One night in April, I dream of a friend from middle school. She’s sitting on a concrete rooftop. I join her even though I’m supposed to be at work. In the dream I think, I might not see her again. This is more important than work. Sitting crossed-legged with her, overlooking the city, I’m bundled in a cotton-candied joy, the kind only available in dreams. The happiness ballooning in my chest would surely pop in real life, but in my sleep it floats and floats.

This friend, like me, was a fire sign. These things are important. She had olive skin that shone oily even in winter, dark brown waves, a Leo’s temper. We’d listen to music on her clunky third-generation iPod in 8th grade homeroom, Daddy Yankee and Soulja Boy, while she manically rapped along in Spanish and English. At our rich private school, two girls of color in a cloud of white, I held onto her like a life raft. That is to say, a little desperately.

I wake from the dream heavy-headed with a dark, crushed feeling. I realize I’m mourning our friendship even though it ended fifteen years ago. This is not the last dream I’ll have that spring about girl friends I’ve lost. I wonder what they’re trying to tell me a decade too late.

The next morning, I tell the dream to my mom. “Yeah, I don’t get it,” she says. Like clockwork, we call each other at 8:30am while we make our breakfast. Her coffee rumbles in the background like an upset stomach. My mom is the queen of female friendships. She’s 63. Her longest friendship is almost as old as she is.

My mom is a riotously funny, practical Capricorn with an impatient edge. “It’s WORK,” she snaps when I ask how she’s maintained her friendships for so long. “And they get on my fucking nerves half the time! You get on my nerves too. But I love you. I’m committed to you.”

She has dozens of letters from girlfriends dating back to the 1970s, when she was a teenager. She lets me dig through the box where they’re stored in Ziploc bags labeled and sorted by name.

A handwritten one from my Auntie C.J. begins with a mistake. January 1979 is crossed out for a correction: 1980, a little oops! scribbled beside it:

“Hey girl, what-up? I am still bugging about you and Steve!! Cheryl told me all about y’all. How did she find out? I have a few quick bullet points hot off the press: 1. David is a fuck!! I am never, I mean N-E-V-E-R, going back to his ass!!”

C.J flies through a dozen other bullet points: a guy asked her to dance at the “cabaret” the night before. “And I did!! :(” she writes. Another guy asked her to see a play with him: “And I stood him up!!”

The last time Auntie C.J was in town, I heard her rummaging through my mom’s kitchen over the phone — our beloved overbearing New Yorker. “Peri!” she called. “Why don’t you have any pots or pans?” They’ve been friends for 44 years.

Sorting through the letters, my mom and I stumble across a tiny handmade card. The cover has a felt frog with glued-on googly eyes. It’s also from January 1980. “Sorry I missed your birthday, it would have been nice to spend it together! Happy 19 years and may you live to see 81 more!! Love, C.J.”

“You see how creative she is.” My mom rattles the card so the frog’s googly eyes spin, laughing. “And guess what? It has been 81 years since she wrote this.”

Auntie C.J, like my mom, is a Capricorn. These things are important.

I bumped into my childhood friend, S., in a bar stairwell a few years ago. We’d been best friends from second grade all the way up to our senior year of high school. Standing on opposite ends of the staircase, we froze, blinking to reset our eyes in the poor lighting.

“It’s you.”

We hugged, not saying much. She was going back to New York soon. I told her to please keep in touch. We swapped numbers. I sent her a message that night with my name and a red heart. Two days later, I told her I’d love to see her before she left and, if not, asked again if we could please stay in touch.

She never responded, my desperation a sticky mess on our phone screens.

This friendship was different from the others. S. and I were best-best friends, pinky-swears, tell-me-everything, up late giggling on a school night, “you’re my best friend,” best friends. The kind made for movies. Our friendship was different, too, because it’s the only one to end with a fight.

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That May, I dream of one of my friends from 3rd grade. I can’t remember what happens in the dream, only that the friendship is falling apart and I’m too young to understand how to save it, a ship filling with water unable to find a hole to stuff.

This friend had vampire-pale skin, blue veins, the kind of blonde lashes you could see through. It was with her that I learned I wasn’t white, a valuable lesson. We sang, “Kids in America,” in her carpeted basement, rehearsing for talent shows. She was bossy and tiny with fine wisps of hair that were hardly there in the light.

I live less than a block away from her childhood home. Her family was part Irish and when I think of her, I think of her mom’s accent, how it hit my young ears at just the right angle. I remember her mischievous little brother, the pasta dinners, the never wanting to go home.

I pass their old house at the top of a jagged hill often. I have no idea if they still live there. Sometimes, I dream of knocking on the door and finding out.

My mom shows me letters from a friend of hers I never met. “She was a Jewish girl with the kind of curly hair you killed for,” she says. “It was like…what’s her name from Sex & The City? Like Carrie Bradshaw’s.”

Jess wrote my mom incessantly from summer camp when they were 14 and 15. She was sleeping-away in Georgia while my mom was back in D.C.

June, 1975

“Hi Perita, I’m at camp now. I’m swimming and there are girls here who have to wash their hair every day. Did you go see Jaws? If you did, who was there and don’t tell me what it was like (the movie). How are Zoe’s puppies? Are you going to get one? Fill me in, girl. You better write me back, honey child.”

I noticed flowers scrawled in pen on the envelope. “She was artsy,” my mom explains. “Always drawing these little flowers.”

In her letters, Jess flaunts a naked excitement, a feverish need: to speak to each other, to dish everything, to write and be written back.

June, 1974

“I got your letter today. Also Dan wrote me…I think you deserved better than a C+ in art. I don’t know my grades but it’s not hard to guess all Fs! You’ll probably start your period before me!”

P.S WRITE BACK please.

July, 1975

“It is about time you wrote back!!!!!!!!!! One of my counselors is always borrowing stuff! On her day off she borrowed a dress from a girl in cabin 9…when I came in the cabin once she said, ‘Oh, Jess, by the way I borrowed a little alcohol, okay?’ She used a ton!!”

My mom stands over me in the dining room, slowly drawn back into her childhood. “Ew, I remember Dan! I had the biggest crush on him. But he liked Jess. I don’t know why she didn’t like him back.”

Nostalgia has a dash of danger in it. Was the past really better or does it just feel that way when I’m standing all the way back here? I’m not naive. As a teenager, adulthood looks pretty great when you don’t have a car or are being told to do the dishes. It looks pretty bad when you’re an adult who still doesn’t have a car and is always doing the dishes. What I’m trying to say: I’m wary of romanticizing what’s in the rearview mirror, memories that are no doubt distorted, closer than they appear. Yet, I can’t help but read my mom’s letters and remember what it was like to have these small, simple desires: to play, to chit-chat, to scream-laugh, to ‘oh my Gawd, you’re joking!’ until the end of time. In other words, to be together.

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I spent large swathes of elementary and middle school at my cousin’s house. A ground-floor, two-bedroom apartment that squeezed inside of it a family of four. It was with her that I learned about class, how people can be in the same family and have none of the same privileges.

We were almost-tomboys, playing racing games on her Xbox, the controller greasy from the fried chicken her mom made us from scratch. We stayed up way too late watching Cartoon Network, sucked into the waking nightmares of Courage the Cowardly Dog and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.

During sleepovers in the summer, we’d lie on the floor on our backs in the dark telling stories, always romances involving our crushes, an endless well of scenarios we reached our hands into. It was with her that I became a storyteller.

In 4th grade, I wrote a book about S. for school. She was a ballet dancer, so I wrote a story about a ballerina with her name. Ever the artist, I designed a cover for the book by cutting and painting construction paper in the image of a little Black ballerina wearing a pink leotard, her hair in a bun. I didn’t think it weird to write a book about her, to get it spiral-bound, to spend so much time on it. The story wasn’t even about our friendship, it was just about her. She must not have thought it weird either because I read it to the class. I don’t recall anyone else’s reaction, only how excited I was to show it to her.

S. was tall and lithe with an upturned nose and slits for eyes. We had the same caramel complexion and midnight-black hair. We were on a hip-hop dance team comically called the “Dark Shadows.” In high school, we’d hole ourselves up in the since-shuttered Cosi’s sandwich shop in Dupont Circle. I knew her number by heart. In the age of smartphones, that meant something.

“I used to hear you two giggling all through the night in your room, teeheehee!” my mom says to me now. “I was like, what in the world are they laughing about??”

The worst part is I can’t even remember.

Over the years, the tone of the letters from my Auntie C.J to my mom matures. No more, David is a fuck!! at least not in writing. Phones became a thing. They had kids, weathered divorces, deaths. The boys disappear from the letters, a gratitude for each other rising in their absence. I start to appear in them, too:

January, 2007

“Thank you so much for coming to N.Y and spending time with us. Our visits over the last few years have felt so rushed and I miss spending time! You should start planning for Sag Harbor? I had such great fun at the party...when you and H. come up again, we’ll plan a few trips.”

May, 2016

“Thank you for years of counseling. You have saved me time and time again…thank you for all you have done, will do, and are doing! :)”

The last message is tucked inside a lavender Mother’s Day card. On the cover it reads, The Best Mom and Friend A Girl Could Ask For.

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The cousin with whom I once traded stories came to a housewarming I threw. We hadn’t seen each other in seven years. What I remember about that night is how much she laughed. Not the way people laugh when things are funny but when they want to be liked, accommodating. As a kid, she suffered in ways I’d only learn about later. Her mom and my uncle had long since separated. She was at the party along with two of our other childhood friends. It’d been over a decade since we’d all been together. S. wasn’t there.

They brought me bottles of wine, sweet housewarming gifts. What did I do with these generous tokens of friendship? Drowned myself with the wine and threw myself dizzy at a guy who, by the morning, wouldn’t even be speaking to me.

While everyone played cards on my couch, I took the guy to my room. One of my college friends, a no-nonsense Scorpio, opened my door. “You’re being rude,” she said. I was so drunk I didn’t even hear the door clicking when they all left.

A part of me feels like I don’t get to mourn friendships I’d forgotten. I never fought for them, let them slip from my fingers like a hair tie I had a million of at home. I was always ready to move on: to middle school, to high school, to college, leaving a trail of girls in my wake.

My mom’s longest friendship is with my Auntie P. They grew up across the street from each other in a mixed-income Southeast D.C neighborhood in the 60s. They’ve been friends since they were five. There are fewer letters from Auntie P.

January 1985

“I had to write you before the semester got too outrageous! How are things in New Orleans? I was chilling out here listening to jazz and remembered I had to send something to my aunt. I decided to write to you quickly too! You know I don’t write.”

Auntie P. goes on to talk about a guy she’s dating. “I like him, but he’s an Aries so I don’t trust him.” (Maybe this is where I get my astrology preoccupation from). As we sit at the kitchen table in my mom’s house, she tells me that back then, everyone had their signature stationery. You always knew who a letter was from simply by looking at the designs.

I hold Auntie P’s stationary in my hands. It has a drawing of a little girl holding a watering can, standing in a bed of flowers. Beside her it says, In my Garden of Friendship You’ll Bloom Forever.

S. and I wanted to be actresses. In most of our school’s productions, we snagged leading roles. Singing solos in Godspell. Leading parts in Schoolhouse Rock. There’s a tape of us somewhere from 2006, caked makeup sweating off our faces, cavorting across the stage as Dina and Shulie in homemade costumes.

She was a soprano with a shattering squeal. I was an alto with a dismal range but who could belt out a song. These theatrics followed us offstage. We were always making sounds: cat sounds, baby sounds, a strange impulse to make noises out of nowhere that I carry to this day, an impulse I found with her.

Our junior year, my acting teacher chose me to accompany her to a T.V pilot audition. The audition was that same afternoon. I miraculously got a callback.

I remember exactly where I was when I called S. to tell her. It was late spring, the city overrun with rush hour traffic. I was walking to the Foggy Bottom metro station, cutting across George Washington’s campus. Her response confused me: “You know I want to act,” she snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me about the audition?” I tried to explain that I’d just found out about it even though this wasn’t the conversation I wanted to be having. Where was her excitement for me, with me? By this point, she’d left school to be homeschooled for medical reasons that remain a mystery. I resented her for leaving me to wander the hallways of our magnet school alone, fretting over where to sit at lunch, waiting for the final bell.

It never occurred to me what it was like for her, watching me move forward while her future stalled, like a car breaking down on the shoulder of the road.

Out of the dozens of letters in my mom’s collection, there’s only one in her voice. That’s because it was never sent.

August, 1978

Dear Jess,

“Hi! It’s really good to hear from you! I remember you telling me you were going to be a counselor this year. That sounds like fun. Do you get paid much? Guess what?! I finally got my driver’s license and almost didn’t make it. I was so nervous, but I passed with a 77. Parking was what messed me up. I also got contact lenses…Jess, can you actually believe that this is our last year of high school!!? Next year we’ll be going to college. It’s kind of scary especially since I don’t know where I want to go and have absolutely no idea what I want to do. Oh, well. Write back.

I asked my mom about her oddly formal tone to Jess in this letter, so different from Jess’ delirious one in her letters to my mom.

“We’d gotten more distant,” she says. “That’s why it wasn’t sent.”

There’s nothing sad in her voice. She’s matter-of-fact. These lost friendships can feel like a litany of lovers you recite to fall asleep, as bloodless as counting sheep. Other times their endings feel like ellipses, like sentences that didn’t have to end.

The story of my and S.’s falling out is strange to me now. She, my cousin, and I went to a psychic the winter of our senior year. I cannot remember why. We’d never gone before. But I always look back on this moment, unnerved, and wonder, a bit superstitiously, if the trip had dragged something dark to the surface.

We were city kids. This was before Uber so we took the metro everywhere. Everything started because I had to be home by a certain time and S. lied about when the train was coming. We hung out for an extra twenty minutes, waiting before we walked to the station. She admitted to lying with a smirk. We would’ve had no idea had she not done this. I got in trouble at home for being late. It seems small, but it sent me over a cliff.

The next few months were wretched. We tried to work it out. Or I should say, she tried to work it out. I was a door shutting myself to her. Our mom’s talked on the phone about it. We’d been friends for a decade, so it wasn’t surprising our parents got involved. My mom told hers to stop calling the house.

“That’s one of my biggest regrets,” my mom tells me. “Not helping you mend that friendship.”

I was leaving for college that fall. For health reasons, S. wasn’t. I see now that though we were the kind of best friends who “told each other everything,” there was a lot we weren’t saying.

When I missed her 18th birthday party, the friendship broke beyond repair. She didn’t call again. The saddest part of this story is that S. had lied about the train all because she wasn’t ready for us to leave.

I have female friends now who, to be clear, I adore. But none carry the intensity, the needy intimacy, of my childhood friendships. Not since S. have I been that close to another woman, as if that loss foreclosed the possibility.

At 28, my closest relationships are with men.1 Funny, bright, generous men. But it’s not the same. Part of me worries I’m leaning too heavily on gender though, idealizing what, in the end, amounts to stereotypes. The giggling, the secret-sharing, the big open love. Anyone could have that. There were girls growing up who were cruel. Boys I laughed with until my stomach hurt. A host of people who broke this binary altogether.

Maybe it’s that girlhood is a kind of war, your girlfriends your allies in arms. Womanhood is still war, you’re just better at fighting alone. Maybe “female friendship” is just a stand-in for any friendship that speaks to the soul, that understands exactly what it’s going through.

“You forget that your grandmother was the actual queen of female friendships,” my mom says, shuffling into the kitchen.

I had forgotten this. My grandma’s been gone for eight years, but when my mom says this, I recall her large troupe of girlfriends, how they doted over me. Even after she passed, one of those friends was the realtor who helped me buy my first home. A few summers ago, another had her 91st birthday party; my mom and I drove five hours to attend it.

Her oldest friendship was with a gorgeous woman named Reida that lasted over seventy years. There’s a sepia-toned photo of them at boarding school, sitting together on a bed. On the back of my grandma’s funeral program, my mom included this line:

“The family would like to thank those who made the difficult years of Jackie’s later life easier for her and our family, including her close-knit circle of girlfriends.”

After my grandma passed, Reida sent my mom a letter. She wrote, “I consider myself fortunate to have had Jackie as a friend…I loved her. Her passing has left a void in my life.”

As we carefully fold up the letters, slipping them into their Ziploc bags, I thank my mom for sharing them with me. “I saved them for you,” she says. Buried beneath her impatience is a lot of softness. My mom: my best girlfriend.

She lingers on a letter from Jess. Later, when she reads the part of this essay where I note there’s no sadness in her voice when she told me she and Jess had grown distant, her expression breaks apart. “That was a total defense I had up. I don’t feel matter-of-fact at all. Reading this made me remember how I never wrote her back.” Her voice cracks. “I’m actually about to cry.”

I experienced the same surprise swell of emotion writing this, like finally finding the hole in the sinking ship where all the water is coming through. It took nothing to conjure up these memories, to remember the tiny details: eyelash colors, star signs, the songs we danced to, sang to. The stories we made for each other, spiralbound with a brash and blistering love.

After every dream I had, I felt ashamed for forgetting about the girls who were the scaffolding of my childhood. I see now that dreaming is a different kind of remembering. I see that I haven’t forgotten a thing.

My mom stares at the dining room table, the letters packed away in her clear purple box. I’m spending the night: a sleepover of sorts. Suddenly, she remembers something she saw about Jess on Facebook and laughs. “Guess what she does now?” I guess and I’m wrong.

“She’s a yoga instructor on Capitol Hill.” My mom pauses. “I think I’m gonna call her up actually.”

I don’t know how to get back what’s gone. I’m not the brave little girl gluing her heart out to make a mirror for her friend between the construction paper pages of a book. But what I’ve learned from my mom’s letters is that after a period, a new sentence begins.

Four score and several discourses ago, before Lena Dunham, before Lindy West, before SHY GIRL, before Sean Manning abolished blurbs and we all forgot he did that, before Madeline Cash and the guy who was mad at her, there was this shit:

And we all went, “hmmmmmmmm interestinggggggggggggggg.”

Savage argues that, “The literary pipeline for white men [is] effectively shut down.” It’s important to note that Savage is not talking about about queer male writers or writers of color—I can easily think of several of those. It is true that I can’t say we have any contemporary white male counterparts to Sally Rooney or Raven Leilani or Emma Cline, Brit Bennett. The question is, do we care?

Like any journalist worth her salt, I decided to go straight to the scene of the crime: I decided to text some young white male writers.1

Savage name-drops millennial men, but I went further and spoke to two Gen-Z white men currently trying to break into the publishing industry. You can send my Pulitzer in Journalism in the mail, thanks.

aneurin:

I met Nye through a mutual friend. We all went to see Heat at the movies. He’s a 6’3 communist who doesn’t watch T.V, drinks hot black coffee every day and wears wool trousers in 95 degree weather. He’s ridiculously sweet and often silently appears in places I also happen to be, calmly saying my name from a dark corner in the back of the room. I almost stabbed him at AWP over that shit. He’s actively querying an incredible upmarket campus noir mystery about a reporter investigating the disappearance of a notable left-wing student activist and a bunch of Shit Goes Down. We’re both part of the Conn Ave scene. You can find him on here at Get Literate. This is what he has to say for his People:

I’m open to the idea that young straight white male writers (YSWMWs) might be underrepresented in traditionally published literary fiction. But a lot of the discourse around it is gender-panic nonsense or ‘notice me senpai’ writing.

If you look at the census data for 2020, you’d expect about a quarter of young literary fiction writers would be YSWMWs, in a perfectly representative industry. I haven’t seen anyone crunch numbers on this outside of Jacob Savage’s reliance on awards data and newspaper mentions, which fails to prove YSWMWs comprise less than a quarter of debuts.

Savage writes: “Those attacks on the “litbro,” the mockery of male literary ambition…have had a powerfully chilling effect [lol].”

That assertion by Savage is pretty much an admission of cowardice on the part of the YSWMW mourners. I’m vaguely sympathetic to complaints about the bloodlessness of some American LitFic—its unerotic sexuality, its unromantic romance, its anti-political politics—but if a couple years of workshop sessions and Twitter beef are enough to sand your work down, you weren’t going to make it in the first place.

Have some self-respect.

If there is a problem, it’s a two-sided problem of audience engagement making YSWMWs irrelevant as sales drivers and economic forces that deter YSWMWs from entering the field.

There is a reciprocal (or dialectical) process where audience engagement by writers and publishers causes disparate groups of readers to cohere and, eventually, to become market forces. FanFic did this with many young women readers and many young queer readers, while serving as a stylistic training ground. BookTok, Substack and Bookstagram are also doing this work. Dimes Square tried to do this with Manhattan transplants whose downward mobility manifests cognitively.

I’m not convinced that the Big Five know what would engage straight young men as a group. Nearly every young man I know reads literary fiction. Granted, these men are college-educated, overwhelmingly higher-income and often politically left-leaning, but that’s a potential audience in the thousands in any major city; the guys who knocked doors for Zohran are reading LitFic; they are not a coherent audience for any specific subgenre.

I suspect that publishers do not need YSWMWs to reach these consumers; YSWMs do not exist as a coherent market demographic.

The production side problem stems from the decline of the writer’s socio-economic fortune.

The downward mobility of the creative professions, prevailing since the Great Financial Crisis, corresponds with the disappearance of the YSWMW. The pressure to make more money and find economic security drive educated young white men towards higher-waged professions at the same time sociological barriers to women and people of color in creative professions are eroding somewhat. Why would a financially insecure member of a socially dominant group pursue a profession with an extraordinarily high barrier to entry where 80% of people never earn out?

B2B software development might be mindnumbing, but the money is almost certainly better.

The YSWMWs who are trying to break into the industry are in it for the love of the game. There’s no coincidence that the dudes Haili got to talk for this essay (sorry Haili) are politically left-wing men from the greater Rust Belt, professional journalists of lower-middle class, ethnic white backgrounds.

