Sarah Perry: Go Toward Your Obsessions

Sarah Perry is the author of the memoir After the Eclipse, which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Poets & Writers Notable Nonfiction Debut, and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick. Perry is the recipient of the 2018 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award and was a nominee for the 2024 MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at Colorado State University. Follow her on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Sarah discusses how resolving to write every day for 100 days led to her new essay collection, Sweet Nothings, her hope for readers, and more.

Name: Sarah Perry
Literary agent: Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency
Book title: Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover
Publisher: Mariner Essay collection
Release date: February 4, 2025
Genre/category: Essay collection
Previous titles: After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search
Elevator pitch: A hilariously obsessive, intellectually sharp memoir-in-essays that uses 100 kinds of candy to cover a wide range of subjects, including pop culture, history, philosophy, and the difficulties and rewards of love. An argument for joy as a means of survival in dark times.

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What prompted you to write this book?

My first book, After the Eclipse, focused on my mother, who was murdered when I was a child. I’m so proud of that book, and so glad readers have found it, but writing it was incredibly difficult. Afterward, I was working on a sort of sequel memoir focused on love in the wake of trauma, but I found that I was more worn out than I’d realized. Then the pandemic happened, and I thought, In the midst of all this chaos, how can I make my own writing process enjoyable again? So, I finally gave in and did what my partner, the writer Preston Witt, had been hounding me to do for years: I started writing about candy.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

At first, “the candies” (as I came to call them) were a project of private creative rehabilitation. I just wanted to enjoy making sentences again. So, I resolved to write each morning, for 100 mornings, about a different kind of candy. I’d get up, still sleepy, and say, “Today is about Reese’s Pieces.” And I’d let it rip, just kind of following my morning brain wherever it wanted to go, before my editor-brain woke up. One day, my agent, Jin Auh called me and asked what I’d been working on. I actually felt like I didn’t have much to say for myself, but I eventually “confessed” that I had a “secret project” that had somehow grown to 65,000 words. She insisted I send her the manuscript later that day, and she loved it. We sequenced it by color and submitted it to my publisher for first look, and we got an offer pretty much right away. Then I revised for about a year and a half. So, the whole process was 100 days to generate (I know! So fortunate) plus a pretty long period of revision, on and off, while I was starting my first full-time teaching job. The biggest change was in my realizing that I’d accidentally made something pretty valuable and awesome, just by following my instincts and doing what worked for me as an artist.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

This is absolutely a story about the wisdom in writing what you please, what’s uniquely “you,” even if it seems uncategorizable and weird and you don’t even know what to call the thing as you’re making it. It’s also about not pigeonholing yourself—ignoring any idea that you should keep delivering the same kind of work you’ve done previously. These were principles I’d held, things I’d told students many times, but I was still surprised to see how well they really panned out, professionally. I was also thrilled when my dear friend Forsyth Harmon asked if she could illustrate the book, just when I was getting up the courage to ask her!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I discovered my morning brain is quite strange; I would read back passages and barely recognize the person who wrote them. I wanted to spend more time with weirdo. At first, I kept the project private, but then I started sharing them aloud to my partner and a friend or two, and they would laugh! I was, as you might imagine, not used to being funny on the page.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope that readers will have fun reminiscing about their favorite candies—the best part of this project has been when people start telling me these incredibly emotional and important personal memories they have attached to different candies. We know food is so important culturally, and candy in particular occupies this really interesting, flexible space in our memories because it’s kind of free-standing, not attached to particular rituals of eating as far as time of day, context, etc. This book is also super fun for ‘90s kids. More ambitiously, I hope the book does help people get through their days. I have a friend who read a pre-publication copy during election night, and she said it helped her weather the anxiety. With that, I feel like I’ve already done what I meant to do.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Get weird with it. Go toward your obsessions. This isn’t just feel-good advice—writing deeply into whatever your unique brain is most interested in will result in the best work. And that’s the best starting point for success.