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Now that Plenty, my second book, is coming out in September, I’ve been having major thoughts and feelings about marketing a book. Writing a book is an extremely solitary process. Even though I spent time with some amazing women for Plenty—my mom, a chef, a sommelier, a cheesemaker, a barge pilot—the actual writing happens solo. It’s just me and my laptop. It’s a very interior experience, hanging out in my own head and heart for sometimes excruciating stretches of time.
My talented writer friend Jessica Gross (who coauthored this really interesting story at Catapult about publishing a book with a small press) recommended Sheila Heti’s Podcast with Raisins, and Heti talks about this process in her most recent episode. Heti said that writing a book takes you inside of yourself, and then publishing a book takes you outside of yourself. They’re symbiotic parts of the whole experience that is The Book, but they’re also diametrically opposed.
One of the many weird silver linings of this horrible pandemic is my new friendship with the author Naima Coster, who has her second novel coming out next month. (It’s called What's Mine and Yours and you should pre-order it right now.) We were talking about the sort of surreal experience of launching a book, and she mentioned getting asked all these Big Questions. Naima’s novel touches on family, identity, race, and integration, and so interviewers are keen to know, “What is the legacy of school integration in America?” or “What is the future of North Carolina?” (where part of her book takes place) and, whew…it’s A LOT. Naima is an incredibly smart and thoughtful person, but she’s not some sort of guru.
I remember this experience with Feast. I wrote about my own eating disorder, so surely, I should know how to solve eating disorders, etc. I felt like I was letting people down a lot in these pre/post-pub conversations. I reminded myself that I shared my own experience in my memoir, and I wasn’t claiming any sort of expertise beyond my own journey. But still! The whole thing felt awkward and hard.
Naima told me how heartening it was to hear an interview with Jamaica Kincaid, where the beloved author, when faced with one of these meta questions, answered simply: “I don’t know.”
I don’t know!
I loved this insight from Elizabeth Gilbert, on her podcast Magic Lessons, for Britta Böhler. The former defense attorney in the Netherlands had a revelation in the yogurt aisle of her local grocery store on her 50th birthday. She always wanted to write, and it felt like now or never. She quit her job and gave herself a year to work on her first book. Her plan worked. Her novel The Decision had been marinating in her thoughts for years. It was exhilarating to put pen to paper and turn her dream into reality. Böhler found an agent and a publisher. The Decision received glowing reviews and was translated into several languages. Böhler couldn’t wait to dig into the meat of the work of her second novel.
More than two years later, Böhler felt stuck. “I’ve been struggling with the second book. I have a great idea, I start, and then after two or three months I don’t think it’s worth it. I put it away and try to work on something else. Same thing over and over…I keep thinking maybe one book was all I had.”
“You are simultaneously living the dream and facing the nightmare,” Gilbert responded. “You did the thing.” She went on tell Böhler:
Second books are harder than first books for a lot of reasons. One is that there’s a whole different level of expectation now. There were no expectations on this first project that you created purely out of passion, in your own mind when you were totally alone, and nobody was watching. This was an act of love and an act of inspiration. Acts of love and inspiration are wholly spiritual and magical things, and they don’t happen often.
All of this stuff accumulated, and you could act from a place of pure devotional aspiration and creative curiosity—I want to make a thing, it may or may not work. I don’t have a book deal…
The first thing that you make is born with a very private and very quiet communion between you and inspiration and love. The second thing you make is a public event. You’re expected to make a shift from someone who acts out of a place of inspiration to someone who has a job…you were liberated from having a job, and now you have a job again.
I think this also applies to the place between my unwieldy Word Doc and the galleys showing up in a very heavy box at my apartment, during which time the project goes from a private thing to a public thing. A thing of inspiration to a thing I’m trying to hustle and sell.
It’s like growing a baby in your body for 9 months and then the baby is suddenly on the outside, in the world, completely separate from you.
I genuinely enjoy talking about my work—after all, I write books because I want to share them with readers. But this “outside yourself” experience brings its own set of challenges.
For me this is also a time of enormous anxiety. All my old insecurities bubble up: Nobody will care. The whole thing massively sucks. You get the gist.
I think it’s a time to keep reading, which reminds me of the magic of words and stories. And keep writing.
PS My Tara French binge continues! I have two more of her novels to read, and then I will be finished and need new books.
PPS You can pre-order Plenty here, which would mean a whole lot to me.