Mirror Me: Belonging & Connection in Lisa Rosenberg's Exploration of Self-Identity-117

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Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:03

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us fifteen minutes of your time, and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Christy Leonard, owner and host of Writers in the Wild retreats, nonfiction voice over artist, and president of WFWA. I'm excited to share with you a little about today's guest.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:35

Today's guest is an author, psychotherapist, former ballet dancer, and adoption caseworker. Lisa's writing is inspired by her biracial black Ashkenazi Jewish identity, her ballet background, and her nineteen seventies New York City childhood. Most recently, Lisa's essay, Black Girl Blue Leotard is the narratively memoir grand prize winner. Alright. Welcome, Lisa. It is so great to meet you.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:01:04

Hi, Kristi. It's great to meet you too, and I'm excited to be here.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:08

Well, I'm gonna fan girl a little bit because I've actually read both of your books. And they're both so different, but I could see your voice in both of them and pretty darn awesome. Can't wait to talk about it.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:01:22

Thank you so much.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:24

You're welcome. So we always start with the same question, and I did read in your bio that you are from New York City. So tell us a little something about where you're from.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:01:36

So I am from the Upper West Side Of Manhattan, which is very much a thing. It always felt like a special place to grow up because you can see Central Park. Like, we could walk to Central Park, and that is kinda the heart of the city. And every Sunday, my parents and I would take our bicycles into the park. And the thing is, if you're a city girl, it's like we love our trees, but we have them all in a cage. So we could actually enter that cage at a Hundredth Street, and we would ride our bikes all the way around. We'd stop at the zoo, in Central Park Zoo, and then ride all the way and make a circle and come back at home.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:02:14

And that was always a big part.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:15

Oh, I love that.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:02:17

You know, we'd see the Natural History Museum, which was, like, a mile away, and the net was right across the park. So it just feels like home, the city.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:27

It sounds magical, actually.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:02:29

And I set Mirror Me on you know, I know exactly whose apartment everybody lives in. Like, my Yay. Like, Eddie and Eddie and his brother Robert grow up in my friend Michael's parents' apartment building.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:43

That's awesome.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:02:45

Yeah. I just based a lot of things on places I actually my dentist office is there's a horrible incident in an elevator, and I said there are actually a bunch of elevator incidents in the building.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:55

Write what you know. Right?

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:02:58

In any book. So yeah.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:00

Yeah. You could feel it.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:03:01

But anyway, before I grow up.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:03

Well, let's actually talk about you a little bit first. Your background as a ballet dancer turned psychotherapist and writer, it's pretty fascinating. Can you tell us how that journey unfolded and what inspired you to make all those shifts?

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:03:20

So being a writer was not a shift. Okay. They think you know, my mother was an early education specialist, and she from the time I was I can talk, she would dictate stories to me. She they'd tell me a story, and I would draw a picture of, like you know, I had a whole series about this group of penguins who have all kinds and I didn't know what a penguin was. I didn't know what one looked like, but I drew them anyway. And Pinky and Ratania were the penguins, and they had all these great adventures. And I would just dictate to my mom, and she'd write down every word I said, and that was my book. And my father was the art director at Viking Press.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:03:55

So every year, my father went to sales conference, and that was, like, what I thought you did when you grew up. Oh. You know? So I had all kinds of piece of paper all over the house with, like, a drawing, and it was a cover. And it would say, written and illustrated by Lisa Williamson.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:04:12

Oh, I love it.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:04:12

But it wasn't really. So I believed I was a writer long before I actually was one for better or for worse. It's a big learning curve to actually learn how to write an all. So I kinda started there. And also back in the seventies where I was growing up, every little girl wanted to be a ballerina, and I kinda never stopped having that. And it was one of the things. It was a driving force of my life.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:04:39

I loved music. I loved to move to it, and ballet kind of worked on me. Like, that was the kind of dance that spoke to me and kind of fit my body better than, I'd say, a tap or jazz or modern or anything like that. And, you know, when I was older and had to give up dancing because of injuries, and, also, I had been to college and seen the world in a different way, and to me, there were some other things to do. What is as exciting as being a dancer? And to me, that was kind of working with people and understanding how their stories could lead them to become different versions of themselves. And that also went hand in hand with writing. Kind of so it all kind of throw motherhood into that. Yeah.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:05:27

