When I first met Kelly Williams Brown after a talk she gave at the Arlington Public Library back in October 2015, I was thunderstruck to finally speak to the person who, to my 22-year-old self, seemed like the ultimate role model. This was a few months after I’d graduated college and left the Midwest, and I’d come across Brown’s 2013 book, Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, right as I was navigating that awkward transition into the real world. Forget having it all—I just wanted to have it together.

Brown’s quirky, accessible manual not only dispensed practical advice on everything from friendship to buying bulk toilet paper, but it also insisted cheerily throughout that adulthood was a verb, not a definitive category. If you’ve ever heard of the word adulting at any point inside the last decade—tossed off by your friendly exhausted millennial, embroidered on many an Etsy throw pillow—it’s because of this book. (Don’t worry, she’s haunted by it too.) You might not feel like a grown-up, the thinking goes, but given the correct tips and tricks, you could pull off an effective cosplay. No wonder it was catnip for me, along with countless other flailing millennials: By the time I’d started dog-earing every other page, Adulting was already a New York Times best-seller turned potential J.J. Abrams comedy.

Nearly 10 years after Adulting’s publication, as the millennials who made up Williams Brown’s original flock age into uncontested grown-up territory, I wanted to hear how the now 37-year-old author felt about its legacy. But I also wanted to know (the way you do when catching up with the person who taught you how to check your credit and clean your tub) how she’s been doing since publishing Gracious, an etiquette guide, in 2017. Conveniently, Williams Brown wrote a third book last summer to answer that question, which will be released in paperback by Penguin Random House on May 10. But while its title might slightly belie this, Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things is far from another handbook-y sequel for now-30-somethings.

Tl;dr, Williams Brown’s life post-Adulting blew up in almost every imaginable way. Easy Crafts documents these “700 bad days”—including, but not limited to one failed marriage, three broken limbs (over three separate instances), the end of several close friendships, and a harrowing experience with depression that resulted in a suicide attempt—with honesty and darkly funny crafting how-tos, in a kind of ironic throwback to her first books. For any Adulting reader who might have put her on a kind of all-knowing self-help guru pedestal, Williams Brown importunes in Easy Crafts, or anyone who still believes that following (or prescribing) a specific set of steps to reach adulthood as a kind of guaranteed home free, safety zone is to miss the point entirely. No matter how clean your tub is, your life can still fall apart along the way.

Over Zoom from her home in Salem, Oregon, I chatted with Williams Brown in early March about her memoir, the endurance of Adulting, and the question of resilience, especially during a collectively agonizing time. “You caught me in a crazy week,” Williams Brown says, revealing that she’s been interviewing at grad schools in hopes of inhabiting her fullest advice-dispensing self in a new role: as a therapist. (A few weeks later, Williams Brown informed me she’d been accepted to Lewis & Clark College’s masters program for mental health counseling.) Below is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

Vanity Fair: You published Adulting back in 2013—what’s your relationship like with its success?

Kelly Williams Brown: Well, I was really signing people up for disappointment. I tried to be extremely clear in Adulting that I was writing it as a nonfunctional person who knew there were people out there who just did a good job on their laundry and had houses that weren’t chaos. I wanted to treat it like a reporting project and go find out how from them. But somehow, some people interpreted it as, “I am now a lifestyle expert,” which is the opposite of what I was. And it’s hard, because you can’t just constantly say, “No, I’m a grubby baby.”

Do you remember when you came up with the actual word, “adulting”?

I was sitting in a bar with a much older friend of mine. She was in her 50s, and I was in my mid-20s. I was talking to her about this idea I had for a book, how it should have all the things that you need to learn before you’re 30, like how do you change a tire and all that stuff, in one compendium.

I do make gerunds out of nouns, like Nashville-ing, bridesmaid-ing. And I was like, “You know, adult-ing.” The act of being adult, rather than thinking of it as a category that you feel like you can never be a part of. The bartender, who was also a little older, was like, “I don’t know, it sounds a lot like ‘adultery’.” But also adultery was not a word that crossed my radar much in my mid-20s. So adulting it was.

What was it like to be the poster child—er, author—of this neologism that’s now like, everywhere?

I am so sorry for it. It haunts me. Everyone, every time they see a mug that says #adulting or a hat that says I don’t feel like adulting, they buy it for me. I’m like, thank you, I’m not making any money off this.

I enjoy inventing words; I just can’t believe that’s the one that caught on. When people introduce me, a lot of times they’ll say, “She invented the word adulting!” And the person’s like, “wow,” and I’m like, “I did that 10 years ago.” But here we are, still talking about it. But I don’t really mind. I feel like other people made that word annoying. I wrote a helpful book that people really like and I still hear about. I definitely didn’t put it on any hats or mugs or anything.

But it sounds like you were pretty uncomfortable with the role that Adulting thrust you into.

I love giving people advice. That is one of my favorite things to do, when requested—I try to be extremely consensual about advice. What I didn’t like was people thinking that I had it all together. And then with any evidence that I had a misstep, or when there was something painful or unhappy in my life, or even just that my house was messy, they’re like, “Didn’t you write a book on this?”

