1. What inspired you to write this book?
I’ve always been more comfortable writing my
feelings. It’s how I make sense of things. In that way, writing has always been
less about art for me and more about medicine. I didn’t really set out to write
a book. I was writing my way through my life. Through motherhood, marriage,
divorce, cancer, grief, work, love, and all the versions of myself I had become
along the way. At some point, I realized I had spent a lot of time being
something for everyone else and hadn’t spent nearly enough time asking who I
was underneath all of that. The book grew out of that question. It became a way
of following the breadcrumbs back to myself, and eventually I realized those
breadcrumbs might help someone else find their way back, too.
2. What exactly is it about, and who is it
written for?
This is always the question where I want to
say, “How much time do you have?” It’s not quite memoir. It’s definitely not
self-help. There is no five-step plan, no vision board exercise, and I make
absolutely no promise that you’ll be transformed by page 127. It’s a collection of stories and reflections
about the people and experiences that make us who we are. Family. Motherhood.
Marriage. Divorce. Cancer. Friendship. Work. Grief. Sex. Food. Music. Faith.
Reinvention. And the stories we inherit about who we’re supposed to be. I wrote
it particularly for people who have spent a lot of their lives being something
for somebody else. Somebody’s mother. Wife. Partner. Daughter. Boss. Caregiver.
Fixer. Strong friend. Whatever your version of “everything” is. The dedication
probably says it best: this book is for anyone who needs proof that the messy,
beautiful middle is still holy ground.
3. What do you hope readers will get out of
reading your book?
Recognition. Not transformation. I don’t think
a book can hand you a brand-new life in 200 pages, and I’m suspicious of
anybody promising one. What I hope happens is that somewhere in one of my
stories, readers recognize something of themselves. Maybe it’s in my
relationship with my mother. Maybe it’s motherhood. Maybe it’s shrinking
yourself inside a relationship or a career. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s
realizing you’ve spent so much time performing “fine” that you’ve forgotten to
ask whether you actually are. The book says, “You don’t have to fix yourself.
Just stay with yourself.” I think that’s what I want readers to take away. Maybe
you aren’t a problem waiting to be solved. Maybe there are breadcrumbs all over
your life reminding you who you are. Follow
those.
4. How did you decide on your book’s title and
cover design?
Before You Were Everything came from the
central question of the book: Who were you before you became everything
everybody needed you to be? Before the titles. Before the responsibilities.
Before you became somebody’s mother, wife, employee, caretaker, problem solver,
whatever your version of “everything” is. The book is really about following
those breadcrumbs back to yourself. And the cover is a picture of my mom.
That choice felt inevitable once we saw it. So
much of this book begins with the women who raised me, and my mother is woven
through nearly every version of who I became. She represents love,
contradiction, freedom, strength, spirituality, creativity, and a kind of
unapologetic womanhood that shaped me long before I understood what I was
watching. There’s also something I love about the fact that the book is called
Before You Were Everything, but the woman on the cover is one of the first
people who was everything to me. It makes the cover feel less like an
illustration and more like part of the story.
5. What advice or words of wisdom do you have
for fellow writers, other than run!?
Well…running remains a perfectly reasonable
option. But if you’re staying, stop trying to sound like a writer. That was
probably the most important thing for me. The best parts of this book happened
when I stopped performing “author” and started telling the story the way I
would tell it sitting across from somebody I love. Write the weird sentence.
Leave the joke in. Say the thing you’re afraid is too specific. Specificity is
usually where people find themselves in your work. And don’t polish all the
fingerprints off your writing. Perfect prose can be beautiful. But sometimes
the sentence with a little dirt under its nails is the one somebody remembers.
6. What trends in the book world do you see,
and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?
I am far too new to publishing to pretend I
have some grand prediction about where the industry is headed. Ask me again
after I’ve sold a few million copies and developed completely unjustified
confidence. But as a reader and now an author, I do think people are hungry for
voice. We have more content than we’ve ever had. AI
can produce technically competent words in seconds. Social media gives us an
endless supply of perfectly packaged thoughts. So, I think what becomes more
valuable, not less, is the thing that is difficult to manufacture: perspective. I think readers want to feel like there’s an
actual human being on the other side of the page. Somebody specific. Somebody
with a point of view. Somebody who isn’t sanding down every edge trying to
appeal to everybody. I don’t know exactly where publishing goes next. But I
think unmistakably human work is going to matter.
