Her most recent project is the genre-defying Finally! Jane got very real with us about money and creative freedom, and why podcasting can sometimes feel like a graveyard—as well as how to bring it back to life. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. I'll tell you the whole true story. I was friends with Edith Zimmerman in the late aughts, and we had been talking about her starting The Hairpin. I was in a relationship where my partner wanted to move to L.
It wasn't totally golden—it was like silver handcuffs. I never wanted to leave that job, but then there was this opportunity of like, okay, you could be an editor on this website, and your soon-to-be husband can live in LA and pursue his dream. And so I took the leap and became a blogger. So then I was blogging for a while, and I started doing a lot of like, sex and sexy content. One of my great friends is Dan Savage; we would go on shows together and talk about sex and all this stuff.
I was like, Oh, I should do a sex show. So I called Gimlet, which was a small company at the time. Do you want to host the Tinder podcast? And that led into me finding my voice as a host. I was putting myself in, you know, David Sedaris head, or David Rakoff's head, or Mike Birbiglia, thinking, how would he say this? And becoming a blogger forced me to try and figure out what I sounded like. I can talk like a person on the microphone. If you listen to any of my old This American Life stories, I was just nervous, and I didn't feel like I had a mastery of the language or the way to present it.
And then after years of blogging and finding my written voice, I could get in front of the microphone and be like, this is just how I talk. You're going to have to like it or not. I mean, I write pretty conversationally.
So my script is usually the way I would talk. And then I say something else, or I make a joke or something. Giving myself permission to do that, to just be a total nerd and make some dumb reference that no one's going to get is what keeps me in it.
