A Google alert lands in Andrea Seigel‘s (b. October 28, 1979) inbox one morning in 2008. She keeps the alert running on her own name and defends the habit with a joke about being a Kardashian. The alert carries a paparazzi photo. Britney Spears (b. December 2, 1981) walks out the back of a Malibu restaurant. Photographers ring her on three sides, the way they work a star, so that a face turned from one lens swings toward another. Spears wears a white dress. She carries a pack of cigarettes, a phone pressed to the pack, and a paperback. The paperback is To Feel Stuff, Seigel’s second novel, a book the market has all but ignored. Seigel sees the photo and loses her composure. She starts emailing everyone she knows.
That morning holds the shape of her working life. The front door of literary fame stays shut. Her books reach the world through side entrances, carried by a pop star, a public-radio confession, a detective podcast, a sensation that has no name yet. She writes about people stalled on the edge of adulthood, and her career keeps her on an edge of its own, known to the readers who find her and unknown to the rest.
Seigel is born in Anaheim and grows up a few miles south in Irvine, a master-planned city of cul-de-sacs and ranked schools in Orange County. That suburb becomes the ground of her early fiction, the place her characters want to flee. She graduates from Woodbridge High School, goes east to Brown University, and takes a master of fine arts at Bennington College in Vermont. The training is literary. The appetite is for popular culture. The two never separate in her work.
Her first novel, Like the Red Panda, appears in 2004, when she is twenty-four. The narrator, Stella Parrish, is seventeen, smart, alienated, two weeks from graduation and from a place at Princeton. Her parents died of a drug overdose at her eleventh birthday party. She lives with foster parents she cannot reach and visits a grandfather who plots his own exits from a retirement home. Across two weeks of final exams and senior rituals, Stella plans her suicide and narrates the approach in a cool, watchful voice. The book offers no endorsement. It records a mind talking its way toward a door. Reviewers reach for Holden Caulfield. The Salon critic confesses that he opened the novel hoping to hate one more teenage lament and closed it won over by Stella’s company. Amazon lists the book among its debut novels of the year. Booklist marks it for adult readers and teenagers alike. A studio options the film. No film follows.
To Feel Stuff arrives in 2006. Elodie Harrington lives in the infirmary at Brown, sick in ways the doctors cannot chart, and the novel folds a ghost story, a campus romance, and a medical mystery into one frame. The haunting carries grief and the distance young adults keep from their own lives. The book earns respect and sells almost nothing. Its Amazon rank settles in the three millions. This is the paperback in Britney Spears’s hand.
The Kid Table follows in 2010. Seigel takes the idea from the children seated together at a family wedding, the table set apart from the adults. The novel gathers a cluster of cousins across a single wedding weekend and moves among them as they negotiate family rank, friendship, and first romance. Ivan Reitman (1946-2022) options it for Paramount. No film follows that one either.
In 2015 she writes Everybody Knows Your Name with Brent Bradshaw, a young-adult novel about fame, social media, and the teenage hunt for a self. It is her last novel to date. The work moves toward screens.
The sideways pattern reaches its clearest form in a feeling she carries from childhood. In the fourth grade a friend named Mindy comes to the house and asks to see Seigel’s things. She works through a shell collection one shell at a time and murmurs what she likes about each. A warmth opens at the crown of Seigel’s skull and runs down to the nape. Seigel is seven when she starts hunting the sensation. She sits in the library to hear pages turn. For years she assumes she is a tribe of one.
In March 2013 she carries the feeling onto This American Life, in an hour built around the idea of tribes. She describes the tingle and the loneliness of believing no one else feels it. Then she finds the videos, the strangers online who feel what she feels, the whisperers and the show-and-tell channels. The label for the sensation, autonomous sensory meridian response, sits at the clinical edge of the language, a term coined to sound neutral. Her segment is the first time the phenomenon reaches a mass audience. She later makes the videos herself.
The household scene catches her at her funniest and most exact. She and her husband Brent watch a Twilight film, his pick, and she uses Bella’s turn to vampire, the new ear for every small sound, to explain the tingle to him. He never buys it. He cannot feel it. The gap between them holds the comedy and the loneliness at once.
Her move into film starts on a Los Angeles street. Seigel drives past a sign twirler on a corner, a woman dancing hard and throwing herself into the work, and a song on the radio moves her in the same minute. The two things meet. She begins inventing an inner life for a woman who cannot make herself step forward. She develops the script across two or three years.
