An Interview with Julie Kling
Part of my series with funny moms named Julie
Next up in my inadvertent series of interviews with funny moms named Julie is Julie Kling.
Julie is a very funny writer and parent of two kids. She writes the newsletter Mom Rage(r), “a bi-monthly newsletter that offers funny stories, self-care recommendations that will never include an $80 bath bomb, and actionable steps to turn your (totally legitimate, fucking universal) mom rage into meaningful change.”
Julie is currently working on a parenting-related gift/humor book which any reasonable editor should immediately pay her a lot of money for.
Here, Julie and I talk about parenting, writing, jokes, softly-lit maternity photos, old cars, regional accents, and more.
Janine: In Mom Jokes, we talk about the intersection of humor and parenting. You are a mom, and you have two kids who are five and three. Tell me about your mom jokes.
Julie: I think I think it all started getting very funny when I had kids — in a way that I was not expecting. With my first kid, I had this idyllic experience. I loved motherhood, and I had my mom coven in the city. Then when I had my second, I couldn't handle it. I was exhausted, I was strung out. And so I turned to writing to process my anxiety. And instead of paying a therapist, I just share things with the world…
Janine: You take your turmoil and your anxiety, and you turn it into jokes. I do the same thing.
Julie: And you get paid for doing it sometimes.
Janine: Then you take the money that you make, and you put it towards therapy.
Julie: Or a lot of bagel sandwiches. I’ve realized all I need to be happy is a bagel sandwich and 10 minutes of daily silence.
Janine: Let's talk about the kind of humor writing that you’ve done. You've written a lot of parenting-related pieces.
Julie: One of the first pieces I did was for Scary Mommy about my son and how for about two years, my son thought of nothing but Humpty Dumpty, and it drove me fucking bananas.
Janine: My husband and I were recently talking about “The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground and we found the video on YouTube and showed it to our kid. Then I made the mistake of Googling what happened to the guy from Digital Underground. It ended badly. I think he was doing meth in a bathroom in Florida. I'm sorry to tell you, in case you didn't know, what happened to the guy who did the Humpty dance.
Julie: I definitely didn’t know, but now I can’t un-know it. Things usually don’t end well for Humpty Dumpty either. Anyway, so I wrote an article about that for Scary Mommy and the lessons that it actually taught my son. I was trying to find some meaning in the pain, finding the hilarity in the struggle and writing something that could uplift other people.
Janine: It's like when you're in war, and you have to find a way through.
Julie: Exactly. But in this kind of war, you can sometimes placate the enemy with apple juice. A nice, fun bonus of all this has been connecting through writing with my friends, with new people, and hearing everyone's common stories.
Janine: It's that old cliche about how if you don't laugh, you'll cry.
Julie: “When humor goes, there goes civilization.” I have a mug that says something like that. Janine, I really like my novelty mugs and novelty shirts and novelty coasters. I have a Frasier mug that’s the size of my head and I’m convinced I can only do decent writing if I have a funny mug by my side.
Janine: I have so many mugs. We have an overflowing amount of mugs in my house, but we can't resist a mug — or books. You know how people do clothing swaps? We should have a mug swap. You also wrote a very funny piece for McSweeney's, and I would like to try to take full credit for your success with it.
Julie: Well, I did start to write that piece when I was taking your humor class. “Here Are a Few Things I'd Rather You Didn't Say During My C-Section.” It was based on my very tragicomic, very real experience. I had two elective C-sections. I didn’t personally elect it, but my first baby was breech and 10 pounds. I’d seen a fair amount of pretend 1950s breech vaginal deliveries on Call the Midwife, but the 2018 New York City hospital system wasn’t about to let me try that for real. The elective C-section is an interesting beast, because in some ways, it's great because it's planned and you know what to expect. But then the doctors treat it like another day in the office. So as I said in the piece, your uterus is like their water cooler. They're just shooting the shit about golf and what they did last weekend, and you're there being sliced open and having one of the most important days of your life. That piece did really well on McSweeney's, and then an agent reached out after that piece and asked if I had any book ideas, and I did not — but I wrote back and said, “Of course I do!” I made a bunch of shit up and it got the ball rolling. I wrote a book proposal and now I have a literary agent, although not the one who originally reached out to me. That person ghosted me.
