I first met Jodi-Ann Burey at a book launch in Seattle a couple of years ago. A mutual friend introduced the two of us and mentioned that Jodi-Ann was working on a book based on her viral TEDx talk about authenticity in the workplace.
In the midst of the after-reading scrum, as people bumped into us, pulling on their coats and making dinner plans, I asked her, “How’s the writing going?” Jodi-Ann looked back at me with eyes full of a very specific quality that I immediately recognized. Many writers deep in a book go around looking a little desperate, but it’s possible that writers of hybrid nonfiction have our own facial expression. It’s the look of a person trying to mash up a whole bunch of ingredients, hoping it’ll all go together: personal history, cultural criticism, deep thinking, reportage. I saw that look, or something like it, in Jodi-Ann’s eyes. She looked the way I had felt when I was writing my own hybrid work, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. I suggested we meet for coffee.
It’s quite a thing to get to ride along with someone who is writing a great book.
And so our friendship was born, and grew from there over weeks and then months of talking about authorial voice, the politics of publishing, the crushing despair of our historical moment, and how long should a chapter be, anyway? We always always returned to the thorny problem of structure, which troubled our talks with its insistent demands. Jodi-Ann’s ridiculously adorable dog Bilsky sat at her feet, looking at us like he couldn’t believe the amount of time we were wasting on this nonsense.
I found that my new friend read the world—and wrote it—with an unflappable combination of realism and love. It’s quite a thing to get to ride along with someone who is writing a great book. And that’s what I got to do with Jodi-Ann over these last two years, through all our lunches and coffees and walks. I had a backstage pass to witness the strength and flexibility and force and humor and, again, always, love that went into Authentic. We continue our conversation here.
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Claire Dederer: Tell me about the TED talk that seeds the book. Why do you think audiences connected with it so much?
Jodi-Ann Burey: Much of my work pushes back against existing narratives we use so often we no longer interrogate its actual meaning. It started when I was diagnosed with a spinal cord tumor in 2018. Anyone who’s been through any major health crisis faces a constant barrage of platitudes: “one day at a time,” “you can beat this,” or “you’re a warrior.” Do you know how long a day is when you’re in constant pain?
CD: So you realized the word “day” had completely different meanings for different people. That brought this emotional urgency to the way you’re interrogating how we use language.
Taking back language is about a power struggle.
JAB: Yes! It’s the dissonance between language and experience. Part of me has to lie—part of me has to die—to satisfy someone else’s need for their language to fit. That requires me to disagree with myself, and I was not willing to do that anymore.
I returned to work after my disability leave, quit my job, and started working at a women’s focused startup. This was the #girlboss era. I was fascinated by how “bring your full authentic self,” “come just as you are” and other identity-based narratives were treated like they were enough to end racism, sexism and other forms of occupational violence. All I saw was bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. It was my best “idea worth sharing” by the time I applied for TEDxSeattle.
CD: The unpacking of language itself is core to non-fiction writing and unpacking the way language is used to dominate is an important part of political thinking. Your genesis story has both these elements that are so important in Authentic.
JAB: Taking back language is about a power struggle. If I cannot control the situation, if I cannot control what’s happening to me, in hospital, at work, and in this country, I for damn sure can control the language I use to describe my own experiences. When I talk to someone about “bringing your full authentic self to work,” they roll their eyes. There’s physical language, but not verbal. I wanted to translate that eyeroll to the page.
CD: When I was working on Love and Trouble, I remember looking into people’s eyes when trying to describe it. They would get this gaze and that was my exact thought!
Tell me about the process of moving from TED Talk to making the decision to writing the book.
JAB: I thought TED was the end of this authenticity chapter in my professional life. Little did I know, it was just the beginning. The talk connected me with so many people who wanted to share their stories. The more they talked, the more I talked, and then realized there was more to explore. Keeping that “you” allowed me to bring their voices into Authentic.
The biggest problem I had to solve in the book was already solved in the talk, which was to determine who was the “you.” I remember watching other speakers who represented me because we shared identities or experiences, but they were not talking to me. I was not their “you.” I could tell because they didn’t indicate any assumed knowledge shared within our community. In my work, other people of color, disabled people, and other marginalized folks, we are the “you.” Through collective narration, our voices together showed what we know together.
CD: This is something our books share: “thinking” is the protagonist. Tell me about what it felt like taking up that much space with your own thought, and second, does showing your thinking bring up a fear that it’s making the work appear weaker?
