I loved the book; I got very emotional reading it and had a very familiar feeling while reading it. Was that something that you intended…to make it feel like something that felt like home for people? Because that's what I got from it.

Shaina Feinberg: That's so great. You just made me tear up. I think what we want to be doing, with all we do, is to make it feel conversational. Which I think makes it feel familiar. I do think that our goal, in general, with the column and with our books is to do that. When you hear people's stories in their own voices, it just makes it seem like it's someone you know.

Right? That was really captured, I felt that familiarity in it. So your column is kind of similar to what you do in the book: talk to people, ordinary people, business owners, from small to big. Why did you turn the work you do in the column into a book?

Julia Rothman: A lot of the stuff we do for The New York Times is topical, so it felt kind of weird to just take it all and  publish it. We thought about it a lot, actually. We had done this one column that everyone really resonated with, which shares a name with the book, ‘How We Got By.’ It was at the very beginning of the pandemic, and we didn't want to do another sad story. We wanted to do hopeful stories of people getting through really hard things. That was the inspiration for the column; we had such a good feeling about it and lots of people responded positively. So we thought, ‘Maybe we want to do more work like this. Maybe this should be a book.’ So it’s similar to our column, but we got to expand it and talk to people for a long time and have a lot of their words and points of view. It's their real voices and you can really feel that.

Shaina Feinberg: For me, the thing that felt like a big difference was that for our column: we don't run the stories past people; we just fact check them. But with this, I got to follow up with probably 100 of the 111 people. They got to read what I had written up and there were some edits and tweaks and they got to read that before we handed it in. That was such an amazing experience. It felt really good to hear directly from so many people who were like, ‘Oh, my god, wow, I said this, like, this is awesome.’ One woman in particular, was like, ‘Whoa, I was just feeling really down and then I got this and I inspired myself by reading this story.’ It felt really nice to have that interaction and exchange of energy. 

I know from doing interviews that people can talk and so I’m wondering, how did you know when you found ‘the story within the story’?

Julia Rothman: I feel like people were more succinct than they usually are because they knew they had to tell a story. 

Shaina Feinberg: Sometimes people will come with a story and that was the story they wanted to tell. At times we would have several options for the story based on what they shared. Then we would ask questions that would flesh it out. So, I feel like there was something about these interviews that felt more directed. And then, obviously, there are parts of stories where once you write it all up there are parts you need to just take it out in the editing. I think that when people then get to read it they realize, ‘Oh, wow, yeah, this is how this story goes.’ So I think we just had to keep circling back to whatever the theme or the primary story of each story was. 

It sounds like you organized it in a way, where you knew going in, that you would have to make sure they were very precise. And then you have to give directions because otherwise it could go in different directions.

Shaina Feinberg: An interesting thing happened. When we first started, I really felt like we had to get one of each kind of hard thing. As we started doing the interviews, and noticed that the stories sometimes were on the same topic, like death of a loved one or divorce, we started to realize that the details of these were different and similar from subject to subject. It could be that the advice was different or the way the person handled it was different. So it started to occur to us that it didn't really matter like that we cover every single bad thing that could happen to a person, but that we just listen to these stories and try to take what people learn from their own life experiences and boil it down. For example, there's this one person who got a divorce and they said that the thing that they learned was, ‘fight fire with marshmallows.’ We felt that you can do that in any part of your life, in that you don't have to get a divorce to fight fire with marshmallows. 

Did either of you have a story that impacted you? Or that you walked away with as one that stands out or is your favorite?

Julia Rothman: I feel like it's mean to pick favorites. But if I have to, I could say, the stories that are more serious stand out. But one was actually my former therapist, who talked about her daughter who was very sick in the hospital. My former therapist didn't know what to do, so she called this meditation center and told them, “I'm losing it. My daughter is dying.” And then they said, “Well, there's gotta be something good.” And she jokes and says, “Oh, yeah, the lemonade at the hospital is really good.” And they were like, “That's it. Just focus on the lemonade. Every day, drink that lemonade. Give yourself the time and the space to sit and enjoy that one thing.” And that's how she got through it, drinking this lemonade every day. She told me that story in therapy, way back. But then when we were making this book, I was like, ‘I gotta get her to tell the lemonade story in the book.’ It's so good. So that's in there. 

I'm curious about the illustrations. You have a specific style, and it’s beautiful, and it works. How do you think illustration impacts the story versus photography or any other medium?

Julia Rothman: Well, you don't see illustrations as much as you should in the world. I think people's reference is childhood and picture books. And I think that that gives it this warm, nostalgic feeling for sure. They never actually look exactly like the people and I always worry about that all the time. I try to make a good painting that encompasses who they are in some form. I don't know Shana, you had some thoughts about this because I was having issues articulating why it's hard because I'm around illustration all the time. 

Shaina Feinberg: I guess when I think about photography, I think of whether it's a good, bad, or a flattering or unflattering photo, whereas illustration is sort of more just like the essence of the person. So there's something nice about that. That feels very…like the thing you originally said, where it feels more familiar. So even though you don't know all these faces, it's kind of like, ‘oh, this feels homey’, you know?

