whelm
In 2016, after my first book came out, I wrote, of the week that had preceded its release:
“it's like trying to recall the details of days spent in a fever: my skin tight, all experience queasy, surreal, fragmented. I think maybe I yelled a lot? Like I talked and talked, and I had to keep talking, because I could never remember what I'd just been saying but also I was pretty sure that whatever it was, I was about to figure something out. I mean, it was not dissimilar to the way people behave when they're on drugs.”
That’s approximately where I am now, except the fever feels more literal, this time. Los Angeles reached a hundred and seven degrees on Thursday; our power went out in the evening and I spent the night sweat-slick, at best half-asleep. In the morning, it was still above eighty degrees, both outdoors and in-. A swarm of ants had found the cat’s food bowl, and a shimmering line of them marched across the floors of the house to infest her kibble. I tried to decamp to my parents’, but the cat got her claws in me before I could get her into her carrier.
Then, the power came back on. The AC kicked in and the house cooled. A friend texted that I had made New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix, and not just that, the most coveted quadrant: highbrow, brilliant. Approximately seven hours later I had the worst panic attack I’ve ever had, my body roiling with muscle spams, jaw locked, heart hammering. Doom, doom, doom, doom, doom.
I mean, in some sense, yes. I am in the midst of a natural disaster that is a symptom of the natural disaster, of the uninhabitable wreck that we’re making of our planet. And all I could do about it in the moment was to sit still, crank the air, make it worse.
But it was more than that. It was everything. It was my brain trying to make sense of my physical experience— uncomfortable, stressful, scary— and this massive, unexpected professional triumph. It was four years during which I canceled a book contract and broke up with my agent and couldn’t get another one to save my live, and all of my books went out of print and then, all of a sudden— what, fucking, highbrow, brilliant? Really? I was ready to give up, I was ready to quit, I wrote this book because Claire and Erica asked me to and it seemed fun but like—
This is how it happens? Now?
This is what it feels like?
I’m terrified of sounding ungrateful. I promise, I am so, so grateful. I’m also nauseated, numb, disoriented, and scared shitless. I hate being reminded how little control I have.
I wrote about this sensation in the very first edition of this newsletter, actually.
I keep trying to come up with a phrase that will describe how it feels to have this book coming out, and “psychotically vulnerable” is the thing that keeps occurring to me. A book is too long-- too many pages and words, too many years of my life-- to even pretend to have control over. I thought when I was writing it that it was all fiction, just made-up stuff I pulled from the air, but every time I read it again I see how close to my life it is, how it reveals me in ways I never considered or intended. It's like I've spent the last few years doing burlesque, dancing a tease; now I'm standing still on stage, naked, letting you look from every angle.
So. The clothes really come off tomorrow. You’d think at this point I’d be better prepared but I think actually it’s just the opposite. I was so certain I knew what to expect. And then, surprise! And I’m knocked right off my feet.
In addition to all of that, I wrote about freezing my eggs and confronting death for Romper.