very important writing advice by me, jen
First: Don’t daydream about being famous, not when you’re still writing. Write your story pretending like that’s not even a possibility, and then fling it away from you. Send it into the world and pretend it never happened. Otherwise, you won’t get through any of the next bits. The ones with where you’re at all of their mercy, for good or ill.
But it really does start out pretty nice.
I had written a memoir proposal — a story about the fairy tale of weight loss, and what an ugly, terrible lie it is, the story they sell you about how being thin solves all your problems and grants you ahappily ever after you’re supposed to drift daintily into, nibbling low-fat wheat thins and always smiling. No, my book was about thinking I was alone, when I realized I had lost a couple hundred pounds and my problems weren’t solved — yet. Realizing that I was so much more than finally-thin, and about girding my loins to go find a real kind of happiness that meant something.
For over a year and a half editors said right, but how is this different from all the other weight loss memoirs? The part where there’s no happily ever after, I said. Right, so how are we supposed to sell a weight loss book without a happy ending? It’s not a weight loss book I said. Right, so what is it then?
So I sighed and said YOU KNOW WHAT, FINE and just gritted my teeth and wrote the damn thing.
THERE THAT’LL SHOW THEM, I said. HA HA HA, I added.
The manuscript went back out into the world, back to the skeptical publishers and the confused publishers and the suspicious publishers and around to anyone else we had possibly missed the first time.
More waiting. The waiting feels like it’ll never end. That’s maybe my most important piece of advice: Publishing is glacial. The pre-climate-crisis kind of glaciar, I mean.
But it finally happened, and it happened when I was in a Target in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had a shopping basket over one arm and was flipping through a rack of sale cardigans — too young, too young, too weird, too young, why is greige still a real colour.
The phone rang — my phone never rang — so I fumbled with it a bit and when I got it up to my ear, my agent was saying, “Jen? Jen? Did you hear me? They want it!”
I said,
“What?”
“They want it!” she said.
“Want
what?” I said. I dropped my basket. There was a pair of leggings in it, and my
wallet. I watched the basket tip over on the navy speckled carpet.
The manuscript had been picked up, she said. An editor I loved at a small press I loved wanted it.
“What?” I said.
Very slowly, very patiently, she said, “Seal Press is buying your manuscript,” and then suddenly I was on the floor of the Target, hunched over my tumbled-over basket of leggings and weeping, my face stretched into a terror-mask of glistening mascara tears and the inside of my head pounding yellow.
“Miss, are you okay?” a Target employee asked me, crouching down several feet away. I was hugging the leggings in my arms. I was making monkey noises into the phone.
I looked up at her. I clutched the phone to my chest. “I’m so happy!” I wailed. She left me alone.
Publication is supposed pure happiness for a writer. It’s validation, right? It’s the holy grail. It’s the holy grail of validation and I don’t know any writer who really means it when they say, Oh, I write for myself, full stop. I mean, they might. And I bless them and their purity.
I wanted to be published because it’s what I had wanted from the time I had walked by the Random House offices in midtown manhattan, hand in hand with my dad, and recognized those silver words spelled out on the building, on the front doors, from the spine of a book at home.
“Oh!” my dad said. “Yeah, that’s where they make books.”
“THEY MAKE BOOKS?” I said. Apparently I had thought you found them under a bush or in the damp confines of clouds after a rainbow.
My father patiently explained that authors were people who made up stories which were brought to the publishing houses by storks or something – he was unclear on the entire byzantine publishing process, as most humans are – and then voila! We’re reading Little Women at bedtime again and as usual you’re getting really angry about Jo selling her hair.
“That one,” I said to him. “I want to be that one.” A person who made books.
And even though I didn’t actually ever finish even the shortest short story until I was almost thirty, that conviction lodged like a splinter in my heart all those years, wobbling every beat of it. It still does. I want to be that one. On the floor of a suburban Target, I realized that I finally was that one.
And I was so unprepared for what that meant. Or no – I wasn’t naive. I knew exactly what that meant, every possibility that I could encounter as a writer; I just had forgotten to think about it because I couldn’t keep all of it in my head at once, while I was writing a draft, because otherwise I would be writing this from beyond the grave.
But still, the thing I was most unprepared for was how I would react once I finally let myself imagine what it really truly meant to have, specifically, a memoir on the shelves. A true story, hand to god. A book that, from cover to cover, ripped open and spilled out all the tarry, sticky, factory-seconds and -thirds and -fourths parts of me. That asked you to look over this collection of mistakes and mishaps, fuckups and misdeeds, and like me any way.