As someone who does have some pretty profound ADHD, and everything that goes with it, that was difficult: for people to have an idea of me as a perfect person. Not only did I feel bad about my inability to fulfill it, but they would mention it too. That sucked.

Your 2021 memoir, Easy Crafts for the Insane, chronicles the most unimaginably difficult 18 months anyone could experience involving divorce, broken limbs, and mental health crises, to start with. Is it safe to say this book is a response to those expectations around Adulting, as well Gracious, the etiquette book you wrote as a follow-up in 2017?

It certainly was in reaction to my earlier work, just because Adulting has defined a lot of my life. But I think the reaction was more: I want people to know that you can be a person who is successful and happy and seemingly has your life together, and then it can fall apart…. You can be a successful person and be doing terribly. And then do terribly for a while. And hopefully become a successful person again, in however you want to define that.

Did this book change your relationship with your previous work?

I think the events of the book changed my relationship with my two earlier books. Because there was very much a sense of, “The fuck are you to tell anyone anything? Your life is not good right now. You are not a very functional or healthy person in any number of ways.” So it was hard to have these more successful happy versions of myself that were not only so present for me but so present for the world. That was the last they had seen of me.

What kind of response have you gotten from readers over the past year that Easy Crafts for the Insane has been out?

I know it’s inspired at least four or five divorces, which I’m quite proud of.

Oh, my God. I love that?

I mean, if you don’t have kids, and your marriage is terrible in year three, and you’re both professionals living in a glam city together and you want to brain your spouse, just stop. You don’t have to do that anymore.

One of the themes I found fascinating in Easy Crafts is the way you write about these personal tragedies against the backdrop of the Trump administration and these collective experiences of pain that were also happening in tandem. There’s this implicit question about how we’re able to connect with each other during a crazy time, when everyone’s mired in their own craziness, so to speak. I’m curious if you’ve found a satisfying answer to that.

One of the answers, for me, is simple: I need to engage with the news less. I need to be really mindful about my consumption of information. This is a strange position to take as a reporter, but sometimes there’s an idea that if we do not bear witness to trauma and to suffering, then we don’t care. At a certain point, that consumption becomes just about us, and alleviating our sense of guilt and obligation. I just don’t think it’s very good for us to conceptualize constant engagement as being an action that has a moral value to it.

When you’re scrolling on your phone or watching the news, that’s a very individual activity too. You’re not engaging, or even sharing a kind of burden, in the same way.

Yeah, absolutely. I think an important question to ask is like, is this about me, or is this about things that I can do for or be better for other people.

The most heartbreaking parts of your memoir are the moments where it feels like things are going to be okay. And then you break another bone, or you lose another part of your chosen family. When I was reading it during the omicron surge, those passages helped shape my thinking about resilience in terms of like, it’s not so much weathering the first big storm or the initial emergency so much as finding your footing after the rug gets yanked out from under you again. How did you build your resilience?

I lie to myself. I am just like, you know what? Nothing lasts forever, no matter how bad this is. It might be bad in a different way. But it won’t be bad this way any more. And if you can hold that as almost a religious statement of fact, I do think hope is a moral imperative. I do that not just for myself but so I can be there for other people in my life.

If I’m just a nihilist, then what’s the point of anything? Why wouldn’t I just go out to the desert and curl up into a ball and dry out and die? Even when things are really bad, I tell myself, “This is a useful experience for you. You are growing painfully. When you encounter this same thing in the future, it might be just as bad, but it won’t be new.” Which is what I often find makes something really difficult—when it’s totally novel and you have no frame of reference.

It’s like what you say in the book, about brushing your teeth even if you don’t think your life is great right now.

Exactly. Even if you don’t care today, you might care tomorrow. And you will want to have teeth at that point.

The question of resilience is a difficult one. It’s shortsighted and incorrect to think that suffering makes us better people. I think that we all have the opportunity to figure out what our narrative is. The more you can give yourself an understanding that is perhaps a little less painful than what actually happened, the better you’ll be able to get out of bed in the morning.

Is there anything else you want to talk about before we go?

Two things: Number one, for anyone who needs help out there or is in a dark place, you can call a crisis line. You do not have to be standing at the ledge of a building to call. If you are feeling significant distress, they’ll be able to assess what is needed and often can connect people to low-cost and available treatment in the area. There’s also something called warmlines, which are less urgent hotlines. No matter how you feel today, you’re not going to feel the exact same way tomorrow.

Two, to me, very proactively building support structures that are not just, “Okay, I have three really close friends and my mom” has been really important. I really do know every single neighbor on my block; we have a very active group text. Earlier today I was like, “I have to do B-roll of my hands demonstrating the dragon eggs craft for a morning-show appearance in a little bit.” I put the word out to see if anyone had one of those grippy tripod things, because I needed a close-up of my hands beforehand. Do you want to see what the dragon eggs look like in real life?

Of course.

It’s always a nightmare to try to demonstrate a craft on a TV show. The whole point of a craft is that it takes time and is kind of boring. But these are very satisfying, especially if you like to click your fingers on things. And you can’t fuck it up. It’s literally impossible.