Ellie Monago, author of The Secret Mistress, asks: is she Therapist or Novelist? Fortunately, she tells us: both!
When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was a writer. That meant me in a room flexing the muscle of my imagination. It felt godlike, in its way. I was the creator of worlds. What I didn’t imagine was my potential readers, or how you find and keep an audience—i.e. how you make money. I wrote for me.
I managed to retain that attitude for a very long time. I think it’s because this was pre-internet. There wasn’t that much information about the business. Everything you can find out now in a quick Google search about the brutality of the publishing industry and how to navigate it—beta readers, multiple revisions, agent searches, rejections, author platforms, developing a brand, self-publishing versus traditional versus digital first—either didn’t exist or was shrouded in mystery then. You didn’t know quite what you were up against.
In a way, that meant you weren’t nearly as prepared to confront those realities and attempt to transcend them. But it also meant you weren’t as afraid or as jaded. Ignorance was bliss, maybe?
My fall from innocence came when I was twenty-three and attending an MFA program in Creative Writing. I realized what a career as a novelist would truly entail, and I didn’t think I had the talent and/or the will to persevere.
So I cut and ran. I dropped out of the MFA program and enrolled in a counseling program instead.
Writing as ‘my happy place’
It might sound cowardly or craven or lazy, like I valued financial security over art or I wasn’t willing to put in the work, and maybe there was a little bit of all of those. But the biggest factor was that writing had always been my happy place. There’s that saying, “Writers don’t like writing, they like having written,” and that was entirely untrue of me. I liked writing, very much. I didn’t want my relationship to it to become one of existential anxiety. Once you set out to monetize things you love, it inevitably changes the way you feel about them. I guess I wasn’t ready to change in that way yet.
Like I said, I was only twenty-three. Lucky for me, the empathy that had been so useful in writing characters came in handy in working with clients. It scratched the itch well enough. For a number of years, I didn’t write at all. I developed other skills and aspects of myself, and I read purely for enjoyment rather than to research the competition or find my niche.
During a period between therapy jobs, I suddenly had an idea for a novel—my first in years—and I went into a sort of trance. When I came out a month later, I had a novel.
It was slight (a romantic comedy, what we called “chick lit” back then), and I thought it was good. I figured that if I was wrong, I didn’t have that much ego or my financial stability at stake. So I took a chance and was able to find an agent quickly. The novel was published by a Big Five publisher which then published my next.
Big Five
Big Five didn’t mean big money, but it felt like easy money. The novels had poured out of me. And I thought, See, I’m a writer after all, and I never even had to agonize over all those pesky business elements! I reduced my therapy hours because I saw myself now as a hybrid: a writer/therapist. I wasn’t a writer with a day job or a therapist with a night job. I loved them both. It was perfect.
Only it didn’t last. I lost my market (“chick lit” was a genre in its death throes) and I lost my agent.
After writing five novels that failed to spark any agent interest and made me feel uncertain about my own taste and ability, I caught a break. Gone Girl had just been published to huge acclaim, and psychological thrillers were a genre for which I was well-suited. I was back in the game.
I’ve continued to work as a therapist, which takes the financial pressure off writing, but I still want writing to be a career, not a hobby. That means compromises. It means accepting (if not always entirely embracing) the business side.
I’m grateful to be a hybrid.
(c) Ellie Monago
If you would like to reach out to Ellie, she can be contacted at elliemonago@gmail.com.
About The Secret Mistress by Ellie Monago:
Our first mistake was trusting him. Our second was underestimating how far we would both go to hide our own dark secrets…
THE WIFE: Before my husband died, we were the perfect couple. Or so I thought. When a woman claiming to have been his mistress shows up on my doorstep with a child she says is his, I know she must be lying. Who is she and what does she want?
THE MISTRESS: I don’t want to tell his widow the truth about the man she married. But if I don’t get what I need, everything will have to come out. And what I know has the power to destroy her life.
We have both done things we wouldn’t want anyone to ever know about. If anyone found out, it would be the end of us. But if she tells, I tell…
And someone will have to die before this is over…
An utterly addictive thriller that will have you gasping out loud! Perfect for fans of The Perfect Marriage, The Wife Between Us and The Wives.
Order your copy of The Secret Mistress by Ellie Monago online here.
And see further Meet the Authors of Crime Fiction on Writing.ie here.