Oh, I
stopped sleeping, once the final copy edits were in and the next step was hard
copies, sold in stores for cash money, to anyone who could pony up. But I also
knew all those dreams authors have, about being a bestseller, about going on
Oprah, about winning the Man Booker and the Pulitzer in the same year and etc.
all have about the same odds as lightning strikes or humans being alone in the
universe.
Don’t panic – but also don’t sell yourself short. That’s the other thing.
The month before the official publication date, my agent called me. I was in a nail salon in Green Bay, Wisconsin, visiting my oldest friends – the ones who knew me at my heaviest, who worried with me before during and after surgery. Who told me that a memoir would for sure be the coolest thing ever.
My agent said, “Okay, are you sitting down?” and I wasn’t, but it didn’t matter because she kept going. She started screaming, actually. “PEOPLE MAGAZINE. YOU WERE REVIEWED IN PEOPLE MAGAZINE.”
“Oh,” I said, sliding down the wall.
It was a good review, the one on the lead page, too, and more reviews came out, because I had the world’s best publicist, let me be clear. There were requests for radio and print interviews, and then the book was published and Good Morning America found me and there was no time to think, because I had to cut out of work on my first day at a new job and sprint home to meet their camera crew.
They showed up with a van of equipment, told me not to be nervous, that this would be fun, and could I maybe turn off that buzzing noise coming from the kitchen while they set up their – and they gestured at the piles of television things that apparently had to be set up.
The timer on the 50’s-era stove had been broken so long I didn’t even notice any more, but I raced into the kitchen and started pounding on it. I had pulled out a hammer when the camera operator came up behind me and said “Hey, whoa!”
He called in the whole crew and they crowded around us. They muttered at each other. He said to me, “Don’t worry about this, okay? You just go focus on being a big TV star.” He patted my shoulder, and he shooed me away.
The buzzing
had stopped by the time I emerged from the bathroom, dry-eyed and ready to face
what I had wanted all along. What I had brought on myself.
I thought I did – well, fine. Actually, I have no idea, because I have never watched or listened to a single interview I’ve ever done, because that way lies madness. Probably I’d be better at them if I had, but was erring on the side of self-care. But I lived through it, and that was enough for me.
The segment aired the next morning. They called it, “Woman Loses 200 Pounds, Still Miserable.”
I looked at
that headline, and I covered my face and I wasn’t sure if I was going to laugh
until I died or die of embarrassment or a little bit of both, because really,
that’s how this book was going to get distilled? That’s how this whole complex
mess of feels and doubts and worries and figurings-it-out was going to come
across?
Once your book is loose in the world, you have no control over where it goes, or who sees it. Who sees it, or what they say about it. What they say about it, and what they want from you. Don’t read your reviews; they’re none of your business and anyway, the good ones won’t even leave a mark.
Pick up when your bikini waxer calls to yell, “I SAW YOU ON THE FRONT PAGE OF YAHOO,” but do not look at the comments on the article. Turn off your laptop and walk away when you are told by a reliable source that there’s an entire forum of people ripping you to shreds for being a whiny, self-aggrandizing little bitch who didn’t do the surgery right, is a terrible role model, can’t even write a sentence and anyway, Brenda, your story is way more inspiring, you should have been the one who wrote a book.
Freak out when someone from the Oprah network calls, and say yes without thinking because you’ll think yourself to death. Don’t watch that show when it airs either. But at every opportunity, make sure you tell the story about the incredibly ripped camera guy who stripped his shirt off every time before the camera started rolling, to help you relax.
Writing is hard, and publishing is weird, and publicity is exhausting, and confusing, and dumb and so is publishing. Because you know, all that was great but my second book – it sank, as they say, like a stone. My next publishing house was a big one with a million other titles coming out at the same time, and mine just wasn’t that important, and that’s how it goes. Lots of younger readers thought it was too complicated. A reviewer thought it was ugly-simple-ignorant, the way I had written the fat main character, because what did I know about being fat? OBVIOUSLY NOTHING. And etc., and so on, and then, and then, and then.
You have no control over anything but the writing. You have no control over anything but the truth in all of its capitalizations, in fiction and in non-. You have nothing else, and it’s enough. So then you just go from there, as best you can.