Janine: Bad move for that person!
Julie: I guess she doesn't like money, whatever.
Janine: Well, now you're shopping around a funny book, which is like a natural extension of your funny McSweeney’s piece.
Julie: It’s about early motherhood — about pregnancy and postpartum experiences.
Janine: I think it's going to be really great. I can say that because I've had a little sneak preview. I think someone should snap it up.
Julie: Say that again, loudly. “Are you going to a baby shower later? Because you need this book.”
Janine: It would be perfect for a baby shower. I mean, the category is often called “gift books” for a reason. Because it would be the perfect gift to give to somebody who's pregnant or just had a kid.
Julie: If you don't have an idyllic view of parenthood, or don't want to keep pushing the roses and flowers view, it's a good alternative.
Janine: Before you became a parent, were you just like, oh, it's gonna be all soft babies on a rug?
Julie: I definitely did a maternity photoshoot where I rubbed furry soft clothing around my body. Somebody took some photos of me in a loft in Tribeca.
Janine: Maybe you should send me one of those photos.
Julie: That would be terrifying for all of your readers, and for me.
Janine: I had my author photo taken right over here by the Metro North train tracks because I wanted to subconsciously imply that I was really going places.
Julie: Thanks for that hot tip. I'll do that for mine as well.
Janine: “She's really going places. She's near a train station! She could be heading right to Grand Central. Maybe she’s going to the oyster bar!”
Julie: With my first kid, I had time to focus on him. I was also working part time, but motherhood was a new role and identity that I liked. When you add an additional kid, it can get more complicated.
Janine: I feel like where we live, it's not uncommon for people to wait until they're a little bit older to have kids. Every now and then I'll like meet somebody who had kids at a younger age and I’m like, oh, you had kids before you were 35?
Julie: When they're biologically well equipped to do so.
Janine: I didn’t even meet my husband until I was 27. You know, we dated for a while, then got married, then it took a while to have a kid.
Julie: Yeah, with my husband and I, we met and we courted…
Janine: You courted? Did you live in the south?
Julie: He's English. So it did feel kind of otherworldly. And there was a civility to it!
Janine: It’s the accent.
Julie: I'm seriously thinking of relocating from New York to England just so my kids can have an accent.
Janine: We were talking earlier about the Massachusetts accent. You grew up in Massachusetts, but you don't have a Massachusetts accent. Do you feel like regional accents are dying out in general?
Julie: I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that. But I will say I know Welsh is dying out and Gaelic too. That’s the end of my regional accent and dialect knowledge. I tend to mirror people, if I meet someone southern, within two minutes I sound like a southern belle. So I think if I moved to England, I'd be one of those annoying vaguely accented people when I came back.
We also use a lot of British words in our house, like “nappies.” My daughter is so confused and she calls it her “niper” because she doesn't know if it's a nappy or diaper. I think my kids also have a little English accent between my husband and Peppa Pig, their primary sources that they listen to.
Janine: When you write about parenting and kids, it's hard to find that line between writing things that are going to resonate with other people and having a sense of privacy. I write more about kids in general than my kid specifically, even though a lot of what I write about kids is informed by my kid. I don’t write about anyone specifically without their express permission. It’s tough with kids, keeping that boundary. My kid told me recently his friends were Googling each other’s parents and I was like, oh, no.
Julie: I want them to Google me and see my amazing website. They can see the piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal about farting cars.
Janine: I loved that piece. I have a friend who has a Tesla, and he was showing my kid the farting feature. It is incredible. We do not have a Tesla, by the way. In fact, my neighbor's car was broken into and he thinks he may have left it unlocked. They took some sunglasses and some spare change. I think they looked at my car, and my husband's car, and thought “You know, we just feel sorry for them. We're just gonna leave this 2008 Volkswagen alone.” When I lived in Brooklyn, I think someone broke into my car and slept in it. It mysteriously smelled like men’s cologne. This was before Brooklyn was as fancy as it is now.
Julie: My sister had her car broken into 20 years ago, and they took a lot of stuff for parts, but they left her CD collection. They took a couple of choice pieces, but they left like the Madonna, the Britney, the boy band stuff.
