How We’re Really Doing

Hey. Are you doing okay?

I wanted to give some space here to talk about the loss of Gabe Hudson, who was a friend and inspiration to so many of us. If you were a listener to Gabe’s podcast, Kurt Vonnegut Radio, you know how positive and generous he was to other writers. He was always reaching out to check in with people, and so it was a real shock to learn he’d taken his own life.

If you’ve read my debut novel, you know I have a book’s worth of feelings about suicide. And writers, it seems, can be especially vulnerable to feeling as if they’re always failing, collecting rejections, and trying to explain to others why they’re not finished with their latest project. Add war, politics, holidays, and the stress can feel overwhelming. So I wanted to check in with you.

How are you managing? Are you doing okay?

I pulled myself off of social media a while back and it’s caused me to pay more attention to people in the real world. Rather than talking online to everyone all at once, I’m meeting with friends face-to-face, one person at a time. It’s amazing how different it feels to just have a cup of soup with a friend. Just the undivided attention and how there’s space for silence, for breath, for all the non-verbal ways we communicate. I don’t know why it matters so much but those little things, like trying to get a waiter’s attention or wind blowing a napkin off the table or a bird preening nearby, turn out to be important. And if your friend’s not doing well, it’s easier to see that or to make space for them to say so when you’re hanging out in person.

A little over a month ago, my family and I were invited to Carnegie Mellon to support the new, endowed fellowship in my dad’s name. It was a very sweet event, attended by his friends and colleagues, who shared their memories him. Imagine having to speak after a number of Turing Award winners and pioneers in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the internet. Very humbling! You can see the speeches (including mine) at this link. (It runs an hour and a half, and the speakers go in this order: Raj Reddy, Vint Cerf, Jim Morris, Cindy Lawrence, Takeo Kanade, Jared Cohon, Bob Kahn, Mark Kamlet, Bill Scherlis, Larry Druffel, Martial Hebert, me, and Alex Weibel. My speech starts at 1:10:57 and goes to 1:17:49.)

Anyway, I mention all of this because writing that speech for my dad reminded me of a lot of the simple things in life we used to do together. Simple things I’m trying to consciously make more space for and hold with as much importance as my career. My dad, despite whatever fancy business he was working on, stopped and took joy from the free things we could enjoy any time. He loved long and mostly silent walks. He loved when I tagged along to mail a letter. He loved to cook soup together or check out the farmer’s market. There was always time to play fetch with a dog or snip something in the vegetable garden. And while I work on my book every day, I’m careful not to lose sight of these important little things.

We’ve been taking friends and family to see live soccer games. And I’ve been trying to limit how much news I watch and replace any TV time with some good fiction. We’re loving the series, Reservation Dogs. And we watched a great, low-budget zombie comedy with the kids last time they were home. It’s written and directed by Shin’ichirō Ueda, and this is the link to the trailer, but it’s better to watch it not knowing a thing about it.

And I’m happy I got some time with the newest little ones in our family tree.

I had two mini writer retreats lately—one with my friend, Jessica Keener. We crashed at her brother’s for a long weekend and it was beautiful and quiet and we wrote and walked and I read her chapters from her beautiful novel so she could hear her writing as I do.

And I spent a second long weekend with Georgia Clarke and company in the Catskills. I work so much in isolation, so it’s a real gift to see how everything about the work changes when you have company. Some of us talked about having Zoom work sessions, not to talk but just to hold each other accountable for how we’re spending our time.

If you ask me how the book’s going, I can say I love this book. It’s going at its own pace and it’s got magical bits in it and I have no idea when I’ll think it’s done or what it will look like in the end. But I’m enjoying the process, and that’s different for me.

I’m trying to remember—both for myself and my friends—that this is not a race. That life is not on pause while we toil away on a book. And before we’re writers or teachers or students or whatever, we’re humans. So, today, check in with a friend and check in with yourself… just as a human.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

Kiese Laymon, Heavy

Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife

Hernan Diaz, Trust

John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

Jill Bialosky, Asylum

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Elizabeth Crane, This Story Will Change

Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage

GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

Elana Ferrante, Troubling Love

Emma Cline, The Girls

Josh Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Percival Everett, So Much Blue

Laura Dave, Hello, Sunshine

Bryony Gordon, Mad Girl

Amy Kurzweil, The Flying Couch

Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See

Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship

Diana Goetsch, This Body I Wore

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

Sara Gran, Come Closer

Bassey Ikpi, I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying: Essays

Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine

Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds

McCracken, Elizabeth, The Giant’s House: A Romance

Sarah Audsley, Landlock X

Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

Zain Khalid, Brother Alive

Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble

Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao

R.J. Palacio, Wonder

Jennifer Baker, Forgive Me Not

A.S. King, Dig

Robin Benway, Far from the Tree

Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

Elizabeth Strout, Oh, William!

Matt Bell, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

Rachel Cantor, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, Innards

Maggie Smith, Keep Moving

Ali Smith, Autumn

Mona Awad, Bunny

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

Colleen Hoover, Heart Bones

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables

Julia Heaberlin, We Are All the Same in the Dark

Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

Damon Young, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

 

And a few re-reads (usually this means I’m studying something—POV, pace, transitions, prologues, magic):

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 

 

Comments are open, and I’d like to hear from you. Tell me what you’re up to, what struggles or joys you want to share—big or small. And if you have any wisdom about bringing balance to your day or making headway on a long project, I’m all ears. Mostly, hi and thanks for being here.