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Heather
McElhatton
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copy of the
book!
FAQs:
The most
frequently
asked PLM
Questions
Contact
Heather
McElhatton
Heather McElhatton
isn't a morbidly obese concubine
with a thing for primates.
How's that for free will?
Mistakes Were Made
______________________________________
by Tricia Cornell
May 30, 2007
Heather McElhatton
Pretty Little Mistakes
HarperCollins
Heather McElhatton has made a lot of mistakes. There's something
universally appealing about that. We like heroes who have screwed up as
badly as we have and landed not just on their feet, but in McElhatton's case
smack on top of a big pink pile of chic lit.
One of McElhatton's mistakes may have been spending six years writing a
novel in "purple prose"—her words—set on a Georgia barrier island. Two
years ago, that failed quest brought the Minneapolis writer to the edge of
tragedy for the modern creative class: 35 years old, living with her mother,
having just heard from her agent, "Honey, there just isn't anywhere else to
send it."
But that mistake also brought her to where she is today: in the pages of
Vanity Fair and Playgirl, talking up the book she wrote as therapy after she
hit that wall.
McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes is all about screwing up in big and little
ways, and reaping the rewards and kicks in the ass that fate sees fit to
dole out. And you—that's "you" in the Time magazine person-of-the-year
sense—get to play along, because Mistakes is a choose-your-own
adventure book. Gen-Xers, like McElhatton, surely remember the second-
person adventure series from the 1980s that closed every short chapter
with an agonizing decision for the reader to make. Call it perfect timing.
The generation that first followed directions to flip to page 79 if you choose
to board the pirate ship is now ripe for a pre-midlife crisis: What if I had
married Ivo and raised his children by a lake in Finland?
McElhatton started by chasing down all those what-ifs in her own life.
Having gathered a stack of what she calls "the nicest rejection letters,"
she traced her path back to the last moment she knew she was absolutely
where she was supposed to be—the last day of high school. And she
mapped, on a massive sheet of linoleum, the choices she had made and
where the alternate choices might have taken her.
"This was not supposed to be a funny lark," she said recently over coffee
at the "Starschmucks" in St. Louis Park. "This was, Okay, before I commit
suicide, I'm going to figure this out, so I know. It got really dark. It wasn't
ever supposed to be published. This was my little self-help project. After
writing it, I really did feel a much deeper sense of peace."
At the start of the book, readers join McElhatton in going back to high
school graduation. The first choice we make is whether to attend college
or travel. McElhatton, after graduating from the private, Christian,
Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis, chose Italy.
"I was like a bat out of hell," she says. "I was just, boom, on a plane over to
Europe, ran around for over a year—my father had just died, so I was a
little upset—drinking, traveling, getting my ya-yas out."
And you, dear reader, also enjoy the chance to get some very exotic ya-yas
out, some you might not have known you had. There's wild monkey sex—
as in sex with monkeys—an erotic circus, a very sweet lesbian affair, and
far more kept-woman scenarios than a modern woman should be
comfortable with.
McElhatton says the sexy bits are "little rewards" to keep readers flipping
around through the 150 possible endings. She also doesn't mind keeping
people guessing about when she stopped writing about her own pretty little
mistakes.
"I know I'm namedropping, but Salman Rushdie once told me...I had a
bunch of short stories and I said 'Salman, I write all these things but the
only things that sell are the ones with a lot of sex in them.' And he looks at
me over his glasses and he says, 'Heather, push on the open door.' And
then I said, 'Well, what do I say if people ask me if these stories are true.'
He said, 'Tell them it's all true.'"
How much of the raunch in the book is invented doesn't interest me much,
but I now know that the monkey in question is named after a former
boyfriend's penis. And, if I wanted to, I could publish the nickname of
McElhatton's own, um, ya-ya. It's the sort of thing McElhatton seems
comfortable talking about over a massive iced latte. Or maybe it's just her
way of surviving the umpteenth interview. Maybe her eyes are twinkling
behind those enormous sunglasses—"Go ahead, stick that in your little alt-
weekly!"
Or, maybe—and this is most likely—she's just one chatty, chatty woman.
The first time I read Pretty Little Mistakes, I thought, All right, I've got this
literary bad girl figured out. I'm going to take the risky path every time, and
I'll be rewarded.
