Author Jordan Roter Discusses New Novel 'Moms Like Us'

Though author Jordan Roter now calls California home, she grew up in New York City, and spent all her summers in Quogue. For the past couple of decades, Roter said, her dad has been a full-time Quogue resident, and she still summers there to this day.

“I have a real place in my heart for that entire area,” Roter said in a recent interview.

It’s apt, then, that she will be attending two author events on the East End this summer celebrating her newest novel, “Moms Like Us.” The first, a book launch party on Wednesday, August 6, at Veronica Beard in Southampton. Following that, Roter will be one of the featured authors at East Hampton’s Authors Night on Saturday, August 9.

“I’ve always wanted to go,” Roter said of Author’s Night. “I’ve never really had the opportunity, and now I get to be one of the authors. I’m really excited.”

The book launch event on August 6 will be hosted by Lara Meiland Shaw and Eugenie Niven Goodman. A portion of the proceeds will go to the charity Caring Kind, a New York City-based organization dedicated to “supporting individuals and families affected by Alzheimer’s and related dementias, with a strong focus on care, advocacy, and advancing research,” Roter said.

“Moms Like Us” is Roter’s third novel, following her debut “Girl in Development” from 2006, and “Camp Rules” from 2007.

Roter wrote her first two novels after mainly writing sketch-comedy and stand-up at Brown University. For the past 15 years, she said she “put books on hold” to focus on writing for television and movies.

That was until two years ago, when both the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America respectively went on strike, both lasting roughly four months each between May and November.

“Because I couldn’t write for TV or film during the strike, I was inspired to write this satirical, quirky, scandalous story,” Roter said.

Roter assured there was a lot of standing at picket lines and walking in circles during those months, but she managed to sell “Moms Like Us” to her publisher after just a few chapters.

“I think if I hadn’t sold the book in advance, I probably wouldn’t have finished it, because I would have just gone back to my TV and film writing,” Roter said.

She did finish it, of course, and now she said the next step is selling the rights for TV adaptation, which she and her team are planning to do in the coming months.

“There were two kinds of paths people took during the strike,” Roter said. Those that “didn’t get anything done,” and those that “went into a hole and wrote a ton. I was somewhere in the middle.”

Roter explained that she had written about 30 pages of the story “out of frustration” four years ago, when she was dealing with the admissions process of Los Angeles schooling for her daughter, who is neurodiverse.

“It was just therapeutic to write stuff down,” Roter said. “I shelved the work because I told myself I was not going to write another novel.”

But, her book agent told her it would be a great time to sell a novel, because the strike would likely take a long time.

“I told him, ‘well, I do have this one thing…’” Roter said.

Writing the book in steps was what kept her creative juices flowing during the strike. Write a synopsis, send it off. Then write one chapter, and send it off. Roter said she adopted this technique of letting the first draft be just that, a draft, from Anne Lamott’s book on writing “Bird by Bird.”

“I judge everything I write all the time,” Roter said. “With that technique, I can just take judgment out, and throw words on the page.”

This process, Roter said, is actually quite similar to what it takes to develop writing for TV: starting with a story area, a paragraph or two about what an episode will be, then moving on to the outlier, an episode which differs from the others, and is much more detailed.

“It’s really a step-by-step process. By the time you go to write the pilot, or to write the novel, you have a real blueprint for what it’s going to be.”

Roter also emphasized the importance of good creative partners, citing her two editors, Carmen and Ronit, who helped her develop one of the novel’s characters.

“They told me that one of the characters was not coming across,” she said. “They didn’t know who she was, and they thought I could just take some of her story points and put them into other characters. Get rid of her.”

“I asked them to give me one more shot, because I knew I could find her,” Roter continued.

Finding that character was tough for a little while, until she had an experience with a friend who was disheartened because she didn’t get accepted into a tennis club, and, Roter said, was “really way too upset about it.”

“My friend and I joke about it all the time now, but that was what helped me find that character and make her more dimensional,” Roter said. “It was really a team effort, because as the character stood, she wasn’t all there, and without my editors pushing me, I wouldn’t have gotten her to where she is.”

Though the story takes place on the opposite coast, Roter agrees that there are definitely some similarities between that community and the East End.

“I do think that there is something really interesting in any kind of resort town, that being the push and pull between the locals and the summer people,” Roter said. “In terms of my book, what I’m talking about is, when you apply to a school as a parent, it’s not just the education, it’s the community that you’re buying into.”

“That is where the private school admissions thing really connects to the Hamptons,” Roter continued. “The membership. Which town do you live in, what does that mean, and what does that say about you?”

Roter explained that part of her motivation for writing this novel was to understand her feelings about certain situations she was dealing with in this Los Angeles community.

“I wanted to understand why I was so mad, why I was jealous of this person, or why I felt I wasn’t as good of a mom as this other person,” Roter said, adding that she spent a lot of time wishing the process had been easier for her and her daughter.

“What I was seeing among my community was some fine behavior, and some really bad behavior. Some of that behavior was my own, for sure, and I was very aware of it,” Roter said. “What I wanted to do was to not only get in my own head, but also get into the heads of these other women, many of whom I didn’t know at all, and see them from a distance.”

In satirizing this community, however, Roter had to amp up the stakes. She did so by taking characters with very real flaws, and multiplying those flaws tenfold, while also searching for the innate vulnerability within each person.

“It’s a really tough thing, in satire, to get to that realness,” Roter said. “We don’t have to love the characters, we don’t even have to, like, root for them, but we have to empathize with their humanity.”

Jordan Roter will be celebrating “Moms Like Us” at a book launch at Veronica Beard, 84B Main Street, Southampton, on Wednesday, August 6 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Roter will also be one of the authors taking part in East Hampton Authors Night on Saturday, August 9 at 5 p.m. in Herrick Park. For more information and to purchase tickets for Authors Night, visit authorsnight.org. “Moms Like Us” was published in May, and is available wherever books are sold.