Janine: My car still has a CD player in it. I'm afraid to get a new car because I don't think you can get a CD player. I went to a take-it-or-leave-it garage a while back and found some great CDs from the 90s. Depeche Mode, My Bloody Valentine, Jane's Addiction. I was driving around in my car like listening to these CDs and I'm like, wow, this is weird. Here I am, driving around in the suburbs of New York listening to CDs.
Julie: It’s amazing what sense memories music invokes. My friend Talia Argondezzi just wrote a piece called What Your Favorite ‘90s Band Says About the Kind of Bored Suburban Mom You Are Today.
Janine: Yes! That piece was so funny. The lines about the bad feet, the wet basement, the dry vagina… hilarious!
Julie: Talia is great. I met her at the St. Nell’s humor writing residency, which is an incredible network of very funny writers, comedians, and cartoonists, run by Emily Flake. Talia’s coming to New York soon, too, we’re going to a comedy show together.
Janine: Look at you, getting out and going places!
Julie: I'm putting on lipstick and actual pants. I can't say whether or not drawstring.
Janine: I still haven't lost the baby weight. It's been 13 years.
Julie: You told me you have the body of someone who does Pilates once a week.
Janine: Another friend of mine who had a kid when she was in her mid-30s said to me after we’d both recently had our kids, “They say you ‘bounce back’ after you have a baby. But at our age, there's no bouncing back.”
Julie: There's just a lot of jiggling.
Janine: I think part of what makes people like you and me and other humor writers funny, especially in their parenting-related writing, is that they're presenting more of an unfiltered view of things that you don't always see. You and I are sitting here making jokes about the ancient mugs that we use and our crappy cars and snapping up free CDs. We're not afraid to be self-deprecating. I am never afraid to make myself the butt of the joke. Maybe, to a certain extent, I use humor as a defense mechanism.
Julie: One hundred percent. I think the easiest way to exist in the world for me right now and to navigate it is to be funny.
Janine: When I teach humor writing, I always say the best humor comes from universal emotions and specific, vivid details.
Julie: I agree. I feel like that's my only writing trick. I get specific. But I feel like for the first time, now, as I'm approaching 40, I actually think I could have a career as a writer — but to actually sustain myself that way full-time still feels so impossible.
Janine: Which is so sad. I mean, I sustain myself through my writing in various ways. I always tell people I do a lot of what I would call ghostwriting, or content writing and copywriting. What people see with my byline on it is the stuff that people know me for. But I also write a ton of other stuff for other people that I don't have my name on it. I have been doing that for many years.
Julie: Yeah, and I could get into that work. But here's part of me that also likes being able to protect my writing practice for the stuff I'm really passionate about.
Janine: Sometimes I wish that I did something non-writing related for money. Because number one, I now have carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. A few years ago, I tried to get a job doing something different, like working in a cafe or a bookstore, and no one would hire me.
Julie: You were just overqualified for everything or what?
Janine: Overqualified or underqualified for everything. It’s tough to marry art and commerce, or to keep them separate. With a lot of things, people are like “You could monetize that!” I recently got a clay kit because I knew I would not be remotely good at it, I just wanted it to be fun and relaxing. I was so bad at it I made something that looked like a toddler made it. My son felt so bad for me, he said, “You can tell people I made it when I was younger.”
Julie: I know, it's insidious. Another article I wrote for Huffpost was about tap dancing and finding this new hobby. I did very competitive ballet dancing growing up. It was nice to return to dance as a beginner, knowing I was going to be shit, knowing that was going to be okay and be able to make mistakes. But I still also was critical of myself in the way you were critical of yourself. I mean, you can't fight it. I still get mad when I make mistakes. Even though I tell my son, that's the only way you learn. I still beat myself up for it every day.
Janine: It's hard. We pass these perfectionist tendencies along to our kids even though we don't mean to!
Julie: My son’s kindergarten teacher said he had perfectionist tendencies at five years old. He is also a better artist than me. He made a great portrait of me the other day.
Janine: Well, Picasso said every child is an artist. I mean, Picasso! You can’t argue with Picasso.
Julie: Picasso would have loved my son’s work. And he would have eventually slept with my daughter.
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