JAB: There is a teacher’s pet that lives inside of me that will never leave, and I hope it never does, although a big part of that energy is, “Hey! Look at me! I’m a smart person! These are the correct answers to your question.” What’s different in writing a book is that I asked the question. And I do not lie to myself. I must then be genuinely interested in finding an answer. A TED talk is a product, but a book can show the process of figuring an argument out.
Plus, I am a New Yorker. My selfhood was partly shaped by being engaged and challenged with everything all the time, all at once. Taking up space with process and thoughts, showing my work, that’s an experience I recognize. It’s part of who I am. That sensibility informs my instincts, my style, my voice. I called on everything I had to write Authentic—my work history, conversations with my friends, family and colleagues, pop culture, poetry, art exhibitions, so so much—to answer my questions.
CD: I learned the importance of “answering your own question” while working on Monsters. The process requires finding a big enough question that can sustain the book. What was the question you knew could handle a book’s worth of thinking?
Risk is part of the art.
JAB: I am always thinking about what it means to be a person. Always. Authentic explores what it meant to be a person at work. Maybe that’s because becoming disabled and adopting disability as an identity changed how I saw myself? I had to ask, what does it mean to be disabled? in my body? at home? at work? I love being disabled. I love that identity, that community. I love how disability changed how I think. Becoming disabled as an adult changed my relationship with myself, but also my relationship to institutions. I hope readers see the nuances between naming yourself, the institutions, and the self within the institution.
To your earlier question about whether I was worried that thinking on the page might make the writing feel weak. I’ve learned not to concern myself with what Melissa Febos described as the “bad faith reader.” I am my primary audience. I need these words. I need me figuring this out. The result of writing makes you a different person. Perhaps witnessing that transformation strengthens its usefulness to others.
CD: Too often critics, especially white critics, talk about personal writing as being transcendent or universal. I really love this reset!
JAB: Transcendence is not my job. Once my work is out there, it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s for the viewers, listeners and readers to bring who they are to the work. Sometimes that connection is in alignment with my intentions, sometimes it’s antagonistic. Regardless, it has nothing to do with me.
Last week, I met a street artist in Mexico City who showed me murals that had been destroyed and painted over. He said, “I’m a street artist. The art belongs to the streets.” Risk is part of the art. I do hope Authentic finds readers who are also unsure, also still thinking. The job of the good faith reader is to think alongside each page.
CD: My book grew out of an essay. Your book grew out of a TED talk. My initial questions with Monsters were structural: Should the book have the same structure as the essay, but supersized? Would the book have the same hairpin turn? Was the essay just a chapter in the book? Can you talk about the dynamic between the structure of the TED Talk and the structure of Authentic?
JAB: I had those same questions! I started by getting at what made the talk sticky. I called my friends and said, “Don’t rewatch it. Just tell me what you remember.” I wanted to see whether what mattered to them still aligned with who I was and what energy I had to expand into book form.
My writing became more iterative once I decided not to follow the talk structure. Details from the talk sparked more associative writing. I quickly mentioned being an immigrant. Okay then, how does my immigrant identity show up on the page? Now I’m writing about migration, the American Dream, I’m interviewing my parents and including their voices in big and small ways. Like in my discussion about “invisible disability,” for example, my mother always says, “am I not somebody?” I took that question and found a new line of thinking. Why call my own identity invisible? Is it not visible to me? Am I not somebody? That one question helped complicate ideas about institutional visibility and legibility. Being more associative gave me permission to take Authentic out of the office. In book form, I can bring the reader through scenes not set in the workplace.
Good speech writing, I think, requires special attention to its rhythm and rhymes, pacing, repetition, and melodies.
CD: Was there any sense that something was lost in turning the talk into the book?
JAB: Authentic was originally six very long chapters. I got too caught up in thinking long form meant long chapters—which was insane.
CD: I know the exact moment that happened! You were navigating something every nonfiction writer goes through where the shit wouldn’t fit in the thing.
JAB: Exactly! I ended up transforming six chapters into six sections to contain what became twenty-two chapters. Honestly, if I knew I was going to write that many chapters, I’d be like, “You weak bitch!” I don’t know why I thought long chapters made me a serious capital W writer. Authentic is better for it. It needed shorter chapters to bring back that initial urgency I’d been missing.
