Talking with Heather Havrilesky

It's fitting that Heather Havrilesky sounds slightly apprehensive when she answers the phone in her California home. After all, her memoir, now out in paperback, is titled "Disaster Preparedness" (Riverhead, $15), and early chapters poke fun at her conviction as a child in the 1970s that something terrible was about to happen at any minute -- a meteor crashing into her house, a tornado, a nuclear attack -- and her distress that her parents not only had no plans for dealing with these hypothetical emergencies but refused to reassure her that everything would be fine, anyway. "I'm bracing myself deep in my soul!" she jokes about her phone manner, but in fact her book and her conversation trace an encouraging trajectory from the anxious kid who wondered why the grown-ups didn't have a plan to the accepting writer, wife and mother who realizes that no one is truly prepared for life's surprises.

It was a relief to read your declaration in the opening pages, "This isn't the story of my parents' failures." So many memoirs are.

I was pregnant with my second child when I wrote the book, and it only takes one day of parenting to start making mistakes and realize how easy that is. There's a point at which you have to move on and say of your parents, "These were other human beings." My aim wasn't to write a shocking exposé, just to paint a portrait of my life in an entertaining way. Also, every year I find myself more accepting of the flaws in other people; when I was younger, I held everyone to such a crazy high standard.

Including yourself?

I expected way too much from myself for years. I had a berating narrative going on in my mind at all times: This voice in my head said, "You woke up too late, you didn't make coffee," etc. I started to notice that every single step of my day was dominated by flogging myself over every little thing.

Did the memoir help you get over that?

Well, I found myself attracted to writing about the most humiliating experiences, and I was certain that people would read them and say, "Oh, how shameful and embarrassing for you that you put this in a book." Instead, people say, "Here's my story," and you realize the experiences you thought were so terrible are actually universal. Mind you, it's easier to expose your teenage and early 20s self; you need some distance to be honest. I think that maybe in 10 years I'll be able to write about what a terrible mother I am!

What are you writing about in the meantime?

Right now, I'm finishing a novel. I haven't really written fiction before, so it's been really interesting. I've always wanted to move in that direction, but it was almost like I had to write the memoir first. Whenever I tried to write fiction, I found myself writing stuff that was directly related to my childhood; I wasn't flying off the cliff and inventing things. I didn't know how to do that until I got my own stories down, and then after the memoir I was able to create out of whole cloth instead of sticking to the facts. It felt really freeing.