Jeanne Marie Laskas

Author Jeanne Marie Laskas gets pushed by the wind, and she’s learned to trust that. The mother of two daughters adopted from China, Laskas talks about the wind and the powerful forces of nature in her new book, The Exact Same Moon: Fifty Acres and a Family (Bantam Books, 2003), which explores the adoption process.

“The book is about belonging—finding out where you belong or if you can belong anywhere—which is what I see as my daughters’ struggle, but ironically it’s also my struggle,” said Laskas, assistant professor in Pitt’s Department of English.

Described by Laskas as a follow-up to her previous book, Fifty Acres and a Poodle: A Story of Love, Livestock, and Finding Myself on a Farm (Bantam Books, 2000), the new book was written while Laskas was waiting to go back to China to bring her second daughter home.

The title comes from Laskas imagining how nature connected her to her daughter during the long adoption process.

“…Waiting for this little girl from China, who, in my imagination at least, was looking at the moon, and I’m looking at the moon. …We were looking at the exact same moon,” said Laskas, who says the book is also about family.

Family is important to Laskas, who discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that she wanted to be a mother while caring for her own mother, who was stricken with a disease that paralyzed her quite suddenly. Fortunately, Laskas’ mother recovered, but during her yearlong illness, Laskas was at her bedside.

“It was through this process of nursing my mother that I realized I was becoming a mother, except my baby was my mother,” said Laskas. “It really, really hit me hard. So, I started wondering about that, and that was the beginning of this whole journey.”

Laskas explained that adoption always had been the most natural process in the world to her because the first baby she’d ever met was her niece, who had been adopted. When she thought about becoming a mother, she knew she wanted to adopt, but she wanted to have a baby, too.

“So, when Alex and I decided to start a family, we started infertility treatments because I was kind of old and this adoption process was another long journey,” said Laskas. “I write about both of those journeys, the infertility world and the adoption world, which are very different worlds. One, I found, was a place I belonged, and one, I found, was a place I truly did not belong, so I dropped that infertility world pretty early on and embraced the adoption world.”

While Laskas said it was on her mind that her daughters, 4-year-old Anna and 2-year-old Sasha, would probably read her book someday, it wasn’t her reason for writing it. Laskas had already been through the year-long adoption process with Anna, and said that taking on a book project was very therapeutic while waiting to go back to China to adopt Sasha.

Writing books is not all that Laskas does. She writes a weekly column for The Washington Post, contributes regularly to GQ and other magazines, and teaches two courses a term at Pitt, where she is on the tenure track.

Laskas said she is able to manage all this because she is very disciplined. The first thing she does each day is to write, because, she feels, it is the hardest job of the day. Everything after that, like playing with her children, is her reward.

“I love writing, but like most writers, I love having written more than I love writing,” said Laskas. “It’s so much a part of me now; it’s like breathing, especially the column, which is something that I’m writing every single week.”

Laskas, who said she uses a voice similar to her own in writing her books and columns, finds it psychologically healthy to step away from that voice to write magazine articles, which force her to do research and enter someone else’s world.

And then there’s teaching, which brings another dimension to her work.

“It’s good for me to be doing a feature [while teaching] because it brings a lot into the classroom,” explained Laskas, who teaches writing at Pitt. “I’m interviewing, I’m wondering how to structure a story, and I’m talking to my students about that same thing. It keeps me fresh.”

For Laskas, the teaching really happens when she’s reading her students’ work.

“I take their work very seriously because I remember the few teachers who took me seriously when I was in school, and it changed my writing to have someone challenge me in a sentence, or someone challenge me in a paragraph, or say ‘this doesn’t make any sense at all,’” said Laskas. “I try to bring that level of critique to it.”

Laskas said that teaching has helped her writing.

“For 10 years, I was hidden away in my attic just writing and writing and writing,” said Laskas. “Now, I’m out in the world talking about this process with students. It’s really been stimulating and that’s been a big surprise.”