My senior year, I just couldn’t take another chemistry class. Usually when I had trouble with a subject, if I worked hard enough and put in the time, I’d eventually understand what was going on. Not so with chemistry. My brain just couldn’t process it. I really wanted to be a doctor so I could help people, particularly children, either through pediatrics or child psychiatry. But failing organic chemistry made me wonder if perhaps my aptitude was in something else.

Bartending can be quite lucrative! I had this job at a neighborhood bar [where I] worked Saturday and Sunday nights and usually made like $500 a week, which to a twenty-two year old is a lot of money.

I would write during the week. I lived in a shoebox and shopped at Forever 21 but still had enough money to go to the movies or a baseball game and basically just had the best time. 

First, I applied for a summer internship I saw on Media Bistro for a business magazine about shopping centers and got it. Then I applied for a fall internship at a men’s magazine and got that. That place (which is now defunct) didn’t have the budget to pay real writers to do features so they let me write some, which was amazing.

[When] one of my editors there left, he went to ESPN and took me with him. But I kept having to bartend because I was making (no joke) $50 a week as an intern. So I basically worked 9am-7pm Monday through Friday at ESPN and then 9 pm to 4 am on Saturday and Sunday [at the bar].

When I started getting work for ESPN, it was slow at first. I think I made maybe $5000 freelancing for them the first year. Then it steadily increased from there. They were using me so much that they put me on contract three or four years after I started freelancing because it was cheaper for them (and more secure for me!).

I take a lot of notes as I go, but I write all at once. I have to kind of know how a story ends before I begin it.

That being said, I don’t always come up with the last line of a piece before I start—sometimes I figure out what a story is about while I’m writing it. This usually happens because I go back and listen to an interview and hear something I missed the first time, either because I wasn’t doing a very good job listening or because my brain was automatically omitting anything that didn’t “fit” with my pre-conceived idea of what the story was about.

For larger pieces, I definitely outline. My book was heavily outlined, first by chapter, then within each chapter. I had stacks of notebooks of material from two years of reporting, and I went through each one and typed everything up. [From there,] I moved each note into its specific chapter outline, and highlighted it in the original notebook when I found it a home.

The saddest part is flipping through those old notebooks and seeing great little nuggets that were never highlighted because I failed to find them a home in the book—so I don’t do that!

Each situation was different. The New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief (who I didn’t know) read one of my ESPN features and reached out to ask me if I wanted to write for him. It took me a year to gain the courage to pitch an idea. I started writing for Self because my story editor at the New York Times is married to an editor at Self and recommended me. For Glamour, my friend and I just happened to pitch a story cold. [Another] friend who I met through covering the Dodgers was an editor at Variety and tossed me some work. Everything comes through relationships.

I found these guys to be extraordinary, and that’s really what the book is about: extraordinary people in an extraordinary situation. It [also] helped that the guys approached me to do it and gave me incredible access.

Trust takes years, honestly. You have to treat them like humans and be impeccable about keeping your word. I agonized over getting everything right. Someone may not like that I wrote the truth about certain situations, but none of the players ever denied a word of it. I’m really proud of that.

I started formally reporting the book in the spring of 2013—but I really started three years before that. My agent sold the book in November of 2013. I spent the winter outlining and then began writing on April 1. I finished the first draft by February 1st [of 2015] and the final draft by May 1 or so. It was a crazy process. 

I would recommend trying to write 500 words a day. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up pretty fast. Just get started and don’t give up.

Earlier in my career, definitely. Guys would explain the simplest plays to me, either because they assumed I didn’t understand or they wanted to embarrass me. But it’s gotten a lot better now. When I started the players were all older than me, so I don’t know if they were also just condescending because of the age thing. Now that I’m interviewing guys from my generation and younger, there’s a lot more respect.

And yes, I would say being a woman has its advantages. The guys have no problem giving me their wives’ and mothers’ phone numbers. They don’t really like giving out those digits to my male colleagues.

It’s the way I express myself. I don’t know what I would do otherwise. [But] being a professional sportswriter is exhausting. People think you just show up for the games when the fans do. No.

For baseball games, we get there at 2:30 P.M. for a 7:00 P.M. start, then stay until 11:30 P.M. or so. Our social lives are kind of lame because that schedule includes Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes you get Mondays or Thursdays off but never weekends.

Since blogs have become a thing, it’s hard for some readers to differentiate between someone blogging from home with no locker room access and someone who spends 60 hours a week at the ballpark talking to everyone. That’s frustrating. Sometimes I’ll tweet something based on what a player told me, and I’ll get people writing me back calling me a moron. It’s like, OK. What? This is straight from the horse’s mouth!

It can also be frustrating when I see stuff bashing "the media agenda," as if we all get together at summer camp each year and decide what to write. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Reporters are cutthroat competitive—I’ve had friends break stories from the other side of a dinner table and not even tell me! The goal is always to write different things from your competitors. But if ten different writers are writing the same thing, it is most likely true—and not a media conspiracy. Sorry.

When I was twenty-one I reviewed CDs for an indie rock magazine. I got paid $5 per review. I was really snarky and could be quite critical. I wouldn’t do that anymore. I think it’s pretty awful to be a jerk about something someone poured their heart into.

The proudest moment of my career so far was making The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list two weeks in a row! That is something I never thought would happen.

That’s a great question. I wake up being grateful that I woke up. I know how fortunate I am to be in great health because many people I love aren’t that lucky.

I will write more books. I just need to come up with an idea I can sit with for the next three years (or so) that I won’t get sick of...