The film, Laggies, opens in 2014. Megan, played by Keira Knightley (b. March 26, 1985), is twenty-eight and stuck in a quarter-life crisis. When her boyfriend proposes, she bolts and hides out in the home of a sixteen-year-old, Annika, played by Chlo\u00eb Grace Moretz (b. February 10, 1997), and the girl’s single father, played by Sam Rockwell (b. November 5, 1968). Anne Hathaway (b. November 12, 1981) holds the lead first and leaves for Interstellar. Lynn Shelton (1965-2020) directs, her first feature from a script she did not write.
The title starts a small war. Seigel insists that everyone knows what a laggie is, a word she and her high-school friends used for a person who lags behind. Shelton has never heard it. Shelton runs the word past focus groups and keeps waiting for recognition. The recognition never comes. The word turns out to be Seigel’s invention, common only inside one teenage circle in Irvine. The title stays. British distributors release the film as Say When. Shelton moves the Orange County story to Seattle and shoots at real addresses, the Northgate Nordstrom, an actual police precinct with its own sign on the wall. The reviews land in the mixed-to-warm range. Shelton says the script let a woman be flawed and fumble her way toward herself, the territory studios usually hand to men.
Seigel keeps writing for the screen. She joins the room for Pen15, the comedy that stages middle-school humiliation with adult actors playing thirteen, a register close to the one her novels work. She writes for Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie in 2017 and contributes to The Silent Twins in 2022. She keeps a low profile in literary circles and a steadier presence in film and television.
The Britney photo gets its answer in 2015, on a podcast called Mystery Show. The host, Starlee Kine, takes the case Seigel hands her: how did a book no one read end up in the hands of the most photographed woman alive. Kine calls bookstores. None of the clerks have heard of To Feel Stuff. She meets a bookseller whose parents won the lottery before she meets one who knows the novel, and the odds tell her how far the book has sunk. She studies the photo for clues, the paparazzi triangle, the white dress Spears wore through a pregnancy though she carries no pregnancy in the frame. The answer, when Kine reaches it, is the plainest one. A fan gave Spears the book, and a camera caught her carrying it to a pool. The episode sends a new audience back to a novel the market had filed away.
Set the record end to end and the output looks small. Four novels. One produced film. A writers’ room or two. An accidental turn as the first popular witness to a sensation millions share and few discuss. Measured against her contemporaries, the shelf is short.
The work holds together anyway, around a single subject. Seigel writes the people caught on the inside edge of growing up, the ones who can see the next room and will not walk into it. Her narrators watch more than they move. Her comedy runs cool and her sympathy runs warm, and she declines the redemption a softer writer might grant. Stella plans her exit in good prose. Megan hides in a teenager’s house. Elodie haunts an infirmary she cannot leave.
The career carries the same shape as the books. Seigel writes about the wish to stay on the threshold, and the world keeps meeting her at thresholds, the glancing contact rather than the full embrace. A pop star at a pool. A radio audience learning the name of a feeling they thought private. A detective working the phones to solve the mystery of who read her. The discovery always comes sideways. It comes anyway.
Novelist Andrea Seigel
We did this via email (Andrea returned the answers Sept 23, 2006).
* To what extent do you identify with your protagonists in your two novels?
they're all, at the very least, slivers of me. so if i didn't identify with them, then i'd be someone completely alienated from herself.
* How did your friends and families react to your novels? Particularly the first one?
everybody was congratulatory. they expect this kind of shit from me.
* How long have you had this cynical persona? What things are you naive about?
i've had it internally since, probably fifth grade. externally since, probably, ninth grade. i'm naive about what "being in love" means to other people.
* You signed your email "andreaa." Why the extra "a" at the end?
that's kind of a long, boring story, but it's partly because 1. when typed, i dislike the visual symmetry of my name (starts low, swoops up, returns with an equal and constant lowness on the other side) and 2. because in the days before the internet i used to be a bbs'er, and my handle was "andreaa," so i got really used to signing off that way.
* How do you feel about the work of Brett Easton Ellis?
i think it's genius, and not in the empty way that a lot of people throw around genius. i literally think what he's doing with his endless combinations of various levels of assholes are evidence of an extraordinary intelligence.
* What causes your right eye to twitch? I have the same thing. For me it is lack of sleep.
i have no idea, but it hasn't been twitching since i returned from new york.
* How do you feel about your author photos and how do you choose them?
i'm pretty indifferent toward the first one. i'm living with the second. i chose the first because i had this look on my face like, "what can you possibly want from me?" which i thought was appropriate. when 'panda' came out, this girl in a book club called to tell me that the members of her club had spent a half-hour discussing how bad that author photo was. they thought i looked like an unattractive slob. they wondered why i "hadn't done more with myself." i chose the second because it was one in a set of ten that all looked almost exactly identical, so there wasn't all that much of a choice. i wore a smocked strapless romper-type thing that i liked because it reminded me of my childhood, but my publisher cropped out my clothing. i generally don't like any photos of myself.
