Monica Heisey

• 'Monica Heisey's observations on men, women, friendship, love and sex are equal parts hilarious and profound' - Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love

• 'Hilarious, heart-warming, wise' - Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

• 'Monica Heisey is so funny and entertaining it might be tempting to call her a humorist. But all the best humorists transcend the label, and she is one of those' - Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

• 'Monica Heisey makes me laugh hard and often' - Rob Delaney author of A Heart that Works

Interview with Monica Heisey

1. What does a day in the life of Monica Heisey look like?
   I’m freelance, so every day is a bit different. I like the flexibility but it can be easy for the day to get away from me, so I try to get out of the house and work from a coffee shop or library or some other public place, just to be around people, to hold myself accountable. I’ll work for the bulk of the day, then wander around and do little errands or see a friend for a drink or something, then come home and hang out with my boyfriend and cat, maybe talk through a movie or TV show he’s trying to watch. I like my life.
   

2. How do you set yourself up for a day of writing?
   I don’t have much of a morning routine. My boyfriend does, though, so he brings me coffee in bed every morning, which is a very nice way to start the day. After that I do emails and read articles and do any other non-writing work til about 10:30, and then I get started on whatever actual writing I have to do.
   

3. Maggie’s a young divorcée who’s life experiences challenge what adulthood can look like, she’s been married and divorced by the time she’s 30 and her ex has taken the cat with him. Are you challenging a generations idea of success? If so, what do you think success really looks like in this day and age?
   I think maybe those traditional markers of success (house, spouse, long-term steady employment, 2.5 kids) were always a little satisfying, or maybe satisfying to a smaller portion of wider society than we thought. Now that those markers are less available to us, I think there’s been a bit of a reckoning regarding other ways we might find happiness or define success. I define it as mostly being able to spend my time how I want: having a job that I like, living in the place I want to live, having friends I feel lucky to know, being there for my family, going out to restaurants maybe slightly too often. It’s not that complicated, really.
   

4. You said in The Guardian that you’re fascinated with internet use, and how people joke through fairly serious instances of pain in their lives on social media. What did you hope to convey to readers in having Maggie channel that behaviour, too?
   I think Maggie’s generation and mine thought of the internet as this kind of fun and silly place, somehow different to “real life” and not that capable of impacting us in any important ways. When it started, it was all message boards and hotel review websites! But it’s not like that anymore, and hasn’t been for some time, and it’s having real and often devastating impacts on our mental health, our self image, and more. I feel a little silly it took me so long to start interrogating my internet habits, what I was getting from it and what it was doing to me, so I guess I hope Maggie as a character inspires a bit of that questioning in other people, too.
   

5. Do you ever worry / get excited about the prospect of Harry Styles reading a particular stand-out, laugh-out-loud chapter in your book? What would you do if he did! (I’d buy some champagne..)
   I suspect it is not the first fantasy of its kind that has been written down and put out into the world. Harry Styles is probably drowning in such materials, and would not be shocked to find another one, even in a book about something theoretically unrelated.
   

6. You’ve based Maggie on your own experience of getting divorced in your twenties while writing Schitt’s Creek, and in your Guardian interview you say that you’ve had therapy to process that chapter in your life. How, if at all, did writing Really Good, Actually help you process it too?
   I waited a few years after my breakup before writing the novel so that I could come to it as a creative project inspired by my emotional experience rather than as some kind of tool for catharsis. Even so, I think there was something therapeutic about being able to take these difficult emotions and make comedy out of them. It felt like I’d come along way from the version of myself who had been really devastated by it all.
   

7. I’m interested in your perspective on yourself as a child of the 90s and 00s. What was the catalyst in those days do you think for us Millennial’s questionable relationship to our bodies and mind? In what ways does Maggie experience / tackle those?
   Diet culture was JUICED UP in the early aughts. Watching movies or television from that period now is a real trip, people were so openly fatphobic. Maggie grew up seeing the same supermarket tabloids and watching the same episodes of America’s Next Top Model as the rest of us, and I think no matter how much work you’ve done to move past that way of looking at the world, if you’re in a period of personal crisis it’s easy for bad habits or disordered thinking to creep back in.
   

8. Really Good, Actually is packed with memorably hilarious anecdotes. Do you have a process for getting into the comedy mindset?
   I just try to keep myself entertained while I’m writing, to tackle whatever part of the outline seems most fun on that day. You have to enjoy it, right? Like if you can’t make yourself laugh, you’re probably not going to make anyone else do it, either.
   

9. What path in your career did you take to become a writer for (what myself and so many others believe to be the funniest TV show, ever) Schitt’s Creek? What was it like working with them?
   I was incredibly lucky in that Schitt’s Creek was my first job in narrative television. I wrote on seasons 3 and 4 of the show, so 2016 and 2017. I was very intimidated to be writing for (and in some cases with) some real comedy heroes of mine, but everyone was very welcoming and I learned so much.
   

10. What’s next for the wonderful Monica Heisey?
    I’m editing a television series right now - a romantic comedy called Smothered, coming to Sky and NOWTV in the UK this summer. And I’m writing a second novel, and adapting Really Good, Actually for television. I feel very lucky and a little tired.