Interview with Christine Sneed, Author of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos
Christine Sneed is the author most recently of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Paris, He Said. She is also the editor of the short fiction anthology Love in the Time of Time’s Up, and her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New York Times, O Magazine, and other publications.
She's received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena, CA and teaches for Northwestern University’s and Regis University’s graduate creative writing programs.
Christine Sneed’s novel, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos, was released in October 2022 from 7.13 Books. She sat down to answer questions on humor, her writing process, and office memos.
Jacquelyn Scott: Congratulations on your recent release, Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos! What inspired this book?
Christine Sneed: I’m not sure what the specific inspiration or inciting incident for this novel was, but I do remember feeling very tired after having completed a more traditionally structured novel not long before I started writing the memos that became Please Be Advised. This other novel was also written in a comic vein, and I wanted to keep writing humor if I could manage it, but I also needed to slow down a little, and the flash fiction form seemed like it would be both fun and manageable, considering the fact my energy levels were pretty sapped.
Scott: Why did you choose the memo format, and how does it add to the overall reading experience?
Sneed: I’ll sound like a parrot here, but it can’t be helped: I don’t remember specifically why I chose to write memos, but I’d taught business writing courses for a few different universities for about a decade and a half, starting when I was a graduate student, and I’d always liked the compactness of the form. Add to this the reality of business correspondence sometimes being dishonest or euphemistic — e.g. “problems” are “opportunities,” “unwanted employees” are “redundancies” — this all culminated in my realizing an entire book in memos could be a riff on the dishonesty and absurdity that often define the world of work and business-speak.
Scott: The world you've created is so humorous and fun. What aspects of the corporate world did you want to draw out and what did you want to change?
Sneed: Candidly, I didn’t have an agenda — I mainly wrote to amuse myself and to reflect in a hyperbolic way some of the personalities and purposeless protocols (at least as I saw them) that inform office work in general — whether it is corporate, academic or non-profit (I’ve had office jobs in each category, beginning in high school when I worked for a student loan collection agency.) I was writing in part to underscore the sadness of having to spend one’s life doing work one doesn’t always care much about, with people who in fact become stand-ins for one’s family and friends.
Just as with our families, we can’t really choose our coworkers (unless, perhaps, we own the company). And so being in a family is in a sense a dress rehearsal for work — you learn to deal with dysfunction and also figure out how to work alongside people you can’t stand in order to be able to pay your bills. Just as when we were kids, most of us figured out how to exist within a family system in order to have somewhere to sleep and food on our plates.
Scott: What's the best office memo you've ever received or heard about?
Sneed: Maybe not the best, but certainly the most memorable — when I was teaching business writing courses, as a case study in how not to communicate with your employees, I used an actual corporate memo/email, written about 15 or so years ago, by a CEO of a company that I think was based in Kansas, that had been leaked by an underling. The CEO essentially was exhorting his managers to work 16-hour days, and for them to flog their staff to work longer days too — in order to, what else, increase profits. The CEO also wrote more than once that his memo was confidential, apparently not realizing that if he wanted his employee flogging to remain confidential, it might have been a good idea not to send this message via email.
Scott: How has your writing or writing process changed since your first release, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry?
Sneed: I’m managing three or four part-time teaching jobs at any given time, more than I was when I was writing the stories in Portraits. As a result, I don’t write as often as I used to. In the last five years, I’ve also learned to write screenplays and pilots, which has taken a lot of my fiction-writing time and energy, but I’ve really enjoyed learning this new craft. Lately, however, I’ve slowed down — I’ve been promoting Please Be Advised and the short fiction anthology, Love in the Time of Time’s Up, which I published this past October and has taken much time and energy, too.
Scott: If you were to invent a collapsible office product, what would it be and why?
Sneed: Ha! If only I could think of one — maybe a water bottle (wait, those have already been invented — those floppy, pouch-like vessels that can be kept in the freezer).
Scott: What advice would you give to someone who is trying to incorporate humor into their work?
Sneed: Well, for one, humor can’t be forced. You have to have a knack for it — i.e. you have to like to laugh and have an ear for jokes and funny people’s way of talking about their lives, and you have to find some aspects of the world, despite its inherent tragedy and injustice, funny (as Oscar Wilde once said, “Life is too important to be taken seriously.”) You also have to be open to the strangeness of everyday life in a way that’s different from the observational skills that underscore more dramatic writing.
It helps to be able to laugh at yourself, too. A lot of comedians make fun of themselves, and they are able to see the humor in their own behavior and in general, I think they each have an off-kilter way of viewing the world and its inhabitants — both human and non-human. Take the banana peel dangling over the lip of the garbage can at the gas station. See how limp and homely it looks…but remember, at one time, before the fruit was pulled out of it, it was a tumescent, silky-skinned… (I’ll leave you with that — dirty minds are useful comic tools too).
Scott: What form would you like to try in your writing next?
Sneed: I’m working on a story that’s told partially in letters and diary entries. It’s based in part on a couple of family members’ experiences, and I’m a bit wary of trying to publish it, even though the person one of the two main characters is based on knows I’m writing it and has been helping me with some of the factual details in the story. Ninety-six percent of the time I am writing true fiction, so this feels risky to me in ways other fiction-writing I’ve done hasn’t.
Scott: What are you currently reading or working on?
Sneed: I’m reading Jim Harrison’s novel Farmer, and Elizabeth Crane’s memoir, This Story Will Change.
I’m trying to finish a novel set in present-day Chicago, mostly, with a little time in New York City too, that has two female POV characters. (This isn’t the same manuscript mentioned above – probably one reason why I haven’t finished it — I keep fracturing my focus.)
Scott: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received?
Sneed: You have to take the long view — you can’t expect to be a good writer overnight. It takes most of us years of writing and reading, literally, to write a book that’s worth anyone’s time and money.
From 7.13 Books:
Please Be Advised:
A Novel in Memos by Christine Sneed
Please Be Advised is award-winning author Christine Sneed's bright, irreverent send-up of corporate America in the 21st century.
Mixing cultural critique and formal inventiveness with wicked laughs and the sort of surrealistic mysteries only a novel about the corporate world could give us, Please Be Advised tracks the decline, fall, and possible resurrection of Quest Industries, one of the world's foremost purveyors of collapsible, portable, and (occasionally) dangerous office machines.
Featuring a rogue's gallery of corporate cogs from drunk, womanizing, and often-delusional CEO Bryan Stokerly, Esq. to his executive secretary, the brainy, libidinous Hannah Louise Schmidt and his soon-to-be-rival, new office manager and disgraced former coroner, Dr. Ken Crickshaw, Jr., Please Be Advised will leave you laughing at a work world more like our own than most of us would care to admit.
Get your copy from 7.13 Books.
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