And I taught for a little while. So I feel like all the pieces sort of fit. And on paper, it's like, wow, these are very divergent.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:35

Right. Disparate.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:05:36

It's me, they're not.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:37

Yeah. Well, everybody's journey is different, and we all get to where we're supposed to be in my opinion.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:05:43

I believe that. I really believe that.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:45

Yeah. Totally. So if you were going to summarize your very complex, incredible book in one sentence I'm challenging you.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:05:59

If I were to summarize it so, you know, they're sort of like when we're asked about our books, there's the setup of the plot and then there's the summary. And I kind of, like, lean into both. So I will say my sentence is Eddie Asher, biracial adult adoptee, because that's important, with mysterious memory lapses is pretty sure he killed his brother's fiance and checks into a psychiatric facility to find out what really happened.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:27

That actually tracks. Having read the book, well done. It is a complex book. It has so many twists and turns, and it's just creative. I love that it has ballet in it, which is really awesome. I was also a dancer only up through high school.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:06:45

You were. I could sort of tell by the beautiful hair arrangement you had going on.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:49

Yeah. Uh-huh. I got into the performing arts high school for ballet, and then I decided I wanted to have a normal childhood.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:06:57

We missed each other.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:59

Decided not to.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:07:01

I went to the Performing Arts High School on Hart Valley. It was the old building where the famed school was filmed.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:08

Oh, no way. That's awesome.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:07:10

There were a lot of my teachers were a lot of the teachers, principal, head of the drama department, they were in the movie.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:17

That is so amazing. Alright. Let's talk about this book. Let's dig deeper and talk about Eddie. So the character that you referenced, his brother's girlfriend is Lucy. And Eddie's relationship with Lucy and his complicated interactions with Parr, which is another character, drives much of the emotional tension. How did you approach developing the complex dynamics, especially when reality itself is, like, uncertain?

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:07:52

I would flip it. So I didn't start out with the characters and then discover their dynamics. I kind of came up with the dynamics, like, who is Eddie and why is he so lost and what connects him

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:05

Okay.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:08:05

To being in this body, being in this planet. And I worked in adoption transracially adopted adults in my therapy practice.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:19

Oh, I see it all connects.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:08:21

So all of that and Annie was a a side character when the book started. It was about, like, you know, Robert and Lucy were in their thirties raising kids, and Annie trips on acid one Shabbat and has this whole thing about a disaster happening to one of their children. So that's not the book anymore. That was when the book was called Acid Shabbat, long time ago.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:43

Wow. That is quite a title.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:08:45

What I became fascinated with about Eddie was his particular brand of anxiety and concurrent clinging to Robert or anyone who can be with him, like him, part of this "we". Yeah. And I think that's part of being an only child, which I was, part of being biracial, which I was, and not looking like anyone. There's this notion of, like, who can I be part of a "we" with? And he doesn't realize it, but he's got his own personal Greek chorus whose name is Per. And that's a and Per, it's got an umlaut. It's p e r. It's a Swedish name that Eddie's Swedish exchange student birth mother would have given him had she decided to raise him. So Per is a disembodied consciousness who took the name Eddie's birth mother would have given him, and he's sort of like I mean, one of the overarching questions of this book is, does Eddie have what we now call dissociative identity disorder or does he have something completely different? And that's a question I deliberately don't answer even though if you read the reviews.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:09:51

Many of the reviews say this is a book about dissociative identity disorder, which when it said is 1993, it was still called multiple personality disorder and the psychiatrist researcher is one of the people pushing to call it dissociative identity disorder. But anyway, that's who Per is. I always thought of Per as like a Jiminy Cricket. Remember? I always thought of him as like a Jiminy Cricket consciousness riding around on Eddie's shoulder, and Eddie does have a scar on his shoulder, and that's Per's home. I'm not gonna give away the spoiler.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:10:23

