Meet Rachel Lithgow | Writer, Owner of Noga, Boutique Agency

We had the good fortune of connecting with Rachel Lithgow and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Rachel, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
After 30 years of running museums and archives in three states and two countries (and a partridge in a pear tree), I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. I was typically on a plane one week a month for a long-haul flight. It was becoming unhealthy. I was getting divorced, my father had died and I was being sued by the woman with whom he’d spent the last 20 years of his life. I was a mess.

I had enough saved to figure out my next move, and I wrote three books in two years. My first is being published on November 11th (“My Year of Really Bad Dates” https://www.amazon.com/My-Year-Really-Bad-Dates/dp/B0DXD6FLJF/). After October 7th, and the ugly divisive presidential campaign in 2024, I was shaken. I saw a tremendous need in the civil society space. I decided to use my skill set (use it or lose it!) to help citizens of every race, religion, and ethnicity level up. Now instead of writing, educating, and raising money for exhibitions that few people can experience, I do all those things for small, unknown organizations. I can’t fix everything, but I hope my choice shines a light on a few organizations that make the world better and more inclusive for society’s most vulnerable.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’ve always written. As a child, I got a tape recorder (the old school, black with a handle and giant buttons that weighed 6 lbs kind of tape recorder) and I would write little plays and record them playing all the parts. I went to a tiny high school in a blue-collar community in Buffalo New York where creativity and critical thought were not let’s say, emphasized. I was bored out of my skull and did not distinguish myself as a shining star in the academic department. Miraculously, I got into Boston University, In my first semester I took a giant gen ed class on world civilization and loved it. When it came time to write the midterm, I wrote the essay telling the story through a lens as though I was explaining it to my grandfather who had died in 1985. When the blue book was returned to me, there was a note from the professor asking to see me during office hours. I thought I was going to fail and prepared an apology speech. I launched into it before I even sat down and he stopped to tell me he was very impressed and had I ever considered history and writing as possible careers. I was gobsmacked that a distinguished professor thought I had talent in anything.

In graduate school, I struggled terribly. I hadn’t read any texts everyone else seemed to know, or read in high school. I spent all my free time reading but it felt like I could never catch up on Foucault or Durkheim. I took a seminar on a topic I didn’t know much about thinking it would be interesting, but the professor was a truly awful woman who thought I was a dolt. She actually called every professor on my committee to tell them to drop me because I couldn’t write and I was, what she referred to as “dead weight” including my work-study job, which I desperately needed. I believed her and stopped journaling and writing creatively for a decade.

Now that my first book is being published, a script I’ve written has been optioned and I have been published in more than a dozen outlets, I wish I had ignored the opinion of one classist, myopic jerk, and followed my passion much earlier than I did. I have three more manuscripts ready to go after my first book is published, at age 52, thank you very much and I have no plans to stop there. Everyone has obstacles, bad teachers, bad parents, or bad something. But after 51 years (and a lot of therapy, I am a New York Jewess after all), I understand that where you come from and your perceived failures in life don’t define you. Each failure I’ve had, and lord knows, plenty of them, led me to build a successful career, a successful business, and hopefully, a killer third act as a writer. I’d love to hear more people talk about failure as a stepping stone to success.

My book coming out in November of ’25 is a memoir that I hope resonates. I’m told it’s hilarious but also raw and honest with a lot of my darkest moments and failures on display. I’m excited for people to read it, but I also have a historical fiction book I’m dying to see published about a Jewish street gang in Queens between 1957 and 1977 and a memoir about my father and my complicated relationship with him. I like to experiment with writing across genres and even though traditionally in the publishing world, that’s not the norm, I need to write stories that resonate with me. I write about moral ambiguity and living in the grey zone where I think the most interesting things happen. The world has become so black and white, right or wrong. In most cases, the truth lies in between and I think that’s the beauty of the written word: reading between the lines.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I love New York, and I love taking people to weird places in the city that most people wouldn’t think to go, but are necessary!

You can’t come to New York and not do the dumpling crawl. There are three places in the city where you can get the best dumplings, homemade: 10 for $10, 8 for $6, and a bowl of the best sesame noodles for $5. You have to be willing to walk and go to the abandoned mall under the Manhattan Street bridge in the basement and sit on a milk crate, but trust me, it’s worth it.

The Frick is still my favorite museum in New York. It may not have the best collection, but it does have the calmest most beautiful galleries and a pool to sit and reflect. They also have a fantastic little gift shop. My second favorite is the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side on Orchard Street. They have recreated apartments, businesses, and factory rooms occupied by various groups of immigrants that made their way through the lower East Side of New York from the late 18th century on. They have a fantastic gift shop and bookstore attached and it’s near every good thing to eat in the city from Chinatown to Little Italy to Balthazar on Spring Street which has a great and reasonable off-hours menu and is perfect to look at the beautiful people.

My favorite bar is the Russia and Vodka Room on 52nd. Go after the theater. Around 10 pm, the place gets hopping and you can drink their homemade infused vodkas (the grapefruit is divine) and eat some of the best Russian food outside of St. Petersberg. As a bonus, a baby-faced man of indeterminate age sings a mixture of Celine Dion and Russian pop tunes while wearing a sparkly shirt and playing various instruments. Trust me, it’s even better than it sounds and will not disappoint.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I was fortunate to be mentored by brilliant and generous people. My first boss from my first grown-up job, age 22, fresh out of college was Dr. Michael Berenbaum at The Shoah Foundation. Michael and the Foundation allowed me to wear many hats (plus, I look really good in hats) and stretch my intellect far beyond where I thought I could go. Without that first job, I would never have gone to graduate school where I worked with Dr. David Myers, a superb historian, teacher, and philanthropist. That work led to my first Museum CEO job at Holocaust Museum LA, where I worked for 7 years. It was the best training ground for everything I would go on to do: manage people, do research, write well, work with disparate (and often at odds with each other) communities and people, and realize that my passion is not only history but preserving and sharing that history with the public.

I have to say, I’m also lucky enough to have incredible friends, from my childhood high school and college to when I returned to New York 12 years ago. I could never have accomplished a thing without their support. It takes a village, to lean in and not fall over.

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Other: https://www.nogaagency.com