by Travis Cohen and Michael Cuervo
Julie Marie Wade is an author who could serve as a dictionary entry for multivalence. She is a poet, essayist, memoirist, hybridist with so many collections of poetry, prose, and genre bending forms that her publications become difficult to enumerate, though they are all worth seeking out. Her 2023 collection, Otherwise: Essays, was selected as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize, her 2013 poetry collection, Postage Due, was a winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, and she received the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir for her 2010 memoir, Wishbone. Her newest project, The Mary Years (Texas Review Press), was awarded the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, and traces 25 years of her life through the lens of her fascination with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The book is a force of insightful vulnerability, vibrant lyricism, and formal inventiveness that feels like an affirmation and a gift in the reading. Julie teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University, where she recently spoke with Gulf Stream’s Editor-in-Chief Travis Cohen, and Assistant Managing Editor Michael Cuervo. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and concision. The Mary Years is out now.
Travis Cohen: I wanted to start with a question about a section with one of my favorite titles. In “Even a Shadow Enjoys Being Cast,” your mother talks about how tough it will be once Linda is a mother and wife. Meanwhile Linda seems to run parallel to Mary Richards in terms of living her own life for her own reasons, enjoying life rather than enduring it. In these pages, it seems you’ve done plenty of both. This feels thoroughly connected not just to who you are, but to your work. There’s a lot of pain here and anguish and longing, and yet there’s not just resilience – there’s hope. There’s plenty of sadness and survival in the book, but it’s also one of the happiest things I’ve ever read. It feels triumphant. That, for me, feels like the meaning, the heart line that runs through the book, not just grinning and bearing it, but smiling and feeling that smile, feeling hope all the way down and all the way back up. It made me feel hopeful reading it. And I wanted to know what it made you feel writing it?
Julie Marie Wade: I wrote this book faster than any book I have ever written. I know that people think I’m really fast at doing things, but that’s kind of an illusion because I work on a lot of things at once. But this book began because Mary Tyler Moore had died, and I really wanted to do something with all those years of not only loving her work and reading about her life and reading interviews with her and with people who were close to her. I felt like her life must be commemorated, but I didn’t want to write an elegy that felt hopeless. And she died on January 25th of 2017, right as a new semester was starting. It was also the beginning of the first Trump administration, the week after the inauguration, so I was feeling a lot of things that weren’t overly hopeful. And then, when the summer came, I had all this time to reflect on her life but also what her life meant to me—and how was it possible that it had been 25 years since the first time I watched her show? I wanted to write something that was a response to her life, but I also know I’m not a historian. So televisual ekphrasis and elegy sort of came together, and I thought maybe I just want to trace the last 25 years in roughly chronological order.
Not a lot of people know this, but I can tell you, I wrote almost all of this book in Cindy Chinelly’s and John Dufresne’s house while I was cat-sitting. Every single day for 10 days, I packed up really early in the morning and went over to their house, and I did nothing but write this book. And it was complete communion with everything I could remember about the show, everything I could remember about my life with the show. It felt hopeful because it felt like something I could do about something that I couldn’t do anything about, whether it was Mary Tyler Moore’s passing or the other changes of 2017. Just being able to spend 10 days, morning till night, only writing about Mary Tyler Moore felt triumphant. I felt like I was doing something so I didn’t have to sit in my sadness.
TC: I love that. That comes across the whole way through, all the way to the closing credits. I’m happy to hear that it felt that way.
JMW: It’ s very rare in life that there’s just a little swath of time that amounts to “Nope, Julie’s writing that Mary Tyler Moore book.” All day, 8 to 6, every day. And I did nothing else. I mean, who gets to do that? It was just a really beautiful time.
Michael Cuervo: It was like it was meant to be.
JMW: It was like I carved it. This was my little time. Devices off. I didn’t even know their internet password; it was very nice. Now I know it, but I won’t tell. I just sat there with no way to be reached, just me with Django and Zoe, the cats. Perfect.
MC: You said that you didn’t want to write an elegy that was very sad, and I honestly did not even consider this an elegy even though it literally is one. It’s hybrid in every way – an elegy, a love letter to Mary Tyler Moore, an analysis of a television show in correspondence with your actual life. It’s about resilience and family and home and becoming. And it’s about saying what you’ve always wanted to say for yourself, not for someone else. And so I’m curious about how the form came to you. Did you have other memoirs to bounce your own ideas off of or were you trying to create your own kind of form? Because this book as a whole feels very Julie. Were you inspired by another piece that made you put this book in this cine-ekphrastic form or were you creating your own hermit crab?
