Interview with Helen Schulman
Jennifer Cho Salaff
Helen Schulman, 64, is the author of ten books including the New York Times bestseller This Beautiful Life and the forthcoming collection of short stories, Fools for Love (Penguin Random House; July 8, 2025). Masterful across forms (novel, short story, nonfiction, and screenwriting), she has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Tennessee Williams Fellow and her work has been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sundance, and Aspen Words. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and serves as fiction chair in the MFA creative writing program at The New School.
Schulman’s funny, sexy, and wide-ranging new collection, her first in more than twenty-five years, is comprised of ten stories — one new and nine published over the past three decades — about relationships, sex, love, female agency, and people’s fierce attachments to each other: A single American mother and a French Orthodox rabbi fall in love over poetry as she helps to dismantle a shuttered bookstore in Paris. A rebellious young woman marries a series of men who are all wrong for her and proceeds to cheat on each of them; her widowed mother finds her deceased husband’s sex diaries and decides she needs to make up for lost time. And in the title story, a blossoming East Village playwright realizes that her marriage to a brilliant actor is doomed, after watching his performance in an alternative production of Sam Shepard’s iconic play.
Schulman was my very first fiction professor at The New School. During my second year in the program, I served as her research assistant and taught creative writing as a fellow at WriteOn NYC, which she founded in 2016. We chatted during her office hours on a recent sunny but cold spring afternoon about the writing life, motherhood, nurturing children — and the self.
Jennifer Cho Salaff: It’s always good to see you during your office hours, Helen.
Helen Schulman: We’ve had many of these chats, haven’t we?
JCS: Yes, we have! This time, let’s start at the beginning. When did you know you were a writer?
HS: I was a reader, first. I needed to read to survive. There was a lot of pain in my family. My grandparents were refugees from Eastern Europe and everybody carried such huge psychological trauma. Reading was a way to get away from my family.
JCS: What were some books that made an impression on you when you were young?
HS: Jane Eyre was my favorite book when I was nine. I read a lot of kids’ books but also books like Gone with the Wind. I remember one time the school librarian said, “You’re too young to read this,” and I was like, “But I already read it.” I went home and told my mom and she called the school and said, “My daughter is allowed to read these books!”
JCS: When did your love for reading inspire you to become a storyteller yourself?
HS: I always wrote a little bit as a kid, but it wasn’t until I went to college and took creative writing classes and fell in love with it that I knew I was going to be a writer. Like a lot of people, I wrote poetry first and it was pretty bad. And then I thought, Why don’t you write things that you like to read?
JCS: So it was when you were at Cornell that you cemented this desire to become a writer?
HS: Well, I had to leave college a semester early because my dad had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery and I had to go back home [to New York City]. I was short a few credits so I took classes at Columbia, and one was with Gordon Lish, the writer and legendary editor of Raymond Carver. He was this sort of dashing and handsome man whom everyone called Captain Fiction. At the time, I had no idea how famous he was.
JCS: Wow, what was his class like?
HS: It was intense. Like six hours long, and people were still smoking in those days. I remember if you went to the bathroom, he would talk about you behind your back. And if you read your work (he made us read it out loud) and you said something he didn’t like, he’d say, “Oh Schulman, you’re killing us! This is such shit! You really want me to hear this shit?!”
I was twenty-two years old and it changed my whole life. The thing about Gordon — I owe him so much. He taught me to read, word for word, and to write, word for word. He taught me that writing was a noble and important way to spend your life, but if you wanted to do it, you had to work really hard and take it seriously.
JCS: And after that, you never looked back.
HS: I applied to Columbia and got my MFA and I sold my thesis.
JCS: Which became your first book, Not a Free Show — a collection of short stories.
HS: It sold, like, no copies, but whatever. It was the first step in a career that’s had a lot of ups and downs. But that was kind of amazing — at twenty-six to sell your thesis.
JCS: That is amazing! And the rest is history, as they say. Seven novels, including adapting P.S. into a film starring Laura Linney, essays and reviews for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ and The Paris Review, just to name a few. Heading the fiction concentration in the New School’s MFA program and founding the WriteOn fellowship. Oh, and another collection of short stories, Fools for Love, which comes out this summer — your tenth book! We’ll talk about that in a minute. And you had children in the midst of building a career.
HS: There were many years, even after I published my first book and sold my first screenplay, that I had no money and I was temping, adjunct teaching, writing nonfiction, writing books, trying to write more screenplays. It was just juggle, juggle, juggle, and going all over the city, up to Columbia, down to NYU.
Once you have kids, everything goes out the window — all the little things I needed to write: the quiet, the time, the coffee, the cigarettes, whatever. It took me a long time to have children. And then I had them and it’s been the best part of my life. I love being their mother. But what happened for me was that I was so scared I was never going to write again. I still had to make a living. I just found spaces [to work] in the cracks. I also had two parents who had really long, awful illnesses and I was their first line of defense. Looking back, I still don’t know how I did it.
