Jenna Tico Survives Her Twenties

Jenna Tico
Survives Her
Twenties

Memoirs of a Wiser
Thirtysomething

By Zoë Schiffer | August 29, 2024

Cancer Moon opens with memoirist Jenna Tico sitting on the toilet, texting her boyfriend from a bathroom on Lake Havasu, approximately one hour into a three-day bachelorette party she already regrets attending. Reflecting on the bridal party, she writes:

There comes a point where one has to wonder how they have survived this long. The lot of them, bikinied and blitzed out of their minds, are also the most entertaining, honest, and disturbingly well-read women to ever enter a room. They feed children out of their bodies and make six figures at work and have definitely, at least once, changed a tire. But the thing is, when thirtysomethings are finally given a weekend away from their toddlers, they almost immediately become toddlers themselves.

Tico reports on the women’s habits like Jane Goodall inspecting a wily group of primates. They leave their drinks everywhere! They adore inflatable pool toys! They fall asleep on random surfaces! In the process, she realizes she’s learning more about herself than the women she’s with. It turns out, Tico isn’t the type of person who likes day drinking on Lake Havasu. But she is the type of person who can surrender anyway.

Tico, a ninth-generation Santa Barbaran and community organizer, is the daughter of musician Randy Tico and event planner Robin Sonner. She previously acted as grant writer for four local nonprofits and lead facilitator for Sing It Out at AHA!, an organization that brings social-emotional learning programs to Santa Barbara teens and parents. Her work has appeared in Writer’s Digest, Conscious Connection magazine, and the Manifest-Station. She is also the author of the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice coffee-table book and director of Backbone Storytelling, which hosts live events akin to The Moth. Tico attended Santa Barbara High School, where she participated in theater and choir. 

Cancer Moon, Tico’s first full-length memoir, is a collection of essays and poems. It follows the author as she navigates her twenties — through doomed relationships with famous men to hilarious dalliances with spiritual F-boys. Ultimately, she arrives in her thirties wiser and more self-assured, a soon-to-be mother navigating a fresh set of joys and challenges. 

Cancer Moon will be published by She Writes Press, a hybrid publishing house, on September 17. Tico is hosting a kickoff party at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club on September 19.

I spoke to Tico last month about her book, the writing process, and what she’s learned from working with a hybrid publisher. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Talk to me about your decision to write a memoir. Where did the idea start? And what made you want to write it now, specifically?  The honest answer is that if I could write fiction, I would. No author fully keeps their personal experience out of their writing. But for me, I grew really interested in creative nonfiction and read memoirs that inspired me throughout my twenties. I think that felt like an anchor point in what was otherwise a chaotic time of figuring out who I wanted to be and how I wanted to be in the world.

I chose to write this memoir in part because I had all these pieces that I’d written over the course of my twenties, and I was curious to see if there was a throughline. I worked with a book coach in town, Yvette Keller, and she helped me get an outside perspective. She gave me the push that I needed.

The “now” part was actually, ironically, becoming a parent, and feeling like I had this huge identity shift at age 30. On the one hand, I have less energy and less time, but then on the other, I have more fire to honor the decade of my twenties and to close the door on that decade, my maiden years, and all that they represented.

There’s a bias that if someone is going to write a memoir in their early thirties, they need to have lived through something truly extraordinary. But there’s also real value in elevating the everyday experiences of women, and giving them the gravitas and respect of a book-length treatment.  [Laughs.] “Gravitas” isn’t the word that I would use to describe what that time really felt like, but I know that one of my main impulses when I started to put the book together was looking at the “why.” And one of the whys was that when I was in my twenties, I felt there was a serious lack of books that were messy and honest, that weren’t a triumph of the human spirit, that weren’t “and then I climbed Everest, and then everything worked out for me, and I met the love of my life, and I’ve never had a bad day since.” I am really just doing this for the me that needed this book in my twenties and trusting that there will be somebody else who feels the same way.

What made you want to revisit your twenties specifically?  One of the main reasons is that I went into my twenties with this myth of it being the best time. That’s why the subtitle is “How I Survived the Best Years of my Life,” because especially in America, it’s like, “Youth! Glory! Power! Ability! Chaos! Fucking!” And I just never really felt that way. But I wanted to write about it to reframe it in a way, like, what if it’s not the best time of your life? In fact, for a lot of people, it’s a really tumultuous time, and that’s okay. That’s actually important.

The narrative arc of the book is about the experience of denying your humanity and then learning to come into yourself, if not completely, then certainly more fully. But the journey feels unfinished in a way. Can you talk about that a bit?  Yeah, I think that you nailed it. The book isn’t linear, which felt important to me, because it wasn’t linear when I lived it. It was a journey, and I’m still on it. It’s not like, “I’m cooked now; I’m fully formed.” But I know more about myself and I certainly feel more loving and celebratory toward the parts of myself that I was trying to suppress in my twenties. It’s the part of me that feels everything and gets really excitable, and really sad, and really emotional. It’s a part of me that baffled my parents when I was a child. 

I also had some formative relationships where the person I was with, instead of owning that they themselves were insecure, projected onto me that I was too much. I was the reason for their discomfort, and I internalized that and tried to contain it in ways that were very painful and at times damaging to my sense of self.