JMW: There aren’t as many televisual ekphrastic texts when I go looking to my fellow contemporary essayists and memoirists as there are cine-ekphrastic texts, written in response to films. A long-time touchstone for me is A Van Jordan’s “M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A.” I had read it in my first MFA workshop with Tracy K. Smith, and I was just astonished, and I will always be astonished. I will forever be bringing that book into my undergrad Poetic Techniques class. A Van Jordan’s ” M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A” is the result of the poet reading an obituary in the paper in Akron, Ohio, and realizing that this woman, the first Black American to compete in the National Spelling Bee in 1936, had died—but he didn’t know anything about her life. And he didn’t know how he didn’t know that that kind of historical moment had arisen from someone in his own town. So you would think that what he wanted to do was to write a biography of this lesser-known historical figure. Then you think, he’s a poet, so he’s doing kind of a poetic biography. But MacNolia Cox was a spelling bee champion, so he does all of this stuff with spelling out of words and then definitions of words and he creates his own hermit crab shell of dictionary entry poems, and there’s ekphrastic art about the year, and he starts bringing everything from 1936 into this text across all different disciplines. That book has probably given me more permission than I realized in the 20 years since the first time I read it. And while Jordan’s not really in his book, I think he was the first person, with the MacNolia Cox project, to give me a sense that you can do all of it, everything in one book. You don’t have to commit to just one avenue. And it feels like probably A Van Jordan is the greatest direct source of inspiration for me.
MC: I think that also speaks to what we talked about earlier about focusing on a project over a genre. You went in with this specific project in mind about this specific person and yourself rather than trying to stick to it having to be a poetic memoir.
JMW: Absolutely. I was just really writing “The Mary Years” for me at first because I thought I’ve carved out this time, I’m just going to do this, and I don’t know if anybody else will care. I have lots of projects that I’ve never sent out because I don’t think anybody else would care. But this one felt like it was truly all mine, my time with Mary, so that was really thrilling. Then later you can kind of shape your project and frame it and send it out into the world if you want. But for me in the process of writing, it was wholly about the project over the genre.
TC: It jumped out at me when I got to the end and saw the different publication dates. A number of the sections were published between 2018 and 2020, but it doesn’t feel like it was ever not going to be a whole. There’s a connectivity from the opening credits to the closing credits, a through line that’s nonstop. I’m curious what it was like having it come out over the course of years and now having it all come together in its whole form.
JMW: Well, first of all – maybe last of all – I never dreamed the book could look like this, and I didn’t even know it was possible to have so much color in a book. I just love color. I love rainbows. I loved rainbows before they were queerly symbolic for me. I love the opening of The Mary Tyler Moore Show with the 11 iterations of her name, all those bright, bodacious colors. When I sent in the book to Texas Review Press, I sent free use archival images, all black and white, to try and capture what Fauntlee Hills looked like, what Lamonts looked like. But they were, in a way, too literal. Then I had one meeting with the editor-in-chief PJ Carlisle last year and then one Zoom call, and that was it. He just understood my book. I remember saying something like, “I don’t know if you can use any of the pictures I sent you, but I have all the attributions and use permissions.” And he said, “We’re going to try something a little different.” The team at TRP translated things that were just of my essence. They just got it—they got me. I have never felt so seen as by the way they made those section breaks with symbolic illustrations. I didn’t understand fully what this book was going to look like until I saw it and held it in my hand. It was more me than I knew it could be.
As for what was it like to have it come out in parts and then to see the whole together, I finished writing it, and my partner Angie read the book and she said, “I think people would like to read this.” And I asked, “Is this really for other people?” And she said, “I think everybody has something or someone that they’re a fan of and they may not even realize how much that person or that subject has influenced them.” She was saying things back to me that I say all the time in class about intimacy of experience and universality of experience. So, I started trying to do the practical thing, which I tell my students to do, which is to see if you can find an audience for something and send it to different places so that maybe it also leads to someone wanting to know more about the bigger project. I was surprised that very quickly it seemed like there was interest. I circulate parts of larger books for years sometimes, but this happened pretty fast. I was excited to see my essay-chapters coming into print, pulling back a curtain on Fauntlee Hills, where I grew up, and Lamonts, where I worked during college, and Pittsburgh, where Angie and I launched our life together. And I got favorable responses from people I admired, editors I admired, but also from people I didn’t know. And I thought, “Wow, people are coming to this through the Mary Tyler Moore lens, but maybe also through other themes that resonate with them.”