We write because it is fun, not because it pays. Money never lasts anyways. The ruin of industrial New Jersey, New Haven, and Upstate New York will eventually come for California and Manhattan and Texas and all those cushy software jobs will go the way of steelwork, except the B2B SAAS guys don’t even have a union.

That said…agents, editors, if you’re looking for a book about a bunch of socialist 20-somethings fucking and/or killing each other, I have a 90,000 word manuscript ready for you. And if you want a clique of D.C. insiders who convince themselves they need to do a coup d’etat against the president, I’m working on that book too.

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matt

I know Matt through Nye. He’s also a Conn Ave scenester <3. My friend Lauren and I recently spent two hours talking to him about all our diagnoses at a friend’s party (that friend was supposed to be the third subject in my experiment, but sadly he’s dead to me now.) Matt has a boisterous laugh and always clarifies, with a twinge of apology, that he doesn’t writer litfic but genre fiction. It’s okay, Matt. Genre is a construct. Genre fucks, too. Here’s what he has to say about All This:

I’ve been chewing on the question of why there aren’t any young, white male writers for a while, partially because I’m not sure it’s entirely true.

It is accurate in the sense that we’re not seeing any contemporary Jack Kerouacs or David Foster Wallaces or whoever else popping up at the top of NYT bestseller lists for any lingering period of time.

Part of it is the result of a culture, particularly among young white men (younger than 30) about the pursuit of fiction and reading overall. Most of the straight white male friends I have that aren’t specifically writers barely read fiction. Many gravitate toward nonfiction. Many don’t read at all.

Our education system bears a large part of the blame. The arts are being strangled. A lack of funding across many public school systems for arts programs is making this phenomenon worse. Without being introduced to it earlier, it’s harder to get into the trade overall. I myself didn’t really start to write on my own until after grad school.

But why is this? In my opinion, a shift in what young white men view as “important” or “worth their time.”

A lot of people in this demographic view literature as a less masculine pursuit. They view the tradition of writers like Hemingway, Sinclair, Joyce as something “less than” and a frivolous endeavor that gets in the way of life’s real goal — making money.

You can see this in college enrollment. More women are completing college than men. This is true across all backgrounds, though it varies. Men are placing less value on education and literacy overall, which leads to a significant part of the problem. I think white men need to look inward here and figure out what they want out of life, because a lifetime of grinding fucking sucks.

I’d also like to take pains to say that writing is not a gendered pursuit. It’s important to create stories that address all aspects of life across time and space. But I think young white men don’t see it that way.

I do think that people crave stories about lives that aren’t specifically a middle class white guy. That makes sense! I want different stories too! But that doesn’t mean that young white male writers don’t exist in general —- I think we just need to work harder to figure out where we fit in.

Particularly in this moment we find ourselves in (Trump, the genocide in Gaza, authoritarian power creeping into every facet of our lives with disturbing speed) we should be learning about how white men see themselves, I think. But we need to find a way to tell that story in a new way, and one that accurately reflects the power white men hold in this society and the cost that can inflict on everyone around them.

To sum it up — these writers do exist. These stories need to be told. But the decline is real. Many young white men don’t want to write, and they’re not interested in telling these stories to begin with.

(Sidenote: I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t mention I find myself in this camp — all of the novel projects I’ve written are either fantasy or speculative fiction, though I have written short fiction of a more lit-fic variety. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself gravitating more toward lit-fic, but up to this point, my entry into the genre is limited.)

postscript

Needless to say, I fuck with both Nye’s and Matt’s takes. And for all this talk of progress (and how this progress has boxed white male writers out of publishing), we are actually in a period I like to call The Great Divestment. We are living in the photo negative of Summer 2020. I’ve talked briefly on here about the decline of The Black Female Breakout Novelist (where was the Brit Bennetts, Raven Leilanis, Yaa Gyasis, Kiley Reids from 2023 onward?), which to be sure is not the average experience for most authors, let alone ones of color. But I do wonder if the huge success we saw between 2015 and 2021 (note the political timing too, please) among Black female authors is because there were very smart investments being made in them (and not just from publishers, but from the literary ecosystem writ large). I wonder, too, if this kind of investment was seen as less ‘risky.’ When companies tighten their belts, Black folks are the first to go.

To continue that thread, under this administration, companies have been given permission to stop pantomiming fucks about diversity. Publishers, for all the ire they receive from some would-be white male authors trying to break in, are not the only institutions involved in ‘making’ a book. There’s all these other major players—book critics, magazines, book subscription boxes, celebrity book clubs, trade reviews etc. etc. etc.—who anoint a novel, an author. When the number of books balloons and the space for them to breathe in the market shrinks, again, who gets cut first? You’re worried about breaking in and I’m worried about staying in.

My mom, who was among the early beneficiaries of affirmative action in the 1970s, told me: “I’ve been through this cycle of investment and divestment many times before. It’s a very real cycle. They don’t see it as taking anything away from us. They see it as they were doing us a favor in the first place.”

What white male would-be authors haven’t acknowledged much is that it’s one thing to break into the publishing industry—it’s quite another to succeed in it.

What greater warmth is found than from the flames of a white woman’s burning marriage? The marriage doesn’t even need to end for us to make snow angels in its ashes. We’re not intruders. She’s invited us into the fire by way of a novel, an essay, a memoir. Like moths, we flock to read it.1

In 2024, that marriage was Molly Roden Winter’s, the author of More: A Memoir of Open Marriage. Winter was a virtual unknown, but her story alone catapulted nonmonogamy into the zeitgeist. Even in a media landscape atrophied by layoffs, it was reviewed in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker. She and her husband were even guests on the NPR show I work for. The book became a New York Times bestseller, a rare and charmed outcome for a debut author.

Earlier this year, the marriage story we swarmed to was Belle Burden’s: Babe Paley’s granddaughter and author of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage (There’s a pattern even to the titling of the books in this genre). The memoir traces the decline of Burden’s twenty-year marriage after her husband suddenly walked out on her. An instant New York Times bestseller.

Lindy West is now the white woman whose marriage has inflamed the internet for weeks. Her memoir Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, was released last month to manic debate. It documents West’s cross-country road trip as she reckons with the fallout of fame from her years as a feminist icon and battles depression. But the frenzied reaction around the book is not about those themes: it’s about her open marriage, particularly the way her spouse behaved inside of it.

I’m not here to litigate the content or merit of West’s book or the others. I’m here to talk about the space these stories claim in our cultural terrain, the way they dominate discourse. I’m naming a phenomenon that, year after year, holds true. West is famous (And Burden, wealthy), but still the equation feels infallible: White woman + bad marriage + nonmonogamy (or infidelity or both) = the book everyone’s talking about.

It’s practically the fate of every big book that contains a nonmonogamous thread to invoke the polyamorous equivalent of gay panic in the media: Polyamory Isn’t Progressive, cries The Wall Street Journal. Say It With Me Now: Open Marriages Never Work, shouts The Free Press. Don’t Tell The Internet You’re Polyamorous, chuckles The New Statesman. Love Is Never Having To Say You’re Polyamorous, squawks The Times. I’m all for people living as their ‘authentic selves.’ I just don’t think we need progressives trying to convince us that polyamory is normal, whines this weird subtitle to a USA Today opinion piece.

I don’t know, guys, it feels like some of these calls are coming from inside the house. But I’m here to assure you that nobody wants your husband with his crossed-out face on Feeld.

In the case of Winter’s memoir, many of the headlines sound like jokes, like satire: How a Polyamorous Mom Had ‘a Big Sexual Adventure’ and Found Herself or The English Teacher Who’s Become the Face of Polyamory or Is This The End of Monogamy? (penned by Winter herself for Elle UK).

The question that’s asked every time a book about nonmonogamy is published to any fanfare is the least interesting one: But does it actually work?

Haven’t we run that inquiry ragged? Jean Garnett, who wrote the only white-woman-open-marriage-story I recognize for The Paris Review, said after her divorce:

“…A newspaper editor got in touch with me asking if I would care to join the buzzy conversation around West End Girl [Lily Allen’s album] by spitting out a thousand words on “why open marriage doesn’t work.” I did not care to; I do not see open marriage as an unworkable model—certainly no more so than monogamous marriage.”

A new formula emerges: one ‘failed’ marriage + nonmonogamy = parade of polyamory hit pieces.

Every time we ask the same tired questions, we prevent the discussion from becoming something deeper. What we should be asking instead is why we’ve pinned our entire understanding of this sprawling and splintered identity on a few books by white women? Why do their stories have the power to force an entire romantic paradigm into question when millions of bad monogamous marriages get to simply be that: bad?

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The backlash to West’s partner, Aham Oluo, has been loud. Oluo cheated on West with at least two women.2 Her consent to ENM, at least in the beginning, is murky. Oluo claimed West did not grasp concepts of ownership the way they did because they’re Black and West is white (note the lack of articles saying interracial marriages never work—y’all not brave enough to go there)3. The memoir ends with West in a throuple with one of the girlfriends Oluo was seeing behind West’s back. They all share a home. Most nights, West allegedly sleeps in the guest room where she can hear the other two having sex. West says she’s happy. We can’t know if this is true. We only know Oluo’s actions are heinous to many of us, and West’s inability to see them as such is unsettling.

But all that has nothing to do with some inherent evil lurking around the corner of every nonmonogamous relationship. The awkward framing of West’s memoir as polyamous self-discovery journey, as subversive feminist character arc, reminds me of another book I wrote about. Liars by Sarah Manguso (reviewed in the LA Times, The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian) is about a terrible marriage and a white woman with means who cannot manage to leave it. The husband cheats, cusses at her, cannot keep a job, leaves the room while she’s speaking to him. The novel is positioned as a feminist send-up of heterosexual marriage which Manguso has argued is simply a ‘bad choice’ “We are impelled to make.”

In Liars, the husband ultimately leaves the wife after sixteen years for another woman. She doesn’t exert agency to extricate herself from him. The heroine, Jane, is cast as the everywoman (hence their vanilla names Jane and John—your average couple). She’s a professor, a writer, living in the US in the 2010s. I always think of NYTs book critic Parul Sehgal’s response to Manguso’s claim that this kind of marriage is inevitable for most women, that heterosexual marriage is, in a way, fundamentally an unconsensual act because we are so socialized to perform it: “As the product of generations of arranged marriages, a number of them coerced,” Sehgal, who’s Indian-American, writes, “I find that such claims feel strange, if not obscene.” As a descendent of enslaved women, I have to agree: I don’t really want to hear about a white upper-middle class woman in the 21st century acting like she doesn’t have any choices. Manguso is telling one story. Sehgal is telling another. Imagine a world in which we hear only Manguso’s.

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My position is a weird one, riddled with conflicts of interests: I identified as polyamorous for years but am not sure if I want to keep practicing.4 I wrote a Modern Love essay about my decision to break up with my boyfriend and pursue solo polyamory. In it, I mis-defined terms, I sounded wiser than I was, I fucked up as people who stumble into being spokespeople for an entire community do. I was hated on the internet for a while, not nearly on the scale of West, but enough for others in my life to notice. I am a steward of stumbling over yourself in public, trying to make your decisions legible to others while they remain illegible to you. Stories are mirrors of ourselves, portals to other people and places, yes, but they can also have a distorting effect; they are not neutral.

My own book, They All Fall In Love At The End, is coming out in June; it’s a novel about a young Black woman tripping through an open relationship, falling for all the wrong people, trying to write herself a happy ending. Why else would I write this piece if I didn’t have a forthcoming book? This is how you handle an atrophying media landscape, you slip in when there’s an opening. And so I’m calling out the glut of white women marriage and nonmonogamy books at the same time I’m piggybacking off of their success like a flea clinging to the back of a dog. The glut, anyway, is an illusion: there are exponentially more books about monogamy. Those searching for nonmonogamous stories are still trekking across a narrative desert. Where are the ones involving relationships between non-white people? Where the woman instigates opening the relationship? Where polyamory is something one is, not only something one does? Not an antagonist or answer to monogamy, but simply a different logic? Where it’s not that big of a fucking deal when it gets released into the world, just another story?

The canon of nonmonogamous stories is still too spare and therefore the discourse stays stuck, endlessly orbiting the worlds of white married women.

The bad ones stick up like thumbtacks. The rope is too thin, we’re hanging too much on it. No wonder it’s falling down.

My post about losing my virginity, gynecological trauma and pelvic floor dysfunction has become my most popular one to date. Sadly, I’m not surprised it resonated with thousands of women and others with vulvas—the medical misogyny, the paltry discourse around penetrative pain—but I’m grateful it did.

At the end of that essay, I wrote a postscript explaining that that piece was originally written years ago, when I was 26. I talked about how I’d recently gone to the OBGYN for a pap smear. It hadn’t gone well, the pain of the exam haunting me hours later. The frustration of still having Pussy Problems at 30 when I was supposed to be passed All That Shit.

So much has changed since I first wrote that essay, I wrote, not knowing I was in the middle of more change.

I now look at that declaration and laugh/scream.

Reader: so much has changed since I wrote the postscript to that essay.

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I’m writing this from beneath a weighted heating pad, lying in bed on a towel, panty-free, on my side with a pillow wedged between my knees because it’s too painful to sit, because I lose my breath standing and walk now with an lopsided gait. Beside me: a box of pink medical gloves, a roll of almost used-up toilet paper, Q-tips, a donut cushion, creams, muscle relaxer. You’re probably wondering, Bitch are you okay???

I’m not okay, not really. After that pap smear, the pain didn’t leave. This has never happened before. My pain was alway connected to penetration; it did not persist once the object was removed, certainly not for weeks. But days after the exam, my vulva began to feel raw and overexposed, chafing against my pants.

Why had I moderated a panel at AWP even after wandering the conference’s book fair feeling like my clit was inflamed? Why had I masturbated even after knowing there was something off down there?

I didn’t pay attention to my body. Now I was paying the price.

By the third week, I’d developed UTI symptoms. I’d never had a UTI but what else could it be? It felt like a infection, one that was spreading with great speed.

I went to C.V.S to pick up an at-home test, mortified to see a cute guy in the same aisle as I reached for it. I told myself I shouldn’t be mortified though. It was my right to have a UTI, fuck him! Men went around instigating UTIs all the time! I screwed up the test but it came back positive anyway. The relief of that pink square. Just a round of antibiotics. I’d be back to normal in a week.

I made my whole personality having a UTI. Joked about how all the hot people suddenly appeared the second I got one, that my UTI gave me a new lease on life. I was finally part of the cohort of women and vulva-owners who’d had one. I wanted a hoodie with UTI on it like it was a college I’d attended.

Reader: I did not have a UTI.

I had to go to urgent care to discover this. They tested my pee. No signs of infection. They were sloppy. They didn’t care. They gave me antibiotics anyway. Never have I wanted an infection so badly. You do not want to be a medical mystery. But I had a feeling that’s what I was going to become.

The antibiotics did nothing. My symptoms worsened. My mom and I called my primary care doctor. It was Friday night so I couldn’t see an OBGYN. My doctor told me to go to the ER so my mom took me to the ER.

Another hot guy waiting to humiliate me, a nurse: “Where should I put my pee?” I asked. “Oh, I can take it,” he said. The camera zoomed in on his lovely hands accepting a plastic cup filled with my yellow piss. Perfection. He, the guy in the C.V.S, and I could now be in a throuple rooted in my vaginal trauma.

The waiting area was crowded: a lot of young people coming from parties. There was too much laughter. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t sit but my muscles were too weak to stand. I curled up on two chairs with one of the hospital’s blankets. My bull of a mother was at a loss. She tried to get me seen but this was America, this was the emergency room. If you weren’t dying, fuck off. It was seven hours before I got a room. Three hours before a nurse walked into it. My mom couldn’t sleep because she had her contacts in and didn’t have her case so she just stared at me through foggy eyes.

The nurse did a pelvic exam with a speculum. All I could think was, They’re doing the same thing that landed me here in the first place. Everything looked fine. They tested my pee. Fine. They wheeled me to the sonogram room, stuck a wand inside me while I gripped the bed rail like a life raft. I felt like a young girl in that flimsy cotton gown. They pressed on my ovaries. She has a long cervix, the tech said to the nurse. What does that mean? I asked. It just means you have a long cervix.

The sonogram showed nothing, just a benign cyst that likely wasn’t causing the pain and that I already knew was there.

Back in the hospital room, I self-swabbed so they could test for other vaginal bacterias. They sent me home with some painkillers, told me I should see an OBGYN. They did their job, they ruled things out. The bacterial swab came back normal. I had deja vu. The pain stayed.

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I’d already been here before and so I knew. The carousel of doctor’s visits that came with no diagnosis.

I Googled my symptoms and found the likely culprit with ease. Vaginismus, it turns out, is a generic umbrella term for any pelvic or vulva pain linked to penetration that is not physiological. In short, it’s too vague a diagnosis to really understand what’s going on.

I was convinced, then, that I had a condition called vulvodynia:

A type of long-term pain or discomfort around the outer part of the female genitals. It lasts at least three months and has no clear cause. The pain, burning or irritation linked with vulvodynia can make you so uncomfortable that sitting for a long time or having sex becomes unthinkable.

The condition is often mistaken for a UTI because there are overlapping symptoms.

That Monday after my trip to the ER, my mom and I called the OBGYN my primary care doctor recommended. She had an opening at the end of April. LOL. Yeah I just won’t sit for another forty fucking days, it’s cool.

I decided to try the university hospital I always go to, the one where I received the pap smear. Voila. They had an opening later that week.

Remember that clinic I mentioned at the end of my last post? The one that opened in 2022 to deal specifically with these kinds of pelvic and vulva pain conditions? The earliest appointment they had was in July when I called after my failed pap smear. But when I showed up for my Thursday appointment, the doctor I saw was one of five OBGYNs who worked in that clinic. It turned out there’d been a cancellation, that the clinic wasn’t a separate building, just a collection of specialists working in the gynecology department. There was a flyer about vulvodynia right on the doctor’s wall. My mom pointed it out, awed by our luck.

The doctor was convinced I had vulvodynia too, specifically vestibulodynia, pain at the vaginal entrance. I am naming these terms because I bet you’ve never heard of them. I also bet you know someone who’s experienced this or who will.

To show you just how maladaptive our medical system is, the doctor didn’t have enough time between patients to give me a proper consultation and so she came back to examine me on her lunch break.

With a long Q-tip, she gently tested the sensitivity of my vulva. The closer she got to my entrance, the more I flinched. She located the spot causing the pain. She said she didn’t have to touch it if it was too distressing. I told her to. I needed the final piece of this awful puzzle. She touched it lightly. My hips lifted off the table.

She pulled out a diagram of a vulva and started taking notes. Vestibule: an entryway, “This body part was named by a man,” she said. At the top, she scribbled likely causes to my condition: hyperactive muscles and heightened nerve activity. At the end, she gave me the picture.

When she left, my mom was in the corner cradling all my stuff—bag, scarf, coat—on her lap. “I had a 60 year-old man looking at my vagina when I was 17,” she said. “Thank God for these young women. They’re changing things.”

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I left with several prescriptions: Gabapentin topical cream, cyclobenzaprine, diazepam suppository—the kind I used to take when I was in pelvic floor therapy that made me high and loopy. My insurance only covered one of the drugs.

The doctor told me I’d likely have to go back to PT. The PT clinic in D.C that specializes in pelvic floor disorders is out-of-network. An evaluation cost $360 dollars and $240 for each subsequent visit. I’ll have to take all this up with my insurance company. If I were a guy who got in a car accident and broke my leg, they’d cover PT, I’m sure, without question.

I admitted in my last post that I wasn’t at peace with this yet. Not only am I not at peace, I’m passing through an uneasy paradigm shift, one of understanding myself anew as a person living with chronic pain, as a person with an invisible disability. I’ve had this condition for years but now it’s acute, now I can’t ignore it.

After I received my pills and creams, thinking they’d be a magic wand, I pushed myself to go to a friend’s party. I knew I was going to have to bring a cane, but who cared, people with pain were allowed to leave the house.

I took a shower, did my makeup, curled my hair. I’d never been more exhausted in my life. It was like I’d run up five flights of steps. I was short of breath. I was getting upset. I had to sit down but sitting was uncomfortable.

My friend drove me to the party and did all the things a good friend does. I was not myself, but I managed. It was important to me to try. Only two people asked about my cane. My friend and I laughed each time she tripped over it.

Later that night, I took my first suppository. I went limp like a rag doll but my sleep was restless. I woke up and cut on the lamp. There was a bug on my water bottle. I groped around the floor for my Raid but the cap broke off and rolled away. The muscle relaxer was so strong I couldn’t move. I cried watching the bug crawl down my nightstand, feeling helpless.

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I move slowly these days with an uneven gait when I get coffee up the street in the morning. When the timer on the walk sign ticks down to five seconds, I can’t rush across the street anymore. I wait until the next one. Bending down to pick up things I’ve dropped is a nightmare, the way I have to contort to do it. I’ve started my period but pads are too abrasive so I just bleed in my underwear.

I only understand how slow I’m moving because of how fast I move normally. There’s a lesson here about capitalism, burn out, illness, workaholism that I don’t feel like learning right now. I just want my life back.

I’m writing all this to say: if you were one of the many people who commented on my last post about your painful experiences with penetration, don’t wait until the condition becomes acute. Get a diagnosis, don’t accept less than one. You can brush it off it when it’s not affecting your daily activities but without tending, one day it might.

Some things have been helping me through this. First: LOVE & OTHER DRUGS with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, a RomCom we don’t talk about enough!!! Some of you are aware of all my Big Plans to find Love. That’s not happening in my critical state but as I heal, I’ve desperately sought out stories about young women with chronic pain finding love and having hot sex.

Hathaway is beautiful from every angle in this movie which is a bit depressing; I’m not that pretty when I’m sick. There’s a critique here somewhere about the eroticism of fragile white women, but I won’t be leveling it. Hathaway’s character struggles to do her art and refuses help and lashes out and sobs after her lash-outs and has trouble getting her meds and it’s all a satirical take-down of the pharmaceutical industry and health care in America and I love every second.