And over the course of my twenties I, piece by piece, started to be like, “What if I can’t get rid of this part of myself because it’s part of me? What does it look like to actually embrace it?” And ironically, in embracing it, I was able to be more mindful of it, contain it more when I needed to, to be more discerning about how I use my emotionality. In some ways, the arc is really just that — me learning to own my own weird.

You mention in the beginning of the book that you’ve changed the names of some of the people involved. But you’re still writing about real people. How did you handle that?  That is a really puzzling question to me still — how to write about people who are still alive. I don’t think there’s one way to do it. I did what I felt was most in integrity for me, which is that I contacted some of the people who are in the book. And I really tried not to have it be a gleaming arrow at anybody, although the people who know me well will know who I’m talking about. Some of the people I wrote about will think all of it is about them, even though it’s not, and others will miss things that were about them, and others won’t even read it.

I had four different conversations with the significant exes who are in the book, and they all went completely differently. It was fascinating to me. Everything ranging from being left on read, to a corrective conversation that actually was healing, to aggressive gaslighting, to a wonderful sushi dinner where I was supported fully in pursuing what I’m doing.

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About Hybrid Publishing

Hybrid publishing allows authors to get access to traditional distribution methods without having to go through the harrowing process of finding an agent and getting a manuscript accepted from a traditional publishing house. 

While She Writes Press is selective in the authors it chooses to work with (just 40 percent of submissions are put on a publishing track), authors are asked to pay a $10,000 fee to cover proofreading, distribution, and more. Some back-of-the-napkin math suggests authors would need to sell a whopping 3,000 print copies to make back their advance.

“I try to be straightforward with authors that if they have to make back their investment or they’re putting themselves in a bad spot, she shouldn’t do it,” said Brooke Warner, one of the founders of She Writes Press.

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How did you decide to publish with She Writes Press?  Yvette [Keller] is the one who told me about She Writes Press. I had no idea that there was anything between self-publishing and shopping it around to traditional publishers. I submitted 50 pages of the book, and it was greenlit in June of 2022. 

It felt like a strong yes all along because I knew that they were selective, and I felt really supported by their initial feedback. I felt like, “Oh, these are people who get this, and they see something about it that is different, and they’re down.” Which not everybody would’ve been.

She Writes Press requires authors to pay a $10,000 investment up front — and then there are fees for publicity and printing on top of that. Did you have any idea what the total would be when you started out?  Oh my God, I went in very naïve about all the costs associated with publishing a book, regardless of whether you go traditional, hybrid, or self-publish. I was just like, “Oh, it certainly can’t be that much.” Wrong. Wrong. But the way I think about it is, I’m kind of investing in a degree, almost like a master’s degree in publishing, as a woman, in an industry that has been traditionally and historically very skewed.

The amazing thing about She Writes Press is you’re not alone; you have this cohort of other authors whose books were accepted at the same time as yours. So, I have 50 women who I can talk to every week and bounce ideas off of, and ask them questions, and they ask me questions, and we support each other. It’s like “Hey, is it just me, or is this crazy expensive? How are you figuring this out working full-time? How are you?”

So yeah, the costs have been shocking. I’m hoping to break even at some point through book sales, but I also knew going into it that I was investing in myself, and that required breaking an idea that I didn’t realize I had, which was that some benefactor was going to come out of the sky and pay for me to make art.

There is actually something to be said for being a woman and stating, “This is what I want. I’m going to go for it. I’m going to make it happen. I’m going to spend my money on this project that I earned, that I worked hard for, and I’m going to decide that my art is worth it.” And also, I’ll get the right credit card so I can pay this off over time, which is exactly what my husband and I decided we had to do. And he’s been on board and he’s been supportive.

It does feel like community is perhaps an underappreciated aspect of hybrid publishing. I published my book with a traditional publisher, and there was definitely no sense of camaraderie in the process — it was just me alone writing the book.  Totally, and you know me — that’s something that’s really integral to how I function and how I tick. To be in a cohort with women who are decades older than me, who have this kind of wisdom, some of whom have done self-publishing, hybrid, and traditional publishing, and they can bring that to the equation. I feel like I’ve been in an academic environment, learning from my peers.  

Do you need something to happen in terms of the book’s success, post-publication, to feel like it’s all been worth it?  Yes, I need to be in the Santa Barbara Independent. [Laughs.] On a soul level, it’s somebody feeling less alone through reading it. On a professional level, I think just to know that I could complete this marathon, and that I have something tangible in my hand, and that I am really orienting my ship toward life as a writer, and possibly being an author of multiple books. 

It also strikes me that for a lot of writers, there’s this feeling of impotence where you’re waiting around for an agent or a publisher to accept you. Your process with She Writes Press feels a lot more active to me, in certain ways. You had agency.  That has actually been more significant for me in writing a book about my twenties than I thought. The experience of being in my twenties felt like waiting for someone to choose me, waiting for the right job to come along, waiting for John Cusack to show up outside my window with a boombox, or an agent to scout me at the mall. And the book writing process was the exact opposite. It was like I said, “Oh yeah, this is going to be more expensive than I could ever imagine. This is going to be so much work, and I’m going to go for it, and claim it, and make it happen.”

This question should be illegal, but before we go: What’s next for you?  I would really like to write an essay collection about early parenthood.

Jenna Tico will be celebrating the launch of her book, Cancer Moon, at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club (1221 State St.) Thursday, September 19, at 5:30 p.m. Tickets are $15. See jennatico.com.