I realized at some point that I’d published just about everything that’s in the book, but nobody who’d seen the parts of it had seen the whole. This actually does bring us to project and genre. I didn’t exactly know what I had written I think it’s a memoir, but I think it’s also other things, and I was intrigued that Michael Martone was judging the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. I read the guidelines, and they didn’t say anything about a novella having to be fiction. Obviously, the coming-of-age part of “The Mary Years” is literally true, but the fantastical aspects of feeling this closeness to someone that I’ve never met—that could be in a gray area around what a novella could be. It seemed like “novella” was being defined more by length and by some sort of implication of “prose.” I really like Michael Martone’s work; he has such an innovative sensibility about form and genre. Sometimes I just look at who the contest judge is and think, “Do I meet the general criteria?” and if so, then “Do I think this judge would respond positively to my work?” The Clay Reynolds Prize didn’t state that the book had to be fiction as in the autobiographical “I” cannot appear in it. And that reframed “The Mary Years” for me because I realized maybe someone could look at this and read it as a novella, even if it is autobiographical. I would never have said I wrote a novella, but now I can say I wrote a nonfiction novella! And I can say I wrote a work fan nonfiction, which I don’t even know is a thing, but I love the idea of it. When you write the project and it’s your own thing, you might find that judge, that press, that possibility is there waiting for it.
TC: I saw, “winner of the Novella Prize” on the cover and I also saw it described as memoir. This got my attention very quickly. I see novella, I think fiction, I see memoir, I think CNF, and I think this is because I’m less evolved as a hybridist than maybe you are. But it was interesting to me because the idea of memoir makes the reader engage with quotes as given fact. Whereas fiction, you see these quotes from a ten-year-old who is remarkably wise and precocious, and you’re maybe thinking, “Is that possible?” Fiction begs the reader to believe, whereas memoir and nonfiction implicitly state this is reality. So, there’s sort of a genre permission there in blending those two things. And there are multiple instances throughout the book where you’re guiding us through your voice on the page and it helps us become unstuck in time, moving us around in time and in tense and in ways that don’t feel jarring. It feels like reality manipulation. I think about this in terms of the unbound capacity of hybridity and relegation of genre. I’m curious if there were any other moves that you knowingly found yourself putting on the page that you see as permissions that wouldn’t necessarily be allowed in more classically defined fiction or nonfiction.
JMW: The biggest permission in a lot of ways for the book that I think I was intentionally invoking is the nature of television. I really love TV. It’s kind of funny because I read a lot, so there’s this paradoxical notion that if you watch a lot of TV, you don’t read a lot. But I was the kid who read a lot and also watched a lot of TV. The thing about The Mary Tyler Moore Show is that from 1970 to 1977, it’s running in real time, and it would have had the commercials of the 1970s. The show has a lot of zeitgeist markers from the 1970s, all these things in the show that are very timely for that era, which is not my time as a person born in 1979. But then as a person who couldn’t even get access to the show and didn’t know that it existed until 1992, I was coming to it a full generation later. A show that aired in the 70s that I’m coming to in the 90s—that’s a past and a present, and syndication makes it eternal, right? It’s the eternal present. But in the 1990s, I was watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show with 1990s TV commercials, and I was watching it in a 1990s world. At the same time, I was also watching it in a 1950s world because my world was not a world that had a lot of 1990s stuff happening in it. So, the other paradox is that for me in the 1990s, this was the most contemporary popular culture that I was getting. The 70s felt really modern to me because I was raised on stuff that was a lot older, like 1930s and 40s music and 1950s family sitcoms and movies of that era, too. It’s that weirdness of time, to be watching something in the 90s that was first recorded in the 70s, but in a very mid-century community, down to the architecture, the furnishings, and the worldview—it makes me feel differently about time.
And it also makes me feel just how past, present, and future-y time can be all at once, a sort of accordion of time, and how syndication makes that possible. When we didn’t have syndication, I can just picture everything in a time capsule permanently, but when you bring older things into the present and they feel like the most present you’ll ever get, that is also very cool to me. A lot of the dialogue about time and tense in the book was trying to gesture toward life within eternal syndication—when something that’s really old by your time standards is really new to you. And that’s actually always true. If anybody in 2024 sat down and watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show for the first time, the show is new to them, but it’s also marked by its own era. But then you’ve got this weird thing of what we know now about our world. In 1975, there’s an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that addresses overpopulation. In that episode, Lou Grant uses the phrase “fake news.” And so, things that become very significant when you’re living now, in 2024, seem almost incandescent. We’re looking back at something that’s actually foreshadowing our present. It blows my mind how much a comedy from the 1970s could be prescient about things that now seem even more salient than they did then. You keep finding things in the past that are relevant in the present.
And then you think, “Well, what tense am I going to use to talk about that?” That’s what’s in the book: the accordion of time, the weirdness of time and its recursions and maybe its foreshadowings, too. I was trying to keep that sense of “The all is always now” of T.S. Elliot in the book. And it was the genius of PJ to bring in the fact that I’ve always been an obsessive journaler, to bring that fact visually into the text to show how the then me would have been chronicling experiences versus how the now me would be chronicling in a more writerly, conscious-of-audience voice.
