m trying to relax.

EDGE: So, Pamie... do you prefer to be called Pamie? Pamela? P-Dawg? Maybe P-to-the-izzle? Yes, I’m living 3 years in the past or so...

PAMELA RIBON: Most people call me Pam. But people who really like me call me Pamie. People who really love me call me sweetheart. My mom calls me Pamie. The internet calls me pamie. In official titles, I’m Pamela. Um... most people call me Pam.

EDGE: Recently, you’ve written on your own blog about how you’ve had to search for your "novelist voice" while battling the expectations of your editors. How does the pressure to meet audience expectations as a novelist compare to the pressure you feel from audience expectations as a blogger?

PAMELA RIBON: That’s quite a question. I write my blog for an audience, but I also write stories for me that I don’t want to forget. When I’m writing a novel, I’m telling a very long story about people I don’t know.

My blog is about my real life. In a million ways the blog is easier, and the novel is daunting. The expectations are greater with the novel because nobody’s investing days or even years of their lives (you’ve read me for three years. see what i mean?). That means if one day I write, "I like television. Bye," I’m forgiven because I’m going to write something else later that day or the next day or soon. But a novel only comes out every couple of years, and the people who pick the book up have no damn idea who I am and really don’t care if I’m swamped at the office, writing at three in the morning. They just want a good book.

I get less sympathy, and I give myself less sympathy. I have no idea if I’ve answered this question with any kind of insight. Books are hard. There.

EDGE: How did you come to write Benny, the narrating character in Why Moms are Weird? Like Anna K [the main character of Pamela’s first book, Why Girls are Weird], Benny seems to share some traits with things you’ve blogged about. Do you actually go in looking at things about yourself that you want to novelize, or do these things just come out organically as you work?

PAMELA RIBON: I start with a brand new voice in my head, but often by the second or third chapter it starts to sound false. I’m guessing at what this person is going through, particularly if she’s in a situation I’ve never come close to being in (which is what happened when I tried to write a novel about a reality show). So I start over with a few essays of what’s going on in my head - things I’ve been worried about, things that have made me laugh, little moments I don’t want to forget - and those start to shape the emotional state of the main character at the beginning.

I usually know where the story is going, and how it will end, so getting the engine going in the beginning with a girl I think is worth spending some time with is the tricky part. And that’s probably why she ends up sounding a lot like me and my blog. I have to spend more time with this main character than anyone, and I have a difficult time writing about someone who doesn’t feel like a person I’d want to know.

Sometimes I’ll be writing and remember a story from the blog and try to incorporate some of those elements into the story, or I use it as a jumping-off point for the next chapter. But usually the story stays separate from the blog. It’s just the same woman writing both, so my sense of humor, my experiences and my way of telling a story would obviously bleed into one another.

EDGE: A novel about a reality show, eh? Sounds quite topical. What happened with that?

PAMELA RIBON: Let me put it this way: someone who doesn’t really enjoy watching that many reality shows probably shouldn’t write a book where the main character is trapped on one. Halfway through the book I started to hate everybody I had created, and had fantasies about killing them off. It’s the worst book you’ll never read.

EDGE: When you write on your blog, you (of course) end up drawing from the people around you. How much do you draw on the personalities around you in your day-to-day life when working on a novel? And do you feel any need to be true to the real-life personalities, even as you expand them into characters?

PAMELA RIBON: Characters in the books tend to be mixtures of people in my life and people I hear in my head. I’ll take the sense of humor from one person and put it in the head of another, and sort of stir it around until there’s a new person that I can see and hear. Writers are thieves. I’m very lucky that the people in my life understand that they will sometimes end up in my stories, and that they are more flattered than insulted when it happens.

EDGE: Your first novel had a "gay best friend" character who helps Anna K through her man dilemma, while your second novel has, instead, a straight guy who’s hot, smart, confident, and (seemingly) out of reach of Benny. While he adds an element of romantic tension, parts of Zack’s relationship with Benny sound a lot like the beginnings of certain gay man-straight woman relationships. Did you consider making this character gay at any point?

