You act, write screenplays, write children’s books, write and sing the songs. You must be very busy.
I left LA Law when I was 28. I left because I thought “This kind of job is going to kill me”. It takes up so much of your time and your focus. When you’re working, you’re at working 16-18 hours a day and you’re there at 4 o clock in the morning. You don’t have a lot of psychological space to do other stuff.
I like being an actress, I like it alot. But when you work in television there’s no joy in that. You do that to make money. There are rarely great experiences in television because so many factors are working against you. So you have to decide what you want your life to be.
I didn’t want this to be my life. You go from a good series to maybe a bad series. I’ve got a ton of cash, but I never really did these other things, things that I’ve always really wanted to do. There’s a moment when you realize that you’re not going to live forever , when you’re around 32 and you go – oh my gosh, I don’t have that much time. I’ll have a lot of time to rest when I’m old. When I imagine being old, I hope I’ll have some of my eyesight left so I can read. I’m going to live in the motion picture home and have all the time in the world to rest and do gardening.
And I just feel like, right now, I have all these kind of ideas and projects and things bursting and bumping around in my head, so now is just the time to do them. It is kind of a lot at the moment, but there’ll be another time when I don’t have a lot of ideas and I can slow down.
Do you have problems moving from one to the other?
Yes, I really do. My priest, who’s this lovely guy who’s down in San Diego and who I talk to every now and then when I’m losing my mind, and I say “God, what am I going to do? He’s this fabulous priest and he’ll say, Michele, you’re selling yourself and doing PR and calling up clubs to book gigs and just dealing with all that stuff you have to do and dealing with various business aspects of your careers. That’s such a different place than where you have to be when you write. Or when you write music.
And its really hard. You think: at 3:30, I’m going to start this other thing. So you have to go away and go do something else for a couple of hours,like go to the pet store or the market. Or do something to get your mind off everything and then try to clear your head enough to sit down and work.
Of everything that you do, which is your favorite?
Actually, my favorite thing is writing, mostly because you get to do it completely by yourself. I get a great deal of satisfaction from it. You can sit down for several hours and come up with stuff that you really like.
That’s when I feel in control of my life. I think that when you’re in the arts, you don’t always feel in control of your life. Your finances go up, they go down – you have a lot of instability. But with writing, I feel like I’m creating my life. When I was writing the Jaguar book, I felt like I was creating this great, big new world.
So, how do you balance your personal and professional life?
(laughter) What personal life?
I believe it will all work out when the right person comes along. Or not.