TC: I love how organic that is. It takes thinking about the project over thinking about the genre to a really foundational level of the writing because it’s not necessarily just a conscious, intentional way of addressing how to handle time, it’s also about what is time to me? What is my relationship with time?
MC: And it’s a perfect segue because in that second loose leaf insert, you give a lot of the details about the complexities of each character. In part of the Dramatis Personae, talking about Phyllis, you say that she’s not necessarily a likable character on the surface and not sympathetic, but that you still feel for her. I wonder how the show molded your relationship with empathy. As a reader and a student of your work, I’ve seen such an abundance of empathy for the people you render on the page from “The Mary Years” to homophobes throwing stones in “Cliff Notes for Coming Out.” So, on the topic of the empathy you show for the people in your life in “The Mary Years,” I’m curious how the show impacted the way you demonstrate your empathy for the people in your life that end up making it into your work?
JMW: One of the main things that I try to identify in creative nonfiction classes, the only thing I can identify solidly that all creative nonfiction has the potential to do, is to increase empathy and our means of accessing it. Because you can’t have had all the lives. Even your own life is mysterious in ways that you’re always unpacking. How are you going to be inside anyone else’s shoes or their skin? And fiction does that to a degree, of course, but I also think there’s that powerful idea that somebody lived to tell the tale, whatever the tale is, and they’re the person telling it. Empathy is the thing that I want to pull people into. We can keep advancing in craft and form, but for me, the thing that’s under creative nonfiction is the tidal pull of someone else that has had this experience, lived this particular life with this particular set of circumstances. I get to enter into it through their work, through doors that they have chosen to open for me, and they built the doors too and the doorknobs, and they shaped the way they wanted me to enter their life.
As I’ve refined my thinking about these things to impart to my students, it turns the question around on myself. A fear I think all people who work in self-referential arts have on some level is “Am I going to hurt people by writing this?” You ask what is a fair way but also an honest way to bring others onto the page. I think everything for me goes back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in some way. It’s not a show about everything being perfect. There’s a depth and a gravitas to that show that I feel like I’m still unpacking. The Mary Tyler Moore Show is so different from earlier sitcoms, and it’s partly because people do change on the show. I think there’s a lot of empathy built into how the characters grow. Take the character of Ted Baxter. The actor who played him wanted to get off the show at the beginning because he felt like his character was just a buffoon. And the writers basically said, “We’re building it. You have to leave time for Ted Baxter to evolve.”
In a lot of ways – I’m realizing this just in the moment – that’s what a syllabus is, too. A syllabus is just building a script. It has to be built week by week and class by class, just like a show. If your students will trust you and suspend disbelief at the beginning, if it’s going to really be about the evolution of character, which is also connected to empathy, you’ve got to give it time. You see all these characters on the show who are imperfect, a workplace that is imperfect, things that are funny and joyful, but also, that are not perfect. There are terrible fights on the show and fallouts between characters. There are all these complicated dynamics, but the people still find a way to make the best out of their circumstances. And I guess that informs my natural disposition toward optimism. The Mary Tyler Moore Show really is a primer in empathy. There’s a lot of humor, but there’s also forgiveness. It’s not about a binary of perfection versus unforgivable sin, which is a little more like the religious side of my upbringing. It’s a different model, a very secular one. The characters are not invoking some ultimate truth. They’re just trying to be good people to each other. I love that about this show – it’s so much more complex than it first appears to be.
TC: I want to jump back to Mary as a bridge between three worlds and the three worlds that you lived in. That idea of the show as a bridge between worlds and living in multiple worlds at once, multiple times at once, felt like a way of talking about hybridity, not just in genre, but in life. In the book, there’s a ton of reconciling between the idealization of an idol and real life, between the world inside the TV and the world outside the TV and all these different worlds that you have to exist in. And sometimes these worlds coexist and sometimes they clash and sometimes they share space and sometimes they grapple for it. It feels like part of the growing pains that we travel with you through in this book are navigating those different worlds and how to exist in those different worlds at the same time. I’m curious how Julie Wade nowadays lives in many worlds? How do you feel about living in many worlds and how you feel like growing into yourself, into your hybrid self, has changed the way that you experience living in many worlds at the same time.