JCS: I think you just do it. You don’t think about it. When you’re in the thick of it, there’s no time to think about it.
HS: I guess that’s true. I love my children and they always came first. I also felt a huge sense of responsibility towards my parents. But if I hadn’t written I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it. Writing is where I put my crazy. It’s like what Flaubert said about being regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
JCS: Yes, that’s relatable. I’m certainly wild and free in my work, but pretty neat and methodical in my everyday life.
Speaking of everyday life, including motherhood — a bit of a sidebar here — when I talked to Sam Chang [Lan Samantha Chang, author of The Family Chao and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop] she told me about this conversation she had with you at Bread Loaf Writers Conference many, many years ago. She asked you how you managed raising a child while also working. She said she knew she wanted to be a mother, but was also terrified about how she was going to make it work. Does this conversation ring a bell?
HS: What’d I tell her?
JCS: Well, you must have encouraged her because she ended up having a baby fourteen years after that initial conversation.
HS: (laughter)
JCS: We also discussed the importance of a supportive partner, in addition to having money and a room of one’s own (referencing what Virginia Woolf famously said about women who write fiction). How important was that piece for you, when you were raising children?
HS: I have a great husband and he’s a great father. But he had a traditional job working as a journalist and magazine editor for most of our lives. He traveled a lot and had demanding hours. He worked at Time and was deputy editor at Vanity Fair for twenty-two years. When the kids were young, I did the caretaking and had to figure it out. Office hours during the day while the kids were at school, picking them up and having them with the babysitter while I went back to school to teach.
In terms of support, I will say a great part of our marriage is that we read each other’s work. He edits me, I edit him. We have very different sensibilities and we occupy a different part of the writerly firmament, but we are interested in each other’s minds and interested in each other’s work.
JCS: It’s like a writerly match made in heaven.
HS: I got very lucky.
JCS: On the topic of love, let’s talk about your upcoming book (your tenth) and your second collection of short stories, Fools for Love. When does it hit bookshelves?
HS: July eighth.
JCS: So exciting! I feel like short fiction is making a comeback.
HS: You may know more than I do.
JCS: I’m calling it, short stories are back!
HS: I had been writing the stories for years in between novels and screenplays. When I didn’t have a big project and I didn’t know what to work on next, I’d write a story.
JCS: What is at the heart of this collection?
HS: They’re about the crazy things you do for romantic love. I think they’re lighter than my novels. And hopefully they’re funny and sexy.
JCS: I would say that’s something of a signature in your work: funny, sexy, and a lot of heart.
HS: Thank you.
JCS: Your work reveals your lifelong passion for telling women’s stories. I think you’ve said before, in interviews, that your work is about how hard it is to be a girl, and in this new collection you examine the joys and absurdities of looking for love. One of my favorite stories in the collection is “I Am Seventy-Five,” about septuagenarian Lily Weilerstein, who, after stumbling upon her recently dead husband’s secret sex diaries, seeks a late-in-life tryst.
HS: Ha! That story [originally published in A Public Space, No. 4, 2007], like Lily, is so old. Glad you liked it!
JCS: I love stories. I started out writing stories. I remember one of my very first office hours with you, I was talking about how I had this idea for a collection of short stories, and you strongly suggested to me that my first book should be a novel.
HS: When I was coming out of grad school, it was a golden age of stories again. I sold my collection and a lot of people were writing stories. But that was a long time ago. That was 1986. Now you can’t find my old stories anywhere. I wanted them to exist and the only way to do that is to get them into the Library of Congress. So, this book is a way for them to live forever.
But going back to that conversation we had about stories, I hope I also told you, If you want to write stories then you should write stories, but if you have a choice between writing a novel or stories, the wisdom is to go with a novel because it’s easier to sell.
JCS: It was good advice and ultimately it opened me up to the idea of writing a novel, which I am doing now. It broadened me as an artist, and I like the challenge.
HS: I remember you saying to me — and now I’m going to put you on the spot — you said, “There’s something I really want to write but I’m putting it off.”
JCS: Oh, I remember that conversation. I don’t think I said I was “putting it off” but I told you it might take me a while to write this book. And then you said, “Why kick the can down the road?” For me it’s less about putting it off and more like feeling the project is going to take me years to finish. Writing books is a long game. Not like doing an all-nighter and cranking out a short story.
HS: But it’s also, Seize the day. I think that’s the two things you have to wrestle with in your mind as a writer. If you think of how much work it is and how long it’s going to take, you’re never going to do it because it’s such a hard road. But those days go by anyway.
JCS: Kind of like parenting. If you think about how much work it will be and how long it will take, you might never do it.
HS: This is true.
JCS: Those days add up and next thing you know, you have finished a book. Or, your son is going to turn twenty, like mine will this year, and you’re like, How did that happen?
Photo credit: Sarah Yi