Meet ‘The Singer Sisters’

“Write what you know” is probably the most hackneyed advice aspiring novelists are fed.

Of course you shouldn’t write what you don’t know, unless you have the imagination, consistency, and brio to carry it off for many pages. But if you only write what you absolutely do know, unless your life is unusually adventurous, you’ll end up with a pretty dull book.

Good novelists look around. They notice things — what people wear, how they look at each other, what’s in the store window, how the sun glints off the river, who does or doesn’t clean up after the dog. They wonder about things — is that a mother and daughter? What’s the book that guy on the subway’s so engrossed by? Doesn’t that person own a mirror? And they knew things — what it feels like to have a mother, to be a mother, to eat lox, to load the dishwasher, to suddenly be reminded about your fifth-grade teacher.

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Sarah Seltzer is a first-time novelist (although a long-time reporter and writer, particularly of short stories) whose work combines what she’s imagined with what she knows in “The Singer Sisters”; she’ll talk about that book and what it was like to write it at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly on May 30 as part of the JCC’s new Fiction Fridays series. (See below.)

“The Singer Sisters” is about, yes, two sisters who sing, and their family’s next generation. Judie and Silvia Zingerman are folk singers — one’s a brilliant writer, the other silver-throated — whose story unfolds mostly in the 1960s and ’70s; Judie’s daughter Emma Cantor, a punk musician — her father is Dave Cantor, a famous rock star known professionally as Dave Canticle — uncovers family secrets that affect, inflame, and eventually enrich her life, some 20 years later.

Ms. Seltzer, who grew up in Manhattan, was educated at Rodeph Sholom, the progressive Jewish day school on the Upper West Side, and then at Horace Mann, the highly academic private school in Riverdale, before moving on to Harvard, graduating with a degree in English, and then earning an MFA in fiction. She’s about the same age as her Emma, and her parents are roughly Emma’s parents’ age.

She wrote for the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, during college; after that “I freelanced for a decade for many publications.” They ranged from such local papers as West Side Spirit and Our Town to Ms. Magazine and the Nation, and included such early, influential feminist websites as the Hairpin and Jezebel.

“I have been a cultural journalist for my whole career,” Ms. Seltzer said. “And a journalist dabbling in fiction. The idea of writing a novel about pop culture comes from that.”

Most of her fiction was short stories; they were “personal; about New York families dealing with grief, loss, and heartbreak.”

But about 10 years ago Ms. Seltzer got pregnant; now, she and her husband, Simon Vozick-Levinson, have two sons. “When I had my first baby, I decided to write something that would entertain me,” in a way that unleavened grief, loss, and heartbreak do not. She’s a writer, so she had to write, was compelled to write, but “I couldn’t face serious literary work, which is very tense. Very serious.”

So she started to work on something different.

“My idea for ‘The Singer Sisters’ probably came in part from Kate McGarrigle’s memorial concert,” she said. Kate McGarrigle, the Canadian folksinger, died in 2010 and was remembered in a concert in Manhattan’s Town Hall in 2011 that was packed with family and friends. Famous family and friends. Kate was one of the two McGarrigle sisters, the mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright, and the center of a web of brilliant performers and writers, with enough stories among them to fill a library’s worth of novels.

“If your whole family business is folk singing, and writing songs about each other and them performing them together, it is going to be emotional,” Ms. Seltzer said. “It’s different than if you were in a different kind of field than your parents, or if you worked in different fields. This had an intensity that was intriguing to me.”

Later, in 2019, a concert at Madison Square Garden that celebrated the iconic folk singer Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday — a concert packed with famous performers who were connected to each other over decades and in deeply personal as well as professional ways — also fueled Ms. Seltzer’s imagination.

So did the careers of Bob Dylan’s son Jakob and John Lennon’s son Sean.

But “of course I always figured that anything I would write would have a Jewish family and a New York element,” she said.

Writing “The Singer Sisters” was a slow process, because being the mother of a young child and being a writer are both all-consuming, and she was trying to do both at once.

Then the pandemic began, and Ms. Seltzer had her second child. “So then, in 2021, I went back to it, and got serious about working on it and submitting it.” How? “Piece by piece, a little bit at a time.” The book was published last year.

“The Singer Sisters” is about the baby boomers and the generation that followed them — her generation. “It goes up to 2004 and ends in the Bush era,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I wanted it to be set in the ’60s and the ’90s, and to be about the interplay between those two times.”

The 1960s and even the early ’70s were long enough ago to have become at least partly mythic by now, but why the ’90s? Because that’s when she was in her teens, and then entered young adulthood; that’s when the music in the world around her formed her. “You don’t realize that you’re living through a historical era when you’re in it,” she said. “There was a lot of rich cultural stuff going on then. Certainly, musically, people would say that the ’90s were an exciting era in the way the 2000s were not, and there was all this stuff that was deliberately throwing back to the ’60s and ’70s.

“That’s why I chose to have the mother and the daughter formed in those eras, which are so linked musically. It felt important to me.

“There also were a lot of Jews in the folk scene,” she added. “A lot of Jewish women — Cass Elliot and Carole King — and Jewish men, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Whatever I write will have a least something Jewish in it, and something about New York.”

Some of those things — Dave Cantor’s family having survived the Holocaust, his making motzi at a Shabbat dinner when we first meet him — “Jewish readers will pick up on,” even when they’re just mentioned in passing, Ms. Seltzer said.

The Jewish and New York parts of her story are deeply ingrained in her. The music part, not so much. Neither she nor any of her family are singers. But her husband, Mr. Vozick-Levinson, is a music critic — he’s Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor — so the music industry world’s not foreign to her, although she’s not native to it.

Instead, her book comes from the experience of “loving to listen, and loving to be an audience member, and trying to use my imagination to figure out what it would be like to be on the other side of that.”

The book also deals with larger political and psychological issues — “the reproductive choices we face, questions of sexuality, and the push-pull between parenthood and art, between what we owe our talent and what we owe the people around us. About balancing those things, whether or not we are artists or contribute to the bigger world in any other way. How do we divide what we give to the outside world and to our smaller world? Women think about that all the time.”

Who: Sarah Seltzer

What: Will talk about her first novel, “The Singer Sisters”

Where: At the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly

When: On Friday, May 30, at 11:30

Why: For the JCC’s new program, Fiction Fridays

How much: $12 for JCC members, $15 for everyone else

For more information and to register: Go to jccotp.org, click on Adults, then on Lectures and Learning, and scroll down.