JMW: The first thing that I was going to say when you were first posing the question is: analogic thinking. We’re good at analogies if we like the arts and Humanities. I think people are all adept at living in multiple worlds at once in order to survive, but finding this useful— that feels like such a valuable life tool as well as a literary tool. You can help connect a reader to you and your experience more fully when you make analogical comparisons. The kind of analogies you make in your work show people what you think about and what you care about. I think analogies are a good navigational tool for life. Asking what wisdom has been imparted to me that’s useful here? Is there anything that I’ve learned from any art text or any conversation or any human interaction that, by analogy, can help me now that I’m in a new situation? You can cover a lot of ground with an analogy, not because two experiences are identical, but because they run parallel in a recognizable way. There are ways that I’m similar to Mary that I could recognize when I started watching the show. She’s very smiley, and I’m very smiley. That was an initial point of connection, but sometimes Mary smiles and she’s worried about not being taken seriously. If you are a really smiley person, people often underestimate you. If you’re a very happy person, people often assume you might be dumb or you haven’t faced any challenges because if you really had, you wouldn’t be so happy. There are things that started to analogically happen when I watched the show that made me realize that Mary and I aren’t the same at all. There are things about us that are very different, so Mary’s version of “making it after all” and mine were going to be different, but by analogy, there’s a throughline there that I can follow, that she is interdependent with others, and she brings other people into her life. Making it after all is also a communal practice.
By analogy, writing and teaching are really close; they intersect in mutually reinforcing ways. It would be weird to teach a class and ask people to do things that I wasn’t also willing to do in my own work. But it has a self-masking quality where a big part of the work I do is also hiding part of the work I do. If you’re doing your job well, you want things to proceed smoothly; you want classes to look somewhat effortless. But sometimes students and very new writers will say, “I like that you only have to work a couple of days a week.” It’s hard to navigate that part of it, because you want to be genuinely encouraging about other people pursuing both writing and teaching, but you realize that most of what people see is the thing at fruition stage. People see what is published when it’s published. If you’re reading a book, you see a thing that lives in the world already. But you don’t see the process leading up to it. I couldn’t choose another life that would make me happier in a million years, but it’s also not glamorous. It’s a lot of work to bring about the moment where we could even be having this conversation or where I could be teaching a class. All the work that goes into making the thing public, that work, by its nature, can’t be public. The writing-teaching life is an enterprise where most people only see the class that you made, but not the work you did to make it, or they see the book that you wrote, but they don’t see the work that you did to make it. One comfort is that as your graduate students mature into their work as both writers and teachers, they grow into an understanding of these nuances, and your colleagues also have a deep understanding of this contrast between the public and private nature of it.
I think professors and writers live in a weird space in the public imagination that doesn’t really match my life. I really love my life, and that’s part of why I don’t want to give false impressions about it, most especially to the people who would like to pursue the same things that I’m doing. To be clear, in no way do I want you to feel that I feel taken for granted by anyone. I just don’t want to misrepresent for anyone, for the uninitiated, what this life entails. With sharing my literary rejections online this year, I think I’ve made that part of my life a bit more public. I want that to be more public because that’s my biggest concern, that people will get a couple rejections and then just stop submitting.
TC: On the subject of different worlds, one thing that I was thinking about while you were describing the masking of what you do, it feels like the world behind the world, the world behind the world that you see. I see both worlds. I exist in both worlds. I exist in the final product world, but I also exist in multiple worlds that exist successively behind that, that all have to exist for me to get to this world that you get to coexist with me in. But I exist privately in these four worlds before it.
JMW: Which we all do, different kinds of worlds and sometimes overlapping worlds, but yes, that’s exactly it. Snow globes within snow globes.
TC: I want to keep talking about self-representation. There are a lot of moments throughout the book that made me stop and think about the you-ness of the you on the page. I think of the moment where you ask Linda what she thinks of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and you write that you raised your hand to your heart as you waited for her answer. This is a gesture I have seen you make so many times. I was amazed by the vividness of self on page and how you have this way of rendering yourself accurately, in full glory without glorification, without aggrandizement, just this full detail and totality. It feels like a gift of all of yourself to the reader where you say: “Here is all of me.” I know as a reader, that feels like a gift being given. And I’m curious if being able to put yourself on the page like that feels like a gift to yourself in the writing.
JMW: Well, I didn’t know that that was how it felt as a reader who is not me. It’s really thrilling to hear that. It’s a strange thing we talk about in class: Proxy Julie on the page and Proxy Travis and Proxy Michael. We’re an extension of ourselves, and we’re writing ourselves, but we wonder or even worry if we are coming through. But you’re also studying the selves you have been and how you became those selves. I was a psychology major in college, in addition to a creative writing major, because I was really interested in how we look at the self. I was really interested in adolescent and developmental psychology, and I thought maybe I should be a psychologist and focus on how we evolve and how we change. But really, it was probably that I’d also been studying The Mary Tyler Moore Show and was obsessed with how those characters had changed and grown over time. That made me interested in their psychologies and everyone else’s psychology, too. I think if you love something or someone, you want to study them, including yourself, who you’re stuck with whether you like you or not, so hopefully you can work on liking you and also work on understanding you and then somehow you bring that self onto the page.
