When do you celebrate a book?
hardbookfinalfinalforrealfinal.docx
A few weeks ago a friend said something to me like, “I have no idea when to congratulate you on this book” after I had mentioned slogging through my third pass pages (then explaining what pass pages even are). I find the publishing process blazingly incomprehensible when I’m in it — everything somehow always needing to be done THIS VERY MINUTE or sometime in the next 6 months, with seemingly no sane midpoint otherwise — and therefore I know it must appear that much more looney tunes when you’re outside of it. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned handing my book in/off at least a half dozen times. What even is a milestone? Is this an entire industry determined to expose my file naming convention of finalfinalnofinalforreal.docx? Do I even know when or how to celebrate finishing my second book? (I did/do not)
I celebrated my first book right out of the gate, back in 2017, minutes after we arrived in Maine for vacation shortly after my book deal was announced. We poured shorties from a small bottle of sparkling wine that a friend had delivered to me with flowers and hell yeahs, and I allowed our kids to try it for the toast — my son said that was actually illegal and refused, my daughter took a tiny sip and spit it into the beach roses, declaring it disgusting. I mean, fair. Don’t give your underage kids alcohol! Especially to celebrate a book about motherhood I guess!
This book has been a more complicated endeavor, given its subject. No one wants to talk about divorce (even though the book is about so much more than that, especially since I’m still not divorced!) And I get it! But just because I understand this reaction, it doesn’t mean it’s been fun. I wouldn’t characterize the process of working on this book as one spent embraced by my community or marinating in dazzling good feelings at every milestone or having easy (or any) casual conversations about it. I basically just hit each marker along the way and have felt either yay-ish or oh-fuck-ish, only posting about it on Instagram (or Twitter) because those were honestly about all the outlets I’ve had for this thing, and just kept anything else I’ve been thinking about it or feeling about this experience to my-fucking-self.
Anyway. Back to the point. I handed in my 3P pages a couple weeks ago. I never need to read this book again. On the one hand I never want to read it again but on the other I’m incredibly grateful to have had a standard publication timeline where I had the absolute luxury of reading it, reviewing it, editing it, picking it apart so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, oh my god so many goddamn times that I was absolutely sick of it by the end. This is all I had wanted with my first book, because that process had been so insanely rushed and everything — every. single. thing. — about the whole entire process was new to me.
I did celebrate that this book was done-done, finally, a couple weeks ago. My family had just left for the first Dad Camp in two years, a coming together of most of the dads from previous trips and kids now two years older, so much taller, so much less kid-like. Everyone stunned to be together again, non-stop. For many, it was their first sleepover in 16 months and it just happened to be with about twenty other people.
Anyway, a friend and I had plans to pick up a picnic and watch the sunset, enjoying the kickoff to a weekend we relish alone in our own houses so much so that we’re reluctant to make social plans outside of them. But it started to rain so we texted texted texted with another friend from the parking lot of this beautiful place and ended up driving over to her house and unpacked our picnic across her kitchen counter. It was a rain forest of a night, my hair curling up into its natural wig-like state from the humidity. We were inside her house, drinking and eating inside her house, no masks, hugs upon entry, we had made it, we had made it, we had made it.
And I got to drink to the book being done. It was the first time I had talked in person with anyone about the book in six months. I mean don’t cry for me Argentina or anything but sometimes it’s hard when you feel like you’re writing about a hard thing and no one wants to hear about that hard thing because it’s hard or it feels yucky or others honestly just don’t know enough about that particular book to feel ok asking about it! Understandable! But still feels pretty bad from my side of things! So it felt like a relief to talk about it a bit, to feel genuinely supported, to celebrate that it was done, to feel really so proud of this book and the changes it both forced and inspired in me along the way, and to mark the occasion — even in this intimate, understated way — because I had marked so few, actually almost none, of the milestones along the way.
The day before that tiny celebration, on my son’s birthday as it turned out, I packed up the writing phase of this book for good. All the drafts. The bound manuscript. The draft that I had printed on pink paper and put in a pink 3-ring binder so I would hate that particular draft less (it worked tbh). All the pass pages. It feels obscenely good to be done with that part of it. I am absolutely and fundamentally a different person than when I drafted the initial proposal. I see my life so differently now compared to back then that I honestly still feel stunned by the realization, by the difference. And I’m genuinely excited to write again. Not about my life, please dear god don’t let me do this to myself again, haha WHOOPS. But that, of course, is going to have to wait as the promotional machine begins to gear up to launch this book. Stay tuned!
SOME UPCOMING NEWSLETTER CHANGES
I’m going to be switching up the content of these newsletters because: 1) I don’t have the time, mental capacity, nor the actual will to write my way through an original thought every couple weeks plus it’s summer hello and 2) a month after my book comes out I’m going to disappear like Homer Simpson into the bushes for months on end and you probably won’t get another newsletter out of me until like Feb 2022 — if ever — so I’m gonna front load allllllll my random shit now.
I’ll still be doing some of my typical WHAT I’M THINKIN’ ‘BOUT / HERE ARE A HUNDRED LINKS format but I’m also going to switch it up with original humor pieces, book recommendations, maybe some style stuff, maybe one that’s only about wallpaper who knows. If there’s anything in particular you’d like to see more of, please let me know! If you’d like to see less of something, keep it to yourself!
Preorder BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY here.
Preorder a SIGNED copy of BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY here.
You can find my copywriting work here.
You can find my writing-writing work here.
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You can find me on Instagram.
Please do not find me in real life, I’m wearing a swimsuit a lot lately so just, no.
I can’t remember when I took this screenshot but thank you to Apple Books for making it look like I have two hardcovers and also for showing all aspiring writers that maybe one day you too can whore out your life for a small percentage of one dollar and 99 cents lol *cry*