Trusting Your Gut with Mary Laura Phillpot (Ep 5)
In this #amwriting podcast Write Big session, Jennie Nash talks with author Mary Laura Philpott about the surprising choice she made after her acclaimed book Bomb Shelter—to stop writing on purpose. Mary Laura shares how, after pouring everything into that project, her gut told her she didn’t need to rush into another, despite the pressure of “what’s next?” from the industry and readers. This conversation reframes writing big not as chasing ambition, but as honoring your gut and giving your whole heart to whatever season you’re in—even if that means not writing at all.TRANSCRIPT BELOW!THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:* Mary Laura Philpott’s website* Bomb Shelter* The New York Times ReviewSPONSORSHIP MESSAGEHey, it’s Jenny Nash, and if you’ve been writing a new book through the month of November and wondering if it’s any good, this might be the perfect time to work with an Author Accelerator certified book coach to get a professional gut check. Eighty-six of our certified coaches are offering a Black Friday special. For just $299, you get a mini blueprint strategy session, which includes a one-on-one call, some feedback on your pages, and the kind of insight and inspiration you need to write forward with confidence. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/black-friday to find the book coach who’s a perfect fit for you.EPISODE TRANSCRIPTJennie NashHi, I’m Jennie Nash, and you’re listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. This is a Write Big Session, where I’m bringing you short episodes about the mindset shifts that help you stop playing small and write like it matters. Today, I’m talking to Mary Laura Philpott about the idea of trusting your gut. This is a critical component to writing big, and I asked Mary Laura to come speak to us because a very interesting thing happened to her after the publication of her second book, Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. This book is so good. It’s a book about being a parent and a daughter and a spouse and a person in the world. And what happened was that she stopped writing—on purpose. Her gut told her, “I’m done now.” And it struck me that if we could understand what makes a successful writer choose not to write; maybe we could understand better what makes us each choose to write big. So welcome, Mary Laura.Mary Laura PhilpottHello, friend. Thanks for having me.Jennie NashAh, I’m so excited to have this conversation. I’ve been wanting to have it for a very long time.Mary Laura PhilpottOh, good.Jennie NashSo thanks for joining us. This is maybe your second, third, fourth time on the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast—you’re a fan favorite. So welcome back. To set this conversation up, I’m going to read a little snippet from The New York Times review of Bomb Shelter, which was written by Judith Warner, and in which she called your book a “master work.” I’m going to read the end of her review, because it really sets up this question that we’re going to be talking about.So she writes: “I want to say something negative about this book. To be this positive is, I fear, to sound like a nitwit. So to nitpick—there’s some unevenness to the quality of the sentences in the final chapter—but there’s no fun in pointing that out. Philpott already knows. I’m telling this story now in present tense. She writes, ‘I’m still in it, not yet able to shape it from the future’s perspective. The story is still being written, and that’s all right. The only problem is having to wait to read what comes next.’”So—you wrote this book, which was your second book…Mary Laura PhilpottSecond book of this type—yes, kind of second, second memoir.Jennie NashSecond book of this type. And you get this beyond rave review in The New York Times by this luminary reviewer, in which she says, “I can’t wait to see what you write next.” And here we sit some years later, in which the answer is—there is nothing next. So can you talk about that? Can you talk about how you—first of all, what that feels like?Mary Laura PhilpottYeah, it’s—I mean, you know this feeling of before a book is even on shelves, people are already asking, “So what’s next? Like, what are you working on?” You know? And then you go on tour, and every question everywhere is, “So what are you working on now?” There’s this relentless, kind of—this churning wheel of productivity behind it all. And so I’m used to that, and I was used to that feeling of, okay, the book is out, people are talking about it, but I need to be working on something next, because that’s always been how it is. But I was tired. That was a really—I love that review so much, and I love the way this book was received—but it was a really emotional book to write, and it was a really emotional book to tour with and go out and talk about for several weeks on end. And so when I came back home, I was like, you know, I get to decide how this little hamster wheel of productivity goes—and I have decided I need a break, and I’m going to focus on, you know—I had, like, one or two years left with my kids at home before they left the nest. I was like, I’m just going to be at home. I’m going to focus inward. I’m just going to be kind of living life on my own terms. And I did that for about a year—and