Edan Lepucki: A Perspective on Writing, Motherhood, and Teaching at Caltech

Leo Jenkins

Edan Lepucki is the rare member of the Caltech community who is better known off-campus than on. Off-campus, she is a New York Times bestselling author who has published five books and counting. On-campus, she teaches Fiction Writing to a small group of passionate but frequently inexperienced students. This raises the question – why did a successful fiction author decide to teach at Caltech? By interviewing Lepucki and her closest friends and colleagues, I learned that her passion for fiction writing extends well beyond her own work and that teaching at Caltech is just the latest way that she has found to interact with people who have a passion for creative writing.

Sitting outside of Red Door waiting for her arrival, I thought back to my first impression of Lepucki during our fiction writing class this past fall. I remember she gave off “mom’s fun friend” vibes with her outgoing personality and occasionally dated pop culture references (Later, during the interview, I told her about my characterization. She laughed and said she used to just be the fun friend).

Lepucki arrived wearing a white and pink blouse, blue jeans, and gold earrings. She has short blond hair, freckles, and gleaming blue eyes. She is physically emotive when she talks, gesturing with her hands if she is excited about the subject.

Born in Santa Monica, California, Lepucki always wanted to be a novelist – or, if that didn’t work out, a pop star. While majoring in English and Creative Writing at Oberlin, she spent her time in the library studying, working, and hanging out with her friends, who also aspired to be writers. “We enjoyed producing work and sharing it with people,” said Doug Diesenhaus, who has known her since college. Even then, he remembers Lepucki being “imaginative about stories and characters” and having a deep understanding of “what is going on in a character’s emotional experience.”

After graduating from Oberlin in 2002, Lepucki went on to receive a MFA in Fiction in 2006 from the renowned University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, known for its prominent alumni including Raymond Carver and Ann Patchett. After college, she moved back to Los Angeles. Despite her credentials, Lepucki was unable to find consistent work as a writer. To supplement, she decided she would start her own business and co-founded Writing Workshops Los Angeles in 2006, self-described as “a private writing school for the brave, enthusiastic, and talented.”

It was at Writing Workshops LA where Lepucki first helped people write novels – the only catch was that she had never written novels herself. Through helping other people with their novel writing, she developed her own skills as a novelist. Having only ever written short stories, Lepucki used her experience as a tutor to give her the confidence to start writing longer pieces of fiction.

Lepucki’s first published novel, “California”, a story about a couple living in post-apocalyptic California, reached the New York Times bestseller list in 2014, aided by a remarkable celebrity endorsement from Stephen Colbert. During a negotiation between Amazon and Colbert’s publisher, Hachette Book Group, Colbert accused Amazon of playing dirty by “preventing pre-orders and delaying shipments” of Hachette’s books. To combat this, Colbert struck back by encouraging his almost two million nightly viewers to buy Edan Lepucki’s new book by the same publisher. Her book was selected by Sherman Alexie, whose works – including “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” – were also published by Hachette. Colbert gave Alexie books by debut Hachette authors and asked him to find one to promote on “The Colbert Report”. Alexie chose “California”, he said, after he could not put it down, later calling it a “page turner” in an interview with the New York Times.

Colbert’s audience listened to Alexie’s recommendation, propelling “California” to debut at third place on the New York Times bestseller list. To celebrate this success, Edan Lepucki was invited onto the set of “The Colbert Report” for an interview. Her agent since 2010, Erin Hosier, called this level of exposure the “1% of the 1%”. It is nearly impossible, she said, to get a first time author on television.

While some may have quit while they were ahead, that thought did not cross her mind. “The idea that someone would want to write just a single book seems crazy to me,” exclaimed Lepucki. So she committed herself to the life of a full time author, closing Writer Workshops LA and focusing on her follow-up novel. As of this article, she has written and published three novels, two non-fiction books, and a plethora of other essays and short pieces of fiction.

