Well, friends, it has been over a year (!), since I last wrote. I’d like to say the long break was intentional, but in fact I’ve been intending to write again for months. I have been busy, I guess. I had a second baby and wrote a second book. But it is 2023 now, and early January, a time for resolutions; I have graduated from TinyLetter to Substack; and I deleted my Twitter account, but still feel the need to communicate, online, with friends and strangers; so it's time, I think, to start writing these letters again.
My first book has been in the world five years now, which is long enough that, at this point, it feels very far away, like a text written by a different person — a less experienced and younger writer — which, of course, it is. In topic and theme it reflects what was on my mind in my early thirties, because of course it does: questions, mainly, of ambition and loyalty, honesty and art, the beginnings of adulthood, and love. My second book is still in the nascent stages of publication, but because I started working on it shortly before the first one came out, it reflects the concerns of the second half of my thirties: motherhood and daughterhood, family and independence, addiction and sex, and the ways a woman might begin to make — or, later, reexamine — her place in the world.
Of the many changes I and my life have undergone between book one and book two, the most significant is parenthood.
Having a second child — by which I mean gestating, then giving birth to her, then beginning to guide her, through infancy, into consciousness — while also raising a toddler, has been, let’s say, consuming. Literally: the babies have been consuming me, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Here I am, though. More or less. Here part of me is, anyway. What was once I . . . is no longer. What is left is something else: part human mammal, part existential octopus, holding on, if barely, with one weak arm, to all my old identities — among them writer, citizen, friend — while my seven other tentacles all grasp at and wrangle two small people, both of them tumbling, racing, wiggling, frequently screaming, catapulting themselves and me into the unknowable future.
The absurd unbalancing act that is holding all my life and work at once has brought to mind a certain phrase that writers of my general generation use sometimes. That phrase is “book baby.” As in, “My book baby comes out in spring/summer 2024!”
I mean. No judgment, really. I have found it as hard as the next guy — hilariously difficult, really — to find the right balance between humble and brag when tasked with talking or writing about my own work. But. I also find this specific metaphor . . . grotesque.
So I was going to write — or, more accurately, rant — here about the phrase “book baby” and how, by implicitly comparing babies and books, we do disservice to parents and writers, at once undermining the infinitely difficult work of caretaking (a favorite activity of our capitalist-misogynist society!), and infantilizing the complex work of writing (book baby? Please. Book hydra, maybe. Book Sphynx!).
I was going to say that, in my experience, anyway, gestating, giving birth to, and then caring for babies is way, way harder than writing books. I was going to tell you, also, listen, if you’re a parent — hell, if you have parents — or don’t! — you’re already doing the work of living, which, if you're awake for it, is way, way harder than writing. Because, I was going to say, what is fiction, after all, but a sideways and two-dimensional approximation of life? What is fiction but a version of life that is shapely and often satisfying in ways real life rarely is?
But then, after much typeage and deletage, I ended up feeling like, who cares? And, also, who am I to say what's hard? All of us, I’m sure, find some things difficult that seem to come easily to other people. For me, lately, it's been overwhelmingly hard to make dinner. Baffling, even. More frequently than I'd like to admit, the very concept of dinner-as-such leaves me at sea, disoriented, in a fog of discouragement, asking unanswerable questions: What is . . . dinner? How does one . . . dinner?
The truth is it’s all hard, and deeply dull and draining, and exquisitely joyful, too, if you let it be.
The truth is, the most salient difference between babies and books — and a reason, I think, that the dumb phrase “book baby” so rankles me — is that, once a child is out of its parent’s body and in the world, it continues to live, on its own terms and in its own language. It grows away from its parent, becoming itself, beginning and sustaining a multidirectional dialogue with its world, a dialogue in which it has agency, and in which it can and does change its position constantly. A child may become antagonistic or acquiescent, sympathetic or psychopathic, curious or apathetic, sensitive or numb to the world around it — and more, and all of the above, and multiple times a day. A book may incite dialogue, but — even it is very lucky, and attracts a lot of attention from scholars and critics who keep its text alive by engaging with its ideas and advocating on its behalf — it cannot participate in the discussion it kicks off. It is only ever a reflection of its writer’s past, her memories and thoughts, opinions and positions, that have since evolved or been abandoned. And both these sets of defining qualities — those of babies and those of books — can be frustrating; disheartening, even.
When SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY was accepted for publication, the advice I was given was: start something new. That way, the theory went, I could channel all my kvetching and perseverating into productive, career-affirming work. I took it to heart. I started a version of FRUIT OF THE DEAD in the late spring of 2017, several months before SELF-PORTRAIT came out, and though it would be many years before it became anything like the book it will be in 2024, working on it helped me keep my head down, my creative eye on the future, and my sanity intact. In fact it was delicious to work on something so different and new, while speaking and writing publicly about the old work. It was like having a fun little secret.
Now, a year and a half before the release of FRUIT, when I’m not working on edits or prepping for my spring classes or taking care of these two (thousand?) demanding babies — in the fragments and slivers I am barely able to carve, in other words, from my poor, compromised slabs of time — I have, again, started something new. And though it will be years, again, before this nascent, unnamed project becomes a novel or, fingers crossed, a book, I’m enjoying the process, in all its imperfection, of writing a sentence here, a paragraph there, collecting and jotting down ideas. As work on FRUIT OF THE DEAD comes to a slow halt, and its many continuity errors are uncovered and fixed, and my sprawling Scrivener file becomes a 311-page Word doc, which becomes, eventually, a bound and ISBN-numbered book — as the queries in tracked changes are resolved, and this dynamic project becomes a static object, and there can be no more futzing with sentences, and there is no going back — I find a certain, private, delirious freedom in beginning again.
I started this newsletter years ago with a particular conceit. It was meant to be a series of writing prompts. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that up forever, but for now, I guess, let’s indulge. Your prompt today, should you choose to accept it, is to start something new, in intentional drips and drabs. Carve out your slivers. Chip away your fragments of time, here and there. Use your Notes app or a small pad of paper or maybe a whiteboard, whatever. Don’t let yourself — or, worse, force yourself to — work on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Don’t draw in the lines of any constellations. Just allow the small pieces to accumulate — faraway, unrelated points of light — and let yourself imagine, vaguely as daydreaming, how dazzling it may look, someday, years from now.
We like the suggestion of not letting yourself "work on [writing] for more than a few minutes at a time." Chip away here and there. It's something that we'll urge our students to try when they're overwhelmed with long writing assignments.
Fabulous description of parenthood. Thank you for this. Happy to hear the publication news....
"Here I am, though. More or less. Here part of me is, anyway. What was once I . . . is no longer. What is left is something else: part human mammal, part existential octopus, holding on, if barely, with one weak arm, to all my old identities — among them writer, citizen, friend — while my seven other tentacles all grasp at and wrangle two small people, both of them tumbling, racing, wiggling, frequently screaming, catapulting themselves and me into the unknowable future."