what it's all for
Last week I had coffee with Rufi Thorpe, whose forthcoming novel The Knockout Queen you're going to want to read. We talked, of course, a lot about publishing, and how difficult and disappointing it is almost all of the time. Selling a book is a dream; launch parties and seeing your name on best-of or most-anticipated lists and getting emails from readers are magic, but that's like, ten or twenty days out of every 365, and on the rest of them you're reading other people's names on lists, seeing other people's better, fancier book deals, asking for something your publisher won't give you, and looking at your sales numbers and cringing, wondering whose fault it is that they're like that, you or your publisher. (It's you, isn't it, it's always you, why aren't you and your book lovable enough, god!!!) Wondering if you'll ever sell a book again, or if you even should, since no one seems to care about the ones you've already sold.
Rufi quoted a piece of advice an author had given her when her debut (The Girls From Corona del Mar, maybe my favorite complicated female friendship story) came out: something along the lines of, you're going to hear so much praise and so much criticism, and the best thing you can do is figure out that none of it means anything. The faster your ego dies, the better.
The faster your ego dies, the better, we agreed. That way, you can get over yourself, and get on with the work. (Marge Piercy forever: "Work is its own cure. You have to / like it better than being loved.")
I don't write books because I want praise; I write books because I'm trying to figure something out. I publish those books because I want praise, and also money. You have to separate the two processes; you have to know that the praise and the money are not up to you, but the figuring things out, the making something you love, the understanding yourself and your world better-- that part is yours. And that part is the part that will make the rest of it mean something, or not. You can experience so much success and never really feel it. My failures have forced me to ask why the fuck am I doing this over and over and over again. To start to get comfortable with the fact that the answer is only, is just, is simply: because I want to.
Because I really, really fucking want to.
I've been thinking about this a lot as end of year tweets and end of decade lists float around the internet, as people tell their stories of triumphing over years of rejection, saying to others: don't give up! this success is coming for you, too.
The thing I keep asking myself is: what if it's not? What if my books never sell that many copies, never win any awards? What if I don't get the job or the residency or even the byline I want? What's that story? How do I tell it? Success might never arrive to redeem my failures, erase my disappointments. Things just might not work out for me-- for any of us-- in this specific way. Is the work itself enough to redeem the life I'm dedicating to it? Is it worth everything I give it, even if it never turns into anything anyone else recognizes or cares about?
This year has been a hard one, professionally speaking. I tried to sell a non-fiction book that no one wanted; I got a well-paid regular gig that promised some stability and then disappeared out from under me very suddenly. I've almost run out of money I can't tell you how many times. I'm on track to make $20,000 less than I did last year. I have threatened to quit freelancing and, separately, to quit writing, repeatedly.
I may still have to stop freelancing; it's very hard to see how I can keep going this way, especially with the state of media being what it is. But and also, my ego is as dead as it's ever been, and the work itself has been so good to me this year. Maybe this period of my life will end in failure: I will not be an inspirational story. I won't be a story, period. What kind of narrative arc trends down, ends in nothingness? But then of course life is not a story. It's just a lot of days that happen to you in a row. And the days have been good ones, mostly. They don't have to add up to something particular to have been important, and good.
-
Of course I wrote this whole screed and now I'm like, look at all of these good and exciting things that are happening! I don't know, guys, I contain multitudes and so does a publishing career. O Magazine declared LOOK one of the LBGTQ books that will change the literary landscape in 2020, and it is an official Junior Library Guild Selection! My birthday is coming up on January 3rd and if you want to get me a gift, you can pre-order yourself a copy, preferably from the local independent bookseller of your choice.
Also I did an episode of one of my fav podcasts, First Draft with Sarah Enni, answering reader questions about writing good villains, how you know when a draft is "done," and what to do when you feel creatively uninspired. (Spoiler alert: Sarah and I are big fans of having hobbies.)
And my one concession to end-of-decade madness was to write about how the Kardashians spent the last ten years taking over the world for Buzzfeed.