That said, I often need distance. For a long time, I wrote more about my earliest years, trying to understand the child that I was. I think there was a child there who was very candid and not worried about saying everything that came into her head. That candor got reined in eventually because there were so many ways in which my inner thoughts were not okay, but then it was the double life of a lot going on in my brain and a lot going on in my journals and trying to figure out what was acceptable to say. I think everyone does that to some degree, that negotiating. So then the question becomes how do you reconcile yourselves that have been more contained throughout your life, the ways that you changed by choice rather than by restriction. There’s a psychological process at work there of trying to integrate a self. Writing is one way that really works for me, because I would like to reach readers, but I would also like to help myself better understand myself and better understand other people at the same time, so that I’m not carrying around anger, even if I’m carrying around a certain poignancy for things that can’t be resolved. That’s okay, that’s human, but I don’t want to go through life on a rage-bender, that’s not how I want to live. So that also means more reckoning on the page, and more anger and sadness may have to go into my work so that those emotions don’t end up ruling my life.
At the level of craft, I think some of it is just intense self-study but also wanting to resist the fear of navel gazing, the accusation that nonfiction writers often face. You’re always working on that dance. And ekphrasis saves the day again and again because you look out to look in. And if you do that, then you’re not actually just staring into a mirror and looking back at yourself, but you’re also looking into screens, into books, into other kinds of art to get a purchase on what is going on with yourself. If art is working by juxtaposition and everybody needs to have their wall in the swimming pool to push off from – which is mixing metaphors, but I was a swimmer in my youth! – if you’ve got to have that other thing, then maybe that’s the thing that helps you be on the page but without being overpowering on the page. If I can look out to look in, then I can keep some kind of balance. I’m really glad if I come across to readers like the me that I think I am, to readers who know me and even to readers who don’t know me. This process is also about wanting to render the other people in my life in a way that feels fair and honest about who they are, but also have the reader understand those impressions are always filtered through the memoirist’s view. There is no objective representation, of self or others, that I have found. For me, looking out to look in helps.
TC: I want to stick with the subject of that proxy self for a second and the process of rendering that self. “The Mary Years” feels like a departure from everything else I know of your work. I can see moments in this book that appear before, for instance the triptych in “Postage Due” and some of the postcards or the meditations in “Otherwise.” In the work of yours that I’ve read, we get you on the page in these interstitial moments of you, moments in poems and essays that feel like different spokes of a wheel that connect to the center of the hub and that speak to each other. They work around each other, they work with each other, but they’re different, they feel like different and distinct spokes. “The Mary Years” does not. It feels like the one that follows the story of you most thoroughly, most unflinchingly. It doesn’t turn away, it doesn’t shift to another spoke. It is the center of the wheel. It gives us a Julie that it feels like you’ve been maybe building up to writing down in one piece for a long time. Did writing this Julie feel different than the Julie’s you’ve known before?
JMW: It did. And it’s narrative. Like most binaries, of course, I like to get to the in- between of them, but there is an implicit binary between narrative and lyric. First of all, my other projects were written essay by essay. “Postage Due ” is a little different, but “Small Fires” and “Otherwise” were a matter of writing a lot of lyric essays and then going in and seeing which ones seemed to be talking to each other. So that’s a perfect analogy: what are the spokes that seem to be coming together around the hub, the thematic hub of one particular project? But that’s a very inductive way to do it, write a bunch of essays and then go back and see which essays are coalescing around some kind of centerpiece and then put them together in a book. Some memoirs and essays are built that way. What am I writing about? What are my obsessions that keep coming up? My fears, my passions—what is going on with me? Where is my work directing itself and what is it building toward? Putting the spokes together to make the spinning wheel.
But “The Mary Years,” of course, isn’t written like that at all. It’s very much a linear bildungsroman that says let’s go all the way back, let’s look at the beginning of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and where I was in my life when I started watching it. Right there, we have a built-in timeline. It’s 25 years from when I started watching the show in 1992 to when Mary Tyler Moore died in 2017. Also, that’s the same year that I was going up for tenure. Often, I take a bunch of essays and they move around in time, but I order them in something that resembles essays from earlier in life to essays that are closer to present day. But with this one, it’s the narrative arc leading up to my “Mary years,” age 30-37, that gave me a structure for the project from the start. As a person who does not naturally operate in a narrative mode, but much more often in a thematic mode, I do love linear stories; I just rarely write linear stories. So maybe “The Mary Years” is also different because I really like a challenge every time I come to the page. Where’s the push going to be? Is it digging deeper into a part of my content that I haven’t written about or have maybe felt reticent to write about? Or is the push going to come formally? And more recently – and this is also in another project that hasn’t come out yet – I’m pushing myself into narrative because I’m thinking about all that training in all of those wonderful electives in fiction that taught me about plot and arcs. Maybe there’s something I can do with what I’ve learned about fiction when writing my own life.
