Happily Ever After?
On hitting reset after the big thing.
My novel came out last week! (You can buy it here.) It brought with it all the warring emotions everyone has warned it would: elation, self-doubt, self-aggrandizement, glumness, giddy excitement, dread, exhaustion, jealousy, happiness, contentment. What I didn’t expect was catharsis, but here we are; after months of angst, I am currently in a state of eerie calm. Calm before a storm? Maybe! Only time will tell!
For a window into the hours surrounding the day The Mythmakers officially hit shelves, here’s a wellness diary I chronicled for V.F., coupled with Laura Regensdorf’s beautiful introduction. Come for her as-ever brilliant framing, stay for my podcast recommendations (including one on deciding whether to become a parent), favorite Portland spots, and a watery middle-of-the-night freakout.
The events of the week feel both like a blur and sharply delineated. I was anxious in advance of the launch events in Portland (Mechanics Hall, co-hosted by Print Bookstore) and New York (P&T Knitwear). Scared nobody would show up, that I’d do something weird on stage. People did show up; I did do something weird on stage. (Pause two minutes into my reading to murmur “I’m breathing very heavily” into the mic.) First and foremost I was overcome with gratitude, seeing new friends and old friends and people who wandered in because they liked the event posters. It was all pretty great, honestly. I also had lunch with some of the Marysue Rucci Books team—Marysue and Andy and Clare, plus my agent Jen and our publicist Katie—and it was just really lovely and special to be with the people who have put so much work into this book.
Since then, here are some things I’ve been doing that I wish I would not: Cycling dully through Instagram and Twitter and Goodreads (just to peek at the rating) and the Amazon sales ranker (I know), seeking out meager little dopamine hits wherever I can find them—in pixels shaped like a heart, in numbers ticking up and down. Of course, there are some real, lovely interactions that come through Twitter and Instagram DM’s. Notes from strangers and acquaintances’ acquaintances and very old friends. But it’s so easy to slide into this mindless, icky appeal for approval, the search for a quantitative answer to a qualitative question.
Here are some things I’ve been doing that I’d like to do more of: Walking in the woods, reading a ton, baking a little, resting (Dan and I both came down with colds in the wake of the excitement), spending time with family, writing thank you notes to the many people who made last week possible.
And, happily, working on something new.
Once a year, the wonderful author Jami Attenberg (I Came All This Way To Meet You, All This Could Be Yours, All Grown Up, and more) facilitates a project called 1000 Words of Summer. For two weeks, she sends a daily email newsletter with a motivational note from her and an essay by another writer—the current iteration, which began on June 17, has featured guest spots by Sarah Thankam Mathews, Nicole Chung, and Camille T. Dungy. The aim is simple in concept if not necessarily in practice: for two weeks, participants write one thousand words per day.
I was incredibly grateful when I saw that this summer’s two weeks kicked off the morning after my New York book reading. One can use the archives to self-direct anytime—I’ve done it before—but there is something particularly motivating about receiving those emails. Something I have been craving, throughout the process of publishing The Mythmakers, is getting to sink back into storytelling. In the weeks leading up to the book’s release there were emails to respond to, and essays to write, and questionnaires to fill out, and (so very fortunately) interviews to give. These are all lucky time-eaters, but time-eaters nonetheless. And so it was a wonderful thing on June 17, waking up in that hotel bed with happy memories of friends gathered together the night before, and getting to fall into a manuscript I started working on late in 2020, one that’s come in fits and starts, juggled between first and second and fifth passes of The Mythmakers, and then all those other things. Despite that craving, I can imagine a world in which the day after that New York reading I’d start the day checking the metrics, worrying away.
Instead, I started it with Jami in my inbox, encouraging me to move forward. The worst feeling, for me, is having the time to do something important and not doing it. Those are my big regrets these days. Which isn’t to say that I think one should always be producing—sometimes the thing I regret not doing is meditating, or flipping through a magazine, or walking down the street to admire whatever blooming plant is sweeping through the neighborhood.
But it’s true that most often the thing I regret not doing is writing, for the uncomplicated fact that I always feel better having written than not written. I might look back, later, at the words I put down and feel defeated, or disappointed, sometimes even embarrassed—but I always, always feel better having put words down than not.
Most people, I think, have a thing, the thing that takes effort, and makes them feel better for it. Yoga, or puzzles, or swimming long distances in cold water. Tending bonsai. Organizing. Baking sourdough bread. Balancing chemical equations. Sometimes this thing is a lucrative side gig, sometimes it’s a secret, private practice. At times it is all-consuming. My husband loves building, knocking walls down and putting them up, staining wood, figuring out the math of floor tiling. When he’s in the midst of a project, for days he’ll work late into the night, and I’ll fall asleep to the faint whine of the table saw in the garage, the whir of the Shop Vac in the basement. He emerges from wherever he’s working covered in dust or paint, with a faraway look in his eyes. His responses to questions and anecdotes are delayed. He yeahs and mmms on a lag.
Some time ago, on one late night, I had a bit of an outburst. He wasn’t listening to me, I said, his mind was elsewhere, he was too obsessed with this side thing. He listened, and apologized, and we moved on. And then an hour later he said, patiently, You get that way too, you know, you get just the same way. When you write. I bristled, because I sometimes interpret valid constructive criticism as a personal affront, but then I paused. Oh. Of course I do. Of course, in the morning after I’ve been writing for two hours and I finally yank myself into the real world to take the dog for a walk, still so stuck inside my own brain, I sometimes literally do not recognize friends passing me on the beach. That’s the thing about that thing. It’s consuming.
Anyway, all this is to say that I am happy to have this two-week nudge to buckle back into a daily writing practice. (Not everyone who writes needs or wants or can write every day; for me, it’s what works best.) It feels a bit like hiring a personal trainer for a few sessions to jump start a gym routine. I know a few other people who are following it as well, and it’s nice to briefly check in, see how the words are flowing, or not. Until today, the words came quickly, as though they’d been bottled up. This morning was something of a slog. Who knows what tomorrow will be like. Life, right?
Give me a better, more emotionally fruitful dopamine hit than a heart on a page. (Though if you want to do that, too…) In the comments, tell me what you’re doing—or want to be doing—that lights you up. Tell me about your writing project, or your crossword puzzle, or your commitment to taking five minutes each day to sit quietly outside, just existing. I really would love to hear about it.
Until next time!
Further book stuff:
I talked to Vogue about the cult filmmaker who sparked my idea for the novel.
I chatted truth and fiction with The Millions.
I divulged getting duped to Shondaland.
I answered the LitHub questionnaire alongside four brilliant authors.
My conversation with Maris Kreizman at P&T Knitwear was recorded for her podcast, The Maris Review.
I wrote about other nesting doll novels for Electric Lit.
I gossiped with Miwa Messer for Barnes & Noble’s Poured Over podcast.
This was a really lovely and enlightening read today. Planning on taking my copy of THE MYTHMAKERS on vacation this summer, and hoping it might inspire me to do a little more of my own 1,000 words.