then another year—and now it’s been... let’s see... here we are in 2025... It’s been three years since that book came out. I have not written another book, and I have never been so calm about not being in the middle of writing another book. It just feels like I don’t have something I urgently need to say.Jennie NashYeah.Mary Laura PhilpottAnd I also feel—there’s something rebellious in the beginning about saying, “I’m not going to do it.” But once the rebellion kind of burns off and you realize, actually, I don’t owe anyone anything—like, I’m not under contract for another book. I had the sort of miraculous timing of my editor for Bomb Shelter and for I Miss You When I Blink retiring right after Bomb Shelter came out, so I don’t even have an editor breathing down my neck going, “Come on, what’s your next thing?” So I’ve been experimenting with saying I’m retired. When people ask me, like, “What are you working on?” I say, “I might be retired. I don’t know if I am. It might be temporary. It might be—this might be like Ross and Rachel: are we on a break, or are we broken up? I don’t know.” But I am so calm and happy with the decision not to be getting up every day and sitting at my desk. It’s like a cord has been cut in me—and I don’t feel any guilt about it.Jennie NashSo you said you feel that you don’t have anything to say. When you started these books and your other books and projects, did you feel that?Mary Laura PhilpottAlways! Yes. Like, I—for myself and for other people—like, I need to get this on paper. There’s that therapeutic part of writing: I need to get this on paper and organize it so that I can understand what it is I think. That’s not enough of a reason to go through the misery of publishing a book, but it’s something. And then there’s the other part—where you, or for me, where once I figure out what it is that I’m thinking as I’m putting it on paper, I realize there are other people who may feel this way, and translating it into words is a gift. And it’s something that I want to be able to do for readers, and I want to enter into that two-way conversation with my words and my readers. And it’s not that I don’t have anything interesting to talk about right now—it’s just that I don’t have anything keeping me up at night, begging to be translated and, therefore, you know, urging me to the page. I’ve started and stopped little—not books, but like other little projects here and there—where I’m like, oh, maybe I want to play around with this idea. And then I put them down, and I just feel... it’s honestly the first time in my life I have felt no guilt about not working on the thing that everyone thinks I should be working on. And it’s so weird because other people seem to have really strong feelings about it.Jennie NashI was going to say, what are people’s reactions when you say, “I might be retired”?Mary Laura PhilpottThe other day—okay, so I’m going to tell you about this event I went to the other day. It was a book event for a woman who we all know, who’s pretty well known, and this is her—I don’t know—fourth or fifth or sixth book and it’s very much anticipated by its readers. And she’s exactly my age—she’s 51—and when I went to this event, I ran into a lot of other book people who I know, and of course, the first question everyone asks: “What are you working on?” So I decided to test out my line, and I would say, “I think I might be retired.” The vehemence with which people go, “No, you’re not! Like, shut up!”—I got told “Shut up” so many times. Like, what? Why? Why do people have this strong reaction? But then—and then, you know, I’m such a people pleaser that if enough people say, “Shut up. No, you’re not,” I start to question myself. I’m like, maybe I should try? I don’t know. I don’t want to disappoint everybody. But then we sat down for the discussion part of this event, and someone in the audience asked this fellow writer, “Where do you want to be in ten years? Look ahead ten years and tell us what you see.” And she said, “In ten years, I will be in my early sixties, and I think by then I’d like to hang it up and live life just for me.” And I felt so viscerally and instantly—oh, no, I do not want to wait ten years. I wanted to yell out, “You don’t have to wait till then!” But, you know, to each her own—and she may have ten years more of wanting to be out and about and hustling and doing this.Jennie NashYeah, yeah. So it sounds like you wouldn’t characterize what you’re feeling as burnout. It’s not—it’s not like, “Oh, I burned out, and I’ll get back to it someday.” It feels really as if you arrived at a different place.Mary Laura PhilpottIt feels like—yes, it feels more like closure than like burnout. And that has changed. That feeling has changed over the last two to three years. In the beginning, it did feel like burnout—like, when I came home from that book tour, I was wrung out. I mean, I was thrilled, it was—it was amazing—but I was tired. And I thought—I remember you and I talking about this and saying, “You know what? I’ve just—I left it all on the field. I’m exhausted, and I need to take a year-long nap.” And then, over time, it became more of an “Okay, I’m not burned out. I actually feel fine. I’m just taking a break.” And I’ve talked to—you and I have a good friend in common, Laura Vanderkam, who writes a lot about