Julia Rothman: Yeah, it's something made by hand. There's more intimacy. I guess photographers would probably argue that though, even though that's just a machine. But I feel like when you see something handmade directly, there is something to that.

How do people respond to that? When they see themselves, do people like it?

Julia Rothman: Oh, I heard from one person who was like, ‘That's what you think I look like?’ You know some people don't like them, but a lot of people love them. When we do the column, a lot of people want to buy them, and I'm always like, ‘Oh, no, you're gonna have it. It's a portrait.’ I mean we send them theirs but I think, I don't know, I think it's a hard thing to see yourself painted if it's not accurate.

Shaina Feinberg: I think something that always happens when we take photos of people is that they're always like, ‘Oh, my eyes are a little red today? or ‘Can you make my stomach smaller?’ And with Julia, it's a painting. It's not a photograph. So I think there's a little more room for details and I think that's nice. That makes people feel at ease to know you're not gonna get every single wrinkle or whatever. 

Attia Taylor: So going back to the amount of people, 111 of them for the interviews, were there more planned and you had to scale it down or did you have a plan for that?

Shaina Feinberg: Well actually, in the beginning, our plan was to have around 400. But then we started doing the interviews, and some of them were great, some of them needed some air. We would have this super detailed, long story about a person escaping Syria, or taking care of their father who has AIDS, and it's like this needs some space. So we started to realize that we wanted to choose a lower number than 400 and we just liked the number 111. We thought it sounded cool.

Julia Rothman: We also had to fit in a certain number of pages. It couldn't be too thick of a book, and there's only so many pages. So we kind of tried to calculate it a little bit.

Shaina Feinberg: If there's this many short, medium, and long stories, then around 100. Once we started interviewing people, everyone was just so interesting. All humans are interesting. 

Yeah, I love how everything rounds itself out. The editing is really beautifully done. Because sometimes it’s just a paragraph or two pages, and the four sentence one was just as impactful as the two pages. So, I love how it all kind of works together. One that stood out to me was the ‘Freedom Riders’ story. How long did everything take from beginning to end? How much time did you spend on this?

Shaina Feinberg: In November, it will have been three years. So it's been a two and a half year process. I'd say gathering the stories took us just over a year. Then there was a point where we had gathered a lot of stories and gotten a lot of photos and hadn't done the work of molding them or illustrating and that was a scary moment. We then started to get stuff done. 

Julia Rothman: I met my husband because we did this book. I watched his film and then I asked him if we could interview him for this book and that's how we started talking. He's the first person we really interviewed on Zoom for this book two years ago. Afterwards, I was like, ‘Shana, I like him.’ Then we kept talking and then he flew over from New Zealand to meet me and never left.

That’s so beautiful. So this book is really impactful.

Julia Rothman: It’s meaningful in a lot of ways.

Shaina Feinberg: I will say my story isn't as good as Julia’s but we did interview my husband Chris, who is a recovering addict, and interviewing him also impacted me. Even though I had heard these stories since being married to him but hearing it all in one go…I just remember the feeling, ‘I should be more empathetic to this person in my life who I love.’ So yeah, it's definitely impacted both of our lives doing this book.

Julia Rothman: Hearing all these stories put things in perspective in that you don't focus on the small stuff in your life after. So I feel like it did have a super positive impact on my mental health doing this project, personally. 

It really bakes you into the fabric of the book, like you're not even just a spectator or a voyeur, your lives are within it. My last question is: Who is this book for? Did that change from when you were starting out? 

Shaina Feinberg: So, I'm an advice junkie. When I'm with someone at a cocktail party or a picnic, I enjoy hearing their advice. I'm like a plant going to the sun. I want to hear from everybody. I want to know how they manage their grief. I want to know every piece from little to big. I've always just been really into hearing how everyone lives. Julia's mom had a great message about the advice. Do you think you can tell that?

Julia Rothman: She said, ‘Would you buy it (the book) if you saw this in a store?; She's a very honest person. She said, ‘I'm 76. So I don't need advice anymore at this point in my life, and I'm probably not going to.’ I was like, ‘Hey!’ but then she looked through it and after she said, ‘You know what, I really loved reading these stories.’

I think this book was always for everybody. We just want it to be for all kinds of people. One thing I wanted to say about the title. As we were talking to people, everybody kept saying, ‘I'm actually not through this. I'm not over this.’ They actually are still dealing with these things (mentioned in their stories) that are really hard. It's not that you just get over something so fast; you take it with you and you move forward. You keep moving forward. It can feel that the title doesn't work with the book, because it's like they didn't get by getting through it. 

Shaina Feinberg: It was the question we posed to all the people we interviewed.  How did they get by? So even though in the end we did struggle, asking ourselves ‘Wait, should we change the title? We realized that no, it's still accurate.

Julia Rothman: How are we getting by? It wouldn't be past tense, because I think people carry this stuff with them forever, even though they found ways to work on it. It's still a struggle.