I also listened to IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD on audiobook by a fellow 2026 debut author.1 It’s about a chronically ill woman who meets a guy in her chronic pain support group. I love that both of the main characters have disabilities. The title makes me think of something the OBGYN told me with a cheeky lilt: “No, it’s not all in your head.” I knew she was referencing this specific phrase used in medical gaslighting. This novel digs into that, too. The way care and medication are withheld from patients that doctors deem overweight, the way you’re spoken to when your illness doesn’t have a clear cause.

My romantic fantasies are smaller than before—someone to help me change the sheets on my bed, walk down the three flights of steps in my building to wash my clothes, to hand me my heating pad when I’ve tossed it too far away. I’m still watching pick-a-card tarot readings on YouTube about love predictions for April, even though I’m struggling to imagine a future.

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At the doctor’s office, there was another flyer on the wall for a group called Tight Lipped, a grassroots movement for people with chronic vulvovaginal and pelvic pain. They have a podcast, a zine called ‘Opening Up,’ chapters across the country. They are fighting for vulvovaginal and pelvic floor disorders to be a standard part of OBGYN training so that every gynecologist in the U.S is equipped to diagnosis and treat vulvovaginal and pelvic pain conditions.

While I was trying to find the strength to attend my friend’s party, I listened to one of their podcast episodes about a woman named Gabriela:

“I could still find joy, even if I was feeling pain. I think I used to see them as separate. So if I'm in pain, there's no possible way that I could also experience joy simultaneously. And now I have stories of when, well, maybe I shouldn't have, but I go out with a flare. I said, you know what?…If I'm going to be in pain, I might as well be having a good time.”

I’m writing this post from the frontlines so I have no good way to end this. I’m instead forced to find an ending when there’s none in sight.

This is the one I’ve chosen: I’m writing a RomCom. For months, I didn’t know what the heroine’s problem would be. She needed a hurdle, a central struggle. I decided I would give her my pain, and then I would give her a happy ending.

I lost my virginity to a shiny metal speculum a month before I went away to college. My mom insisted I get on birth control because even she understood that college is as much about fucking as it is about getting an education.

The OBGYN was a smiling white woman whose high, measured voice was meant to telegraph trustworthiness. But I found neither among this landscape of large needles and other apathetic tools designed to prick and pry open my body.

“She’s a virgin. I don’t think she’s ever even used a tampon,” my mom said. “Is an IUD still okay for her?”

The OBGYN nodded. “There might be some discomfort, but it should be fine.”

I draped a cotton gown over my body then laid on my back, my legs propped awkwardly on the cold stirrups. The doctor put on blue rubber gloves and retrieved the speculum. It looked like an instrument of torture. She told me something along the lines of, “You’ll feel a small pinch and some discomfort,” though there was no way for her to know what I’d feel.

I didn’t even know what I’d feel. Nothing had ever been inside of me. All I had was a collage of cultural images portraying first-time penetrative sex in which a woman’s pain gives way to pleasure. Pain: a mere curtain through which the body must pass to get to the real show.1

The OBGYN gently pushed my knees apart. “Just a small pinch,” she promised.

My mom held my hand. The speculum was cold, suddenly no longer an indifferent tool but something invested, sharp, pushing through me. I cried so loud it felt like the sound was coming from someone else. Pain pulls you out of character, shutting off the part of your brain responsible for decorum, social grace, so you can pay full attention to the instruction of survival. But the parts of me that were still online were speaking. It would take me years to understand what they were telling me.

Unable to compete with my squirming and pleading, the OBGYN gave up and removed her hand like removing something from the oven.

When I looked over, my mom was crying as much as I was.

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Years later, this incident sits inside a different frame, one informed by how medical professionals treat Black women. All the evidence that suggests white doctors believe Black patients experience pain differently. How the field of modern gynecology was founded on Black female pain.

In 2018, NPR covered the removal of the statue of J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,” from Central Park. According to this piece, “Sims perfected a technique to repair fistulas, which are holes between the vagina and the bladder or rectum and can lead to incontinence, by repeatedly conducting painful experimental surgeries on enslaved black women without using anesthesia.” Sims claimed that these women had consented to the experiments, yet these same women didn’t have ownership, authority, autonomy over their bodies. They were possessions. A thing can’t tell you what it does or doesn’t want. Or rather, you don’t have to listen it.

A study published in 2016 on NIH’s website explores the presence of racial bias in pain assessment. The authors of the study explain two ways that racial disparities in pain evaluation may happen, the first being, “That physicians recognize black patients’ pain, but do not treat it, perhaps due to concerns about noncompliance or access to health care. The second possibility is that physicians do not recognize black patients’ pain in the first place, and thus cannot treat it.”

However Sims was aware of the pain he was causing his “patients.” In his autobiography, he describes the reaction of one woman during his experiment: “Lucy’s agony was extreme. She was much prostrated, and I thought that she was going to die...After she had recovered entirely from the effects of this unfortunate experiment, I put her on a table, to examine.”

Were my OBGYN’s warnings of discomfort her attempt to manage my fear? Was it simply the euphemistic language of bedside manner? Or did she look at me and really believe that that’s what I’d feel, a ‘small pinch?’

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I may have lost my virginity to a speculum, but I didn’t have my first kiss until college. The guy’s lips were cracked with dryness. I didn’t find him attractive. Pressed into mine, they felt like air, like absence.

When I think of my Eighteen-Year-Old Self losing her “real” virginity, it’s not a clear transaction that appears neatly on a receipt, but a saga, a series of failed attempts. No one—not her, her friends, her partners—can make any sense of it inside the narrative of sex and virginity with which they were raised.

Rooms are entered and left with no evidence of intercourse. Things are started, then abruptly stopped. Pain does not give way to pleasure, it looms over the room like a rot. Men throw up their hands, knowing not the first thing about her pleasure, afraid or indifferent toward her flinching body. Wrapped in one boy’s sheets she laughs and says, “I want to but my vagina won’t let me.” He doesn’t understand why these are separate things. Neither does she.

She decides when she’s fingered in a vacant classroom and bleeds for three days that she’s not a virgin anymore. She simply decides because she’s tired of trying, even though it’s not the story she wants to tell when people ask. It’s not the way she wants to lose it.

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I have good reasons not to trust gynecologists. A gynecologist told my Grandma she needed a hysterectomy when she didn’t. This same gynecologist molested my mother in her teens. Remove a woman’s womb, rob her of desire. Reproductive assaults are how you make sure a community doesn’t exist in the future.

During this period in college, when sex was at times painful, at others impossible, I saw several gynecologists. One stuck her finger inside me and said, structurally, nothing was wrong. Another did an ultrasound of my vaginal cavity. When she inserted the wand-like device, I jerked, my bottom scooting away from her touch. “How do you even have sex?” she asked with snark.

I flushed, humiliated. A woman who can’t do the only thing a woman is good for. I knew there was no truth in that, but shame doesn’t need truth to survive.

She stuck the wand in again and I forced myself to move past the pain. I didn’t want to be embarrassed anymore. Eventually my fantasies about penetration were no longer about pleasure, but about ease. About feeling nothing.

After graduation, I started looking for answers. I don’t even remember what I put into the search bar but I remember what came up: a pelvic floor disorder called vaginismus or, “The body’s automatic reaction to the fear of some or all types of vaginal penetration. Whenever penetration is attempted, your vaginal muscles tighten up on their own. You have no control over it.”

The only time I ever saw vaginismus portrayed in popular culture was in the 2019 Netflix series Sex Education. One of the supporting characters, Lily, cannot bear penetration and shoves her partner away during intercourse. I watched the show years after I learned about the condition, but the prickle of recognition was no less sharp. Lily is desperate to have sex but, as she explains, “My vagina is like a Venus flytrap.”

I didn’t need a doctor to tell me that this is what I had. But anyone living in the U.S knows that a diagnosis is only the beginning of a new kind of nightmare—one of medication, bills, appointments and insurance.

I began pelvic floor therapy in the summer of 2019. My doctor was a Black woman in her late-thirties with short twists and soft-looking arms. For an hour every other week, I’d lie on a cot breathing from my belly while she hooked a finger onto my sit bone and gently tugged. At some point, she began inserting her finger and resting it there while I exhaled from my diaphragm. Once she started using lidocaine, the numbing agent in Icy Hot, she was able to move her finger through my vaginal canal like an adept archeologist while I laid there feeling like a cave.

At night, I did the stretches she gave me before slipping a valium inside my vagina. Even after cutting it in half, it still numbed my whole lower body. Sometimes I’d call a friend to talk about how high I was, smiling in the darkness, trying to stop my head from rolling back. Whenever I wanted a glass of wine before bed, I’d darkly remember a side-effect of mixing the two was death.

I was in therapy for seven months when the pandemic hit and the clinic closed. When it reopened, I saw my doctor two more times before she abruptly left the practice without saying a word. All I know is that I had an appointment with her and then the receptionist called to say the appointment would have to be canceled. She told me I could never make a new one with that doctor.

I wish I could say I walked into that office and left with a vulva that didn’t undercut my own desires. That’s not what happened. I’d paid for the entire thing out of pocket because my insurance wouldn’t cover it. At the time I was living at home. I wouldn’t be able to afford a treatment like that now with my mortgage.

I have never known where to place that incident with the OBGYN on the spectrum of sexual trauma. I’m not a survivor of assault but I’m a survivor of something. I just don’t have a name for it.

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During my research, I read about second-hand trauma, a phenomenon in which a person sees, hears, or reads about a traumatic experience and recalls it as their own. I remember reading an article when I was ten in the hair salon about a thirteen-year-old girl who was r*ped in the back of a van. She’d just gotten into an argument with her mom before storming off into the cold winter night. I remember what the man said to her before he abducted her, that he’d never been with a pretty girl before. I remember her shirt was red. I remember this story as if it were my own. Even now my heart pounds at the memory.

My mom used to send me articles about young women who were r*ped by Uber drivers, just so I’d be ‘aware.’ My dad would tell me never to let the number of guys outnumber the number of girls in a group. In mainstream porn, it’s erotic to see women sobbing, screaming, not wanting it but deep down wanting it.

What does it mean that sex for me was about reenacting porn for so long? A place where my pleasure doesn’t exist and my pain is glorified? What does it mean to have been brought up bracing myself always for violence and violation?

My body is doing what an animal’s body does: reacting to the danger crowding around it. Shutting off a part of me so all of me can survive.

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The last thing I ever wanted to say is that Gwyneth Paltrow changed my life.

My friend told me to watch Sex, Love & Goop. Goop, Paltrow’s wellness and lifestyle company, has been criticized for its pseudoscientific, late capitalist approach to women’s health. The shop is also ridiculously expensive. But I watched the show anyway.

In one episode, a sex expert named Jaiya discusses a concept called “Erotic Blueprints,” centered on five Primary Types: sensual, energetic, sexual, kinky, and shapeshifter. She describes them as the, “Language you’re most fluent in speaking when it comes to sexuality. It is the language your body understands and responds to immediately, with ease.”

Of course, there’s an online quiz you can take for $18 to discover your Primary Type. Of course, I took the quiz.

I don’t know what I expected but I didn’t expect to feel like the dust had been cleared from my eyes. My Erotic Type was energetic meaning my arousal has little to do with physical touch. Instead, it’s cultivated through anticipation. Jaiya explained that for energetics, “Sometimes touch can feel like pain as opposed to pleasure...You may leave your body, due to dissociation, and not actually be present during sex. You can be deeply mistrusting and feel a lack of safety in sexual situations.”

Moments that defined by deepest erotic enjoyment were always in the form of unspoken sexual possibility: a hand on my low back, barely there, a meandering three-hour conversation.

Did I ever have vaginismus or was that all I knew to reach for, this paradigm of pathology and disorder, in the absence of a language for emotional and erotic difference?

Jaiya said she created the Erotic Blueprint because, “I felt like in our culture, we have this messaging of, ‘This is what sex looks like. This is how you are supposed to respond.’ What I was finding in my own personal clinical practice was that that wasn’t the way people responded...This person is turned on by not having direct touch to their genitals or to their body. This person over here loves that. This person over here is turned on by a slap to their inner thigh. Well, those are all completely different.”

It’s deflating to realize I could’ve avoided years of physical and emotional pain had the different doctors and experts I went to see had a shared language. They all dealt with the body, specifically the reproductive organs, but they did not have a unified way of talking about them.

But perhaps this was a conclusion I had to draw mostly on my own. Maybe that’s the lesson, the victory, that I can rely on myself, more than I believed.

In her book, “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” writer Saidiya Hartman draws from the real intimate lives of Black women in the early twentieth century. Here, she imagines the sexual awakening of one teenage girl named Mattie who fled Virginia for New York in 1915, still in the shadow of American slavery:

“There were so many lessons to teach a girl who knew nothing, so much for her to discover. What to do? How to hold him? How to not be embarrassed by her naked body or ashamed of her smells and the things she wanted to do? First she had to breathe deeply and let go of the body armored in anticipation of insult and attack, surrender in consequence of pleasure, allow the body to yield to another, to be entered, joined, bridged, to risk all defense, yet not be made into the mule of the world.”

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The friend who told me to watch Sex, Love & Goop taught me other things about desire. The first time we had sex, we had to stop because it was too painful. When I cried, he placed a sympathetic hand on my arm, “It’s okay,” he said. I felt the reckless thump of desire in my chest when we spoke on the phone for hours. I understood the words traversing the city through cell towers were building toward something. These conversations had the power to make touch feel soft and electric. They created the context I needed around penetration, an act that so often felt performed in isolation, something that took place in a matter of minutes instead of over a period of slow, sinuous months. My body stopped clenching and began to melt instead like a lozenge on a warm, wet tongue.

Pain is a warning that something is wrong. But what if it’s also a map leading you toward what’s right? My pain made me attuned to my body, it’s likes, dislikes, in a way I might not have otherwise been. How many times did unpleasant encounters that would’ve likely gone on end because of my pain? My body has always known what it does and doesn’t want before I’ve known it. I might’ve thought leaving my body was normal during intimacy had pain not brought me back to it.

Not long after I began writing this, I was with a guy who had tried to pressure me into a position I knew would be painful. He thought he could coax me with empty reassurances. What he didn’t know is that even if I had said yes my body would’ve said no. My body has gone to absurd lengths to protect me, why should it stop now? Its sole desire is to preserve me even when that’s not my sole desire. I see now that this is its true power.

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There is no clean break between the time I suffered from painful penetration and the time I stopped. The possibility of pain still pulses through every sexual encounter I have, every gynecological exam. These moments are all scrambled together like shuffled cards in a deck.

Oxford Languages defines penetration as, “The action or process of making a way through or into something.” Here, penetration is delicate, a series of actions rather than one swift event. It doesn’t promise resolution, only a way forward.

postscript:

Hello from Future Haili!! I originally wrote this piece in 2022 when I was 26 (Obviously I was young bc who quotes the fucking dictionary). I had entirely forgotten about this essay until I recently got a pap smear. In the bathroom before, I told myself, you’re 30 now. You’re a grown ass woman. You can do this. I couldn’t. We had to stop. The OBGYN, in the end, referred me to a special clinic for People With These Kinds of Problems that ironically opened in 2022 (#progress). This doctor was incredibly kind, warm, understanding. “You did great,” she said. But I felt the same shame leaving the doctor’s office I’d thought I’d wrestled into submission. I felt silly in the new wool coat I bought, something I thought said Real Adult Here, yet I couldn’t even make it through a doctor’s appointment. Hours later, I was still in pain.

I’ve been *abst!nent* for (mumbles number) while I get clear on the things I need before I Do That with another human again.2 For that reason, I’d been particularly worried about this visit. Solo sex has deepened my sense of control over my body, it’s also tightened my grip on it.3 Anyway, I called my mom afterward and we talked about that first OBGYN appointment when I was seventeen and then I remembered the essay above, how I already worked through all this Shit before, if Shit is a thing that can even be worked through.

My mom was like, “Honestly I should’ve been the one to teach you this stuff.” She often flippantly takes full accountability like this in casual conversation. I was like, “I know.” She was very happy to hear about this new clinic, said it was a happy ending to the story even though they likely don’t have an open appointment for another six months bc Health Care <3.

So much has changed since I first wrote that essay: that relationship with my “friend” ended on absolutely terrible terms (BWHAHAHA, so mid-20s-core). My definition of feminism now is basically me not having to do shit ever again. I discovered low-quality audio porn and will never go back. I have a novel coming out that originally included bits about painful sex and pap smears that I decided to take out because it detracted from the story (L O L).4 But I still believe Young Haili was onto something even if that something didn’t turn out to be a solution.

I don’t know how to end this postscript. But it felt dishonest not to say that I’m still not at peace with any of this. I also can’t believe I ended that first essay with a definition of penetration, like actually where is my Pulitzer Prize???

If you want to escape into a calamitous love triangle starring an unhinged heroine who’s basically me set amid America’s crumbling democracy hit me up BWAHAHA.

You’ve probably heard about the ravenous appetite among readers and publishing professionals alike for escapist books. Leigh Stein talked about it here, literary agent Alyssa Morris talked about it here.

Before I begin—Clears throat loudly: THIS IS NOT A POST LITIGATING THE VALUE OF ESCAPIST FICTION. If we didn’t require escape routes from our lives, there’d be no such thing as vacation. You can put your sword down, Susan.

But I’ve been thinking about the concept of escapist fiction ever since, years ago, a major literary author said during an interview that ‘escapist fiction’ wasn’t art. I didn’t know how I felt about this comment then and I still don’t know how I feel now. It struck me as elitist. Even though I balked, a part of me was sympathetic to the assertion. Mostly, I was like: Isn’t all good fiction on some level an escape?

After seeing escapism on nearly every 2026 publishing prediction list, I wanted to wrestle with it. I’m in a unique position: I turned to escapist fiction in the beginning of 2025. By year’s-end though, I failed to find escape in it. More on that soon.

But first, we need to get something out of the way:

what we mean when we say ‘escapist’ fiction

It’s actually not entirely clear what is escapist fiction and what isn’t. Or really, it’s broader than we give credit (Dark romance is showing us it doesn’t simply mean light and fluffy).

We often think of escapist literature as having the following qualities: a story that goes down easy, that makes us forget our own strife. Mostly uncomplicated, unchallenging. We judge this based on its subject matter, its tone and its depth.

Subject matter, in my UNPROFESSIONAL BUT CORRECT opinion, has an outsized influence over what we see as escapist and what we see as “serious.” (I don’t love this dichotomy, but let’s keep it for simplicity’s sake?). Oh, it’s about dragon sex? Escapist. Oh, it’s about poverty? Serious.

But, as Leigh also argues, I think escapism is less about what the story is and more about what it does. Escapism and immersion are only a stone’s throw away. You can get lost in about anything. In my world, execution is queen.

There’s also the feel-good quality that is almost always associated with escapist fiction. And this is what I struggle with most: is escapism the right word then? Because you can escape into a 600-page family drama set during the Great Depression. You can emerge from it, fourteen hours later, with that foggy-feeling characteristic of successful storytelling having forgotten your surroundings.

When people muse that escapist fiction will continue to rise in 2026, I think they’re more often taking about easier, feel-good reads, books that offer an antidote to the awfulness of this moment. But here’s my thing:

a light read doesn’t mean it must lack depth

LESS by Andrew Sean Greer, to me, is a light read but it’s far from a surface-level story. It’s tone is light, it’s heart beats warm. It’s worldview is ultimately a generous one. But the question it raises about how to turn 50 as a gay man who watched thousands of queer men die of AIDS before they could reach mid-life isn’t an easy one.

The most escapist reading experience I’ve had in recent years was DEMON COPPERHEAD, a fucking 500-page book about an orphan in Appalachia. But here’s where the element I haven’t talked about yet comes in: optimism.

A lot of people find this book depressing but to me the tone, the humor, the ending, make it the opposite. It’s sad but it’s hardly hopeless. Even Barbara Kingsolver herself admitted to being a big baby: she wrote a retrospective narrative so we knew that Demon would make it out alive. He must; he’s the one telling us his story from a safer place.

I think about this quote: “Happiness isn’t about feeling good all the time.”1 I don’t think escapism has to be about absolute avoidance.

Sometimes life is so fuck-all-awful you just need to stand in a bright spot for a second. Years ago, I attended a romance conference at Yale. I’ll never forget the opening speech, how the host said romance helped her reconnect with her sexuality after sexual assault. Romance here wasn’t about escape, it was about bringing her back to her body, returning to her a feeling she’d been robbed of.

Some groups (BLACK PEOPLE, GAY PEOPLE, hello!!!!) need fun, light escapist stories because we’ve been systematically starved of them, absent from them, handed instead the most traumatic reflections of our experiences.

Alex Chee discusses this necessity in his wonderful post on Heated Rivalry:

We are, of course, and have been, under attack via a method known as resiliency targeting. If you feel like you can’t catch a break, if you feel exhausted, it may be that you can’t because of the way that method of assault goes after our ability to recuperate.

Those predicting the rise and reign of escapist fiction in 2026 are talking mostly about readers wanting to flee a political moment that has translated itself into certain groups being harmed and hurt disproportionately more than others.

And so we also need to ask ourselves:

who gets to escape?

Early last year, I was binging commercial romances. I would just download them onto my e-reader and basically black out. It was comforting, it was numbing. I felt the same thing again and again like running on an endless treadmill. It was the kind of escape that didn’t necessarily move me closer to my humanity, after a while, it just turned it off.

At the end of 2025, I tried reading these books again but this time felt aggravated. Light and fluffy escapist fiction was a painful contrast to my lived reality. It was too jarring. My cynicism had calcified into a stone these books couldn’t pierce.

Troubled, I told this to my Very Practical/No-Nonsense Capricorn Mother. She said: “Congratulations, you’re like the rest of us.” By ‘us’ she meant a jaded adult. She worked for the federal government for 38 years before retiring last May.