productivity, and she and I had a conversation once where I was like, “I think what this is, is a break. Just—I’m going to take a pause, and I’ll decide when I’m done pausing. When I’m done pausing.” And that may be what it is. I do tend to live life kind of cyclically, so I might cycle back into “Now I want to do this,” or “Now I’ve written that.” But right now it feels like this really peaceful closure. And even if I do write something again—which, come on, I mean, I probably will at some point—the part that feels closed is the hustle part. The part that—a lot of us don’t actually really enjoy that much—which is not the writing of the book or the, you know, nice conversations with the readers, but the part where it’s like, okay, you’ve got to put together this tour schedule, and you’ve got to answer all these questions for these promotional essays, and—and now you’ve got to—you know, this promotional machine that—“Go get your photo taken again.” I’m so sick of my face...Multiple Speakers[Both laughing]Jennie NashRight?! It’s the performing aspect of being a writer.Mary Laura PhilpottYeah.Jennie NashDid—does any of this have to do with the fact that Bomb Shelter...? I know we talked about it at one point—that you felt, while you were writing it, that this—that it was good. Like, you knew that your vision was matching the execution. And then the world reflected back to you that yes, it is good—you did do that, and at a really high level. Particularly that one. There were a lot of reviews like that, but that sort of was the shining—you know, shining star. Was there a—do you think that the fact that you wrote the book—you know, we’re always trying to write the book that we envision, and we don’t always get there—and it feels like you got there. Does that have to do with this feeling, do you think?Mary Laura PhilpottMaybe—because there—I mean, you’re right, there is almost always a gap between—before we write the thing—this wonderful, amorphous idea in our head where it’s like, “This is just a shining galaxy of thoughts,” and then you get it on paper, and its like, “Oops, I killed it. I flattened it.” And there’s always this gap between the two. And with Bomb Shelter, I really did—it has the smallest possible gap of anything I’ve ever written. And so maybe, you know, maybe that is part of it—that I feel like, what else am I waiting for? Like, what else could I want to do? If you get down to the pure reason of why we do this and what draws you to the page—and also the part of my personality that is, for better or for worse, kind of Type A and achievement-driven—this is... maybe I got to that point where I was like, well, I got the A-plus-plus-plus. What else could I try to get? I don’t think that’s entirely it, because it’s not the whole reason that I write. I don’t think it’s like, “I got the A-plus-plus-plus, now there’s nothing left to say.” When there’s something to say, I’ll say it. But I do—I think you’re right that that’s part of it.Jennie NashAnd the idea of writing for other people—that there’s the writing, and then there’s the connecting with other people, knowing that you’re doing it for other people, then being out there in the world with those people— Is there a world in which you would write something that doesn’t go into the world? Or is that not... I feel like that’s something I would not be able to do at this point in my— But I’m so wired and attuned to writing for consumption.Mary Laura PhilpottYeah.Jennie NashI mean, I write for myself. Of course I write the things I want to write—you know, all those things are true—and, yes, for other people.Mary Laura PhilpottYes. Well—and I tend to be similar to you in that regard. And there’s so much—you know, we talked a couple minutes ago about the difference between the therapeutic reasons why you start writing and then the actual hard, somewhat miserable work of getting it from the therapeutic version to something that is publishable. And that takes such discipline and real care for the art of it—of turning this thing that was helpful for your own brain into a piece of art that is worth someone investing in and putting out there in the world. I think—I do—I mean, in a way, I kind of write all the time, and you are similar to me in this. Like, we email, we—you know, we’re very communicative people, so the writing part of my brain is doing something all the time. And I have started a few little weird projects here and there where I’m like, “Oh, I’ve had an idea for this,” and I’ll, you know, write a few pages and then just kind of set it aside—without feeling like I’ve got to go attack it with that discipline that turns it into something.Jennie NashYeah.Mary Laura PhilpottAnd maybe that’s the part of my brain that’s just tired—that’s like, I’m still tired. And when I am untired, I will go back and pull those things out and play with them some more. I don’t know.Jennie NashYeah, yeah. Well, I love your characterization of that, because I have been talking about this—this newish idea—or I have newish words around this idea of calling it “Write Big”. And people often, I think rightly so, mistake that for big ambition, big goals, big wins, big success, big money—you know, all those things. And it’s not that at all, actually. It’s the doing the thing with your whole heart.Mary Laura PhilpottYes!Jennie