So I choose to strap slabs of meat to my body for the sake of art and end
up so obese that "the fire department has to saw through the living room
floor in order to get you out of the basement. They're too late of course;
they've arrived to find you cold dead, legs straight up in the air, skirt over
your head with a Mallomar clutched in one hand." (Fun trivia: All the deaths
in the book are ripped from the headlines.)
Next, I stick to the safe paths. I turn down a role in a possibly sleazy movie
and end up convicted of a murder I didn't commit. There, I die in prison of a
staph infection.
Staph or morbid obesity. Some choice.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek—bear with me here, this is going to
be worth it—compared one of the choices we ritually make every four
years, elections, to the "door close" button on an elevator: It exists purely
to give us a false sense of choice and power. Those doors are going to
close when they're going to close no matter what we do. We all know deep
down that life is pretty random, that we don't choose our own adventure. It
chooses us.
All the same, it's fun, for an escapist evening or two, to try to take the reins
in our own hands: I know I can choose my way to the monkey sex! I know I
can.
McElhatton's decision to take a teenage Italian sojourn didn't bring her to
an erotic circus (I'm guessing). Instead there was waitressing and
photography school, an MFA, decent success as a short-story writer, and a
downright solid career as a radio producer, which allowed her to rub
elbows with the likes of Rushdie. (She currently hosts an occasional live
variety show, Stage Sessions, which can be heard on MPR.) For her, the
end of the chapter didn't read, "Sell novel, flip to page 86. Live life in
obscure penury, flip to page 119."
First novel sold, McElhatton now has two new deadlines to meet.
HarperCollins is awaiting the follow-up to Pretty Little Mistakes, Million
Little Mistakes, about everything we can do wrong after winning $22 million
in the Big Money Suckah Lottery. And HarperPerennial has signed her up to
write the female counterpart to Chad Kultgen's jerk-lit novel Average
American Male.
"Overnight success is, You didn't know about me yesterday," she says,
with only the faintest hint of defensiveness, "but I've been here duking it
out."
McElhatton figures she'll never be immune to the what-if game. "I had kind
of a tumultuous childhood," she says. "I think people who were insecure
as children never really totally lose that. They're always looking around,
'Okay, what's going to happen next? Am I in the safest possible place? Is it
as good as it could be?'"
isn't a morbidly obese concubine
with a thing for primates.
How's that for free will?
Mistakes Were Made
______________________________________
by Tricia Cornell
May 30, 2007
Heather McElhatton
Pretty Little Mistakes
HarperCollins
Heather McElhatton has made a lot of mistakes. There's something
universally appealing about that. We like heroes who have screwed up as
badly as we have and landed not just on their feet, but in McElhatton's case
smack on top of a big pink pile of chic lit.
One of McElhatton's mistakes may have been spending six years writing a
novel in "purple prose"—her words—set on a Georgia barrier island. Two
years ago, that failed quest brought the Minneapolis writer to the edge of
tragedy for the modern creative class: 35 years old, living with her mother,
having just heard from her agent, "Honey, there just isn't anywhere else to
send it."
But that mistake also brought her to where she is today: in the pages of
Vanity Fair and Playgirl, talking up the book she wrote as therapy after she
hit that wall.
McElhatton's Pretty Little Mistakes is all about screwing up in big and little
ways, and reaping the rewards and kicks in the ass that fate sees fit to
dole out. And you—that's "you" in the Time magazine person-of-the-year
sense—get to play along, because Mistakes is a choose-your-own
adventure book. Gen-Xers, like McElhatton, surely remember the second-
person adventure series from the 1980s that closed every short chapter
with an agonizing decision for the reader to make. Call it perfect timing.
The generation that first followed directions to flip to page 79 if you choose
to board the pirate ship is now ripe for a pre-midlife crisis: What if I had
married Ivo and raised his children by a lake in Finland?
McElhatton started by chasing down all those what-ifs in her own life.
Having gathered a stack of what she calls "the nicest rejection letters,"
she traced her path back to the last moment she knew she was absolutely
where she was supposed to be—the last day of high school. And she
mapped, on a massive sheet of linoleum, the choices she had made and
where the alternate choices might have taken her.
"This was not supposed to be a funny lark," she said recently over coffee
at the "Starschmucks" in St. Louis Park. "This was, Okay, before I commit
suicide, I'm going to figure this out, so I know. It got really dark. It wasn't
ever supposed to be published. This was my little self-help project. After
writing it, I really did feel a much deeper sense of peace."
