Today I have something special to share with you all – an interview! I know that many of you have said that you miss these (what, are all my rantings about luxury goods and why the things I want aren’t going on sale simply not enough??). I put an unofficial moratorium on interviews for a while, because they are time intensive, but I’m happy to share that I have a few great ones coming up (very slowly) in the pipeline. Starting today, with Lauren Cerand.
One of the most wonderful things about putting out a book into the world has been all the new things and people I’ve come across along the way. Lauren Cerand, super in demand literary publicist (though to be clear, she and I do not work together in any professional context) is one of them. As soon as I met Lauren, I wanted to interview her. She has wonderful style and grace but more than that, she also has a specific attitude toward life and career that I find wise and intelligent. We had a little chat and delved deeper into some topics of interest. So here we go!
Lauren Cerand, via Whitney Lawson
Who are you? Where do you live, and what do you do?
I am a 38 year old woman who lives in Brooklyn with a little black cat and a garden that I share. I work with a wide variety of creative professionals and organizations to help them tell their stories, often through the lens of the media. At parties, it’s easiest to say that I am a literary publicist, as I am so often known for my work in books.
You work in publicity, and a lot of my readers have professional lives in which they have to consider their own public image. What is something everyone can be doing to manage their “brand” (for lack of a better term)? What is a common mistake you see in how people manage publicity? Is it in how the topic itself is understood?
The biggest challenge is presenting the messy reality of who we are as curious, flawed, passionate human beings who are fundamentally living real life elsewhere as this virtual reality unspools beside it. My best advice is not to conflate the latter with the real thing, for better or for worse. Your social media should be an edited version of who you are in person that puts forward your principles and expresses that which you care about most. I have absolutely zero time for people who go online just to tear other people down. I’d rather be walking in the park, looking at the birds. The biggest mistakes I see people make are typing before thinking and being shy about sharing their success with people who already like them.
You love fashion. Tell me more about how your relationship with clothes. Has has it changed over the years?
When I was younger, I was more seduced by novelty, I suppose. I definitely have had a consistent style over the years, but I was also moving through one phase or another, rather than doing that thing that we all know is really smart: slowly building a small, reliable wardrobe of the best key pieces I can afford. I’m very confident in wearing whatever moves me. Most of my fashion cues come from books, art, old movies, things I see on the subway; rarely from a runway or a current trend, so I suppose I’ve always been bold about doing what I like in that regard. I remember a very specific period when I was about seven and could not be convinced that a polo shirt with the collar up and my pink suspenders was not the last word. I certainly wore that look like I believed it, and I did. Continue Reading