Writing Books With My Husband

Writing with a partner is always challenging - sometimes it can be invigorating and productive, but more often it's frustrating and full of friction. Either way, you, the writer, are no longer your own boss; you must answer to and often spend exhausting hours negotiating with your partner.

When this writing partner happens to be your husband of over twenty years, a whole new set of challenges, and benefits, apply. The benefits include knowing each other intimately, so that while writing together you can speak in a shorthand not usually available with other writing partners. Also, in my case, I might say "Are you kidding? That's horrible! Lose it now!" without fear that my partner will be cut to the core and sulk for the rest of the day. He may disagree, but he respects my professional opinion enough that he usually cuts the offending line, dialogue or paragraph almost immediately.

I, on the other hand, know that Gary is the psychiatrist and medical expert without whom the book would not exist, so I give him wide ground to write a first draft in his doctorly fashion, no matter how hard it is to make sense of. It's my job to then turn his medical jargon into language we all can understand and make the stories flow in a way that readers will not only want to read them, but crave more.

My husband is more than just a practicing psychiatrist. He's in charge of a large research center at UCLA as well as Director of the UCLA Center on Aging and their Memory Research Center. He lectures across the nation and around the world and appears on television as a memory and Alzheimer's expert dozens of times a year.

At work in his day job he is used to being in charge, but that doesn't fly so well at home - like when we're writing. He seldom does this, but sometimes he forgets who he's talking to and barks out orders to me as if to an employee. That doesn't work out very well for him. In fact, it can turn a Saturday of writing into a Saturday of fighting pretty fast. But since it seldom happens, I'd have to say we have more laughs and smoother writing sessions than any other partner I've ever worked with. And I'm counting my sit-com and feature days from long ago.

I love my husband and with our sixth book already in the works, he's become a better writer. He says I've become a better scientist but I'm not so sure of that. Our new book out Oct. 1, The Naked Lady Who Stood On Her Head; A Psychiatrist's Stories of his Most Bizarre Cases, is Gary's most personal book to date, and it was the most fun for us to write. I think this partnership just might have a future.