At the start of the book, readers join McElhatton in going back to high
school graduation. The first choice we make is whether to attend college
or travel. McElhatton, after graduating from the private, Christian,
Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis, chose Italy.
"I was like a bat out of hell," she says. "I was just, boom, on a plane over to
Europe, ran around for over a year—my father had just died, so I was a
little upset—drinking, traveling, getting my ya-yas out."
And you, dear reader, also enjoy the chance to get some very exotic ya-yas
out, some you might not have known you had. There's wild monkey sex—
as in sex with monkeys—an erotic circus, a very sweet lesbian affair, and
far more kept-woman scenarios than a modern woman should be
comfortable with.
McElhatton says the sexy bits are "little rewards" to keep readers flipping
around through the 150 possible endings. She also doesn't mind keeping
people guessing about when she stopped writing about her own pretty little
mistakes.
"I know I'm namedropping, but Salman Rushdie once told me...I had a
bunch of short stories and I said 'Salman, I write all these things but the
only things that sell are the ones with a lot of sex in them.' And he looks at
me over his glasses and he says, 'Heather, push on the open door.' And
then I said, 'Well, what do I say if people ask me if these stories are true.'
He said, 'Tell them it's all true.'"
How much of the raunch in the book is invented doesn't interest me much,
but I now know that the monkey in question is named after a former
boyfriend's penis. And, if I wanted to, I could publish the nickname of
McElhatton's own, um, ya-ya. It's the sort of thing McElhatton seems
comfortable talking about over a massive iced latte. Or maybe it's just her
way of surviving the umpteenth interview. Maybe her eyes are twinkling
behind those enormous sunglasses—"Go ahead, stick that in your little alt-
weekly!"
Or, maybe—and this is most likely—she's just one chatty, chatty woman.
The first time I read Pretty Little Mistakes, I thought, All right, I've got this
literary bad girl figured out. I'm going to take the risky path every time, and
I'll be rewarded.
So I choose to strap slabs of meat to my body for the sake of art and end
up so obese that "the fire department has to saw through the living room
floor in order to get you out of the basement. They're too late of course;
they've arrived to find you cold dead, legs straight up in the air, skirt over
your head with a Mallomar clutched in one hand." (Fun trivia: All the deaths
in the book are ripped from the headlines.)
Next, I stick to the safe paths. I turn down a role in a possibly sleazy movie
and end up convicted of a murder I didn't commit. There, I die in prison of a
staph infection.
Staph or morbid obesity. Some choice.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek—bear with me here, this is going to
be worth it—compared one of the choices we ritually make every four
years, elections, to the "door close" button on an elevator: It exists purely
to give us a false sense of choice and power. Those doors are going to
close when they're going to close no matter what we do. We all know deep
down that life is pretty random, that we don't choose our own adventure. It
chooses us.
All the same, it's fun, for an escapist evening or two, to try to take the reins
in our own hands: I know I can choose my way to the monkey sex! I know I
can.
McElhatton's decision to take a teenage Italian sojourn didn't bring her to
an erotic circus (I'm guessing). Instead there was waitressing and
photography school, an MFA, decent success as a short-story writer, and a
downright solid career as a radio producer, which allowed her to rub
elbows with the likes of Rushdie. (She currently hosts an occasional live
variety show, Stage Sessions, which can be heard on MPR.) For her, the
end of the chapter didn't read, "Sell novel, flip to page 86. Live life in
obscure penury, flip to page 119."
First novel sold, McElhatton now has two new deadlines to meet.
HarperCollins is awaiting the follow-up to Pretty Little Mistakes, Million
Little Mistakes, about everything we can do wrong after winning $22 million
in the Big Money Suckah Lottery. And HarperPerennial has signed her up to
write the female counterpart to Chad Kultgen's jerk-lit novel Average
American Male.
"Overnight success is, You didn't know about me yesterday," she says,
with only the faintest hint of defensiveness, "but I've been here duking it
out."
McElhatton figures she'll never be immune to the what-if game. "I had kind
of a tumultuous childhood," she says. "I think people who were insecure
as children never really totally lose that. They're always looking around,
'Okay, what's going to happen next? Am I in the safest possible place? Is it
as good as it could be?'"