NashNo matter what the thing is.Mary Laura PhilpottAnd not holding back.Jennie NashAnd what you’re saying is that the cost of that for you—you’re not going to do something. It’s not that. And the cost of that for you is too high.Mary Laura PhilpottAt the moment it is. At the moment, when I think about—when I look around at the life I’m in—and this is professionally and personally—there’s this interesting confluence, which is, I’m in my... I’ve just finished my first year of empty nesting. So this has been the first year of my life since I, you know, first had a baby, where my days do not in any way revolve around a school schedule, a nap schedule, a feeding schedule, etc. And then I did maybe the dumbest thing ever—and I adopted a puppy, who does have feeding and nap and all this other stuff. And so all my displaced maternal energy has now been funneled into this puppy, whom I absolutely love—but he is a wild and crazy ‘Looney Tune’. And when I look at the way my days look right now—which is the get up, make my coffee, walk the puppy, feed the puppy, you know, teach the puppy how to sit—and I think, do I feel like trading that right now for getting a dog sitter and going into my office and writing for multiple hours? I don’t. I don’t want to trade that right now. I may change—I fully reserve the right to change my mind and be like those, you know, sports players who are like, “I’m retired,” and then the next season, they’re like, “I’m out of retirement.” Maybe I’ll come out of retirement. But right now, what I want to do is feed my puppy, teach my puppy, be available on a moment’s notice. If a kid says, “Hey, I was the understudy for this play, but I got called up to be in a performance this weekend,” I want to be able to jump on a plane and go and not have other commitments. I’m enjoying that. And I do fully recognize—I should give this disclaimer—that this is a very privileged situation I am in. My income from books is not what paid our mortgage. I’m married. I have a spouse with a job that has health insurance, you know, so I’m able to make decisions. And I do feel the financial consequences of these decisions. Like, it’s not a small deal for me to be like, “I’m not going to write another book,” because that would have been important income—but it’s not the only income in our house. So I’m not—if I had still young children coming up, lots of tuitions to pay, mouths to feed—this might not be so easy for me to just be like, “I want to play with my puppy.”Jennie NashRight, right. Well—the idea we started with, of writing big, is trusting your gut. Not writing is trusting your gut. All of this starts and ends with: what do we think, what do we feel, what do we want to say?Mary Laura PhilpottYeah.Jennie NashThose are such hard things to know, and it feels like you’re just really tuned into that right now. And you talked at the very beginning—you said that it feels peaceful. Can you just maybe, to end our conversation, describe that feeling? Because that, I think, is what we all are looking for with our work—whether we’re doing it or not doing it—is peace around it.Mary Laura PhilpottYeah. I think a big part of the peace—and I wish I had found this earlier, when I did still have things to say and I was writing—because I think it could have removed a lot of distraction for me in writing big, the way you say—is tuning out other people’s voices. And if you are the type of person, as I am, who—like, when the Olympics are on TV and I see the person doing the high jump, I’m like, “I bet I could do that if I went and—” like, which obviously I cannot. But I have that part of my brain that’s like, “Should I try to do everything I’m capable of doing? Like, I can’t. I can’t leave anything undone. I should. I should go try to be the best at everything I could ever be the best at.” Because, you know, other people expect me to work hard and produce things. And to be able to tune out that inner voice and other people’s voices—those voices that equate productivity with worth—and, you know, “If people aren’t talking about the new thing you’ve done, then how do you even prove you’re worth the air you breathe?” Disconnecting from those voices is what led to the peace. And I think I was beginning to disconnect from that while I was writing Bomb Shelter. I think that’s why that book worked, in some ways—because I really—I mean, remember, I wrote it during the pandemic. I wrote it when I was stuck at home. I had less contact with the outside world than ever before. We did not know what book publishing was going to look like. We did not know if there would ever be another book tour. So I really did write that book in a bubble of having as little outside input as possible. So I think that’s the—maybe, if there’s any key to peace—it’s tuning out voices that you just don’t need.Jennie NashI love that. I love that so much. And I think we will end our conversation there, because it’s so profound and it’s so good.Mary Laura PhilpottThank you for having me.Jennie NashWell, for our listeners—until next time, stop playing small and write like it matters.NarratorThe Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output—because everyone deserves to be paid for their work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe
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