life is like an enormous pavlova

pub day, plans!

Hello friends—

Instead of working on my novel, I am writing to you because yesterday, May 23, The Late Americans was released. It’s my third book, and I think it represents a real step forward at the level of craft and storytelling and discursive and intellectual sophistication. I grew up, basically. As an artist. As a person, I am still childish. One time, my grandpa said to me, “You ain’t raised yet.” I was in college which in my mind meant that I was fully grown. “You ain’t raised yet,” he said. And I said, “Well, that’s your daughter’s fault.” And he said, “Yeah, I know. She ain’t raised either.” So I am aware of my ongoing non-adultness as a person. But as an artist, I think I’m getting there.

The book is out. Tonight, May 24, I will be in Brooklyn at St. Joseph’s on Clinton Street to talk about the novel with Isaac Butler, who I think is really cool. He wrote this amazing book called The Method, which in my mind is a biography of method acting. He won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction this year, which was most pleasing to me. I loved that book because it also served as a biography of hot dirtbag bf Konstantin Stanislavski. And it’s a very enjoyable read about a subject that feels ubiquitous but also poorly understood. You should check it out.

Today, May 24, I will be participating in a Twitter Space with Esquire to discuss the book as it is their Book Club pick for this month! How exciting! Join. Tomorrow I get on a train for DC. Come out!

I’m honestly very grateful for the way the book has been engaged so far. Publishing a book is always a little baffling because, to me at least, there’s always this element of being misunderstood or misread no matter how generous the person is being. And that makes sense. You wrote the book out of a particular set of attitudes, feelings, sensations, and ideas that were totally singular to you at the moment of creation. And the reader is coming to the text with their own set of attitudes, feelings, sensations, and ideas at the moment of reading, and they are performing some kind of function upon this thing you’ve made. For me, I’ve learned to stop looking for the shape of myself in how other people read me. I used to have this feeling that I would just write and figure out what I wanted to say by looking at my reflection in other people’s reading of me. And for some people, that is totally fine. Beautiful even. But in my own experience, that has been quite damaging. So I’ve ended up in a place where, a reader’s reading is theirs and my reading is mine. And once the book goes into someone else’s life, that’s their business. What goes on between the reader and the book is their own private affair.

Coming around to this idea was very helpful to me as I made the transition from a person who wrote mostly in private to being a person who wrote things that other people would go out and read. Early on in that transition, I kept coming up against a sense of being watched while I was drafting. Or worse, performing, aping about and trying to show my detractors that I could do this or that. For a while, I kind of lost the joy of writing because suddenly, there was a sea of faces pressed to the glass, cooing at me, trying to see if they could get me to do a thing. Of course, there were no actual faces. People weren’t actively trying to make me do anything. But I felt that way. I had internalized a gallery of reproachful faces that smirked and sneered at every word I wrote. That was particularly harmful during the editing and revision of The Late Americans. I found myself unable to write because I had all these doubts about writing a novel in which there are people who want to make art or express themselves. I had doubts as to the “relatability” of their problems because I had been told and I had seen on social media that the cool and ironic people who go to bars and get other people to buy their drinks thought that to write about my particular milieu or place is not worthy, that we should all be writing…something else, undefined at the moment. And I believed that because I am a person who does what he is told. And I almost stopped writing. I did stop writing, in truth, for a year and a half. I took up photography. I’ve already told this story a bunch, so I won’t belabor it. But, for a long time, I was very miserable about this project. And then I decided that I would just get on with my life and write the book that I wanted to read about the kinds of people and things I wanted to read about.

Sometimes it is that simple.

So the book is done and out and in the world and you can buy it at your local bookstore or digital retailer of preference. You can get it from libraries and as an audiobook if that is more your thing. Any way you want to read it is fine. If you don’t want to read it, that is also fine. That’s your business.

Last night, to celebrate the book coming out, I went to dinner with a friend. I wanted to eat branzino. We ate and it was so good. And then we ordered a comically large dessert. In my defense, it did not know that it would be so big. I was imagining something small, delicate. It was a creamsicle pavlova. So it was orange and cold but also warm but also creamy but also gritty? My friend and I kept staring at each other after each bite, wondering about the textural journey we were on. It was so good, and yet a total mystery. Every bite was a different combination. There were citrus fruits and also strawberries in it. Who ever heard of such a thing.

I am not a person who celebrates things. I am trying to become a person who celebrates things, but for most of my life, I hid away from good news. For a portion of time in my twenties, I was sort of on and off with someone who got really upset whenever something good happened around my writing, so I started concealing that too. It’s always felt that whenever something good happens to me, that something bad must happen too in order to even out things. I think it comes from Baptist fatalism. But when my friend asked me a while ago what I would be doing to celebrate my pub day, I kind of stared at him and wondered what he meant. Why would I celebrate something nice. Why would I invite the potential for horrible vengeance from the universe by being happy about reaching a milestone. It seemed the height of irresponsibility.

But I agreed to go to dinner and it was really nice. I felt for the first time in a long time, maybe my life, a real weightless joy. Like, a nice thing happened. My book came out. I was unreservedly happy, pleased. I ate the branzino. I ate the spicy Brussels sprouts. The gnocchi with cheese. The enormous pavlova. We talked about books and gossiped about people who seem so gleeful to become my enemies. And then we walked back to my apartment. I gave him a book. We gossiped some more. Made a plan to race in writing our novels again. And at the end of the night, we goodbye and I watched Grantchester, which I call Slutty Vicar. Then I wrote a little more and went to sleep.

Of the three American pub days that I have had, it was by far the easiest and the most pleasant. I didn’t feel like I had to barf a single time. I think a large part of the chill I felt was that I had already made my peace with the book. I had already gone to the darkest, harshest place I could go, read the book in the least generous light I could summon, and I had asked every bad faith, ugly, harsh question I could think of. And the book had answers for those questions. I think at the end of the day, this novel answers those questions, and it stands on its own. And the calm I feel is the calm that comes from having done the work.

The rest is the reader, and that’s none of my business.

b

Some further reading if you are interested:

I took Elle Magazine’s ShelfLife questionnaire. Find out all the juice answers.

I spoke to Vanity Fair about the novel and mediocre TV shows y’all love.

Chatted with Esquire about the novel in advance of our Twitter Space convo today.

Interviewed with Shondaland for this piece about the novel and writing about class

Also, some great reviews for the novel appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe.

Also appeared on a couple podcasts:

LOVED talking to Miwa Messer for the B&N podcast Poured Over and it got SPICY

Talked to Jaylen Lopez on Reading the Room about thinky white lady books and form