Divorce, Her Way

PW Talks with Judy Conner

by Diane Patrick -- Publishers Weekly, 10/18/2004

PW: In your memoir, Southern Fried Divorce [click here to read the review], why does your ex-husband remain nameless?

Judy Conner: First off, I try to objectify anybody who doesn't do exactly what I want. Second off, if my name isn't going to be in every other paragraph, then his sure isn't going to be. Third off, I really do like saying "that ex-husband."

PW: What made you choose the high road and stay friends with him?

JC: Good sense—he's hardly someone I could actually beat out on the low road! Plus, we ex-wives can talk high roads all day long, but at the end of that day, honey, we picked 'em! What would I be saying about my own self that I married a man I couldn't even be civil to?

PW: What lessons do you think other women might be able to learn from the way you handled the aftermath of that divorce?

JC: If we're talking garden variety ex-husband, just experiment with being nice. If you don't like it, you can quit any time and be hateful. In fact, then you could make actual comparisons. And you could go around saying, "I've tried and I've tried and I've tried to be nice, but he just won't let me!"

PW: The book was published only a few months ago by the small press Light of New Orleans. How did it get picked up by a major house so quickly?

JC: It was spotted by Janis Donnaud, ace New York agent. She read it, thought it was really funny and phoned me up. Before you know it, she'd found a whole bunch of actual Yankees who also thought my book hilarious. Lauren Marino and them at Gotham Books laughed the loudest and last.

PW: Sweet Potato Queens author Jill Conner Brown is your "seester." Why didn't you go with her publisher [Three Rivers Press]?

JC: Me and Jill always knew that there is not a publisher in the world big enough to handle both of us. Really, we are doing them a favor because we would just gang up on them, and their lives just wouldn't be worth living.

PW: Speaking of which, does being Jill's sister open doors or increase expectations to be as funny as she?

JC: Me and Jill always open as many doors for each other as we possibly can. As to our being funny: we absolutely guarantee that we are both way funnier than those Brontës—and there are more of them. Just by the by, Roy Blount Jr. sometimes gets us mixed up with the Hilton sisters. That is because one of us is blonde and the other brunette, just like they are—today, anyway.