We’re hearing on the grapevine that WalMart has selected You’re Not the Boss of Me, a collection of Erika Schickel‘s essays about being a modern mom in Los Angeles, as its next “Latest and Greatest” book promo. I met Schickel a few weeks back when she came to New York to promote the book, which developed after some of her first articles were discovered by an agent on the HipMama website. Growing up in a house where both parents wrote (her dad is Time film critic Richard Schickel), “I had done everything I could to avoid the writing life,” she jokes, and after starting a career as a performance artist in NYC, creating one-woman shows inspired by Laurie Anderson’s performances at BAM in the mid-80s, she moved to Los Angeles and supported her theatrical work with the occasional film or TV gig. After her first pregnancy, when parts became more difficult to get, she found a way to make the best of the situation. “I realized the part I really liked was the writing,” she says.
She admits she was a little nervous watching various other “mom-oirs” arrive in stores before her book was ready, but isn’t too worried. “I don’t really fit in with the traditional moms or the ‘alternative’ moms,” she says about essays, which deal with subjects like a girl’s night out for lap dances and mangled attempts to bake holiday cookies. “I’m not much for lifestyling.” And motherhood isn’t her only subject; she also wrote a profile of Bikram Choudhury, the controversial yoga instructor. (“He doesn’t really get subtext,” Schickel laughs, “so he thought it was a very flattering piece.”) But even if her path to essay writing has been roundabout, for some it’s not entirely unexpected. “I ran into my second-grade teacher from Dalton at the yoga studio,” Schickel told me as we were finishing up our chat. “And she said that she always knew I was going to be a writer.”