CD: What qualities that make speech-writing effective were you able to mine for the page?
JAB: I was raised around skilled orators in my family and at church. Perhaps that’s why I am obsessed with how sentences sound? Good speech writing, I think, requires special attention to its rhythm and rhymes, pacing, repetition, and melodies. These elements help hold listening attention. Every minute or two, the audience needs something to latch onto, something they can repeat long after I’ve left the stage. That creates momentum, a sense of speed. It creates emotionality. You want people to feel something. You work the sentences and its delivery so readers feel what you’re saying.
I did my best to mirror those qualities in Authentic by reading aloud everything I wrote throughout the entire drafting process. I also have a strategy I call heat-mapping where I read with the eyes of a reader, highlighting sentences, sounds and ideas I liked. I wanted every paragraph to have a little heat.
CD: One of the ways emotion shows up in prose writing is through scene. Did writing scenes take you to a different place?
JAB: The very first scene I wrote was my diagnosis conversation with my doctor. I wrote that scene exactly the way it happened externally and internally. I turned my frustration in not remembering every single detail into an emotional truth about how our minds run away from traumatic information. Not remembering was part of that experience. That pushed me to find artful truths about the scenes I rendered throughout the book. As a writer, it’s my job to do the best I can to accurately represent my own truth from all the ways I see it.
CD: I think every writer of non-fiction needs a phrase like that to turn to. It creates a rubric as you do this sort of inherently problematic moral act of representing someone else’s experience.
JAB: Whether I am writing or reading personal stories, I’m always looking for two narrators. The person writing the scene and the person inside the scene’s action. I secretly recorded my mother to “interview” her for the book. I wrote the chapter, reread it, and was like, “It’s good, but where’s the second narrator?” I went back to the recording and realized I over-edited one of her quotations. I wrote, “They treated you like you were a secondhand person.” She actually said, “treating you like you were a secondhand stu– (starting to say student), and then said “secondhand person.” It was really interesting to figure out why she corrected a word that was not incorrect. It gave me the chance to show the writer as another narrator and interrogate the difference between student and person out loud with the reader.
Honestly, when you write about injustice, it is very difficult–emotionally and morally—to want your book to remain relevant.
CD: Writing a book takes a long time, too long. And history keeps happening. For a writer of a book that’s politically informed and deals with culture and history, this creates a big problem. You don’t want to be overly responsive to the moment. And if you are, if you respond to what’s happening around you, then you risk your book being out-of-date in a few years. How do you manage the changing zeitgeist?
In my case writing Monsters, the changing zeitgeist forced internal changes that then altered the meaning of the book. There was a lot of revision that had to happen as I experienced political and ethical development inside myself. How do you adapt to the moment, but produce a work that will have this longer term meaning?
JAB: Honestly, when you write about injustice, it is very difficult—emotionally and morally—to want your book to remain relevant.
It took longer to write Authentic than expected. I did not plan this, but the prologue and epilogue both lead up to the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, respectively. Authentic argues that institutions cyclically trade on marginalized identities when it is convenient and profitable. These two particular elections just happened to correlate with a “racial reckoning” to where we are now, which is a complete dismantling and disregard for basic civil rights. Unfortunately, the central argument of the book —conceived long before the 2024 election–did not change with this new administration. The revision process was still not fun for my team. I revised Authentic up to the last possible minute. I just needed the reader to know I knew how gleefully institutions across sectors disbanded diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
CD: It builds trust, letting the reader know that you know.
JAB: Truth is, what’s happening now connects to what has already happened ten, fifty, a hundred years ago. Good criticism, I think, identifies patterns. In Authentic, I often use the word “echo.” If what happened to me happened to you, that’s an echo. What happened to us at this company is happening at another company in another sector. That’s another echo. The occupational violence we’ve already experienced in our early careers is still happening. Look at the headlines. There’s another echo. Paying attention just enough to show these echoes guide the reader’s pattern recognition. In turn, readers bring their echoes. I don’t need to report everything because I’m reflecting what we know together.
CD: How has this experience informed you as a writer?
JAB: When you do something you’ve never done before, all you have are doubts and dreams. Writing Authentic taught me to just trust my process, trust my intuition. Even as I missed early submission deadlines, I see now how that time made Authentic a better book. I’m becoming a better person by learning to be present in whatever time it takes.
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Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work by Jodi-Ann Burey is available from Flatiron, an imprint of Macmillan.