Other things happened that made me consider the function of escapist fiction more deeply. I told a wealthy white woman about my book and she told me she didn’t do books with politics in them.2

Do you think Aliya Rahman, the disabled woman in Minneapolis who was dragged from her car and detained by ICE agents had a choice to not “do politics”? Politics happened to her while she was driving to the Traumatic Brain Injury Center for a doctor’s appointment. What about Alex Pretti? Renee Good? For some of us, there’s no such thing as minding your business. You’re minding your business and then your face is on the pavement. You escape, they catch you.

In his post, Chee says Heated Rivalry director Jacob Tierney chose a Canadian streamer because U.S companies wanted to sanitize the sex in the story.3

I keep thinking about this line from this fantastic book I’m reading about the history of sitcoms:

A generation forged in the fire of the war sought placidity and sameness on the home front: stable nuclear families, a nation of identically constructed Levittowns. Television was a product of the same enforced consensus. It would mirror America, not necessarily as it was, but as it should be: peaceable, middle class, eternally unchanging.4

But who ceases to exist when we seek sameness? Who’s shut out of Levittown?

I recently produced a show with a panel of Congressional reporters who were at the Capitol on January 6th. One the journalists said: “The company I work for now requires survivor training, hostile environment training…sadly, I’m a lot more skeptical and cynical about where we are and I don’t know if that part of me can be put back together again.”

Escape how? You look away but the world is still unraveling around you.

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the quality of the place you escape to matters

What I found, though, was that there were stories that did break through; but they had to strike with more impact.

In December, I watched When Harry Met Sally along with the rest of the world and I’m happy to report my stone-cold heart thawed just a little.5

When Harry Met Sally is light but it isn’t depth-less. It goes down easy but it sates your appetite in the end.

And now everyone knows the story of its ending: it wasn’t originally a happy one. Rob Reiner had to fall in love with his wife on set, had to live his full life, to reach this conclusion. So yes, in the film, that ending really was hard-earned, was not guaranteed, as in life.

WHMS does what it does (romance, humor, New York) singularly well and this, this, is what has felt missing to me in what we so often call escapist fiction. Escape to me isn’t the problem, but where are we going?6

what else might we want from fiction now?

One of the most instructive and strangest reading experiences I’ve ever had happened a few years back when I read a blockbuster upmarket novel (though that wasn’t a term I knew then). It was high-stakes, propulsive. I read it in a night. But when I was done, I didn’t get that expansive, wistful, glassy-eyed feeling I get at the end of a book I’ve just devoured. I felt hollow. It was like I’d run my fingers through air for hours. I understood then there was a type of enjoyable story that could leave you empty-handed. It had mimicked depth without ever achieving it and this was uncanny to me.

I’m not one of those people who believe a novel has to give you more than a great story. But God do you have to be a special kind of writer for that. What I’m trying to say is there’s a kind of escapism that offers rest and revival and another kind that makes you aware of the void you’re trying to fill with it. What I’m trying to say is living inside an empty fictional world does nothing for me when most days I already feel gutted.

Out of all the book predictions for 2026, literary agent Anna Sproul-Latimer’s is my favorite:

Readers—like yours truly—are exhausted, spiritually hungry, and aching for deliverance. If last year they wanted ease, candy, a snack—that is, a kind of band-aid—next year I believe they’ll be ready for something more profound, if also more challenging. I believe there are only so many days left for hiding under the covers.

Jenka Gurfinkel calls stories like Heated Rivalry “anti-dystopian art,” arguing that “Dystopia at its core is about cynicism.”

But the opposite of cynicism isn’t escapism, it’s optimism. Optimism is not one note or easy.7 It doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It rises in response to something, has meaning because it’s aware of the alternative, not ignorant of it.

I admit, I’m a total maximalist. I think the great stories do it all: light here, heavy there. Our world but also that heightened energy of make-believe. Fun and profound. Humorous and wrenching. I enjoy a bit of whiplash, a sense of range. That’s the real triumph to me, a story that contains it all.

And as Chee reminds us, escape doesn’t have to mean running away:

One week before [Heated Rivalry] aired, GLAAD published statistics showing the number of queer characters being taken off shows. Another recent study said many of us are planning to lead less public lives as of last month. This is part of resilience targeting, depriving us of the comfort of living publicly without fear or finding our stories in stores, on television, on film, in books. The meteoric rise of the show, the return of the novels to the bestseller list, and the intensity of fans, all are reminders that the regime’s attempt to use political power to enact cultural power was not equal to the task of keeping this from us.

What books are you escaping into right now? Or are you seeking something else in literature these days? I want to hear what escapism means to you!

I am trying, okay!?! I am out here doing The Work™! And by work I mean I’m trying to find love by doing the bare minimum.

Let me set this stupid-ass scene for you: It was the day after Christmas. My mom had given me a Politics & Prose gift card like she does every holiday. I considered just buying five copies of my own novel but that made me feel like a bad literary citizen, so I decided instead to stop at the nearby P&P to buy other writer’s books.

There was a cute light-haired guy behind the counter wearing a thick dark sweater. I pretended not to care, weaving my way through the shelves like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. My mom walked in a minute later. I waved her over to the horror section where I whispered, “There’s a cute guy at the front.”

She said, “I didn’t see anyone at the front.” I was trying to be in a RomCom and she was turning this into a mystery.

“He’s literally right there,” I said.

She went to the front, being obvious, while I hid. She was convinced this was the same bookseller I chatted with a few weeks before about the deluxe edition of THE SONG OF ACHILLES. She kept saying we had a connection because I was excited about this new edition and he was vaguely entertaining my excitement AS ANY GOOD BOOKSELLER WOULD DO????

Anyway: they were literally two different people but my mom didn’t understand this. While she was distracted, I went to check out my books. Here was my chance to do absolutely fucking nothing like always.

Hot Bookseller Guy kicked off the counter he was leaning on to scan my books. Up close, I noticed his dimples. I proudly said I was a P&P member when he asked. My nail polish was peeling. My mom came to hover behind me even though earlier, I’d tried to telepathically communicate to her not to stand RIGHT BEHIND me while I was talking to Hot Bookseller Guy.

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When I paid, I made a joke about the sound the machine made, an abrasive ERRR!! like my card had gotten declined. I said, That doesn’t sound good, like someone’s forty-year-old dad. He laughed the same nice laugh he’d offered his talkative coworker for the last twenty minutes.

When we left the store, I asked my mom, frustrated: “Why did you have to stand right behind me?”

“What? Where else was I supposed to stand?”

She and I were talking about the bookseller’s sweater. “He had on a SUPER nice sweater,” she said. “I bet his mom bought it for him.”

“Not everything is about someone’s mom,” I told her.

As we walked home, I felt pretty pitiful about the exchange. It was the kind of Nothing Burger Non-encounter Silly Bitch Bullshit I was becoming known for.

“I’m gonna call the store and ask for him,” I said. My mom didn’t think I had the guts, which I didn’t really, but now that I’d announced it it was like I had to do it.

Nervous, I closed the door to my old bedroom and dialed the store’s number. I knew it was him when he answered but pretended not to. It was easier talking to him as if he were someone else.

“Hi there, I was actually at your store earlier,” I said. “I was wearing an army jacket and a green Yankees hat—

(Yeah bc the girl in the army jacket and a Yankees hat definitely doesn’t sound like someone who’s going to beat your ass in an alleyway)1

…There was a guy there in a sweater who checked me out at the front. I didn’t know if he was single or not—”

He said, “That was probably me.”

“Oh” —laughs nervously— “Well, I just called because I thought you were cute but I was too nervous to say anything.”

Laughs nervously—“Oh!(?) Thanks?”

Silence.

“Okay,” I said. “You’re welcome," — FOR HARASSING YOU AT YOUR WORKPLACE ON CHRISTMAS— “Happy holidays.”

“Happy holidays.”

I went downstairs and told my mom I might’ve accidentally harassed him. Because she’d become sexually active in the 70s, she didn’t get it. She had other concerns: “But you didn’t close the deal.”

“Close the deal?! What is he, a piece of real estate? I don’t know! I said he was cute, I thought that was enough! He just nervously laughed but maybe I’d made him uncomfortable. I literally called him on his company’s work phone!!!”

She shook her head. “What did you want him to do? YOU called HIM. You should’ve asked him out.”

I pulled my hair. I did not want to ask a man out. I did not want to call people on their job’s landline phones to see if they wanted to go out with me, the girl in a Yankees hat who’s never even been to a game and, frankly, thought it was just a general New York hat for years.

“And also, how was he even supposed to see your face?” My mom was still talking. “You wear that hat on purpose, I think. That’s the kind of hat people wear when they’re trying to commit a crime and they don’t want people to see them.”

“If it was summer, it would’ve been different. I could’ve been in shorts and, like, a halter top.” I was growing convinced of this alternate timeline in which the weather had made all the difference.

“You know those people who have a million reasons for why they can’t do something?”

But I wasn’t trying to do that internal work. I’d just turned 30, I was done with all that. I was trying to get laid/married.

“If it was summer, I could’ve been in, like, a halter top,” I said again. “My boobs would’ve been showing. Things would’ve been different.”

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After my mom dropped me at home like a Lost-Cause-Unlabeled-Package, I got an email from Politics & Prose.

I thought, for a second, that it was him, the bookseller. But then I was like, No, Haili, this guy who does not know your name and was not interested in you isn’t emailing you from the biggest indie bookstore in D.C’s COMPANY-WIDE EMAIL ADDRESS, WHAT? GET A GRIP!!!

The more I ruminated on my Almost Burger Half-Assed Encounter, the more I realized that I just didn’t understand how people who wanted to date each other met. I went to Georgetown, I got on the metro, I went to bookstores, I never met anyone. I went on Hinge and nothing happened. I got introduced to friends of friends and nothing happened. I went to parties, I complimented a guy on his birthday cone hat once and he thanked me and then walked away. I applied for a different app but accidentally put that I was 24 and couldn’t change it and then they sent me a cryptic message about how I was on the waiting list and they’d let me know when I got off of it. A month later, I’m still waiting. Maybe I needed to stop dressing like I was going to beat people up, but even when I got dressed up, nothing happened. It was like, I could’ve just worn my regular bullshit had I’d known nothing would happen.

At a Halloween party, where I was dressed as a super cute cat, a friend of mine said, “Oh, look he’s looking at you,” after I’d just complained about no one liking me. I turned. The guy was looking at the wall. I was like, What? Like, can we get some eye-contact up in this bitch? And anyway, in the end (SAY IT WITH ME!! EVERYBODY NOW!!!) nothing happened. At least I called some guy on his workplace landline like where tf is my vulnerability award? My B- for effort?

Everything was going to be okay though because I had other ways to find Love. I was going to get very 1998 about things. Fuck Georgetown, fuck the metro, fuck bookstores (except for the ones stocking my book, ILYSM).2 I bought three new sweaters and everything: I was going to sit in a coffee shop and listen to Mazzy Star with a printed manuscript. Tall Hot Nerdy Queer-adjacent Kings, you better watch out because although I’m not saying shit to you IRL, I will call your job later to ask about you <3

As I was going through my inbox I thought, I’ve read SO many good Substacks this year! I decided to highlight a few, most of them writing and publishing related (derogatory). A lot of people complain about Substack, but as someone who’s on Instagram, TikTok and Linkedin (for some reason), I can say Substack is probably the best place to be a writer online. A heads up: this post is ‘too long for email’ but frankly, fuck email.

In no particular order, let’s go:

GALLEY BRAG by Ezra Kupor

Oh, Galley Brag! I cannot for the life of me remember how I found wonderful HarperCollins editor Ezra Kupor’s Substack but I DO know whenever I read his titular series, it’s a ride. Filled with text snippets and lore and group chat chatter and provoking publishing questions and pictures of cats, it’s the kind of interview that feels raw, unfiltered, like talking to your smart, funny friend.

Favorite Interviews:

• Galley Brag #2 with Tembe Denton-Hurst

• Galley Brag #3 with Chloe Caldwell

• Galley Brag #6 with Nic Marna

COUNTER CRAFT by Lincoln Michel:

You can tell Lincoln Michel works really hard on his posts. They’re thoughtful and so often on the pulse of the publishing moment. I always know I’m going to leave it having gained something and that’s the best feeling.

Favorite Essays:

• The Age of Genre Bending, Blending, and Juxtaposing

• Yes, People Do Buy Books

• Processing: How Brandon Taylor Wrote Minor Black Figures

CRAFT WITH KAT by Kat Lewis

Kat is one of the most creative writers on here when it comes to teaching craft, from drawing on D&D to develop characters to focusing on crafting a sticky revenge plot, her posts are always professional but utterly honest. She’s also my good friend so SUPPORT HER OR ELSE!!!

Favorite Essays:

• How to Revive a Dead Book

• How to Publish a Novel with a Big Five Publisher

• The Writing Life as Bildungsroman

PITCH YOUR NOVEL by Karin Gillespie

One my greatest “guilty” pleasures is getting really granular about the business of publishing—unpacking genre and market trends, pouring through Publisher’s Marketplace deals. This is Karin Gillespie’s thing. Instead of feeling guilty, though, after reading her Substack, I feel informed.

Favorite Essays:

• The Case of the Disappearing Author

• The Upmarket Fiction Formula

• The Quirky Genre that’s Sucking Up All The Oxygen

FISHER THE BOOKSELLER by, well, FISHER

I remember when Fisher first appeared on Substack, I was like, What a cool fucking name. I love the flurry of booksellers coming to Substack! It’s such an important (and often mysterious) piece of the publishing puzzle. And Fisher does an amazing job of demystifying the bookseller’s role!

Favorite Essays:

• Are There Too Many Books or Are You Prone to Existential Dread?

• Who Decides What Goes on Bookstore Shelves?

HOW TO GLOW IN THE DARK by Anna Sproul-Latimer

Okay, so Anna is the rare talent who can drop publishing wisdom gold from her many years as a literary agent AND be funny about it AND take you on an emotional journey through her posts that reveals a remarkable grasp on empathy and humanity. And she’s a fellow D.C native so OBVIOUSLY I’m highlighting her newsletter, HELLO!

Favorite Essays (ngl, this was a tough one, there’s sooo many):

• The Rest Will Rise in 2026

• The Frankfurt Book Fair Explained

• The Publishing Industry Has Something More Complicated Than A Gambling Problem

• The Man in the Water and the Value of Writers

SMART ROMANCE by Rena Rani

I distinctly remember Rena’s debut to the Substack world. She was writing everything I thought, but more eloquently. She was bridging the gap between romance and literary fiction (my favorite soapbox to stand on!), thinking deeply about the former and with a penchant for stunning prose that will make any literary critic jealous.

Favorite Essays:

• Can Emily Henry Write Her Way Out of The Box BookTok Built?

• It’s Actually UN-Romantic

• Love At The Line Level

DEAR HEAD OF MINE by Sean deLone (I love people who have uppercase letters in the middle of their names!)

Sean deLone is Simon & Schuster an editor whose newsletter scratches three of my biggest itches: thoughts about genre and the art of writing, the business of it and industry gossip. I always look forward to seeing his name in my inbox!

Favorite Essays:

• The One Book Every Editor Wants To Publish

• Where Are All The Young Writers?

• Publishing Economics 201: The Post Mort

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THE QUERENT by Alexander Chee

I’ll be honest, if I have to explain why you should be interested in Alex Chee’s Substack idk what to tell you, he’s fucking Alex Chee!!! He’s written some of the best essays on writing and craft and being an artist in the world I’ve ever read. He’s a writer with incredible staying power for good reason! Also his profile pic is a mirror selfie which is just cool.

Favorite Essays:

• “How Can I Write At A Time Like This?”

• On Turning Writing Community, Writing Habits and Submitting Work Into A Life

• On Encouragement

ATTENTION ECONOMY by Leigh Stein

If a person where a catchphrase, Leigh would be: “If there’s not a way, I’ll make one.” She’s the voice bridging the gap between platform, social media and literary fiction and the publishing world. I’ve learned so much from her! And I love how she’s not afraid to fail—and dish what she’ll do differently next time.

Favorite Essays:

• How Can You Tell If It’s Working?

• Content I’ve Been Trying Lately

• ALL of her Chat Rooms where she talks to industry professionals like editors, booksellers, and book influencers

WOMAN OF LETTERS by Naomi Kanakia

One thing Naomi Kanakia is going to do is tell y’all the fucking truth. It’s frankly refreshing to see writers just say how they feel about publishing without fear! Whenever Naomi drops a new take, I’m locked in.

Favorite Essays:

• The New Yorker Reviewed my Self-Published Novella

• Big Fiction

• A Major Literary Writer Has Switched Up Their Style Entirely, and It’s a Huge Improvement

PINE STATE PUBLICITY by Cassie Mannes-Murray

Cassie is one of the smartest, most creative book publicists I’ve come across. She’s always thinking deeply about how to connect the right books to the right readers without relying on worn ideas about how book publicity should look. If you want to promote your book sans selling your soul, she’s your girl.

Favorite Essays:

• In Defense of Publicity Essays

• YES, FREE US FROM THE BLURB INDUSTRY COMPLEX

• A SHARED CRINGEFEST

There were SO many other Substacks I wanted to include but frankly I ran out of steam lol. But here’s a short list: GET LITERATE by Nye Canham, CRAFT TALK by Jami Attenberg, BOOK PUBLISHING BRICK BY BRICK by Jeffrey Yamaguchi, DWELL by Andrew Boryga, honestly I could keep going but I’ll shut up now.

What were your favorite Substacks of the year?

Yes, I’m insane but also: I’m a simple girl.1 I walk into a bookstore, I buy a book. Unfortunately for my financial future I walk into a lot of bookstores. It’s like someone’s holding a gun to my head. But like a water gun that shoots cool, sparkling water into my mouth.

After spending so irresponsibly, I wanted to see how many of the books I bought that I actually finished. Guys, it’s bad. But in my defense democracy was being destroyed so I was distracted.

This list includes one of the best romances I’ve ever read, Karen Russell’s new novel, Kelly Link’s debut, two novels that made the Booker Prize shortlist, and many (many) books I DNF’ed :’( but will one day probably maybe finish!

THE ANTIDOTE by Karen Russell (30% read)

I fucking love Karen Russell. Even still, I was hesitant to pick up her new novel. It’s about the Dust Bowl which I have literally never wanted to read about. But wandering into the new-ish Barnes & Noble in Georgetown one windy afternoon, I was moved to finally purchase it. And I’m so glad I did. I’m only 92 pages in because I got distracted by another book (you’ll find this is a common theme here) but the writing is beautiful, sensorial, propulsive. Karen Russell is fucking Karen Russell, no matter what she takes up as her subject.

LEGENDBORN by Tracy Deonn (100% read)

As someone who doesn’t read YA, I hadn’t heard of this gem. I discovered it walking around the National Book Festival with my friend who was excited to see the third book in the series on one of the display tables. I perked up seeing a beautiful Black girl on the cover. My friend breathlessly described the plot with a circuitous excitement: “This teenage girl goes to UNC Chapel Hill where she gets embroiled in this old, weird secret magical society and is caught between two guys, one the descendent of Merlin the Wizard, the other of King Arthur.” Oh, I was locked in. I went home and ate this one up.

AUDITION by Katie Kitamura (85% read)

I got really far into this book! I think Kitamura’s prose is so sure, she’s such a seasoned writer. It’s a short book and I got about 100 pages in but then got…distracted l o l.

FLASHLIGHT by Susan Choi (10% read)

Ditto Susan Choi, a writer who, just on a technical level, I have spades of respect for. I didn’t get too far into this one, maybe 40 pages in before I got (come on, say it with me!!!), distracted. Ugh.

THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley (85% read)

I must admit, I only picked this book up at first because a friend texted to tell me how much they hated it but I enjoyed it! What I remember most is going into Politics & Prose and it being sold out—it’s a popular book. I have like 50 pages left and I think I’ll finish it this year, yay!2

WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan (0.5% read)

This one was a book club purchase. The problem is I blew off the book club and the book. I just couldn’t get into this one :( I do like the IDEA of a poetry mystery???

THE OTHER WIFE by Jackie Thomas Kennedy (100% read)

This one had been on my radar for a year before it came out because it sounded similar to the novel I’m currently trying to write (though that project has since gone off the rails lol). I really enjoyed the college flashbacks but the book doesn’t deliver the fantasy of second-chance love I admittedly wanted! A me problem, not the book’s.

BROKEN COUNTRY by Leslie Clare Hall (50% read)

This was also on my radar, it feels, long before it blew up for the same reason as THE OTHER WIFE (similar vibes to my WIP. Can you tell I’m writing a second-chance romance? lol). I am always a little suspicious when a book has an overwhelming consensus on Goodreads. A 4.31 star average across nearly 400,000 ratings? That might as well be a crow flying into my window, a literary omen. *Reaches for my sage bundle and my 3.6 rated awkward queen*

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez (2% read)

THIS is a book I’m soooo excited for. I’m not far into it but I already love it. I’d been seeing Mariana Enriquez’s name with increasing frequency when I walked into Kramers searching for BROKEN COUNTRY (they were sold out of it) and found myself in the horror section. What do they say about having to see a book seven times before you buy it? Enriquez was definitely a name that was floating around in the zeitgeist and the cover is everything, like, claw me up, Daddy!!!

LION by Sonya Walger (1% read)

This is a slender small press book (NYRB) I’d heard amazing things about. I’m only 10 pages in but I really love the style. Next year, I’m making an effort to buy more small press books so please offer me your recommendations!

DREAM COUNT by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (0.5% read)

I loved AMERICANAH when it first came out. I was in college back then and have been waiting for the film allegedly starring Lupita Nyong’o which I guess just isn’t going to happen??? I didn’t get far into this one. I enjoy Adiche’s writing but I have to be honest, I’m one of those people who doesn’t want to read about the pandemic/quarantine. I’m sorry! It’s just one of those topics for me! Again: a total me problem!