Maybe that makes novella less of a misnomer than I had originally thought given that I’m actually fascinated by narrative. I don’t think it’s my first form, and we know story lives in all kinds of spaces, not just traditional narrative, but I like the narrative mode. “The Mary Years” is not traditional narrative, but it’s more narrative than I usually write. And so it was like pulling the whole thread of The Mary Tyler Moore Show through my life in a time-bound way. Lots of stuff gets left out, but there’s also a clear map. This is so different from a thematic map, which is my first instinct as a writer, but I think it’s sometimes really good to step outside a comfort zone and let the project lead us to what else we can do. We can all say, “What do you not usually do? Oh, write a linear thing? Okay. Try that.”
MC: Toward the end of the memoir, you say that you have never written the book you thought you were writing or that you set out to write. And this book, it feels like Julie, like the Julie that has helped me discover so much about myself as a writer and I’m sure for Travis and probably the majority of your students, like the Julie that has uncapped something in us and our capabilities as writer. You’re an uncapper. And this book, it reveals a lot about you, it’s very vulnerable. Did the Mary Years feel like that book, the one that you thought you were writing while you were writing it? And does it feel like that book now that it’s coming out in the world and people are discovering it?
JMW: No, but it feels better.
MC: I love that.
JMW: I love that it came together in a way that felt incredibly right and like Travis said earlier, organic. This book did feel organic. I work on different projects all the time, simultaneously, but I didn’t while I was writing “The Mary Years.” I put everything else on hold. Maybe the lyric sensibility and the collaborative sensibility work well for my usual multitasking, but maybe a really narrative focus like tracing those 25 years required uninterrupted time, which I usually don’t have. It was precious time, time I was building up to and ready to use when it arrived in the summer of 2017. It’s not the book I thought I would write. It does feel better.
The people at Texas Review Press made me feel very seen. PJ Carlisle and Charlie Tobin, they are amazing, and there are also student interns at the press who I hope to meet. They made “The Mary Years” the most me that a book has ever been and has ever looked. I’ve been so lucky to be able to be part of the choices made about books I’ve written, so I have no complaints. My love of the book as art object has been honored in my life working with lots of different editors. But if there was one book that looks and feels the most like me, it would be this one., I feel most seen by that cover and by those visual section breaks all the way through the book.
There was also a feeling after writing this book that I finally set this down. Mary Tyler Moore’s been alluded to so many times over the course of my life, in almost every conversation with anyone I talk to a lot. Now it’s finally all there on the page. What I needed to say came out differently than I thought it would, but it’s there. And that feels really good. And in terms of vulnerability, I feel like I’ve gotten used to it. I know it’s really scary when people publish their first nonfiction work, and they feel exposed. But I feel like it’s also an invitation for other people to be more vulnerable, in their work or in their life. Sometimes people say, “Oh my god, I couldn’t write memoir because it would make me feel so naked,” but I don’t really feel like that. I feel more comfortable with memoir than younger me could have known, younger me who still thought that she had to write about things like desire and embodiment and write them into other characters, not as herself.
TC: Okay, this is the last question and this one is about lineage. The book, obviously, is in a lot of ways about Mary Tyler Moore. The book is also about becoming. But it’s also a book about the teachers who helped in that process of becoming, be it Mary, be it Linda, be it Angie or even John [Dufresne], all these essential figures in your becoming. We know you better, or at least differently than other interviewers will. We know you in a very particular relation to this book in that context. You have been a teacher to us, you have been a mentor to us, you have been a role model to us where we study not just your work, but your life. And sometimes we fail and sometimes we succeed to do our best to be like Julie. “What would Julie do?” is not an uncommon refrain among the many, many, many people who you’ve worked with and helped and not just been an inspiration for, but an aspirational figure, an affirmation.
JMW: That’s so nice.
TC: And so I’m curious, on the other side of writing this, finally getting it out there and feeling like, “Ah, this part of me is fully realized in one place,” and seeing it in the world, what it feels like, to you, to be the Mary Tyler Moore to so many people?
JMW: Oh, you’re talking about the mezzanine! That’s my analogy for it. When you’re at the beginning of your life, you’re at the bottom of the staircase, and every stair is leading up. At the beginning, it’s not like everyone you look up to will be the role model that you need for life, but I love having mentors. I’ve had so many wonderful teacher-mentors who I realize now were teaching me a lot about their subjects but who were also teaching me how to be a teacher, that I was studying them as teachers as well as what they were teaching subject-wise. I always picture it as a really long staircase because you hope that you get a really long staircase for your life. But then there’s also the landing, where at a certain point you’ve gone far enough up the stairs and you’re thinking, “Oh my goodness, there’s a lot of stairs behind me now, too.” I’m still looking up, including looking up to people who are acknowledged in the back of “The Mary Years.” I’m looking up to my colleagues, my senior colleagues who have not only lived more years but had more time doing this work than I have. I’m still so close to so many of my former professors who are still mentoring me now. This year, I realized Brenda Miller retired, a close mentor-professor-friend. Thankfully, most of my mentors are still alive, but I’ve started losing some, and some have retired from teaching. A lot of the people who mentored me in the classroom are no longer in the classroom, at least in a traditional semester-by-semester or quarter-by-quarter way, and that makes me sad on behalf of all the students who aren’t getting to learn from them like I did.