Oh, it's so good.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:10:24

There's another character who also is very closely connected to Eddie and Per, and that is another question that I'm not gonna get into. But Eddie's at one point mistaken for someone else. And even though he's never met this other guy, he embodies him anyway and loves to live as this other person who happens to be a dancer, and Eddie's not. But he is embraced by the dance community just because he looks like this other guy. So the connection is that need to belong. Yeah. And that emptiness of having someone who is like you and can be your other. Right? And so he calls parent the other when he discovers him.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:11:07

He doesn't know about him until he's an adult. And Lucy, I'll just say, who is his brother's fiancee, Lucy is also biracial, also Jewish, but in a different way. You know, she's not adopted, and her mother is deceased in another big plot twist there. But he connects to her and relates to her, what he refers to as her girl version of Eddiness. Right. Because he notices their wrists side by side together. And she Lucy would like to think of herself as a very glamorous femme fatale.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:11:41

Right.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:11:41

And he sees her that way until he notices that she, like him, has chewed her nails to the quick. Right. And he sees their hands side by side and they're the similar shade of brown. Eddie's adoptive family, I think I said is white and so is Robert, Lucy's fiancee. And they both have very small wrists and small arms and big hands with the nails chewed to the quick, which I don't bite my nails. My husband does, but my hands are very deep for my wrists. So he has that.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:09

What techniques did you use to maintain suspense and create believable twists without losing the reader's trust?

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:12:19

I was telling the story to myself as I wrote it. I remember I started it in 02/2009. And when I did a technique, I don't know what you would call it, but I'm is when, you know, the unreliable narrator.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:33

Yeah.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:12:34

And, you know, the unreliable narrator and one person knows everything. Mhmm. Erin knows everything. Eddie knows nothing. So, therefore, they're both unreliable narrators. Yes. And the reader has to kinda pick through and identify what's true. And a recent book that came out, Laura Sims, How Can I Help You? She's got two main characters.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:12:57

Both of them have secrets, and they both have come to this library in the Midwest to, you know, getting away from their pasts. And each of them is kind of lying to themselves and the reader, and you have to pick it apart. And that's a wonderful, wonderful book.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:12

So we are actually almost out of time if you can believe it. Do you have a website? Where can people find you? We wanna make sure we direct people to where they can find more about you.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:13:23

I have a website which is lisawrosenberg.com. It's not too hard to find. No. I've got a Substack that is Saturdays taking stock. But if you go to my website, you can click on the Substack. Oh, perfect. I'm on Blue Sky, and I'm on Instagram, and I'm on threads and All the places. Not terribly difficult to find.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:13:46

I'm not on x anymore.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:50

Alright. So now we get to talk about what book or story inspires you. It's how we end all of our episodes.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:13:57

I have to say the book that inspires me most, even though there's so many, and I think a couple years ago, I might have chosen something different, is really still "A Little Life" because of the for me, my favorite thing in books is the development of the character over a lifetime. How and that's how I operate as a therapist too. Who were you? How did you get to this point? And what is the driving force of your soul? And I think I don't think of backstory as backstory. I think of it as a parallel story. And I think of one of the four main characters, but really the main character in A Little Life is Jude, and he experiences deep, deep physical and psychic pain as a result of an unbelievably brutal abusive childhood that he suffered, and yet it's love and connection and being embraced by others, by a lover, by an older mentor who actually adopts him as an adult. Like, how the ability to not just love, but to be loved, heals. And I think in Mirror Me, I show how Eddie in the world, but also relationships that Eddie has making who he is.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:15:20

And it's a very totally different kind of book. It's very twisty and unexpected. And, reality is not always what you think it is, but it is still about how he becomes and how he, you know, how he becomes and how he learns to belong as himself. And I think you have elements of that. But I have so many favorite books that I could

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:41

Right. Don't we all? I know. It's a hard question to ask. Well, it has been an absolute delight. You have such an interesting book. Both books are so interesting. Your life sounds interesting. You're a very interesting person, and I'm so glad I got a chance to meet you.

Lisa Rosenberg [: 00:16:01

Christy, I'm so glad that we had a chance to talk. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:16:09

Thanks for joining us. We hope you take a second to give us stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram at authorexpresspodcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget, keep it express, but keep it interesting.