7. Were there experiences in your personal
life or career that came in handy when writing this book?
Basically, all of them. I have apparently been
conducting research for this book my entire life without knowing it. My family
gave me storytelling. The women who raised me taught me how humor and truth can
occupy the same sentence. Motherhood taught me that love can completely
rearrange your identity. Marriage and divorce taught me that loving someone and
remaining yourself are two different skills. Cancer changed my relationship
with my body and with time. Grief taught me that sometimes grief doesn’t
collapse on the floor. Sometimes it answers emails and goes to work. And my career absolutely shaped the book. I’m
analytical by nature. I spend my professional life looking for patterns, asking
why something happened, separating signal from noise, and trying to understand
what a set of facts is actually telling us. Apparently, I do the same thing
with my life. The difference is that people are much messier
than spreadsheets. Unfortunately.
8. How would you describe your writing style?
Which writers or books is your writing similar to?
Conversational, reflective, irreverent, and
probably a little nosy. I write the way I think, which means I can move from
something deeply serious to something completely inappropriate without much
warning. That’s also how my family tells stories. Humor was never separate from
grief or hardship in my house. It was how we metabolized it. I grew up reading
everything. My mother’s bookshelf introduced me to writers like Maya Angelou,
Daniel Quinn, and John Kennedy Toole, among many others. But I’m hesitant to say my writing is
“like” another writer’s because voice is so personal.
If I had to describe the experience rather
than compare it, I’d say the book reads like sitting at the kitchen table with
a friend who has poured you something, fed you something, told you entirely too
much of her business, made you laugh at something you probably shouldn’t have
laughed at, and then somewhere in the conversation said something that made you
go quiet. That’s what I was going for. Story that sticks to your ribs.
9. What challenges did you overcome in the
writing of this book?
The hardest part wasn’t telling the painful
stories. It was telling them without turning the people in them into villains. Real
life is inconveniently nuanced. People can love you and hurt you. They can
disappoint you and still have given you something beautiful. You can leave a
marriage without deciding the entire marriage was a mistake. You can
acknowledge what a parent didn’t give you without erasing everything they did. One
of the ideas I kept coming back to was that you don’t have to villainize
someone in order to heal. That required me to be honest about other people, but
it required even more honesty about myself. Memory is a storyteller too. It
edits. It protects. It exaggerates. It fills gaps. So, the challenge was
finding emotional truth without pretending mine was the only truth. Also,
writing about your family when they are alive, literate, and know your phone
number is an extreme sport.
10. If people can buy or read one book this
week or month, why should it be yours?
Because I am trying to sell books. I mean…we
can pretend that’s not part of the answer, but that would be a weird way to end
an interview about my book. But beyond that, I think you should read Before You
Were Everything if you’ve ever looked at a life that is objectively full and
wondered why some part of you still feels missing. If you’ve been successful
and tired. Loved and lonely. Grateful and grieving. A wonderful mother and
still wanted something that belonged only to you. If you’ve ever outgrown a
version of yourself, you once worked very hard to become, this book might feel
familiar. It won’t tell you how to fix your life. It might sit beside you while
you listen to it. And if somewhere in my ridiculous, messy, funny, occasionally
heartbreaking stories you see even a sliver of yourself, then the book did
exactly what I wrote it to do. In the epilogue, I call it a reflection in the
purest sense. If the book is a mirror, I hope you like what you see. And if
not, there are recipes in the back. So, you still get snacks.
About The Author: Mya Fort-Marshall is a writer, storyteller, and
cultural curator whose work explores the intersections of identity, heritage,
and the transformative power of everyday moments. "Before You Were
Everything" is her debut book—a deeply personal yet universally resonant
exploration of love, loss, legacy, and the beautiful chaos of becoming who
we're meant to be. When she's not writing, Mya can be found experimenting with
family recipes, curating playlists that tell stories, and capturing moments
through her camera lens. For more information, please see: https://beforeyouwereeverything.com.
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About Brian Feinblum
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For
the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He
formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the
head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the
director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many
first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with
best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen,
Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard,
Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C.
Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.
His
writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s
The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs
He
hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and
has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers
Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod
Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five
times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and
Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.
His
letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal,
USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester)
and The Washington Post. His first published book was The
Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook. It
was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.
Born
and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids,
and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.
You
can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum
