During her keynote speech at the New York Round Table Writers’ Conference this afternoon, author Lee Woodruff told a starstruck audience of writers how George Stephanopoulos’ wife, actress Allie Stephanopoulos, helped her craft jokes in her memoir, “Perfectly Imperfect.”
Despite her celebrity connections, Woodruff told the roomful of aspiring writers that publicity is easier than ever before for regular authors. “It is so much more egalitarian now. You can Twitter. There’s Facebook,” she explained. “It makes the playing field so much more level. It should be hugely comforting to us… back in the day of the [television network] dinosaurs, you really had to be somebody to get through that filter.”
Woodruff became a bestselling author after co-writing a memoir with her husband–journalist Bob Woodruff–about how he survived severe injuries in Iraq–“In an Instant.”
During her speech, Woodruff admitted she nearly excluded a line about making love to her husband the day he left for his fateful trip to Iraq. “I was thinking ‘O my god, my mother is going to read this! Not to mention my children. But no one ever said a word about that line … [Except] the head of the Marine Corp told me: ‘I read your memoir. It’s a little racy, making love to him before the war!'”