THE SAFEKEEP by Yael Van Der Wouden (40% read)

I heard SO many wonderful things about this novel. The writing is fantastic. That spare, cutting, observant style that I LOVE. I got roughly 100 pages into this one. Here we have a classic attention problem—it’s very literary in the sense that the pacing is slower and the stakes are what I call literary stakes—more quiet and operating on a smaller scale. This is not at all bad! Sometimes I love these books. But this year I found I wanted louder (also weirder) stories with large stakes.

GOOD GIRL by Aria Aber (50% read)

Another book where I thought the writing was exquisite. I’m completely unsurprised that Aber is also a poet. I adored her descriptions of Berlin and the heroine’s time at boarding school. Here we have another me problem: I don’t know if I can read another book about an older asshole man with a young woman!! I don’t care about these men, just kill them off!!! Like, if a dragon flew out of nowhere in this totally realist novel and snapped this man in its jaws, I would’ve been like, Excellent, and kept it pushing. Regardless, I will definitely be picking up whatever else Aber writes. I love her style and voice that much.

THE BOMBSHELL by Darrow Farr (70% read)

This is a book that I REALLY loved. I didn’t finish it and honestly I can’t remember why??? I think it might’ve been because the main characters finally had sex and then I got distracted by something else??? I’m like a kid who eats too much candy too quickly then crashes, ugh.

THE FERTILE EARTH by Ruthvika Rao (20% read)

This is so beautifully written with such compelling characters!! I think frankly I got distracted when it switched point of views outside of the primary character group. I know, I’m such a fucking child. I do plan to finish it eventually!

ONE GOLDEN SUMMER by Carly Fortune (20% read)

I really, really loved the first book in this series, EVERY SUMMER AFTER. I also love Charlie!! The brother from ESA that finally gets his own love story in OGS!! But I just…this book did that thing some romance books do where the love interests are instantly into each other (or at least Charlie’s instantly flirty and enamored with the MC) and it’s like…why? So sadly, I did set this one aside.

SLOW DANCE by Rainbow Rowell (100% read)

If you’re looking for a romance where every intimate moment feels SO deliciously earned, PLEASE pick up Rowell’s SLOW DANCE. I LOVEEDDDD it. It was deeply honest—the characters live in a working class community in Omaha, Nebraska, the FMC is a divorced mom of two whose house is a fucking mess, it is not a fairytale portrayal of love. Everything felt lived in, worn, and I loved it.

THE WEDDING PEOPLE by Alison Espach (100% read)

Sometimes the hype is so huge you have no choice but to fall for it. I enjoyed this one!

THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR by Erin Somers (20% read)

This is a book I’ve seen all over the place and for good reason, it has a SPECTACULAR white space, minimalist cover. I DID get super spooked when it was revealed the main character is 30. I’m 30! But she like has a husband, a house and two kids like some mythological creature?? Idk, I need to stop acting like I’ve been punched in the face when I find out people my age have families. It’s framed as a “sliding doors” style story where a woman has an affair in one timeline and doesn’t in another and it’s supposed to play with reality. I kind of wanted to know if they were actually fucking or not: another me problem!

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There’s been this weird gap between the kinds of books I associate with myself as a reader (quiet literary millennial female fiction) and the kinds of books I’ve actually been reading (Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Mariana Enriquez, the LEGENDBORN fantasy cycle).3

This year my reading tastes seemed to operate on a radio delay. It wasn’t until at the very end of it when I picked THE BOOK OF LOVE by Kelly Link where I was like OH, okay, more wonderfully weird stuff like this.

I am not a publishing trend expert but I DO think my tastes are probably overlapping with where the market and readers are both moving: more desire for genre in literary fiction (horror, speculative fiction, especially), more romance-coded books in that space too, stories with sharper stakes, splashier set-ups.

There will ALWAYS be a need and a necessity for so-called quiet litfic, but I do think when the stakes of life, the country, the world, feel so high every single day, it can be difficult to buy into those lower stakes in fiction. You start to feel like, How does my teeny life feel bigger than this book?4

You MAY have noticed that this list is not 40 books long and that’s because I didn’t feel like adding anymore and this is my Substack, you guys are just Subscribing in it. But to be fair, I also bought ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer, HAPPY PEOPLE DON’T LIVE HERE by Amber Sparks (a fellow D.C writer!!), THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW by Yiyun Li, HEART THE LOVER by Lily King, PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood.5

Basically I finished like 10 books this year. I don’t know, I actually don’t count this stuff or keep track of it because I learned long ago I’m not the kind of reader who sets a goal and meets it. I set a goal, blow it off completely, then black out after dropping tons of cash on books.6

A Booktuber I used to watch all the time once said about yearly reading goals that she didn’t care about reading 50 books a year because she wasn’t a year-long reader, she was a lifelong one.

This feels wonderfully true. No one says I can’t pick up any of the books above in 2026 and, you know, try again <3

I wanted to write a sweeping essay about what I’ve learned leading up to my 30th birthday. 30 lessons for 30 years. It was going to be wise and affecting. I was going to sound so poised. It was going to go viral, like those posts by older women speaking sense into their younger selves. Twenty-somethings love that. I know this because yesterday, I too was a twenty-something.

But now that I’m 30 nothing makes sense. No, honestly. My thoughts are arriving manic, in jumbled fragments. Probably because this year has blown my brain up, like, I read this article about how more young adults are being diagnosed with cancer and started getting afraid I had cancer. This is one of my fears that recurs along with being abducted by my Uber driver and falling off a mountain. I started wondering if that’s why I’ve pooped so much my whole life, because I have colorectal cancer. I stared into my second mocha latte of the day and thought, This shit is killing me and then took a sip.

I started reciting a kind of ‘Cancer Diaries’ in my head. It went something like: “My whole life, I’ve gotten most of what I've wanted. I’ve always believed if I threw my entire self into something, my will would save me from loss and illness, insulate me from reality itself, in fact, I could shape it, reality, with my will. That all went away when they found a tumor in my stomach.”

But no one found a tumor anywhere so what was I even talking about?

And then it morphed into a soapy soliloquy in which I rattled off what I thought my life would be had I not gotten the cancer I don’t have: “I was going to write dozens of celebrated books and win the Pulitzer Prize. I was going to find the man I saw a year ago on the metro and, because we were in our thirties and didn’t have much time, we’d have raw sex right off the bat, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy and a hasty house purchase, a place in Woodley Park I could only now afford because of the wealth he inherited from his family’s German watch company and which he doesn’t really like to talk about.”

What??? Why was my cancer monologue becoming all about having raw sex with this random man??? If he ever read this he’d be like, what the fuck, who are you and do you have cancer or not???

My best friend and I often talk about which one of our mutuals we think will lose their minds before 50. You can already envision them living in their basement on top of a mountain of accumulated trash with a Burger King crown on their head.

But this year showed me how easily I could wind up in a basement wearing a paper crown. That weird cancer monologue was really about my fear that my wild will to shape reality is the only thing keeping me tethered to it.

Welcome to 30, bitch.

Before I got derailed by that cancer study, this essay was going to be a bunch of little scenes from this year. This also wasn’t good but at least it wasn’t delusional:

FEBRUARY

Yeva’s little black cat climbed into my mom’s yard again. She traveled several houses to get there. My mom shows me her on FaceTime, a furry black blur.

OCTOBER

I see a psychic who tells me the two things I least want to hear: that I won’t find love until I commit to my spiritual path and pursue self-love, and also that my spirit guides said I shouldn’t be upset if I don’t make the New York Times bestseller list but what the fuck, of course I’m going to be upset and also I wasn’t even thinking about that list until my spirit guides said I wasn’t going to be on it??!!! I’m tired of being told to love myself when the reason I’m single is because I love myself too much, I don’t let these men come near me. I want to scream, Is self-love going to fuck me in a deserted parking garage??? No—but no one wants to talk about that.1

NOVEMBER

The exterminator pokes a dead bug limp on top of my fridge. “Oh, these are Germans. The worst. They can carry 20-30 eggs, just one of them.” I step into my hallway which is basically still my kitchen, whining and hopping up and down in disgust. My therapist is on my laptop looking wide-eyed in my direction. When the exterminator leaves, he asks me if I mind sharing my therapist’s contact information with him.

These went nowhere and added up to nothing. I knew at this point I wouldn’t have a sweeping, profound essay on aging to present but fuck, I couldn’t present this. I did throw a party. Maybe we should start there:

All the pictures from my birthday are blurry and terribly back-lit but here’s a mental image: I wore a satin Victorian nightgown and gave tarot readings from my sofa. I carried seven dozen pastries from Maman on the metro in the middle of rush hour, refusing help from reasonable people. All my friends came and I loved every minute of their company! I made mulled wine for the first time and bought five bottles of sparkling and there was way too much of everything. I forced everyone to preorder my novel as a prerequisite for stepping foot in my house. It was hot as fuck, everyone was sweating, I had both the radiator and the window AC on which I don’t think you’re supposed to do. The night was perfect until someone broke my toilet. My drunk friend stayed back to try to fix it. In the bathroom, I held my hand to forehead like a tired single mother and fantasized about hosting another gathering, a Knives Out investigation in which I trapped everyone back in my apartment until I found out who the fuck broke my toilet.

I complained about it over the phone to my mom and when she came over the next day to pick up a box of cookies, the first thing she did was ask to use my toilet and I was like, Is this a joke? She said, perplexed, “What do you want me to do, Haili?! I have to use the bathroom!” She was the victim here, sauntering out of my house with a box of chocolate caramel tarts, pumpkin spice carrot cake and the rest of my dessert platter, her pee un-flushed in my toilet.

That beautiful, knowing essay on becoming 30 resisted me so violently like so much else this year. By dodging me, it forced me to write this other thing, this thing that I don’t know what it is.

All the tarot readings I gave at my party were straightforward except for the last one. Too many cards came out. There was a confusing mix of pentacles, swords, wands. I was like is this about work? Is this about love? The story arc wasn’t a line, it radiated around some unknown center. I kept getting phone calls in the middle of it, I kept getting pulled away. My friend was like, It’s fine. And then I said, You know, sometimes what happens during the reading, what’s unfolding around it, is also part of the reading.

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I wanted so badly to say something about being 30 but I didn’t want to say what I was supposed to say. I wanted to say that I hate throwing parties and spent too much on this one. That I cried the day after over a very routine, ambiguous romantic rejection. That I’d never been more depressed than I was at the start of the year because of what was happening in this country. That 30 came like a boulder running down a hill, knocking a hole through my house. That whenever I ride the metro, I search for that man like I’m searching for my real life, that no matter how hard I look, how desperately, I for some reason cannot find it.

The book I wrote is a messy love story, but it’s also about the over-reliance on story to understand ourselves (our politics, nation) when stories are boxes, can only exist inside a frame while life falls out of it.

Thirty years haven’t added up to anything that resembles a narrative. Amid the rubble of 2025, new desires rose seemingly from nowhere, ones that upended the story I’d told about myself all through my 20s:

Diary entry from August 28th, 20252

A few months before I turned 30, I woke up wanting a husband. Many people want this, but for years I didn’t. Fought it, discarded that kind of life. This absurd change in heart had to do with a man I saw on the train for about 15 minutes. No words exchanged, just one long glance that contained nothing in it probably. But he felt like a husband to me. Is it psychotic to say he felt like my husband? (Yes, but I said it). I’m not talking about the stupid puritanical ideals of wife/husband material. I mean, for whatever mystical reason, there are just some people you can viscerally imagine brewing coffee in your kitchen in a wrinkled T-shirt every morning and there’s really not a better explanation than this guttural one. He made me see myself being married in a way I never could before, as clearly as if he’d held a photograph of me from the future and said, Look, that’s you. It was weird and chilling and destabilizing and I still don’t know who he is or what any of it was supposed to mean.3

This is what the path to 30 has felt like: confused, grasping, picking through tea leafs and trying to read them in the dark.

I shared this revelation in all its pat unoriginality with my mom. She seemed to be expecting it. Of course: she’s already been 30 and 40 and 50 and 60. She knows you can wake up and be different, that aging is hard because it forces change on you. Changing body, changing worldview, changing circumstances, changing mind, changing heart.

I asked the psychic about the man on the metro, hoping for direction, clarity. Why did I have to see him? What’s wrong with me? Who gets so affected by strangers like this unless they’re fated to sit on a trash heap holding a cardboard crown???

She said the thing I least wanted to hear but perhaps most needed to:

“I can’t tell you who he is. But I can tell you that that encounter was about not closing yourself off from any path that’s still open.”

For the 30+ crowd, please drop your wisdom and lessons learned!!

As I watch what’s happened with romantasy—that is, publishers scooping up a shit-ton of these books after noticing an appetite for them—I keep wondering why, after the success of writers like Sally Rooney and Lily King, publishing hasn’t appeared to put any true weight behind filling what I see is a different hole in the market: literary romance.1

The romantasy and commercial romance spaces have become increasingly oversaturated. Can you name the number of romantasy or commercial romance novelists on one hand? Sure, if you had, like, 10,000 hands (super bad math, I know, whatever). But I bet you’d be hard-pressed trying to name more than five literary romance writers. Not upmarket (see: Emily Henry) but literary.2

Part of the problem is the market in general is leaning more commercial but also: no one seems to agree on what contemporary literary romance even is??? Because it’s a category that doesn’t really exist??? At least not in the way romantasy or horror exist. The kind of books I’m referring to you’d find on the “Fiction” table at your local bookstore which, idk why it’s called that, it just is, okay!!!

The other problem I think is many literary writers don’t self-identify as romance writers, including our Lord and Savior, Sally Rooney, but hold themselves apart from the romance community. At minimum, they don’t entirely see themselves as writing the same thing as their romance counterparts in a different register. We call theirs ‘love stories’ instead. More on that, well, now:

a romance and a love story are not always the same

I AM NOT AN EXPERT BUT, in my mind, romance is a genre whereas a love story transcends genre. A love story has more to do with the subject matter than with conventions. Like any genre, romance is partly defined by its conventions, constraints, or expectations: the love story in a romance must be the A plot and there usually must be either a Happily Ever After or Happy For Now. The latter is like a dangling clause to me, leaving room for myriad possibility.

Something that is not really an explicit convention of romance but that I personally find distinguishes a romance from a love story is the swooning element. We are swooning, for instance, over Connell Waldron’s silver chain. We are kicking our feet when he picks it up with his teeth. There is some fantasy buoying the story even if it’s not operating in the same dreamy or escapist register that a commercial romance might (enter shit I love like the door lean or fist biting which, I’m sorry to report, most people don’t do irl :’( but maybe they should!?)

There’s plenty of literary love stories where, for example, an older guy is just kind of a dick to a younger woman but she loves it for a while or a married couple is going through some bullshit. These are not romances even if they contain moments of romance and it’s because they contain no fantasy. The guy is a dick in the end, the married couple gets divorced.3

what is literary romance then?

It’s easier to start with what I’m not talking about when I ask (somewhat cheekily) Where Are All The Literary Romance Writers?4

I don’t mean literary writers who’ve dabbled in writing romance like Curtis Sittenfeld’s ROMANTIC COMEDY or literary writers who often pivot from project to project. I don’t mean literary writers who write about love. I don’t mean commercial or upmarket romance writers who pen beautiful prose.

I mean literary writers (who most agree are literary) who’ve made this their lane, who are writing with some general awareness (conscious or subconscious) of the romance genre; this doesn’t mean they are purposefully gesturing at the genre but that gesture is there in their work and they keep doing it across multiple books. We expect this from them. We go to them for this. Holly Brickley, who wrote DEEP CUTS, could be a fixture in this genre but it depends on her next novel. I think you often see literary writers who go on to write something else.5

Literary fiction is a bizarre genre to begin with because it’s more a category of writing—a way people see, engage, and talk about a work—than a more easily classifiable genre like horror. But it still operates as a genre with (albeit mushier) conventions. Someone once said that in commercial fiction, it’s about moving the story forward and in literary fiction, it’s about moving the story deeper. This is a generalization, of course, one upmarket fiction blows open, but it feels loosely true.

The ideal literary romance, to me, draws on the best parts of literary fiction and romance in the same way a great romantasy isn’t either/or but a seamless blend. Two genres that became one <3 (how fucking romantic!!!)

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the problem of positioning

Atria editor Sean deLone recently wrote a great piece defining upmarket fiction (ie. the lovechild of commercial and literary fiction. Think: THE WEDDING PEOPLE, SUCH A FUN AGE, MY BOOK (teehee).

He talks about upmarket fiction as a spectrum and how, where you fall on it, often comes down to the author’s intentions, the style and sophistication of the story, and how the book is positioned in the market. I think this is exactly right.

I also think author intention and positioning are two big reasons why literary romance as a robust category barely exists.

As I’ve said: what literary writers are coming out and calling themselves romance writers? They may acknowledge the influence of romances on their work (See: Kelly Link’s THE BOOK OF LOVE) or discuss their affinity for exploring relationship dynamics or writing about intimacy, but again, there just aren’t enough making this explicit connection between their own work and the genre at large to make it a thing.

And, oh, the positioning and marketing of it all! I can hear people screaming the names of their favorite upmarket romance writers at this post, asking, Why don’t they ‘count’? Lily King, for instance, actually doesn’t read to me as that much more literary than the best of Emily Henry, Carly Fortune or Rainbow Rowell.6 But who publishes an author makes a big difference in how that author is read and understood, whether or not readers grasp the nuances between different imprints. It’s their packaging. Does the cover have cartoon characters on it or eyes crying white flower petals?7

Rooney’s last book was published by FSG. That’s about as literary as you can get. Remember, though, the uproar over the CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS cover? The ‘omg it’s litfic but it looks like fun women’s fiction’ discourse? That helped court a different audience of readers.

A Berkley romance, there’s no question it’s a romance. Berkley has the established infrastructure to position and launch a romance. Even readers outside of publishing know the name, it’s that well-branded.

is ‘happily ever after’ incompatible with literary fiction?

In her review of Lily King’s new novel, HEART THE LOVER, writer Leigh Stein says the reason she thinks the book is so popular is because it’s really a romance novel “disguised” as a literary novel. I think literary writers who take love as their subject totally benefit from the pre-existing enthusiasm for romance. I ALSO think the word “disguised” is doing a lot of work here. It gets at another central problem: romance and literary fiction, at least contemporarily, are often viewed as incompatible. How romances tend to end, I think, has something to do with this.8

I love the debate around commercial v. upmarket v. literary fiction because I am a weird loser! Endings though, for some reason, are often omitted from this debate, but they’re often one of the ways I discern how literary a book is or isn’t.

I don’t want to fall into the trap that assumes literary novels MUST have endings that fuck you up emotionally in a bad way. LESS has an extremely heartwarming ending. I mean, fuck! NORMAL PEOPLE has a happy ending. I can think of dozens of literary novels that end with hope. But for me, the difference is that the ending feels realistic, not like a fantasy.9 The debts introduced in the story must be paid on some level. This might be divisive to say, but if there’s no cost to the character, everyone gets out of the plot’s binding home free with no losses, no consequences, I don’t think that’s a literary novel.10 I focus less on beginnings when evaluating the literary potential of a book; they don’t tell you what the book ultimately becomes, what it can be. The story hasn’t grown to its full height.

But back to Leigh. In her review of HEART, she says that she thinks literary romances have more flexibility in how they end. It doesn’t have to have a HEA (Happily Ever After) like a commercial romance must.

Hardcore romance readers on Goodreads are throwing their phones right about now. They’re also reporting me to the local authorities.

But I actually side with Leigh here! I have ALWAYS been torn by the requirement of a HEA as defined by the characters getting together in the end. I know that technically without one, it’s not a romance. My hope though is not that literary romance discards the concept of a HEA or HFN, but expands what it can be.

there will never be another sally rooney or: the singular talent trap

Finally, I think literary romance hasn’t really blown up because someone like Sally Rooney is primarily seen as an isolated phenomenon rather than part of a larger community. Same with Lily King. It’s just, Lily King is Lily King. Or Sally Rooney is Sally Rooney. Literary writers writing alone, siloed. They’re not writing genre, they’re just writing what they feel like and what they feel like writing about is love.

The takeaway from Rooney’s success seemed to be more millennial fiction or sad girl lit and, I don’t know, I always felt like that wasn’t the right takeaway.11 The takeaway to me was that people are hungry for elevated romances that court fantasy but the kind of fantasy that still exists within the limitations of our world or at least gives the impression of adhering to those limitations.12

Emily Henry is her own phenomenon, too, but she also revealed (or at least affirmed) an appetite for upmarket romance that opened up space for more. Tia Williams, Carly Fortune, Cara Bastone, B.K Borison, Kate Goldbeck—that corner of romance has blossomed. Same with Rebecca Yarros re: a massive phenomenon, but no one (that I know) threw up their hands like, welp, can’t do that again.

Commercial and upmarket romance feel more communal. Literary romance feels like a scatter plot graph that no one has taken out a pen to draw a line connecting anything.

My dream is that literary romance gets its own boom, naturally smaller than the romantasy one, but as enthusiastic, as nurtured.

No more “disguising” romance as literary fiction. No more Litfic slipping through its bedroom window at night to meet Romance by the creek. Just let them be together already.

LIQUID by MARIAM RAHMANI

“The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot about a young Muslim scholar who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer.”

I kind of cheated because this is the UK cover, but I just LOVE how the title and the image are in direct and explicit conversation. It’s like you can feel the title dripping down your body. Also I’m a simple woman: I see a pink cover, I buy it.

NECESSARY FICTION by ELOGHOSA OSUNDE

A novel exploring “cross-generational queer life in Nigeria.”

This is a classically stunning cover with a colorful twist. The image is art. Your eye can’t help but find the bright pink and blue hair, the dark, shimmering faces. It’s a cover you can easily imagine framing for your wall.