I’m told this is “middle age,” that you’re on this mezzanine and you’re recognizing you still have all these people to look up to but new people are also coming into the mix. Looking down the stairs has been the revelation of these last 12 years at this job at FIU. You look backwards and you recognize, “If I got to here, then there’s somebody else who’s on this staircase who is looking up to me because of where they are in the stair climb.” And that’s an awesome responsibility. It’s similar to how you can’t think about walking on stairs too much or you’ll start to stumble. It is a little daunting when I think about continuing to go further up. I’m all for longevity, but I do think quite poignantly about what happens when I’m further up the staircase, and all of my great formative mentors are no longer here. And then I have more stairs that I’ve climbed, and more people looking up to me—will I be equal to the challenge?
I’m comforted because I’ve been emailing even a lot this week with my mentor Tom Campbell, my English advisor from undergrad. He’s retired and he’s telling me, “If I were still teaching right now, I would feel such a sense of purpose. If I was connecting with students, I would feel like I was doing something that mattered, but because I’m not in that role, it’s harder to feel purpose.” I found myself writing a really urgent response saying, “I need you to know that every time I walk into a classroom, I’m carrying you with me.” And his response was, “I need you to know that every time I walked into your classroom, I was carrying my mentor, Hildegard [Weiss].” So, we were talking about lineage just this week, about how every person that you’re looking up to is carrying with them the people that they looked up to. One of the most glorious things is when you’re in the mezzanine and you are teaching students who have been taught by your former students. You realize that was my graduate student who taught this student in their first intro to creative writing class, and now they’re coming in and raving to me that they had this amazing teacher, and I’m telling them that their amazing teacher was my amazing student!
There’s so much beauty in that and reward in it, but I don’t think you ever really believe that you can be the person on the stairs that your mentors on the stairs were to you. And that’s probably good for humility purposes. I can never really believe that I could be for someone else who Mary Tyler Moore was for me, or that I could be for someone else who Tom Campbell is for me, or Dana Anderson, or Cate Fosl, or Annette Allen. But in the same way that you talk about aspiring, I’m still aspiring to be what they were to me to someone else. But you can’t know for sure. You can only really know what the people higher on the staircase have been to you. There’s something too tender and mysterious about it. You can only tell the people above you, “You won’t believe what you’ve given me.” And then the people who are climbing the staircase after you—you just hope you’re giving them enough of what you’ve been given. And it’s so amazing because I also love what I don’t know. For instance, I don’t get to know, but I like imagining, all the influence that you’ve had on the students coming into the program after you, your own students in classrooms. I don’t get to know all of that. Maybe sometimes I get a glimmer of it, but I like to believe we’re all on the rope tow to the future together.
TC: Then I will not belabor the point of trying to make you believe or see or understand what it is you’ve given us because you’re right, it is mysterious and tender.
JMW: I feel so appreciated every day. And I don’t want any of you to worry that my worry about the masking of the work has anything to do with my feelings of esteem. It’s only the fear that people will choose this path and pursue it without knowing that there are hard hats and orange cones needed for navigating this academic and literary world, too. I want to make sure that that’s known, but in no way do I feel unappreciated. In fact, I feel gloriously appreciated, and I hope Mary felt that on as deep a level because when you’re world famous like she was, I imagine it can also be hard to tell which human relationships are real and what’s just that generalized fan space. The lucky thing is that in this kind of work, it’s so intimate; you really know the care is there and that it’s not from a fan space where the people don’t really know the real you.
Which is to say: I’m living my best possible life, and I’m glad all my mentors and my students are a part of it. It’s the best possible life for me.
Julie Marie Wade is the author of many collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2023) and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Julie teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach. Her newest project is The Mary Years, winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize selected by Michael Martone and forthcoming from Texas Review Press in Fall 2024.
Travis Cohen is a Cuban American author and poet whose work has appeared in Litbreak Magazine, Every Day Fiction, (In) Parentheses Magazine, Litro and Permafrost and is forthcoming in the South Dakota Review. He is currently enrolled in Florida International University’s MFA program, where he is the Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Stream Magazine.
Michael Cuervo is an essayist, poet, and hybridist. He is currently enrolled in the creative writing MFA at Florida International University, where he serves as the Assistant Managing Editor of Gulf Stream Magazine. His work explores sexuality, pop culture, and all the messy intersections that arise.
Gulf Stream Magazine 