PAMELA RIBON: Well, I’ll tell you something. I got a lot of flack about Anna’s gay best friend, like it was some kind of cliche. And I’m like, "Hello. Have you met my best friend?" But, apparently, being a female writer with a gay best friend who lives in a big city and is trying to "make it," I am -- currently -- a cliche. So I’m living with that. Now, I think hot-out-of-reach-straight-man is also a cliche, but it’s one people don’t seem to mind. There were two gay friends in the first draft of Why Girls Are Weird, but I ended up having to put all of the story on just one, as it would make him more important.

I’m not sure what part of Zack and Benny’s early relationship sounds gay-male/straight-female. When he calls her ugly but doesn’t mean it? When they tease each other about the sex they’ll never have? Or the fact that they actually talk to each other about real things? I never thought of making Zack a gay character because he’s there to parallel the relationship Benny’s mother has with her boyfriend, but you really just rewrote the whole thing in my head by suggesting it. How great would it have been for Benny to fall for a gay-hot-out-of-reach man? As if she wasn’t feeling helpless enough...

EDGE: I’m glad you like the idea. Funny how different people see such different things in the same story. Probably because we all bring our own lives into what we write. Speaking of which, how did you end up getting flack about Anna’s gay best friend? Was this publisher flack? Friend flack? I mean, you’d think that fictional choices would be less confined by reality instead of more...

PAMELA RIBON: Reviewer flack. "Oh, another girl-with-gay-best-friend chick lit novel." And when we were turning the novel into a movie (I’d optioned the screenplay rights and was chosen to be the writer), one of the things they wanted to do away with was the gay best friend, as they thought it was a Hollywood cliche. It’s also weird getting notes from someone where they say, "We think the main character is too pathetic." I’d have to say, "Yes, I understand." But they’re talking about something I actually did in real life, and I’d have to decide whether or not to let them know I really am possibly that pathetic at times.

EDGE: How does working on a novel compare to writing for a comedy show like "Mind of Mencia"? Do you relish the editorial control of being the sole author, or does it get difficult working without collaborators?

PAMELA RIBON: Writing a book can be very lonely. My Mencia co-workers became family in the time we worked together, so I miss that. When I was finishing Why Moms Are Weird, I’d still go into the office of our (then) cancelled sitcom, just to be near other writers. We’d all work in our offices, and get together for lunch, and talk about what we were working on. I like the creative control I have over a novel, but putting on a show with your friends is much more fun. Television shows reach more people, because not nearly enough people read, so there’s that, too. I am proud of my novels, but more people have seen my television work.

EDGE: Another thing you have to be proud of is your work helping public libraries. Could you talk a bit about your activist side?

PAMELA RIBON: I run a book drive every year to get new materials in the acquisitions department. The librarians put up wish lists through their local bookstores and amazon, and readers click a few books over to a part of the country (or world) they might not have ever seen. This year I combined forces with a friend who runs televisionwithoutpity.com and videogamey.com, and we created the Dewey Donation System (deweydonationsystem.org), which is currently raising books for Harrison County, Mississippi, which lost thousands and thousands of books in Katrina. We’re soon going to take the site much wider, and it’ll be a place where librarians and readers can interact, create awareness for their own communities, and set up individual book drives of their own.

EDGE: Let’s say you had the awesome power to control what piece of your work people remembered you for, but you only had one choice of what they remembered about you: Would it be your blog? Your novels? Your TV writing?

PAMELA RIBON: Yikes. That’s a tough question, because I still feel like I’m really starting out. I don’t have something that I’ve completed that I think is good enough that I can sit back and be like, "There, bitches. Read THAT." I am constantly learning new things about writing, and what people respond to. I hope that each piece is better than the last, and with every new medium I get to work in, I learn something that helps every other facet of my writing. There’s a screenplay I really like, but it hasn’t been made, but I’m proud of it and about fifty producers in Hollywood think it’s awesome. Even that, which I wrote a long time ago, doesn’t seem worthy of being the one thing I want next to my name in your brain. Long answer? That one. Short answer: I haven’t written it yet.