In our series My Monday Morning, self-motivated people tell WSJ. how they start off the week.
Stephanie Danler’s successful mornings involve a bit of deception these days. Isolating in Los Angeles with her husband and their 15-month-old son, Danler has found the secret to getting through a podcast or creative work without the baby banging on the door: simply leave the house through the front door, just like she normally does, then sneak around to her bedroom through the back door.
“You can check in with me next week and I’m sure he will have figured it out,” Danler, 36, jokes. Right now, she is preparing both for the arrival of her second child (she’s six months pregnant) and the release of her second book, a memoir called Stray, on May 19.
Stray, the follow-up to Danler’s 2016 best-selling debut novel Sweetbitter that was turned into a television drama on Starz, recounts Danler’s dysfunctional relationships with her mother and father, as well as Danler’s own affair with a married man. Danler had been planning a 16-city tour to promote the book and though she says she isn’t going to do the same number of virtual events, her plan is to be as available to readers as possible. “The whole point of touring is to connect with readers, so if I’m still able to do that, I’ll feel like I’ve still accomplished some part of the tour,” she says.
Here, Danler talks to WSJ. about using horoscopes to decode your quarantine crew, the cakes she’s therapeutically baking and the writing exercise she used to do every day.
What time do you usually wake up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?
I wake up with my son anytime between 6 and 6:30 a.m., if he’s feeling really benevolent. The first thing we do together is—well, I heat up milk on the stove for him. Then, this is going to sound so quaint, but we make juice together. We have some citrus in the backyard here in California and we make lemon juice and sometimes add oranges. My husband takes care of my son, so I usually try to take the early morning part because he will have him for the rest of the day, which I can’t even imagine.
What do you eat for breakfast to start the week off right? Do you drink coffee?
When I’m not pregnant, I drink coffee. I’ve had the exciting pleasure of being pregnant twice in two years, so it’s hard to remember my coffee life, but it was great. I loved it. Coffee does make my heart race, I tend to be more on the anxious side of the scale. So I don’t need it while I’m pregnant. I drink green tea if I’m particularly tired. I’ve been having a piece of toast with almond butter every single morning for all of my adult life. Sometimes during that adult life, I couldn’t afford almond butter—it still is an indulgence—and so then it would be peanut butter.
Do you take any vitamins?
I take Ritual prenatals, which I didn’t take with the last pregnancy, and I really love them. They’re the only vitamin that didn’t make me throw up during my first trimester. I take a probiotic as well. I take magnesium. Depending on the day, I’ll take maca, which is an herb for stamina and energy that’s pregnancy-safe.
What’s the next thing you do after breakfast?
I play. From 7 to 8 a.m., my son and I play, read stories. I let my husband shower and wake up and kind of take a minute to himself. Then around 8:30 to 9, I transition, and I get into the shower and I’m at my desk by 9, which used to be in an office that I can walk to from my house and is now my bedroom where I hide from my child.
I used to write every single morning. I do some sort of what I like to call expressive writing, which is not really conscious and can be quite repetitive. If you look at these notebooks: “I am sad today. It’s cloudy. I’m happy today. Everything’s under control. Everything’s not under control.” It’s really just superficial. But I like to start by writing because I spend a lot of my day writing in general, whether I’m working on a script or I’m writing 1,000 emails.
Most of us are composing sentences for the bulk of the day, but to do something that’s kind of not productive, that doesn’t have an end goal in mind... is a really, really nice way for me to start my day. I haven’t been able to do that in the past few weeks and I think that’s due to the climate we find ourselves in with this virus. But that is a practice I’ve had for decades.
Do you ever set an intention for the week?
I do. I mediate almost daily, I tend to do that in the afternoon as a reset. But on Sunday night, when I’m looking at the week ahead, I do try to plan times that I can be fully with my family, or give my husband a break from childcare. So that’s an intention. [For example,] on Thursday afternoon I would love for us all to go to the park and I want to be able to leave my phone at home. So what do I need to accomplish this week so that Thursday afternoon can be peaceful? Everything leading up to Thursday afternoon kind of shifts in order to get to that. What seems like a simple goal can be really tricky.
What are you reading and watching?
I just re-read two books that [came out in April], because I’m doing an event with the women and I loved the books so much. One is Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould and the other is The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe. These women can just really write. These novels are so masterful. I’m really excited, we’re going to do a very funny video that includes our children at our event.
I just started Babylon Berlin, which is a German show on Netflix about the Weimar Republic in Germany. It’s like a detective show that so many people had recommended to me. I really love period pieces. It’s just delightful, and so full of twists and turns. Of course I was the last person to watch Tiger King and then I couldn’t stop talking about it.
I normally ask about beauty routine in this column—are you still wearing makeup? What does that routine look like right now?
I rarely wear makeup to begin with. I’m skincare-obsessed and I like to say that I’ve become more low maintenance since I’ve had a kid. But as my husband points out to me every night, it’s still fairly involved. I get a lot of calm from doing a routine nightly that still feels luxurious and that feels to me virtuous. It’s gone beyond skincare to extend to a diffuser with essential oils, and I have this back massage pillow that I found on Amazon that is truly the most life-changing thing I’ve ever encountered in my life.
Are you cooking anything right now? Do you have any favorite quarantine recipes?
We’re baking a lot. I’ve been eating an entire loaf cake myself every week. We did Alison Roman’s Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake, then I did a Cook’s Illustrated ultimate banana bread and now I’ve done a pound cake, which is just a pound of butter, sugar and flour and it is so delicious. I eat them myself.
What are you finding is most important to you right now?
Being outside. Maybe because we’re not supposed to be but I’m finding myself extremely grateful for my small backyard and for the citrus trees that are back there, and for the walks around my neighborhood and collecting flowers. All three of us in this house, my husband, my son and myself, are Sagittariuses. We [used] to travel a lot. We’ll go camping, we’ll drive up the coast to visit people. We just aren’t really good at staying put. I tend to be most comfortable when I have my next trip planned. Even in my memoir, the small trips that I take around California are so essential. I’ve never just been in my house for a month, ever.
You’re going through all this change right now: You’re expecting a baby, have this really personal memoir coming out, and then the pandemic happened. How are you handling it?
I’m having a lot of anxiety, like everyone I know. I’m also having a lot of gratitude and reminding myself in the middle of those anxiety spirals that my family is very, very lucky and this too shall pass. It would be very easy for me to panic because a book and a baby, you want to surround both of those things with some certainty. You want a sense of stability as you make yourself that vulnerable to an audience in one case and to a child in another that I’m not going to have this time around. I know it’s a lesson. I don’t know what kind of lesson yet, but I’m trying to remind myself of that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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