Scribe Media’s Author Hour: Writing Fuckless

From the interview…

Benji Block: You started writing and you didn’t stop. So okay, it’s one thing to have that privately and be like, “Oh man, this is turning into something more,” but to take on a book project like, was this because COVID then hit and you had some extra time? What made it the stars align in a sense to make this the right time for this project?

Gianna Biscontini: Haha, I don’t know! Like I said, I sat down to write this, which I thought was a journal entry in October 2019, so it was well before the pandemic. I wrote the first five pages and I thought, “Wow, I have something here,” and I just kept writing as you said. Once the pandemic hit, I experienced a lot of professional challenges and personal trauma. I lost my father. I moved across the country. I lost my special needs dog to meningitis.

All of these things happen. I had some really toxic relationships and so everything really fell apart over two and a half years, which just happens to be the time period that I was writing this book, and I think, you know, looking back, I was really emotional and angry and proud and ambitious and excited and sad all at once, and it just got factored into this book and reiterated enough for it to become a guide book for not necessarily only women but specifically, women to guide themselves through life’s challenges, whether they are at the top of their game or really just starting to figure it out.

Benji Block: Okay, take me inside this title you talk about in the book about some of the pushback that maybe you received at first when you’re going with a title like Fuckless and in choosing to use the word “Fuck” over and over again throughout the book, but you felt like it was intentional.

I think it adds an element of passion when I read it, and I tell people often, when I go for a run or when I’m doing a hard workout and I just cuss at myself, there’s a huge benefit internally, and it wakes me up and I feel like this book brought on a similar feeling, I don’t know what – talk about the word choice there?

Gianna Biscontini: Yes, so you’re right, I did hear a lot of that. “You need to change the tittle, it’s not going to sell, people are uncomfortable,” and to be honest, my first reaction was, “Oh okay,” and I’m going to backpedal and I’m going to put it out into the world differently than intended. And then I thought, “Fuck that.” I mean, that’s not the point of the book, that’s the exact opposite of the book. And especially women, you know, we’re put in these glass boxes we’ll talk about — be small and be less and be stifled — and by me backpedaling and saying, “Okay, well what everybody else wants is more important than the book that I want to write,” is flying in the face of the concept of this book.

So, I really had to get right with myself and say, “Look, I’m going to say what I need to say,” and if you resonate with it, awesome. If it makes you feel naughty to have a book on your coffee table that has “Fuck” on it, great, and there is liberation in that for me to come back to people and say, “No, this is the title, let’s move on,” and people really respected that and said, “Okay, we’re writing Fuckless, let’s go, let’s publish, let’s market, let’s do all these things.”