CANON by PAIGE LEWIS

An epic tale in which “two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor.”

This book doesn’t come out until May 2026 but it’s exactly the kind of cover that makes me want to pause in a busy bookstore: the chaotic feel disciplined by organized squares, a pretty pastel color palette. The whale is giving Moby Dick. A cover the telegraphs the vibe of the book but doesn’t tell you what it’s about. And I LOVE the title in big, chunky letters. It feels like it’s punching you in the face—the astigmatism girlies are grateful.

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MEAN BOYS by GEOFFREY MAK

An essay collection that explores “art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present.”

There are two types of covers I’m always going to pick up: a pink one and one with white space. The title is simple but loud. The photograph of a hand setting pretty blue flowers on fire is perfection. This collection also contains one of the most beautiful portraits of a platonic friendship I’ve ever read.

VLADIMIR by JULIA MAY JONAS

“A beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own.”

There was a time when you were probably seeing this cover everywhere, and for good reason: look at that man’s chest. I have nothing else to say about this; again—I’m a simple woman.

WHAT YOU MAKE OF ME by SOPHIE MADELINE DESS

I admit, I hadn’t heard of this book before but the cover immediately caught my attention. It’s giving Rachel Cusk. There’s something about a painting on a cover that makes you feel smarter. I also like that you can tell this guy is hot even though his face is fucked up. He’s actually hotter because his face is a bunch of paint.

THEY ALL FALL IN LOVE AT THE END by ME, BITCHES!!!

A twenty-something writer is ready for her messy love triangle era now that she’s in an open relationship. What she didn’t foresee? A forbidden love triangle with the only two people who are off-limits: her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend.

BWAHAHAHA, oh you thought this wasn’t going to be self-promotional??? You thought I was simply putting this list together out of the kindness of my little heart??? WRONG. I’m so delighted by this cover I could vomit glitter. I wake up every morning and look at it lying on my side like it’s my husband. And fucking surprise! You can buy it today and receive it a million months from now. If that logic sounds terrible to you, just think of preordering like edging. The climax is better for the wait.

Americans have a uniquely weird relationship to celebrity and I’m fascinated by how this rigged contract between fan/famous-person is playing out amid all the drama about Taylor Swift.

Let’s catch you up: she has a new album out. A lot of people think it’s bad. Some lifelong fans are butthurt about the fact that she is a white billionaire who is also a Victim. She sings a lot about Travis Kelce.

I am not a Swiftie and have never been. I like some of her songs but not more than I like the music of her contemporaries. If I’m building an army of breathy white girls, I’m recruiting Lana, Sabrina, Billie, Clairo before I’m recruiting Taylor.

But what I keep returning to as I read elegiac posts by Swiftie defectors is this one maybe unkind thought: you all helped create her though?? You lined her pockets, bought every iteration of her albums, bought her sweater at Walmart or whatever. So yes, she is a billionaire now and out of touch as billionaires are. The whole trajectory seems inevitable to me but few people are pointing to the other side of this capitalist equation: the people generating demand.

I’m not trying to sound above the fray when I say I’ve never understood celebrity culture. By celebrity culture, I mean this logic that raises people (celebrities) above the non-celebrity person i.e I am sobbing my body weight in tears at the mere sight of you on the street even though I don’t actually know you. I am waiting in digital lines for seven hours so I can get the new skincare product you’re dropping at midnight because you've created a false sense of scarcity to manipulate me into feeling that I must have this thing now. I am rampaging against strangers online and music critics at the New York Times who critique your bloated album because an attack on you is an attack on me even though you have nine houses and I can’t afford rent.

In the past, I might’ve accepted feminist arguments claiming that dumping on celebrity culture is an attack on an interest largely shared by women and queer men. But as a woman who loves romance novels, pink, and what I call hyperfemme bratty bitch pop music, I’m not fielding that claim today, file it with someone else.

Celebrity culture runs on worship. It maintains a dynamic where one person is the worshipped and another is the worshipper. Or put in more crass terms: the salesman and the one being sold to.

Because celebrities are almost always selling you shit, whether that’s a product or an illusion, and this is part of my issue with the whole idea of them. It’s one thing paying to license an artist’s work, paying to attend their concert. They’ve made a thing you find valuable and now you’re paying them for their labor. I’m all for supporting a creator you cherish, I’m all for allowing yourself to feel awe by what they’ve made.

But a celebrity is not the same as an artist. Celebrities can be artists but, to me, a celebrity is someone for whom fame is the main currency. Fame is a machine printing money, bill after bill slipping out of its green mouth. Fame is a deeply designed story crafted about someone and repeated again and again to an audience that keeps growing, keeps investing with their attention, money, emotions into this story that was not written by mistake or without the support of a PR firm whose job it is to lull you with narrative. I’m not saying we should abolish celebrity, I’m just saying it’s a con.

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I recently wandered into the SKIMS in Georgetown (this is Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand). I’m a fan of SPANX which I thought SKIMS might be similar to. I touched some of the items and the quality didn’t feel much different to me than Forever 21. But best believe the prices were different. The store was packed with teenage girls. All I could think exiting the shop, like someone’s angry grandpa, was that all this was a sad scam but so many people will happily spend money because a pretty person has told them to.

This is a problem not just for pop culture but for politics. The swathes of Americans who just want someone to tell them how to think, what to be angry about. Who believe a person with a large platform must have legitimate, well-sourced information. They want to believe someone has been selected by Jesus to lead us, idk, somewhere, which is the crux of celebrity. You must believe this person has some quality you don’t and can’t possess.

It is other people, en masse, that confer celebrity to another person. And that’s what makes it so weird to me. That this person cannot be famous without you and yet they are somehow positioned as being above you. This dynamic in its extreme can manifest as entitlement, a fan wanting unlimited access to the celebrity in ways that are maladaptive. But also: anyone who’s ever met someone remotely famous or has friends who have famous friends, you know that these people are usually not that great in person. I don’t mean this as a dig, I mean this as a blunt statistic reflective of human nature.

And it’s their right to be fucking average!!! We’re the ones wanting them to be more interesting—funnier, smarter, more talented—than the actually are. You’ve heard the saying, Never meet your heroes? The question I’m posing is why are these people our heroes in the first place, what have they done?1

Americans and our preoccupation with celebrity reveals an inverted value system: we care about the prettiest people, the wealthiest, the most (sometimes) talented, the people with ‘more.’ These are the people we want to hear about. My own most popular Substack posts are about literary celebrities and I find this telling.

How then, can we be so shocked that this country elected a celebrity? A person whose value system rewards worship, who’s whole body bends towards the spotlight.

I think this is why people are deeply uncomfortable with Taylor Swift’s, “Life of A Showgirl,” in this particular moment. The album feels so uncannily disconnected from our current reality as to be an insult to everyone who has to see the National Guard on their way home, the federal workers keeping our government running without pay. Swift is dreaming about the whole block looking like Travis Kelce meanwhile the whole block is looking like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I’m not saying people can’t care about their favorite stars, I’m asking why do you care about them more than the immigrant being pulled from their apartment in the middle of the night, ziptied, and driven away?

Be mad at Taylor Swift, whatever, but also be mad at the logic that allows her to keep metastasizing without actually growing.

People expect too much from that woman. But that’s what celebrity wants, for you to expect more than it can ever deliver, for you to keep believing indefinitely that maybe they’ll turn out to be exactly who you want.

I remember reading a review about a popular novel a few years ago whose headline read, “A Book Made For T.V.” It was the L.A Times so they would know. This declaration was a dig, one I couldn’t out of my head because it didn’t immediately feel like one.

And it was far from the last time I’d hear something like this. The other day, I read a post that described a different novel as “Netflix realism,” or:

a style of fiction that doesn’t attempt realism in the sense of making a lifelike illusion with words, but a realism that we are all used to from television.

Stick around in spaces where Literary Discourse breeds and you hear a lot of breathy lamenting: how literary fiction is dying, how the blurb industrial complex needs to die, about whether MFA programs have crushed creativity (no), about romance readers being a slice above porn addicts (stupid), about white male novelists not getting the attention they deserve (lol). About autofiction (shut up).

You’ll also hear about how books feel more and more like they’re made for T.V and, what’s implied, less like novels.

I understand this critique at the same time that I don’t really understand it. Here’s what I mean: film and television have now been a part of the culture for, what, seventy years? (remember, I can’t do math). Long enough that the form would bleed into other forms. And why shouldn’t we steal from other mediums? Why shouldn’t they mix? What should a novel feel like?

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Sally Rooney’s earlier writing often feels as much like a screenplay as a novel. This isn’t a defect, it’s a style.

DEEP CUTS by Holly Brickley feels like a 2000s RomCom during the golden age of the genre, which makes sense since RomCom conventions cut across both books and movies.

BUNNY by Mona Awad is shot through with cinematography. Her follow up, WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY even more so to the point where I kept thinking as I read, this would make an amazing movie. I didn’t mean that at all as an insult.

One tick I love about BUNNY is the way Awad exploits (and assumes) our shared experience of movies and TVs to craft her descriptions:

“Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.”

“A couple of Wes Anderson-type girls stare at me through their hipster frames. Little silky French shifts with an understated pattern.”

At one point, Awad describes a character’s black mesh gloves as reminiscent of a goth at an 80s prom. Maybe this is because I wasn’t around in the 80s but in my mind, this is gesturing as much at the lived experience of being in high school in the 80s as it is at the 80s high school movies most of us have seen. In short, we know what’s she talking about with these references. The image becomes immediately available. And aren’t words in books meant to connect us to images? Isn’t there meant to be some form of a film flickering in our minds when we read?

But I don’t think this is what people are complaining about when they complain about a novel feeling too much like a Netflix show. I think what they mean is the rendering of real life feels thin and sketched, it doesn’t make use of all a novel can do, that it somehow insults the form, is lazy about it. If it’s mimicking it’s mimicking bad T.V. or at least it doesn’t translate well, fully, or with complexity.

Like books, movies and T.V contribute to our repository of cliches: the wide shot of someone waking up in the morning, the close-up of someone crying on a park bench. Cliches are not just platitudes, their images like these. I think it’s the reaching into that repository without thought or interrogation that’s the problem here, not that one form feels like or steals from another. And there’s a difference, obviously, between a book emulating a good movie and a bad one.

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Not long ago, I read a novel that opened with a scene of a young, pretty woman in a major city who was late for work. She’s hungover, mascara striped across her face, stumbling around for her pants. She runs for the train, makes it just in time. It’s the birthday of her late sibling. We know this because it appears on her phone’s calendar. She tries to ignore her grief. Reading this, I had the uncanny feeling that I was watching a movie but there was nothing cinematic about it. By ‘cinematic’ I mean the sweeping beauty telegraphed by skilled camera-work, smart scoring, all the visual, sonal, thematic, pieces of a scene clicking together.

This novel felt like a movie because that’s where we’ve seen this opening a million times. It tells us nothing, it’s a blandly comforting, well-worn establishing shot. It only works in a novel if the sequence it’s so beautifully written, smacking with specificity, some sort of surprise or subversion around the corner. Otherwise it feels placeless, characterless, void. It feels like, Who cares.

You can find this abuse of cues and shorthands to storytell in films and fiction both. It’s all just janky craftsmanship in the end.

I don’t need to tell you this because you, dear reader, are not a fucking child, but one of the main differences between films and novels is that in a movie, the images are directly offered to the viewer while in a novel the reader must conjure them themselves. A novelist has a different kind of job.

But I do think writers can learn from film and T.V to complete this job. And sometimes a writer is actually aiming to copy what we see on-screen.

I’m working on a novel some of you may know colloquially as White Baby Daddy HBO Drama Novel. Part of it is set in the mid-2000s at a private California high school. It’s the age of Abercrombie, Hollister and American Eagle. High School Musical and Justin Bieber’s swoopy hair; The Hills, Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries. I wanted parts of the novel to feel like, to embody, those high school movies and T.V shows because they upheld the lie of unattainably beautiful white teenagehood that wrecked the self-esteem of a generation of middle-class Black girls.1 And yet many of us, including myself, are lulled by, nostalgic for these same movies with their social hierarchies and hot teen stars. It’s a contradiction I’m playing with, but I have to put you in that cinematic world with all its vacant visual cues.

I think we have to accept that novels—what they’re meant to or can do, how they feel—will likely keep changing alongside our technologies and, more importantly, alongside how those advances alter the lens (or screens) through which we understand and engage with our world.

You can’t divorce the novel from other modes of consumption. Writers are people who are a hodgepodge of what they read, watched, listened to growing up and beyond. And yes, we should avoid the hollow replication of movies that turn characters to mannequins, settings into cardboard sets in Hollywood lots.

I always think about my writing teacher who once called out a student for making a character vomit after seeing something sad/gross. She asked, “How many of you actually physically throw up when we see something gross?” No one raised their hand. This is a reaction we’ve captured from T.V, not from real life.

But the books that feel like movies and fail I don’t think fail only because of this. They fail because that’s all they offer, these empty regurgitative gestures severed from actual character motivation, void of fought-for texture and knowledge of the world in which the story is set. These books aren’t learning from films, they’re simply plagiarizing them.

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself embroiled in several debates about hardback books vs. softcover ones. Before your eyes glaze, this post is not about that. But it is about the cost of books and a book’s physical form is very much a part of that.1

A bit of backstory: the economy is fucked up. The most recent jobs numbers were trash. You don’t need a nobody on the internet to tell you this. You know this.

You also know that you’ve probably considered buying a new release in the last year or so and flinched when you saw $30 on the price sticker ($10,000 if you’re in Canada. Sowrrey).

This whole saga really began for me when I went to the bookstore a few weeks ago and picked up a paperback that felt like (my apologies) Scott’s toilet paper. (No offense to Scott-users. I am praying for your ass though).

Because I’m privy to the goings-on in the bookworld, I knew this decision was likely a financial one. Paper costs have been rising for a while, then you have the tar*ffs of it all (many of which are probably illegal but whatever, I digress).

I am not really knocking the publisher for this flimsy book, and I’m certainly not trying to come for the writer. But I am making an observation.

More books are being released in paperback instead of hardback first, then a paperback later. Now, a paperback release is typical for most commercial fiction. This hardback —> softcover arc is primarily the trajectory of upmarket/literary fiction and select uber-popular romances (like Emily Henry or Abby Jimenez).

A paperback release, I’ve heard, can have implications for how the book is received within the literary world (reviews, prestige, blah, blah, blah). But most readers don’t care, don’t even know that this is a thing. I actually think, at least anecdotally, most readers prefer paperbacks. They’re easier to carry around, some people like being able to bend back the cover for more accessible reading (evil).

I’m a hardback whore to the bone and that’s because I beat my books up. I am wrestling with them—underlining, dogearing, screaming, writing ‘wtf bitch <3!!!’ in the margins. When I was a kid, I ate a page out of a book.2 Reading for me is physical and so I need a steady sparring partner. Case in point: the cover of my paperback copy of The Goldfinch has entirely ripped off (more on this later).

The only paperbacks I recognize are courtesy of Graywolf Press—they have delicious, hearty softcovers. (I praised the quality of their books over the phone to poetry editor, Jeff Shotts, and he actually told me the type of paper and its weight).

But this post is not about whether to paperback-release or not paperback-release.

As I was flipping through that Scott-toilet-paper-softcover though—and I say this as someone who will drop Money on books because I believe in them—I did wonder, is this worth $18? This thing I’m probably going to accidentally rip up before I’ve even finished it? That just flops out of my hands like it doesn’t want to be touched?

So: what are books really worth? And are they worth what they cost right now?

This is not the same as trying to ascertain whether a pair of boots is worth the money. You put them on, walk around. They’re comfortable, they look cute, you take them for a spin, they don’t fall apart. Okay, great, those were worth $40.

That’s because we want our shoes to do maybe two or three basic things, to complete obvious and designated tasks.

But a book? A book is different. How do you calculate its value? Well, first you’d have to read it to truly know if the story (because it’s the story, not just the object holding it, that is then main tool of evaluation here) is worth what you paid for it. A book (like a play or a movie) is a product you must buy before you understand what you’re buying. It’s a risk.

What is a story (which is not a product the way a book is) worth? If it’s a shitty one, maybe not much. If it’s a transcendent one, maybe your soul.

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Do you see the problem? Let’s step back and do some math (God, I can’t believe you guys are making me do math, wtf!!!).

My first copy of The Goldfinch, that I fucked up and which I’ve owned for about seven years, cost $20. (The new copy I bought last year was $22.99). This is more than many paperbacks but 1). it’s Donna Tartt 2). This is post-Pulitzer Prize and 3). It’s 771 pages which is a lot of paper.

20 dollars divided by 7 years is $2.80 a year. 20 dollars divided by 771 is 0.026 cents.

I’m so bad at math that I actually don’t even know what these calculations are supposed to represent but both the outcomes are cheap.

Since we’re talking about today’s market (not the market in 2013), let’s go with the $22.99 version for the rest of this thot exercise. Most people in major cities in the book-buying demographic would easily blow $22.99 eating out. In most cities, that’s a pretty affordable dinner. That’s two glasses of wine at a restaurant. That’s an Uber ride on a bad day in D.C and a good one in New York.

If you’ll allow me to scream at you for a second, part of this is that we don’t really value books. Or rather, because we can’t measure what they gives us (because capitalism involves a clear exchange), we can glibly say, $28 is too much while spending $700 to see Beyonce WHICH fair, but also COME ON.

People are allowed to spend their money on what they want!!! I KNOW! I know!

And this is also why Amazon owns the market. It can sell people a book for $1.99 because readers think that’s fair. They don’t think the book you spent twelve years writing while raising your seven grandkids that’s 500 pages and that you went into a depression over is worth $28, love3. It’s not worth the price of a cheddar burger and a side of yukon fries at Silver Diner.4 Respectfully.

But I didn’t come here to shame. I came here to make a point.

My book is supposed to be coming out in hardback for $28. (JUNE 2 (allegedly) LOCK IN, HOES). And even though I know what it took to create, I’ll be the first to admit the question of worth is so shifty, so slippery, when it comes to literature that it’s forced to inhabit extremes just to accommodate it.

I’m absolutely blazing if I buy a hardback for $28 and hate the book. I feel cheated, slighted, slapped in the face, How dare you do this to me? The hopes I had for you!

But when I love a book, I don’t remember what I paid for it. Unlike meals or car-share rides, books are things you can keep for years. The experience of the story is ephemeral, but the object is not. The cost is irrelevant when the story gets inside you. At risk of sounding pat (too late) it’s priceless.

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A publisher nor a writer can control for this variable, this essential instability that is native to subjective art, ‘products’ that are not designed to do any one thing like a hair tie or a skin cream or boots. The book is worth what the reader feels it’s worth to them. What then are you really paying for?

To inhabit a different body.

To kick your feet with a giggling glee.

To revisit childhood, when your mind felt deliciously elastic and open.

To hide your sobbing face even in the privacy of your bedroom.

To feel a fire in your chest that propels you to motion.

To become part of a web the ties you to every other person whose read it.

To stop time.

To move backwards, forwards, through it.

To lose hours.

To find something better.

To feel known.

To forget yourself.

To remember.

To run your pen ragged over the pages out of love.

To be crushed when you reach the end.

To flip to the first page again.

Very few products that you can fit in your bag can do all of this. You’re paying for the possibility that it will.

This week’s roundup is brought to you by my Depression and Inability to write anything coherent when waking up in a world that would rather I and others not wake up at all. And apparently Canada is not so easy to move to, like, let me into the country??? So here I am, in America, stress listening to podcasts, paralyzed. There’s some dark stuff on this list, some light, and a bit of magic. Enjoy it all while it lasts.

podcasts & audiobooks: ezra klein meet angela davis and covid…again

If you want to hear about what’s really happening in the U.S—and why it’s worse than you think:

This podcast articulates the precise concerns (in their scale, urgency, and scope) that I have been trying to hammer into people over the last few weeks as many continue to mince words over the true implications of the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of National Guards in D.C and his plans to triple ICE’s budget for 2026.

What is going to happen when, predictably, a protester throws a rock at an agent? Klein asks. Or a Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks it’s a gunshot? In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city in a country-defining crisis. What happens then?

His guest, journalist Radley Balko (author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Force), argues that all this is not about immigration (completely) or crime (at all), but Trump’s desire to build a paramilitary force, one that, this time-around, will carry out his agenda unquestioningly.

That violence is the inevitable outcome of this is evidenced by Trump’s suggestion to ‘just shoot’ George Floyd protestors during his first term. Well, Balko argues, now he can. There are no functioning mechanisms to stop him.

I do not see enough people in my life (even as troops patrol our city) doing the wretched work of wrapping their brains fully around this fact, that the foundations for a cataclysmic act(s) of violence against American civilians is being built this minute, is already happening to non-citizens. It’s past time to imagine the worst because the worst is likely coming (read: here) whether you have the heart to imagine it or not.

If you’re looking for inspiration from someone who’s put their neck on the line in dire times:

I have not gotten far into this audiobook but I’m obsessed with the way Davis casually says things like, “Before-uh I-uh LEFT the communist PAR-teee,” in her notorious drawl. We were about the same age when she first wrote her autobiography so I’m very interested in what she has to say about living out your twenties in turbulent times.

If you want to know wtf is going on with the new covid vaccine—and why you probably can’t get it:

YES, I’m including a show I produced because even I learned a lot from it.1 Last week, our host, Jenn, was in conversation with the inimitable infectious disease experts Angie Rasmussen and Dr. Paul Offit. They pulled no punches when it came to explaining the new Covid strain, Stratus, now the dominant one in the U.S, the spike we’re seeing this summer, concerns over tracking the virus and, if Health Secretary Kennedy’s ultimate goal is to pull the vaccine from the market entirely (which is not unlikely), how he could actually do this.

