Susan isaacs author interview
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Author Interview: Susan Isaacs and Angry Conversations with God
By Jeff Goins, Editor
Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir, is written by actor/comedienne Susan E. Isaacs. Jobless, loveless, and living over a bilparkering, Susan knew only one thing to do when she hit rock bottom at age forty: She took God to marriage counseling. Casting herself as the neglected spouse, Susan soon confronts her inner nag and the unrealistic expectations she put on God and herself.
Wrecked recently had the chance to interview Isaacs about the book.
Wrecked: How did you get the idea to write Angry Conversations with God? What set into the motion the writing of this book?
Isaacs: I’d read that book, The Sacred Romance, whose premise is: our relationship with God is like a marriage. I was in a comedy group, and inom thought it would be fun to write a sketch about taking God to marriage counseling – imagining the squabbles we’
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Isaacs is aware of and gratified by the influence she has but wishes she kept up more with current fiction. “I was at a Fourth of July party this summer and met two completely disparate people. One was a whiskey distributor and one was a former Mossad agent. The three of us started talking about mysteries we were reading, and both said how much they loved reading Kate Atkinson. I said, ‘Who’s that?’ One of them looked at me, teasingly, and said, ‘You, of all people.’” (She has since read, and loved, the first two books in Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series.)
Near the end of our conversation, I ask Isaacs about her one book of nonfiction, Brave Dames and Wimpettes (1999), which argued that women in fiction, film, and television were generally too passive. That characters ranging from Ally McBeal to Thelma and Louise blamed their problems on men (with a not-subtle affirmation that her own heroines did not). Did her conclusions still stand 20 years later, or had things changed?
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Susan Isaacs: Why It Only Took Me 45 Years to Write a Series
Readers become writers the moment they glance away from the page, distracted by their own inner voice announcing, Hey,I can do that. In my case, it took a few nanoseconds more to sense that my first protagonist, would be, like me, a suburban Long Island mom. She’d have left behind a stimulating job (in my case, as a magazine editor and freelance political speechwriter) for the stay-at-home life. She’d be bright. Curious. Sardonic? Sure, why not? She adored her kids yet sometimes she yearned for discourse more elevated than pre-school repartee. Without a doubt, she was someone with whom I could identify.
The year was 1978 and Judith Singer became the protagonist of Compromising Positions. Even then I knew that anyone contemplating writing a mystery would be wise to make it Book 1 of a series. Unlike stand-alone crime fiction novels in which a single case is solved and the detec