Lauren Slater is a psychologist and the author of Prozac Diaries, Opening Skinner’s Box, Welcome to My Country, and Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. Her work was included in The Best American Essays of 1994 and 1997, and she was the winner of the 1993 New Letters Literary Award in creative non-fiction and of the 1994 Missouri Review Award. She has written articles and contributed pieces to numerous magazines, including The New York Times, Harper's, Elle and Nerve. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Why did you decide to write a book of fairy tales after working for so long in the world of non-fiction?

I actually started writing with fiction when I started writing in my 20’s and I wrote fiction throughout my 20’s. I discovered non-fiction in my late 20’s and early 30’s. I never tried to publish any of [the fiction]. Then I had kids and I thought I’d try to write children’s stories and that was kind of the first idea of Blue Beyond Blue, but it didn’t really work out that way.

Did your experience writing non-fiction help in this new endeavor at all? Are the disciplines of non-fiction and fiction at all the same?

It really is very similar. It’s the same in term of whole routine and rituals around the act of writing whether it’s non-fiction or fiction. Non-fiction comes from real events and reports on real events, but real events rarely arrange themselves into story—you have to find the narrative and find the structure. That’s what’s challenging about writing: “what is the story here?” That is the same question—and the same kind of inquiry—that goes on for me [whether writing fiction or non-fiction].

You write in your introduction that fairy tales can be a way to express and understand your innermost feelings and conflicts. Given that, is this book more or less intimate than your past books?

Intimate from whose perspective? For someone reading the book, it depends. For people who want to know the real deal, fiction is not going to give the real events of my life. In terms of the degree to which a memoir versus a short story is revelatory, I think both can be revelatory. This book of fiction expresses core conflicts and concerns of my own, and reading it will gain a window into what I’m thinking. But is that different than the window one gains in reading a memoir? In the literal sense, yes, but in an emotional and psychological sense, no.

What are trying to accomplish in writing this book?

I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything through the book. The plan wasn’t to put the stories in a book and publish them. My goal was the same as it is in my other writing in that I wanted to create a world through words that was palpable and tangible and could stand on its own. I always want to do that whether I’m writing true tales or fairy tales. The important thing for me is to make it so the words really create for the reader a sense of a whole world a reader could go into.

Do some of the tales in the book achieve this better than others? Do you have a favorite?

It’s hard for me to see my own work unless years and years have gone by. I really can’t assess it. I think the ones that were the most powerful for me when I was writing them were maybe “Blue Beyond Blue” (I think that finding Snow White’s stepmother’s voice was really exciting to me and I was quite taken with that), “A Daughter’s Tale”, “A Mermaid.” But it’s hard to say. One I’ve written them, they’re no longer of interest to me.

Besides “Snow White,” what other fairy tales inspired you?

“Snow White” didn’t really inspire me. The fairy tales of Oscar Wilde—I love his fairy tales—and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson [did]. There’s something about the purity with which he writes his tales, the way he can make inanimate objects take on whole personalities—a comb, or whatever. He can write a whole fairy tale about a comb and a brush having a conversation and that’s really quite wonderful for me. With Oscar Wilde it’s the beautiful structure of his tales combined with almost over-the-top language. I am less taken with Brothers Grimm fairy tales. There’s such a huge amount of them it’s hard to make a comment on them as a whole. How important is language in your own writing?

Important. I think it’s too important. I was looking back last night—and I don’t know what prompted me to do this—but looking back at Prozac Diaries it’s just so overwritten. I struggle with it. I love beautiful language and have facility for it but it’s my greatest weakness and it’s really easy to hide behind. Learning to say things in straightforward, flat-footed way, for me is the great challenge as a writer. I love ornate language and rococo language and curlicues and drips and flips but figuring out how to make that language reveals as opposed to conceal—I constantly struggle with that. Also because I can’t [bear to] see my work, I don’t know until eight years later that it seems so overwritten. I’m still bummed out when I look at Lying, and I hope don’t feel like that all the time. Lying, after Prozac Diaries, is a huge liability for me and probably always will be.

Why do you argue that people should face their problems and issues, if you will, by writing their own fairy tales?

I think that writing your own fairy tales allows you to figure out what the core plot is for you, the core plot giving you problems, and you can practice different versions of different outcomes. Writing is ennobling to the patients I’ve worked with, who have been socio-economically stressed women in the inner city who no one ever listened to. I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t wanted to be able to write their story. Maybe in the middle class people don’t necessarily feel that way, but when these people can write and feel like the author of their own work and their own world it makes a huge difference to them. One of my patients wrote something and got it published in Elle magazine. So great, it didn’t cure her problems, but it made her feel really successful and visible whereas she had been invisible as a poor woman in the inner city. People deserve that, to be part of the larger cultural picture, and they’re not part of that due to their economic circumstances.

How many of the tales in this book are based on your own life experiences? Is there any value in writing such stories if they are not about oneself?

None of the dairy tales are literally my experience—I’ve never grown wings or put my husband in a bottle (though I’ve wished that I could). I think there is a value in writing, because whether it’s about yourself or an extraterrestrial, it will be about you. It’s impossible not to be, and you learn something about yourself in the process.

The majority of your stories are about women and their relationships with others, be it husbands, mothers, or daughters. Do you see the fairy tale as a predominately female form? Why are men so rarely the central figures of fairy tales?

I think that traditionally fairy tales have not been a female form. Women didn’t have access to language and since fairy tales are some of the oldest forms of storytelling we have, they have traditionally been men’s. But women have since come along and re-appropriated these tales, such as Margaret Atwood and Sarah Maitland, which is something women have wanted to do. They take these tales that are in fact male-centered tales—stories about men and what men think about women—and women come along and say wait a minute! These and cultural icons for us and they make it so these tales represent us. That said, I had none of that [intention] when writing the book. I just loved the tales. But I’m a woman so they came out like that.

What’s next for you?

Well, I was thinking last night as I looked at Prozac Diaries and looked at Lying, thinking about the book I’d like to do next. I think I’m under contract for one more non-fiction book, and I want to write one anyway. Don’t know how really interesting it is but it’s interesting to me to write a book on the core central idea of the credible scientist and their incredible ideas. I’m fascinated by scientists, psychologists, people in hard science who are credible, who have been trained in rigorous ways, but who break rank. One example is Elizabeth Kubler Ross, a conservatively trained psychologist who constructed a developmental scheme for moving through the phases of dying. She was quite mainstream and conventional but at the end of her life she gave up and became very convinced there is an afterlife. I’m also interested in a person at Harvard, John Mack, who really believed that people’s alien abduction stories were real. He was a psychiatrist and after really listening to these people, he began to think “this is true” and put his whole career on the line. You just don’t say that if you’re a Harvard professor. There are a handful of people who have really begun to endorse and believe incredible ideas and they’re not nuts.