At the same time “California” was hitting the shelves, Lepucki and her husband Patrick Brown – whom she met while they worked at Book Soup Bookstore in West Hollywood – started their family. From this point on, writing and motherhood were permanently intertwined for Lepucki. The logistics of being a parent and a writer are challenging – writing requires long periods of uninterrupted focus, something that’s hard to find when taking care of young children. Moreover, as part of her job as a novelist, Lepucki goes on short writing retreats and book tours, leaving her husband temporarily in charge of their three pre-teen children.

While parenting and writing can be a balancing act, Lepucki believes that “on an existential level, they are very complimentary.” Beneath the menial day-to-day tasks, parenting is a chance to have an up close view of someone interacting with the world for the first time. Through this process, Lepucki says, you have “so much to learn about your character and their character.” With parenting often on the forefront of her mind when she goes to write, motherhood (and being mothered) is one of the themes that spans across her fiction and non-fiction writing. Parenting, Lepucki says, is “more complicated than we are often willing to face” and she wants to explore those complications through her writing.

The relationship between motherhood and writing goes both ways for Lepucki. “I’m a better mother when I’m writing well,” she acknowledged. Through writing fiction, she is able to focus her creative energy and give it an output. Fiction writing allows her to be herself, which, in turn, allows her to be a better mother. While she insists that she doesn’t think of writing as a form of therapy, Lepucki says she “uses writing to process an experience.” Thus it is not surprising that her books iterate on the themes of motherhood and living in California.

In 2020, Lepucki was told about a teaching job opportunity at Caltech by Chris Daley – a friend of hers who works at Caltech as a Library Communication Coordinator. Despite thinking she bombed the interview, Lepucki received the job and took over the Fiction Writing class in the winter term of 2021 – over Zoom. She designed the course around the craft elements she found most useful during her writing career. She also drew inspiration from her first creative writing teacher at Oberlin, Dan Chaon, and assigned contemporary readings to give students an understanding of what modern day writers are thinking about.

Lepucki admits she was scared to begin teaching at Caltech – she did not know what it was like to teach humanities at a science school and did not want to teach people who did not care about writing. Her first observation was that the average Caltech student – unlike the typical aspiring novelist – was hesitant to share in class discussions. However, their reluctance quickly faded as Lepucki worked hard to make everyone feel included. Making everyone comfortable is important to the success of the class as students open themselves up to feedback. “My extroversion goes into overdrive,” remarks Lepucki while gesturing outwards with her hands.

Learning how to do critiques – both as a reviewer and a writer – is a focus of Lepucki’s Fiction Writing course. Lepucki says that analyzing other people’s writing is a great way to improve your own craft. To highlight this point, she says that in a group critique, “it’s not the writer who is learning the most.”

Through critiquing students’ work, Lepucki has learned to “diagnose a problem really quickly.” After all, grading is the process of turning the feeling of “this feels wrong” into specific feedback. This skill, honed by critiquing student work, has helped her dissect the failures in her own first drafts. And when she needs an outside perspective on her writing, Lepucki turns to – among others including her husband and fellow novelist Kate Millikin – her former Oberlin English professor, Mike Reynolds, who, once upon a time, graded her college work. Lepucki is always looking to learn, and thinks that reading student writing has made her become a better reader.

Lepucki’s involvement in the writing community goes beyond her official teaching. “She’s very generous with advice,” says her agent, Erin Hosier. For example, Lepucki once took the time to read and review Hosier’s mother’s writing. Moreover, she has a substack newsletter meant to act as an accountability group for other fiction writers. Named after a line from Goodfellas, “Fuck You, Write Your Pages” is a newsletter where every subscriber needs to respond with what they wrote last week and what they will write next week. Lepucki leads the charge by including her own progress report and adding excerpts from authors about the writing process. “It’s very comforting to know that you are in the trenches with all these people,” said Lepucki.

Being a novelist is not easy; there is lots of rejection and instability. Lepucki was released by her first agent and relies on her husband’s job for health insurance. At these moments of uncertainty, her go-to joke is that she should “go down Nursing Avenue,” referring to the idea that she could go to nursing school and have a stable job. But writing is essential to her life and identity (and she admits she wouldn’t make a good nurse anyways). Lepucki is what her agent calls a “lifer” because writing fiction is all she wants to do. She concurs, saying “I’m going to write fiction until I die, and it’s going to be set in California.”