by Mayim Bialik
Once upon a time, I was a pregnant mom with a toddler and a graduate degree to finish. I had made the decision to not pursue a post-doctoral appointment once I completed my degree since it would take me away from my children. After my second son was born, I taught in our homeschool community, designing a neuroscience curriculum for middle and high schoolers and teaching piano as well. I did the things we do to pay the bills and put food on the table, and I also started seeing more and more people supplementing incomes by writing for internet websites, which was still a relatively new thing in the early 2000s.
In 2010, I began writing for a little website just starting out called Kveller.com on the recommendation of a writer friend of mine, Matthue Roth. I humbly emailed then-editor Deborah Kolben (now the 70 Faces Editorial Director) and pitched her on some subjects I felt I had an authority to write about—I had a lot of bad ideas but a few OK ones, hoping some would stick.
And they did. Under Debbie’s tutelage, I learned post by post how to get my point across in engaging and thoughtful ways, how to dial back my anger so it didn’t cloud my judgment as a writer, and how to edit, since I was even more verbose than I am now, and Debbie would fall asleep halfway through most of my first drafts!
In my first months at Kveller, I learned how to share and how to not share. Many talented writers joined our cause and we did our best—and still do—to not sugarcoat anything about being a parent. Our current editor Molly Tolsky and our writers believe that an honest—but not gross or inappropriate—description of the real lives of parents was needed on the internet, and a Jewish one at that! That’s how we all made Kveller.
Bit by bit, Kveller grew, generating some incredible and even award-nominated posts: We wrote about abortion and hating breastfeeding; we wrote about sex problems in marriages; we wrote about race and class issues and so much more. We wrote about loving being a parent and sometimes resenting being a parent. We covered it all. We laughed, we cried, we made each other—and you, our readers—think.
As I began to work more and more on “The Big Bang Theory” and gained more of a fan base through the show, I was able to bring many more readers to Kveller. I got braver about what to write about, and I loved hearing from non-Jews and non-parents: “I love reading about you on Kveller!” or, “I love your writing even though I’m not Jewish or a parent.”
And bit by bit, I grew. I began to see that I had a lot more to say, and as my life has become more and more complicated—Emmy nominations, a significant car accident, a divorce, my father’s death—my writing became more and more complicated, and my need to write even more has become very strong.
When things happen in the world that are outrageous—rape, abuse, immorality, women held to unfair standards—as a writer, I feel the need to write. I want to reach people. I love to touch people. I hope my brain and everything it produces can help someone think differently, act differently, or react differently.