Jennie Nash is celebrating 100,000 copies of her memoir, The Victoria Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming, in print now, and far more importantly, nine years of being cancer-free! Publisher’s Weekly called her first novel, The Last Beach Bungalow, a “winning debut.” And her second, The Only True Genius in the Family, will be published in February. If you’re reluctant to dig deeply into your own emotions in your writing, Jennie’s guest blog here will change your mind. Do post a comment, too, to be included in the giveaway drawing for a signed copy of The Last Beach Bungalow! – Meg

I knew I was going to write about cancer within twenty-four hours of being diagnosed. It was when a writer friend of mine called and said, “You are taking notes, aren’t you?” I was, at first, horrified, because any notes I was taking were going to be about what kind of cancer I had, what kind of treatment was proposed, what sort of odds I had for living and dying. But writers are trained to see stories, and I realized that along with all the technical, medical talk, I was, in fact, seeing a story in what was happening to me – and I began to take notes.

The story, which eventually became the memoir The Victoria Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned from Breast Cancer, , was shaped from the start by the fact that I had no business knowing I had cancer. I was 35 years old. There was no history of cancer in my family. There were no lumps, no rashes, no signs of anything wrong. I went to the doctor because a friend of mine from high school was dying from lung cancer, which she found when she went to the doctor with a cough that wouldn’t go away. It was so illogical, so awful, so out-of-the-blue, and it scared me. I thought that I must be dying, too. When, after a series of tests, I learned that I had breast cancer, I was overcome with gratitude – and guilt and confusion – because unlike my friends’ cancer, mine was treatable. I wrote my story in order to give thanks for my good luck, and to honor my friends’ death.

It’s hard to hide when you’re writing about life and death, and breasts and bodies, and husbands and wives, and sex and scars. My writing was very raw – but here’s the incredibly strange thing: I didn’t feel exposed. Or maybe the truth is that by exposing myself, I felt more human. I was like someone who takes her clothes off, and runs around, and realizes how weird it is that everyone else is still wearing clothes. How weird shoes are! How weird shirts! Later, when readers responded to my book by saying that it felt so real and so human, that was a perfect validation of what I felt when I was writing it. I felt more real than I ever had – meaning, stripped of all artifice; and more human, too – meaning, strong and alive, and fragile and mortal, all at the same time.

Selling a book like that was gravy. I landed an agent on the basis of a proposal and two chapters, which were expanded from an essay I wrote in The Los Angeles Times for the Revlon Run/Walk Special Issue. The agent warned me that the market was very saturated, but she was willing to give it a whirl. Within six weeks, we’d sold it to an editor at Scribner whose sister had recently been diagnosed.

After writing about cancer, and surviving it, and losing friends to it, I was definitely done with the disease. I thought I would never write about cancer again, and I was desperate to prove it. I wrote a book called Raising a Reader, which was about my obsession with teaching my kids to read. The same editor who bought Victoria’s Secret bought that book, too, although she had moved to St. Martin’s Press. Raising a Reader didn’t connect very well with readers. It was ill-conceived, and poorly packaged, and worst of all, it wasn’t anywhere near as real or as raw. It didn’t let readers in.

Not long after Raising a Reader, I began to think about writing fiction. I was captivated by a story of a woman who falls in love with a house, and with the story of a woman who sells a house to the bidder with the best reason for moving in. I toyed around with these themes for three years, writing a draft from the point of view of the seller, and a draft from the point of view of all the other people bidding on the house. I was circling around something, but I didn’t know what it was. Finally, a friend sat me down and said, “Tell me why you were interested in this story in the first place.” I told her the story of a man I had met who had bid on a house that a large number of people wanted, and how he explained that he would have done anything to get the house because his wife, who had cancer, wanted a place where she could live and a place where she could die. She wanted to fall in love with a house, and it was that idea that I loved. My friend looked at me and said, “But there’s no cancer in your novel.”

“I’m not writing about cancer again,” I said, but of course, I did. I let cancer creep into my story, and let it creep back into my life as a thing I wasn’t afraid to explore. I thought I was finished with cancer as a topic, but I found that there was so much more to say. The end result was a novel called The Last Beach Bungalow, which came out in February 2008. My existing agent didn’t represent commercial fiction, so I had to find a new agent, from scratch. I used agentquery.com to make a short list, and I began to make queries. One woman wrote back quickly, and I liked her easy style. I signed with her, and she sent out the manuscript, and an editor who feels like my soul-mate offered us a two-book deal. I’m currently working on my third novel with this same editor, and my writing career has a whole new and fantastic shape to it.

I believe that we don’t really get to choose the stories that we write. They chose us. They come to us at times that are inconvenient, and sometimes they come against our will. But if you’re listening – if you’re open and willing to receive them – the stories you’re supposed to write will come your way. – Jennie

Meg’s postscript: Alas, even wonderful authors like Jennie have their names misspelled sometimes. But the cover of The Only True Genius in the Family will read “Jennie” rather than “Jenny” when it is released.