During the show, when asked why the Trump administration would make vaccines less accessible, Angie replied: “It’s the rise of authoritarianism and fascism is really what it is. In 1938, the Nazis did the exact same thing. They depleted completely areas of scientific research and inquiry and health that would’ve benefited everybody in favor of things that benefit the authoritarian who is consolidating power. And this is really what it’s all about.”

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music: sabrina carpenter and sombr should get married

Some FUN, finally, thank fuck!!!!!!

If you want to feel cute and sexy with a dash of disco and some plucky country chords

“That boy is corrupt / Could you raise him to love me, maybe? / He sure fucked me up / And yes, I’m talking bout your baby.”

I don’t care what people say about Sabrina Carpenter getting on her knees so some faceless man can pull her hair: sign me up. I’ve listened to Nobody’s Son 4,34dn3ur4535 times. My favorite part? The bridge where it sounds like someone’s getting whipped in the background, maybe Somebody’s Son???

If you want to dance to something sweet, sultry, and sweaty while quietly falling in love with a dark-haired 20 year-old noodle

“In a room full of people, I look for you / Would you avoid me or would you look for me too? / Tell me, is our story through? (Through) / Or do our hearts still beat in tune?”

It was like sombr was created in a petri dish in someone’s basement. I had never heard of him and now it’s like I’ll never not hear about him. And I’m totally here for his takeover. This album makes me MISS clubbing in the kind of place with strobing lights, where everyone is sticky with sweat, and that’s just the way things were. 12 to 12, crushing and come closer are my repeat offenders.

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Reading lately has been like pulling teeth. I know I’m not the only one whose reading slumps are epic and existential (Hello, Depression and Dread, you Bitches!!). But I had to pop into say that Mona Awad’s follow-up to BUNNY is FUCKING NUTS. My favorite character of all is a new one. Spoiler: he’s a hot, dumb not-totally-human himbo and I’m obsessed with that man.

This title is something I’ve tried to remind myself as I re-learn how to do my job at a time when the traditional container for that job feels much too small and frankly, inadequate (more on this at some point). Obvi, Lorde is a superb writer. And one thing about me? I love a pink book.

I never thought I’d be listening to negro spirituals as a morose child who once rolled her eyes at songs like “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Swing Lo,” when forced to sing them in school.2

Ah, the Privilege, the Ignorance, the Arrogance of the post-Civil Rights middle-class Black child!! That little prick. If only she could see herself now, darting into the night to buy two candles (one black, one white, to represent balance, and because capitalism is involved even when a bitch is just trying to engage in a bit of witchcraft) to light and summon her ancestors from their graves to protect the powerless, to balance the scales of justice.

So: if you see angry formerly enslaved undead wandering your town, I might’ve done That.

Oops.

The other day, bright-eyed, joyfully caffeinated, I opened my inbox to find this weird shit waiting for me:

Discordia Review

"[Vuong begins to cry]": The beginning of the end of Ocean Vuong

The Vibe Shift has come cataclysmically for Ocean Vuong. Really, he should have seen it coming. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was an extremely pre-Vibe-Shift book—a queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw…

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9 months ago · 410 likes · 97 comments · Eris

Oh? My first reaction was: well, there’s a lot of shit to cry about. My second: this is a bizarrely melodramatic way to frame a thing I’m unconvinced is actually happening, but let’s see what this person has to say since Substack has gone out of its way to stick it in my inbox.

Here’s what this person had to say:

The Vibe Shift has come cataclysmically for Ocean Vuong. Really, he should have seen it coming. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was an extremely pre-Vibe-Shift book—a queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up, and of course it sold like Vietnamese banh xeo…I mean, the title alone put me off, because it’s just so fucking poncy, and the book itself was as much of an overwritten mess as that title would suggest, filled with empty-headed philosophizing. I put it down after maybe a couple dozen pages and then never picked it up again. The critics, on the whole, seemed to lap the stupid thing up.

um…………BAYBEE, who bullied you in middle school??? This all sounds very (excuse my French) bitter. More than that, if he’s blaming Vuong’s rising star on the conditions created by a previous vibe we should now be condemning, what are the vibes now? Fascism? Genocide? What are the vibes now?!?!

I really didn’t want to be back here but here I am.1

This isn’t a piece about Vuong’s new novel (I haven’t read it), or his prose (purple or otherwise). I was a fan of his first poetry collection, I enjoyed his first novel, too. And I want to make clear, I am not anti-review, anti-literary criticism. I want people to engage rigorously, furiously with Art! I don’t want the already-shrinking book coverage to feel too coherent, boringly frictionless.

What I’m saying is, I support the right to dislike a book, to feel slighted by bad writing.

But this?

I can’t ignore the things that actually come out of Vuong’s mouth, which reveal that the man isn’t really an influence I’d like on a burgeoning literature-reading renaissance, for the simple reason that the man is a fucking illiterate bellend.

That’s nuts.

I was glad to see the post’s top commenter, Freddie deBoer say, “I really, really distrust these moments when everyone turns on a writer at the same time.”

This seems right to me. It all feels very cheap.

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But: I want to talk about Substack planting this cheap take in my inbox. I want to talk about cruelty and mean-spiritedness online. Vitriol, ragebait, takedowns.

I recently took a webinar for writers trying to learn TikTok. As a journalist, I couldn’t believe it when the instructor suggested appealing to people’s anger for views.

It’s not that I couldn’t believe it because what she said was untrue. This is the ethos of these platforms, hooking you to them at the expense of everyone’s humanity.

What I couldn’t believe was that we were still trying to disappear the connection between cruelty online and cruelty off of it.

Do you know that a shooter opened fire at the CDC headquarters last week in an attempt to make the ‘public aware of his distrust in vaccines?’2

Do you know how conspiracies about the Covid-19 vaccine circulated? How they spread nearly as fast as the virus itself?

Do you know when we write these hate-pieces, when we click on them, we are telling the algorithm who we are?

Do you know that it uses this data to make us who it wants us to be, which is people who click on hate-pieces?

Do you know a screen is only the illusion of a veil?

Do you know what happens on the internet doesn’t stay on it?

And: do you know that this mf post gets even worse?

….the much-publicized support for Trump among some “POC” communities and the lack of support for Kamala from black men3 (though I think expecting black men to vote for a former DA is some next-level insult) exposed sheltered whites to the novel conception that minority communities are pluralistic. This means that not only is identity politics politically useless, “Voice Uplift” is even less than useless because, surprise surprise, no one subjective experience can stand in for the complexities within a group. In fact, Vietnamese people in particular, Vuong’s demographic, are stalwart Republican voters and always have been, so listening to Vuong will in no way “enlighten” you about a community Vuong stands apart from.

That DA comment is crazy because also sexism but moving right along. The point is taken but the anger is misplaced. Why are we blaming Vuong because white people are looking to him to learn how to feel about Vietnamese people, that sounds like their fucking fault. Why are we blaming him for a phenomenon that happens to every writer of color who “makes it”? That is, the phenomenon of You Failed To Represent Us, How Dare You. See also: You Fucked Up, How Dare You. Because you aren’t as smart as they told us you were, you never deserved to be here in the first place.

It’s fair to question why the literary world (like the rest of the world) is so enamored with the idea of winners and losers. Winners who absorb a level of celebration and scrutiny that they don’t even seem to want it in the end. Losers who are so burned by the system they resort to nihilism.

Trashing the so-called winners who are frankly just shinier cogs in the machine won’t remedy this problem.

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Not long after waxing poetic that, “minority communities are pluralistic” (thanks by the way, I def needed you to explain that to me <3), he writes this:

I used the phrase “intellectual himbo4” when I profiled Simon Wu a while ago, and I think that Vuong very much fits the same shoes. In fact, Vuong and Wu have a lot of identity tag overlap—well, okay, namely they’re just both gay Asian guys.

I don’t even know what to say.

Would you allow me to make things about myself for a moment?

The tone of this piece reminds me of comment some white man left a couple of weeks ago on a post I wrote about selling my debut novel:

“I mean, look: Congrats on the book sale. But, you basically admit it mostly happened via insider connections a la NPR/NYT and then add a very basic-bitch common trope sexual triangle angle as the plot.5 All that AND the book isn’t even coming out until “summer 2026.” A year! I’d rather self-publish with artistic integrity and freedom.”

So much of what I hear when I see remarks like this is, you don’t deserve this.

When I press my ear to them, listen really closely, I hear: You don’t deserve this. I do. You’ve taken what I deserve from me.

Questions about who is or isn’t deserving are a tricky, tricky thing. Let’s just say outright what a big part of this discourse is about: people feel like Vuong doesn’t deserve what he’s gotten. He doesn’t deserve the MacArthur grant, the glowing reviews. The praise. The accolades. The money.

Who are you to say what someone fucking deserves? Who am I to say what someone fucking deserves? Most people don’t get the minimum of what they deserve: like food, like getting to stay in their home country, like not being a casualty in someone else’s war. My great-great-grandfather was a slave, my grandfather was a sharecropper, my dad was stoned each morning on the bus ride to school in the segregated south.

Do you think they got anything they fucking deserved?

Let me draw your attention back to this line:

“A queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up.”

Remember, though, when writers of color were getting paid pennies in advances compared to their white counterparts? Remember how this was the case for award-winning Black authors, those thought to be anointed? Remember there can only be one big Vietnamese author and a million white ones? Remember that when there’s only one, this load placed on that one body of work will become untenable? Remember who put that load there?

This piece landed in my email in a year when my inbox is spilling at the seams with the worst shit imaginable. Maybe that’s why it found me, it recognized something of itself in me. The utter disgust at injustice.

I’m in the process of asking writers more famous than I’ll probably ever be for favors. I decided to take a break from this post to work on a note to one of them instead. Can I tell you how good it felt? Not the asking for favors but the writing something nice? Writing what their work has meant to me?

This is not about whether Vuong’s work lives up to the expectations. That’s a fine and fair debate. This is about the mousetrap set on marginalized writers: you are always writing about the wrong thing. When you write about your community, when you write something entirely different, when you write through a rosy lens, when you write from a place of pessimism, you are always letting everyone down.

The white literary establishment crowned Ocean Vuong the spokesperson of the Asian American immigrant experience. It’s slipping, you’re celebrating that tilt, even though it was a crown designed to fit no one.

Dear diehards,

Everyone says this is a thing: that your second novel is harder to write than your first. My work in progress isn’t technically my “second” novel. It’s more like my fifth. But it’s the second one that feels real, like it could reasonably be released into the world. More importantly, it’s my second one since engaging with the publishing industry, since learning how to revise. My first three books, I finished and never took another look at. I didn’t know what to do after I was done.

I’ve been working fitfully on this second novel—let’s call it, White Baby Daddy HBO Drama Novel—for two years. I’d always been of the mind that one should dash off a first draft fast, but I was working on my debut, so that took precedent and I was always getting pulled back into those revisions.

But now my debut is almost done. As in, almost done, done. But that means I actually have to finish this White Baby Daddy book.

And this shit is turning out to be a real pain in my ass.

Sunday, May 25th: “Fucking Hell.”

I called my mom that morning to talk about David Foster Wallace’s suicide. It set a bad tone for the day. Got my usual at Starbucks—a nippy 50 degrees out, spears of sunlight, the whole long street silent and deserted. I got to work at around 9am. I was going to have to rewrite my entire novel. I’d realized this last night but the revelation still felt like a scream growing in my mouth. I had about 47,000 words written—not bad but not enough.

But before I could rewrite my novel I had to get on Instagram. I peeked at the comment section on a Bustle post about nonmonogamy. Big mistake. The comments were as dumb and bitter as they always are and my mood was ruined for the next hour. I called M, who was in South Africa, to complain, but he was on a mountain. He told me he was holding in his stomach as his Uber curved up the cliff from fear of falling off. Then he said fear was an illusion. I said, it won’t be illusion if you fall off that mountain.

Fuck! I didn’t want to start from scratch when I hadn’t even finished a first draft. My momentum was cursed. The problem was two-fold: I was writing a structurally difficult story—three main POVs, two timelines. It was a story that involved kids, parenting, while my debut was about people in their early twenties. I decided to solve the second issue my removing one of my character’s daughters entirely. I was bad at writing from the POV of parents. The kids would disappear for chapters at a time. The parents would go out and I’d forget that they’d have to get a babysitter to do that. I felt like I was in prison. I might re-add the daughter later but for now she was gone. Sad.

By 10am, I was pretty pissed with myself. Why are you on Substack instead of writing your second novel!!!! In theory, I deserved a break but I didn’t want one. I wanted to write. I wanted to do what I did five years before. I wrote the first draft of my debut novel in about three months. But it was bad. The difference was, I didn’t know how bad it was. Revision was a term that meant doodley squat to me. But I knew that my second novel was bad, knew exactly what changes I was going to have to make later. Was this new knowledge the thing holding me back?

I considered eating lunch at 10:30am just to have something to do. That’s how bad things were going.

By 11:30am, I’d written nearly 800 words, the most I’d written all week, which is insanity. Remember how this novel is a dual timeline? That morning, I decided that maybe I should write the past timeline, when the characters are teenagers, separately. I’d always found those chapters easier to write. And it occurred to me that maybe writing that arc first was useful for writing the present-day timeline. After all, the present day narrative is meant to be imbued with all the mess and drama of those high school years.

These were the little games you had to play with yourself to get it done. Forget about them when they’re 33! Forget about those fucking kids! Write the fun parts: the first love, first heartache, the tragedy that sets them up for a very different future than what they imagined. In short, write whatever you can.

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Monday, May 26th, “Please, motherfuckers ain’t stopping me.”

I had a dream that I adopted a black cat and it attacked me. I cared deeply for the cat, buying it lots of toys, so I was confused when it decided to attack me.

Apparently it was Memorial Day, but I didn’t know what that holiday was about, so I got to work, though really, I spent two hours on the phone with my mom, walked to Starbucks, went on Substack, and THEN got to work.

Another writing block for me: it was painfully clear that the writing that succeeded with audiences—my Modern Love piece, my Katie Kitamura lip gloss post—were always ones I pulled thoughtlessly from my ass. I wrote a piece about the lie of white male safety that got 3 views and it reminded me that my creative life was plagued by this tragic misalignment, that there was an opposite correlation between how hard I worked and how much people cared, so why kill myself over White Baby Daddy HBO Drama Novel?

At 9:45am, I opened the separate document I created for the past timeline and tried to do what I did yesterday. Realizing I couldn’t do what I did yesterday, I got on Instagram and looked at photos of Paris Hilton on the beach with her Greek tycoon heir boyfriend in 2005.

By noon, I’d written maybe four sentences. Frustrated, I decided to run up the street to Politics & Prose to buy THE PAPER PALACE since it deals with an old rekindled love and a marital affair. I don’t know why it’s so humiliating going into a bookstore and buying a bestseller. But reading a bit of it helped. I rewrote the opening to my novel and was actually happy with it.

Tuesday, May 27th, “Ouch.”

All night, my titty was in pain. This is not a metaphor, this is real life. But I had to go to work, not writing-work but work-work, so I brought my heating pad to the office and draped it over my left breast. At least it matched my outfit, the heating pad.

After my show ended at 11am, I walked to Starbucks and went home to call my doctor. I was excited get back to work—not work-work but writing-work—since I’d parted ways with my novel yesterday on good terms.

By 3:30pm, I hadn’t written a damn word, but I had made a doctor’s appointment and listened to a really compelling episode of The Ezra Klein Show.

Thursday, May 29th, “Two Steps Back, One Step Forward. That’s How You Tango.”

Yesterday, I wrote almost 500 words but didn’t get to document anything because my nose ring got stuck in my nose and I had to hop over to the tattoo place to get them to push it out. Leaving with a bloody nose, I ducked into the bookstore across the street and bought Liz Moore’s LONG BRIGHT RIVER.

M called at 10am saying Brazil wouldn’t let him into the country. He decided to try Berlin. The call set me back thirty minutes with my writing.

I didn’t really get into the flow until 11am (a time of morning I HATE because it always feels too late for anything meaningful to happen). By noon, I had rewritten chapter 1. I felt GOOD about it too. The changes I made—of removing one of the protagonists’ child, switching her profession, and tweaking her dynamic with another POV character—began to feel right and justified, like I’d moved backwards to move forwards.

Friday, May 30th, “Retirement is in the air.”

When I woke up, I already knew I wasn’t going to get much writing done. My mom was retiring after 38 years working for the federal government. It was her last day. It was also my boss’ last day at the show so we were throwing him a send-off and I needed to get a card.

Still, the writing life doesn’t stop. After going to Starbucks, I strapped myself in to write, knowing I had two hours tops before I needed to go to the office.

I’m embarrassed to admit one of my main characters is writing a book just like the heroine of my debut novel is writing a book. I don’t know how to make my characters not write books, it was almost like, in my mind, you couldn’t write about people living life unless they were writing about life. Like life only existed when perceived. Did I believe that?

I had a creative breakthrough but breakthroughs make me nervous. I was always bracing myself for them to be false. I needed to set down that fear. Who cared if it was only a breakthrough in that moment?

The rest of the day was bittersweet and magical. We drank champagne and ate cookies with my boss’s face on them. He gave everyone a handwritten letter and a stuffed panda. Afterwards, a few of my friends/coworkers came over to my house and I gave them a tarot reading. Then we hopped on the train and went to a tea shop in DuPont Circle, where we sat outside under an umbrella and talked for four hours. I got home around 7pm. That night it hurricaned. I had beat the bad weather by about ten minutes and fell asleep feeling full of love.

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Sunday, June 1st

The morning was so brisk I had to wear a fleece hoodie under my raincoat. The walk to Starbucks was calming. I listened to Clairo the whole time, entering a dream state. In my olive green coat and seventies braided pigtails, I felt like a different person.

In light of my mounting breast pain, I needed to mellow out, but when I got back home, bracing myself to begin writing, the mellow left me. I was in pain again. I had to write again.

Was I not pushing myself hard enough? Was I using this pain as an out? Because the pain was what was stopping me from writing. It was a slight pain, a 2 out of 10. The actual pain I felt was fear: what was going wrong in my body. That was the wall I was scaling.

Epilogue: Tuesday, June 18th, 2025

We’re two weeks into the future. I’ve been to the E.R to the doctor and to the doctor again, my breast pain morphing maniacally into chest pain. I wake to a news notification from TIME: Trump considers U.S attack on Iran. My chest is already a wall of stone, the muscle pulled so tight over my ribcage from stress—that was essentially the diagnosis, you need to calm the fuck down or you’re going to die. And now, more war. More work. I call my mom, Should we leave the country? Should I quit my job? I don’t do either. I watch the news. I watch my pain. I write.

This is one of my absolute favorite panels on the unique burdens and challenges of writing your second novel after engaging in the publishing process. An all-star panel if there ever was one with Khaled Hosseini, Garth Greenwell, Elif Batuman, Alexander Chee and Marlon James.

Did that headline get you? It’s exactly the kind of hook I’ve learned to put at the beginning of my TikTok videos. Grab them in 3-5 seconds. Offer a valuable insight, advice, a controversial opinion. Cut your breaths out, they slow you down. Matter of fact, stop breathing altogether. You don’t need to be alive for this.

Not everyone operates this way on TikTok, of course. A new friend of mine (Hi, Aneurin!!!) does deeply researched, long form videos (well, long for TikTok) on niche historical and literary topics. There are always exceptions.

But let me step back for a second: I decided to start posting on TikTok a couple of months ago. If you’re wondering if it’s because I have a book coming out next year, you’d be TOTALLY FUCKING RIGHT!!!

Despite being a Zillennial (petitioning to get this term outlawed), I was very afraid of TikTok. Why did shit start playing whenever I opened the app even though I didn’t ask it to? It was like I was being attacked. What was I supposed to get from this video of people shaking hands to that PinkPantheress song? I liked that song, but I didn’t want to keep hearing it, not while people were shaking han—oh look, that 22-year-old just knocked his girlfriend in the head with his ass on beat and magically changed into a suit. That old Taylor Swift is playing in the background beneath an explanation about why you look happier. But are you happy? Are you?

I still don’t entirely get it. But I’m on it now. I’m in it. And I plan to stick out this beautiful, miserable internet k-hole hellscape.

Here’s what I’ve learned about one of the most powerful social media platforms ever.

TikTok Is Your Daddy: On The Algorithm

I’ve heard people say that TikTok owns the most advanced algorithm of all the social media companies. It’s an algorithm that watches you, learns you, knows you, internalizes you. Reduces you.

As a creator, I’ve been told that it tests you. If I push her videos to 200 people, will it perform well enough to push it to 400? If I stopping pushing it, if I let her views fall, will she show up the next day with a new video?

It’s also a powerful search engine. It’s where people find out where the best Thai place is in town. What book to read next.

And I was so, so excited about TikTok during those early weeks! I thought I understood it. I felt good about my posts. I believed I had cracked some hard shell.

And then I started wanting to grow. I’d moved on from messy experimentation, a fumbling kind of play, and started considering strategy.

But whatever the opposite of skyrocketing is, that’s what happened to my views.

They plummeted, my views plummeted.

As of writing, my most recent video is my worst performing (top left corner, if you please. Look how cute I look in it. But TikTok doesn’t care about my cuteness).

I didn’t understand. I was honing my hooks, paying more attention to the titles on the cover. I was getting better at editing, better at showing my personality. I even used one of Justin Bieber’s new songs, like, what the fuck was going on?!?!?!

The endeavour started to feel vacant to me. Maybe because I started to realize that showing up, “being myself,” probably wasn’t going to do much in the end. There was a game. And I was going to have to play it to win.

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GROW GROW GROW, YOU FUCKING HO!

Determined to sell my body to Daddy TikTok, I binged 27 videos of this one content strategist coaching creators on how to grow 100k followers in 100 days. Her videos were compelling! Hopeful! She called her followers, intimately, BookieBoo. And I believed her.

She screamed at me, “LOW VIEWS????? CONGRATULATIONS!!!! TIKTOK IS TESTING YOU!!!!!