* In your blog, you say looking sad is your nature. Is that true? Do you struggle with depression?
yes. this is true. i have a naturally sad face when it's at rest. some people confuse sad with mean. i would say that i struggle with manic-depression, minus the bouts of stealing.
* How did you like Catcher in the Rye?
i liked it fine. it's not one of my favorite books. it was one of the smoother reads on my sophomore year a.p. english syllabus.
* When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
a lawyer.
* What did your parents want most for you and from you?
what they want most for me: stable success from me: a softer nature
* What's the story of you and God and Judaism?
oh my god, this is like writing my torah portion speech. i can't do it again. the short story: i was bat mitzvahed right around the time i became an atheist. when i get on a plane, i talk to something and say, "please, please, please let this be okay." i think that if there's any sort of power capable of hearing those kinds of thoughts coming from all people, then that power doesn't give a shit about who's following what kinds of rules or rituals, since it can obviously see straight into people's psyches and figure out the truth of that person's beliefs within a nanosecond.
* What are the juiciest things your peers say about writing and their careers as writers?
they say nothing juicy. i'm serious. i mean, we often talk shit on specific people, but there's nothing particularly scandalous to be said about writing. it's one of the unsexiest endeavors ever.
* In what ways are your perceptions of life keener than other people's?
i can't answer this question without sounding like an asshole, and while i often sound like an asshole– i'm just not there tonight.
* How has your choice of vocation affected you, relationships?
it has nurtured already overwhelming loner tendencies in my personality. it has, i'm sure, prevented a lot of relationships and damaged some, too. it has been good for my thinking and bad for pretty much everything else in my life.
* How do you know when you've done good work?
a little voice in my head says, "good girl." i'm not kidding.
* What have you sacrificed to be a writer?
the excellent health coverage i was getting at the disney channel.
* What do you do best and worst as a writer?
best: voice. worst: plot.
* Why do you write what you write?
why do you rent the movies you rent?
* Were there any events in childhood that prefigured your adult work?
i think pretty much every single social gathering i encountered past the age where i was allowed to just sit in the corner and drool and talk to my stuffed dog went into making my adult work what it is.
* What do your books say that has not been said before?
again, another question requiring an assholic response that i just don't have the heart for tonight.
* Surely you feel that your view of life that is unique? How so? How do you find your understanding of life differs from everyone else?
i do. but you can't talk about these things. because supposedly everyone is a huge, fucking mess inside. that's what i hear. all i know is that while everyone may secretly be struggling in the room at a party, i'm repeatedly the only one in the room incapable of even attempting a public fake-out.
* How important is it that your reader sympathizes with your characters or likes them?
well if people are capable of simultaneously hating and loving themselves, then i'm fine with them hating my characters, too, since that doesn't preclude the love.
* How has your writing affected your life?
it's both sustained and wrecked it.
* Do you like your protagonists?
they have their moments.
I Love Novelist Andrea Seigel
Here are some excerpts from her blog:
I just got back from my first ever TV interview, and I'm still unsure what this was in reference to, but the first thing Connie Martinson said to me was, "Well, I don't know if you knew this interview was going to be for TV, but if you're fine with that, then I am too." You might be thinking that the "fine" talk was in reference to the taping of the interview, but it was actually directed more, as far as I can tell, at what I was wearing. I think Connie was dissing my threads.
More.
"When are you getting off?" someone suddenly yelled. There was a teenage girl standing directly at my right, bouncing breast and she was staring up at me without any self-consciousness, so I understood right away that she was mentally disabled. "Give me fifteen minutes." She gave me two, and then came back to my boob again. "Are you getting off now?" she asked. "It hasn't been fifteen minutes," I said. "Now?" she asked. I believe that it's condescending to treat people with mental or physical handicaps or ailments any differently than you would were they without these handicaps or ailments. This is why, even though my mom sometimes tries to pull the cancer card with me– "Andrea, I cannot argue with you right now. Not when I'm going through all of this"– I proceed to argue with her anyway, because if I didn't treat her like I always treat her, what would that say about the power of the cancer? (Incidentally, her cancer numbers are dramatically lower and I wanted to put up these cancer numbers to illustrate, but my mom bitched me out on the phone yesterday saying that that information was personal, that I should just let everyone know she's doing well, and I argued, "How can those numbers possibly be personal?") I thought to myself, "This girl seems to be around five-years-old mentally. And would I get openly annoyed with a five-year-old had she been asking me basically the same thing every two minutes?"
