Sasha Cagen

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.

My name is Sasha Cagen. I’m a writer of books and essays, as well as a life coach working in the field since 2012. My career has been a series of creative projects, often with a focus on the empowerment of women.

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My first book Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics (HarperCollins) put me on the map as a spokesperson for single people who didn’t want to settle for less than what they really want in relationships. That book got a lot of attention because it put a positive spin on being single at a time when that was more uncommon, back in 2004. I published a magazine To-Do List, a magazine of meaningful minutiae, which led to my second book To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us (Simon & Schuster). My third book will be a memoir, working title Wet, that tells the story of ditching Silicon Valley in pursuit of pleasure in South America. It’s about a journey of sensuality through travel helped me to heal the long shadow of a secret of childhood sexual abuse, and to find true self-acceptance as an unmarried woman in my early forties.

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I write a weeklyish newsletter to my readers and clients. One of my subscribers, Zoe, wrote this: “As a woman also unmarried, also focusing on your relationship with yourself, I want to know what you are up to in the world. You are, like it or not, modelling what it looks like to live life differently from the prescribed social norms. We need people like you. There aren’t enough narratives of living life differently.” I love getting feedback like that because it gives me a sense of my work mattering and reaching people.

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2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?

Writing has always been part of my life. I won contests as a kid in elementary school, and those awards helped me latch on to the identity of “being a writer.” I see it as a blessing now that I got that validation young that made me think, “Yeah, I’m a writer!” I started freelance writing for The Village Voice during college in New York City and co-wrote a zine called Cupsize. Those projects too made me feel like a writer.

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My first book Quirkyalone was published when I was 30, and my second book To-Do List made it out in the world when I was 33. I didn’t expect to write books but my essay coining the word “quirkyalone” went “viral before things went viral” back in 2000. An agent reached out to me and planted the idea.

 

There’s been a looooooong period of incubation and creation for my third book. But, of course, all those years I have been writing, personal essays, blog posts, and the memoir. And doing a lot of personal work that helped me arrive at the insights in the third book.

 

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?

When an idea or question won’t leave me alone, that’s what I focus on. I work on things that obsess me. Writing is a deep process for me that takes me on a journey over time, so I need to choose themes and topics that have staying power and allow me to go deeper with layers. Otherwise, I would get bored and not feel motivated to finish. The mysteries of my life might be mysteries of another person’s life. That is where we connect.

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There is also something inherently healing about constructing a story. Writing a story can be like writing a list; reading the story back soothes me with order, and on top of that, emotional meaning. Writing gives me a feeling of purpose and contribution.

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I also find inspiration in travel and our culture. I like to draw connections between personal experience and historical or social factors. I like to talk about things we don’t talk about.

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I hope that my work is part of a story of progress. Lately, I wonder if we are going backward as a society, with the loss of reproductive freedoms in the US, the real possibility of a convicted felon as president, and our running out of time on the climate crisis. I hope I am helping with my work to push us forward with more feelings of possibility for more people.

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I love words. I love playing with words. (I have invented two: “quirkyalone” and “pussywalking”!)
 

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?

Many revisions. Many drafts. If you knew how many drafts of my current big project there are on my computer, you would gasp. My pieces start as a mess, way beyond what Anne Lamott calls “shitty first drafts” in the writing book Bird by Bird. I jot down ideas, details, and a rush of images, and over time I construct a narrative that leads the reader on a journey. I fill in more details, polish, and play. This process is true even for some small things, but certainly for anything ambitious.

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There is a great misconception among people that writing is a linear process. Rarely things come out in all one go. The rewriting is the writing. It’s common for me to bring the same piece back to a writing group numerous times to continue getting feedback. I sometimes feel more like a painter or a sculptor than a writer because it’s a process of adding and subtracting strokes, molding something as a whole, feeling the language and the narrative as I reread my own work.

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For my memoir, we are talking about twelve years of going deeper to the meanings of the events. Over time, I uncover deeper themes from the events and shape the emotional arc of the story, the “aboutness”. That discovery gives me a lot. I certainly have grown to understand myself and become comfortable with a level of vulnerability that previous versions of me would be shocked to know the things that I am daring to share now. Writing a memoir has made me braver.

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Being a writer has also shaped my choices about where to live. My decision to move to Buenos Aires was very connected with my desire to work on my memoir. In 2015, I had been coaching for three years in the Bay Area, and doing tech marketing consulting. All that work left little time and mental energy for writing. Moving to Argentina let me focus only on writing and coaching as I launched that new business. Buenos Aires has a strong literary culture as well as a tango culture. (I dance tango.) I found a great writing group as support in those years. I spent two hours every Wednesday in a cafe with the same group of people, exchanging feedback. Those meetings were very important for me.

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5. And what does writing then also give you in return?

Writing involves a lot of time alone, but writing also creates community with fellow writers, a sense of being part of something larger, a sense that I am part of the human family.

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A sense of craft, purpose, and contribution.

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Connections with readers. People learning about me, and feeling closer to me because of the writing. That closeness feels like a good thing.

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Writing is also very compatible with coaching. Being a writer makes me curious, and that makes me a better coach. Being a coach gives me insights into the human condition, which makes me a better writer.

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6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?

After a book is published, it never goes away. We can be pregnant with our books for a long time. But, of course, giving birth to a book is not the same as giving birth to a human being.

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I struggled a lot about whether I would be a mother, and now that I am past that decision point and I am not, I am grateful to feel peaceful and resolved around the answer of no. I identify as an artist who is glad she has free time for her art. This year I spent two months in Ubud, Bali, focused on my memoir. That was a great gift to give myself, and not having children makes it much easier to run off and do things like that. I appreciate the gifts of not having children more now.

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7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?

Sharing my story has been incredibly validating. Sharing my story has helped me to give dignity to this way of life, of being unmarried and not being a mother. Rather than see my life as absent of children, or a husband, I see my life as more full of things that I actively chose and give my life purpose and meaning. I am still open to marriage, and/or a deep committed relationship. I have always wanted that. I’ve learned to prioritize my own happiness along the path of dating, because the path can be challenging!

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For a long time, I compared my life unfavorably to the lives of my friends who got married and had children, but in recent years one of my friends whose life went in an opposite direction (she is the mother of four kids) told me how much she admires my path. She wants to know how to prioritize herself the way I learned to do in all those years. She learned to give, give, give. It’s been liberating to get older and see the pluses and minuses of my life more objectively, as opposed to solely listening to the inner critic voice that told me my life was off track or unhappy because I didn’t fulfill societal expectations.

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8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?

As I look at the books on my shelf, memoir and fiction, I notice there are not too many childfree or childless protagonists. I do believe there is desire for more such stories.

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9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?

People are hungry to read stories from women who are taking different paths in life. Mothers too are interested in my work because they often lose themselves in the role of wife and mother.

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Non-parents too are a big market. There are a lot of seekers out there who are looking for inspiration, and publishers could be feeding these burgeoning audiences. When I was in Bali this year I met a lot of those people! Women are also eager for more stories about women seeking and enjoying their own pleasure.

 

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?

The memoir is the big push! I am hopeful that this book Wet, or whatever it’s called ultimately, will be as impactful as my first one Quirkyalone was, and that it will be an important book for anyone who wants to get to know their own higher purpose for pleasure, for anyone whose life has not gone according to plan, anyone struggling with the idea that relationships must be a certain way or duration to be valuable, anyone struggling to find themselves in this world. This book is also for women readers who want to affirm that seeking out their own pleasure and joy is not selfish - it could be some of the most important work (or play) they ever do.

 

People can learn more about the current book as it gets ready for publication by signing up for my newsletter.