Fuck, but what was the test??? How was I supposed to pass this invisible exam designed by this corrupt corporation in kahoots with the Chinese government???

I felt reinvigorated consuming all these TikTok strategy videos. They started popping up on my feed. The algorithm was learning me as I was trying to learn it, but I had to be captive to the algorithm to get close enough.

One morning, after a regrettable binge, I woke up bleary-eyed, intellectually hungover and thought, why tf am I here?

Recently, I saw a video of a girl talking about an influencer who posted 35 times a day before blowing up. The girl spoke about this influencer with admiration. We were supposed to want to be like the influencer who posted 35 times a day. Instead, this made me want to blow up, but physically. Someone commented, “35? I’m over here struggling with my 3-5 videos a day.”

Am I insane? All of this feels like too much to me, even the 3-5 videos a day.

Or no. This feels like an app whose goal is to keep you on it. A drug company that wants you addicted, a healthcare system that wants you sick.

The thing is, you’re going to have trouble succeeding on TikTok if you’re not a consumer of it. TikTok knows this. It set up this symbiotic relationship. Content like trends expedite this expectation. If you’re not on it, you’ll miss it. That’s what trends do, make you feel late to them, make you feel like next time, you can be first. But you’ve got to already be in line to be first. All incentives are structured around keeping you scrolling.

Although I was pained by my plummeting views, I asked myself a clarifying question: how would you feel if you got the views, if you got 400k followers tomorrow?

My stomach turned at the thought. Now I had to show up for 400k people. Show my face, project my voice, keep posting, keep commenting, keep pretending. The hate comments, the mean remarks. My first reaction was, that’s too many fucking people. I don’t want to talk to 400k people. I want 400k people to buy my book and then we both go on about our totally separate days.

This is the rubix cube insanity trap of trying to be a Writer on TikTok.

Is there a way to be known without being seen? Few authors can have it both ways.1

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Selling Out Doesn’t Sound So Bad When You’re Trynna Sell Books

You might recall my last post was about how I sold my novel in a week. The choice to write about it was a wrenching one. The whole framing of it made me squeamish. But I felt like Substack was enough space to contain the nuances I wanted, and I did my best to make it helpful rather than navel-gazing.

It seemed like a good video to make after incorporating everything I’d learned from Screaming Strategist about strong hooks and valuable advice.

So, I sat down and tried to make the video. This is what happened:

I couldn’t even get the words out of my mouth without looking stressed. Because I was stressed, my whole body was tight. I kept thinking, Who is this helping, really? This is not going to help any writer on here. This is a bullshit ploy to get views. There’s nothing I could say on this topic in under a minute that wouldn’t wind up being reductive and lacking important context. There are no 4 steps you can take to replicate my experience.

The thought of wasting this super cute outfit on something dumb made me ashamed. I had just bought this poncho. Was this really the first time I was going to debut it? In this dumbass video?

I’d bumped against a boundary, I saw, a line I wasn’t willing to cross. I would keep posting on TikTok. But only videos that didn’t make my mouth sour simply speaking in them.

Bleach Blonde Bad Built BookTok

The biggest problem I had was an existential one: I’m not a genuine Booktok consumer.

I don’t go to TikTok for book recommendations. I already have five trillion books I know I want to read, I don’t need to hear about anymore. I don’t go to BookTok for reviews, I go to Parul Sehgal at the New York Times. This does not mean rigorous reviews don’t exist on TikTok, it just means I don’t seek them out.

So how the fuck was I going to be a part of something I didn’t believe in?!?

Subconsciously, I felt, why the hell would someone turn to me on here? Besides being cute, funny, with an oddly comforting and intimidating presence, I wouldn’t even turn to me, so why would Naomi in Upstate New York??

Weirdly, my genre homelessness also felt heightened in this space. I found that many of the Booktokers I’d come across were either too literary or too romance-heavy for me. The ones in between showed me the following: Sally Rooney, Coco Mellors, Emily Henry. Writers, books, I know like the back of my hand.

ALL UP IN YOUR MIND ft. The Chinese Government

I mean, we all know this. That our data is being farmed, we’re being watched, privacy is a thing of the past, our minds are being warped, manipulated.

Even knowing this, it’s insane how fast this app can change your brain.

I had this mantra before I decided to start a TikTok: this platform is a tool. I use it, it doesn’t use me.

But if you’re trying to expand your audience, this boundary can get mushy. The app is telling you how many people watched what, for how long, their age, gender, when they’re most active. If you’re using any kind of strategy, you’re probably going to listen to what the app is telling you.

And that’s what TikTok wants after all. Your attention.

The One Where I Talk About My Most Popular TikTok

Here’s why, after absolutely laser-blasting this platform in this post, I haven’t lost hope in it: my most popular video is the one I did announcing my book deal. It’s me narrating a video where I’m just sharing my life. There’s some shots of my beautiful coworkers, a shot from a small Hands Off protest.

There’s no hook in the first 3-5 seconds, no 5 things I’ve done, read, learned. It just starts with, “This is Haili.”

It’s the opposite of the girl staring dead-eyed at the camera saying, “This is how I sold my debut novel in a week. Here are 5 ways—”

When I initially imagined myself on TikTok, this is what I saw—getting to be silly, being a touch dramatic, playing with video editing. It’s the most ‘me’ video I’ve done.

Maybe that’s the lesson in all of this. There’s the algorithm. But then there’s your audience. And what is an audience but regular people searching for each other?

Or maybe I’ll just try my luck with Instagram.

This post is “tOo lOng FoR eMaIL” so please read it on your appy-app

I felt embarrassed by the idea of writing a post like this, vomiting my good fortune all over the place.1 The aggressive headline, a cheap attention grab. The ‘I can do it, you can too’ of it all. My white-stocking Southern grandma is spinning in her grave. But then I thought: no! *slams fist on table.* Why does it have to feel slithery? I had a special experience, why hoard what I learned from it? Because it’s distasteful, coarse, gauche? Good thing I’m a triple threat. Good thing I don’t know wtf gauche means.

Sharing my observations, picking over publicly this rare, bizarre luck in light of rumblings that selling a debut novel is more difficult than ever, felt like a kind of twisted service to other writers. I can’t tell you exactly why my book sold fast. But I do have a solid sense of what went right to help it happen.

What I’ll say is this: I don’t think selling a novel is the total mystery some might have you believe.

Let’s start with the hard stuff.

PRIVILEGE & REALITY:

“A piece published in Modern Love absolutely helped.”

To say my job as a producer for a national NPR show played no role in grabbing editors’ attention, I think, would be naïve. NPR does not hold the same sway in the book world it once did—but sway it does holds.

(This feels like a good time to note that Congress has voted to rescind $1.1 billion dollars in funding for public media. This will cripple small local and rural stations. You can donate to your local NPR station here, and your PBS affiliate here. It makes a difference, trust me.)

In this same vein, having a piece published in Modern Love absolutely helped. This piece reached a lot of people (don’t ask me how many; the NYTs won’t tell me for some weird reason!!!) and the topic was directly tied to the novel’s subject matter. I know this made a difference with almost total certainty because one interested editor mentioned having read the essay when it came out. It showed that there was an established audience, if not for the book, than for the themes the book explores.

I’ve also been getting an MFA in Creative Writing for like five years or something, though I don’t even know if I’m enrolled anymore (I promise I’m an actual adult). This might’ve helped my submission but I don’t think it made more of a difference than NPR and Modern Love.

Here’s the reality: many editors read submissions during their nights and weekends. Imagine doing day-job work on your nights and weekends. You’d probably be like, fuck this, I want to be drunk! That is what writers are up against—everything else that might clamor for an editor’s attention. You are trying to make it not feel like work.

Humor is how I confronted this problem. Obviously, I didn’t write a funny book solely to entice editors. But I did think, okay, when I have other things yanking at my time, what makes me present? Laughter. Humor disarms people. You can forgive an imperfect book if it had you clutching your sides. I’m not saying my novel made every editor laugh, but I know my editor (hi Anne!! I’m OBSESSED with you <3) told me she laughed out loud at the first line in my first chapter.

As a writer, it serves you to try to identify with the editors reading your work. Truly, they are humans not just gatekeepers. Maybe this was easier for me since some people view me as a gatekeeper when I know I’m just a person who farts in their sleep like everyone else.

Consider your special talents, skills, as a writer and ask yourself, when you’re bone-tired, exhausted, distracted, what keeps you inside a story?

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PITCH & THE MARKET:

“Make them sit up for your novel.”

At any given stressful time, I have about 20 Post-IT notes on my wall. While I was in the thick of revising my novel, one of those notes said, “Respect the reader’s time.” Another note: “Make these mfs sit up for your novel.” Different reminders, but the sentiment is the same.

No one can sit up for your novel if they don’t even crack it open. The pitch is the key. It’s not just what your book is about, it’s why anyone cares what it’s about.

When you’re on submission to editors, you’re that much closer to going to market. So, in my opinion, that pitch is even more about saleability than your pitch to agents. Understanding what an editor does (beyond editing, which is, uh, a lot) and how publishing operates will help you understand what a pitch is really for. It’s the few lines that make the editor want to stop everything and read your book. But it’s also for when THEY need to go pitch your book to their team. These few lines are not just about earning that specific editor’s interest; it’s a kind of argument for why a house should pay for your work, why your story is a good investment.

My agent and I collaborated closely on the pitch. Here’s the short one we used:

A twenty-something woman in an open relationship with her boyfriend can fall in love with anyone she wants—except for her boyfriend’s best friend and his new girlfriend. She falls for them anyway, with deliciously disastrous results.

Tension! Drama! Stakes! We’re getting messy! We’re getting trashy! It’s polyamory, but we’re doing it all wrong!!! And we telegraphed this in two lines. I also wrote an author’s note for submission explaining how this novel was different from others on the market involving nonmonogamy (Read: not about a white married couple in New York or LA, but young Black Gen-Z characters in the nation's capital).

One thing being a radio producer has helped me with is writing clear, concise copy. For every show I produce, I have to write a 20 second promo which airs ahead of the conversation. My old boss always said, “A promo is a promo, not a promise.” What this means is, your goal is not to convey every nuance, every detail, in your pitch. Your job is to get someone to stick around for the whole thing, to reach nuance through reading. As some who attends editorial meetings for work, I also understand what it looks like to defend an idea to your team. You’re trying to make it as easy as possible for an editor to defend your book.

“Being a trendsetter is way more interesting.”

I would never recommend that a writer try to “game” the market or chase trends. If you’re writing a literary novel, by the time you finish it in four, five, ten years times, that trend is probably going to be gone and you’re going to be standing there with your pants around you ankles, upset. Being a trendsetter is way more interesting anyway.

But there are market patterns you can observe. A quiet, experimental literary story collection by an unknown writer is likely going to present a more difficult sale than an upmarket novel with a big hook and knockout prose in a category that’s performing really well. This absolutely does not mean you should not write the former—we do not want a monolithic literary landscape, we want a diverse, dynamic one, and indie presses can be incredible sites for this kind of work and as worthy as any Big 5. On the other end of the spectrum, a commercial novel with a premise that’s been done a billion times may be a harder to sell than one that puts a fresh, compelling twist on an old story but keeps that commercial edge. You can be mindful of these patterns without pandering to them.

I just so happen to be a literary writer who leans commercial. In other words, my agent and I knew the book had upmarket potential. Upmarket is, simply put, a blend of commercial and literary elements: literary writing and execution with more plot or a higher concept than the average litfic novel. These are the books typically chosen by celebrity book clubs but, like SUCH A FUN AGE or THE VANISHING HALF, also have awards potential.

I also write love stories! My stuff is very romance-coded! Love stories are and will likely always be popular in some form. This may mean darker themes one year, romcoms another, dragons, monsters the next, but I don’t see the demand for love stories broadly going anywhere anytime soon. I think the fact that my novel could potentially tap into this readership, crossover between more flexible romance readers and more genre-friendly literary readers was a strength on submission (See: the success of NORMAL PEOPLE).

PARTNERSHIP & PROACTIVENESS:

“Know what’s going on with your shit.”

I have old ass, Black ass parents who, growing up, were always trying to TEacH mE sOmEthiNg. Whenever I looked lost in public, my dad would yell, “Don’t be out here looking like you don’t know where you are!” À propos nothing, my mom would say, “You need to know what’s happening with your finances ALWAYS. Don’t ever let a man handle your money.”

What they were saying was, you cannot afford to be a passive person in life. Be alert. Pay attention. This is how you make it.

I could not ask for a better submission process, not simply because it was short, but because of the way my agent (hi, Margaret!!!) invited me into the process, the way we worked together to put together a submission package we could both stand behind with complete confidence.

You cannot have complete confidence in something you have not seen.

The level of involvement any one writer has in the submission process seems to vary wildly. For example, I sent my agent over a dozen editor names—names I found online and through Publisher’s Marketplace. Together, we deliberated the submission list, comps, strategy. I saw, touched, approved every part of the package. But I also did extensive research on my own long before submission so, (I hope!) I wasn’t just in there touching stuff, but acted as an additive force.

I’ve heard of other writers who don’t know who their manuscript is being sent to. Sometimes an agent will withhold editors’ names to prevent clients from reaching out on their own, only sharing the publishing imprint.2 By most accounts, this approach isn’t cause for alarm. How you work with your agent leading up to and being on submission is a personal matter unique to your needs, your agency’s guidelines, and your dynamic with your agent. But I’m about to say something with all the bravado of a 29 year old who’s done this exactly once: I think you need to know what’s going on with your shit.

I’m sorry!!!!! I just—I think you need to know wtf is happening. This includes who your book is being sent to and why. If something goes wrong, it may not be your fault, but I promise you, love, it will be your problem.

Before you assure me you totally trust your agent I’m here to say I trust mine too!!! That didn’t stop me from doing my own research and asking pointed questions. Just like wanting to be involved in your household’s finances doesn’t mean you don’t trust your partner. Because when the IRS comes knocking, what are you gonna say, babe? I didn’t know? He was handling everything?3

This is not me suggesting at all that you try to do your agent’s job. I deferred to mine whenever I knew a matter was outside of my wheelhouse. Ideally, you both have valuable insights to offer each other. The reason I recommend being hands on during this part of the process is because you get one chance: Once you send your manuscript to an editor at an imprint, typically, you cannot send it to a different editor at that imprint. This means that imprint is out. So, it is imperative that your project goes to the right people. It doesn’t matter how strong your Y.A horror is if that editor has recently stopped buying Y.A.

Of course, keeping up with these professional changes is what makes an agent a good one!!! My agent was outstanding with this. But I wanted to be in a position that if, if, things turned out differently, I knew with every fiber of my being that we did all the right things. There weren’t any avoidable slip ups or oversights. I didn’t want to wonder if x editor might’ve made more sense. My agent’s list was perfection, but say there had been several editors on there that didn’t seem quite right. There’s zero harm in asking your agent, why did you choose them? Chances are your agent knows something you don’t. Or maybe they soft pitched them and, even though their recent deals don’t necessarily align with your project, they’re looking to update their list. But you cannot have these conversations if you’re uninformed. Most publishing houses have their mastheads on their website. Publisher’s Marketplace is like $25 a month. If you don’t want to be a recurring subscriber, just pay for it once and pour through an editor’s recent deals.

The point here is less about suggesting a dozen editors to your agent. It’s about how you see your role as a writer hoping to have a career. You are no longer an artist working alone in the dark, a steward of the slippery creative process. You are, if things go your away, a businessperson. This new role doesn’t have to and shouldn’t soil your artistic identity! Or replace your commitment to the work. But don’t be a passenger looking out the car window of your career and expect shit to just happen for you. Be alert. Pay attention. This is how you make it.

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TIMING & INTUITION:

“I feel like it’s time.”

Do you know that weird phenomenon when you’re fast asleep and, suddenly, you jump up at like 5 in the morning? This is what it felt like when I knew it was time to go on submission.

I’d been revising the novel since 2021. In July 2024, I sent this email to my agent:

“I'm sure you see this all the time with other authors, but I feel like, spiritually, I have maybe one more intense round of revisions in me for this project (with you, not an editor!), though I know you know the market much better and where the bar is for debut projects right now, and I understand it's very high. Still, I'd love to talk about a submission timeline, even if it's shiftable. I'm really feeling like I need a finish line I can see…In an ideal world, I'd want to go out with this before the November election.

The urgency I felt in my body was much stronger than I let on in this (professional, hello!) email. I just knew it was time though. We had to go out then. The novel contained a 2024 election thread and I felt strongly we should not wait to see who won. Nonmonogamy was also having a strange moment that year but all the books in the news were still about white married people who stumbled into ENM.4 Where were the poly people? The women initiating opening their relationships? The Black people? I saw a hole in the landscape.

Like the market, timing is not something you can dictate. One strange thing that happened around the time of my submission was that editors were moving to new imprints (not unusual), but they were moving in my favor. We could now go to this imprint because that editor we liked so much moved there, we didn’t have to choose between them and their old colleague.

You can’t know when or how things are going to happen but you can try to tune in—what’s happening in the world? Am I seeing a bunch of books like mine being sold? On shelves? Are there T.V shows coming out that overlap with my work? What’s in the news right now? What am I hearing from other writers? What am I reading online? What is going on in the zeitgeist? What is going on?

Intuition doesn’t rise from nowhere, it starts with information gathering, a knowledge that becomes so embedded it speaks to you as a feeling.

What I’m trying to say about timing is, you might not be able to get on the train you want when you want. But you need to be on the platform, watching the timetable. You need to be ready to get on when it pulls into the station.

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LUCK & HARD WORK:

“If anyone’s going to do it, Haili’s gonna do it.”

My mom loves to tell the story about how she didn’t think I was going to make it. By ‘make it’ I mean get a book deal, not in my twenties.

“It’s not that I didn’t believe in you,” she said. “I didn’t believe in the system, that you could break through. But I told my girl friend, if anyone’s going to do it, Haili’s gonna do it.”

My situation involves a herculean amount of luck and privilege: that my future agent read my Modern Love essay and signed me based on that AND ended up wanting to represent my novel, which was not completed when we started working together. That my editor moved to Scribner when she did and was looking to build a list there. I mean, I’m lucky.

But I am not ending this post without giving myself my fucking flowers. Every Saturday and Sunday morning for four years, I got my ass up and worked on this novel. I took dozens of workshops. I heard my agent’s feedback, I revised until I was bleary-eyed, I listened to writers who knew more than me. I ate my pride. I stood my ground. I was a bull about it.

My sense is this is what it takes right now for a debut novel to sell, at least for literary fiction, at least if you’re a normal, non-celebrity person. I don’t think I’ve heard of any book selling that went through zero revisions. It’s too competitive, it’s too easy to say no, there’s always another book coming up behind yours. The writer has to be willing to tear the book apart and put it back together for months (or in my case, years). Don’t mistake impatience for intuition.

Writing a good book is the most important ingredient. I did not go on submission feeling mixed up. I went on submission feeling sure. And I don’t recommended going on submission with a book you think, even subconsciously, isn’t good enough.

I wrote about this feral self-belief on my friend Kat’s Substack earlier this year:

I decided that no matter what happened on submission, that book was going to be out in the world. Nobody was writing what I was writing in it, that made it necessary to me. If I had to tattoo it on my skin and walk around my city naked, I was going to get it out there. I believed in it that much, and that belief made everything else bearable because I didn’t have to wait for an answer; I answered myself.5

There was no “dying on submission” for me because other people don’t have the authority to kill my art with their nos. My project dies because I’m done with it.6

This is not to say I wouldn’t have been gutted clean had my book not sold. I would’ve been. This is to say I knew the writer I was going into the submission process. That, along with the work, is what you can control.

EPILOGUE:

There’s a breathlessness about books that get snapped up on submission. A ‘six-figure deal’ has a ring to it that we all know the sound of. We love stories about writers who finished their books in six weeks, who sold them in 12-way auctions. Though none of these stories reflect the reality for most writers. And they were not the ones I turned to while bracing myself for submission.

I wolfed down instead the stories of Haley Jakobson getting rejected by over 40 editors. Carmen Maria Machado receiving close to 30 nos for Her Body & Other Parties. Coco Mellors selling her debut after a revise and resubmit. Submission is only the start. It is not the end. Looking at where these authors landed, you’d never know that this is where they began.

So: I didn’t want to leave you with my whirlwind romance tale. Below are the slow burns, the hard but abiding marriages, the unrequited loves. Stories about being a writer trying to offer your work to the world that are just as worth telling.

Craft with Kat

How My Agent and I Sold My Book

I signed with my agent in 2019, but we didn’t sell my first book until 2024. This week, in a guest post for Sub Club, I wrote about what those five years looked like on a writing and business level…

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a year ago · 25 likes · 21 comments · Kat Lewis

The Trash Museum

How getting rejected by 90+ literary agents helped me get a book deal

Earlier this year, I was talking to my boss’s boss when he mentioned that he’d read an article in The Guardian about a writer who’d been turned down by some forty-odd literary agents. “Did you get that many rejections when you were trying to find an agent for your book?” he asked, the kind and supportive man that he is…

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a year ago · 42 likes · 17 comments · LS

New Motives

For Those Who Failed Miserably + It Broke Their Own Heart.

——New Motives is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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a year ago · 40 likes · 14 comments · Ali Kriegsman

Agents and Books

Five Years and Six Drafts

Hi friends…

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6 years ago · 17 likes · 3 comments · Kate McKean

Jenna's Substack - Author + Agent + Human

How I Really Sold "Made for You"

Happy Tuesday! Made for You has been out in the world for 2 weeks—phew. I’m working on a post about publication week (spoiler alert: NOT my favorite experience), but it’s not quite ready yet—still getting my thoughts in order on that front. (In the meantime, please enjoy the pic of me and Layne Fargo at my book launch, which for the record WAS incredibl…

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2 years ago · 34 likes · 24 comments · Jenna Satterthwaite