my book deal changed my life

on more stupid luck but also hard work

I dreamed my hands framed my face, wrists like windmills. Dreamed that when I fell backwards, one leg reaching into a perfect point, I looked like a woman born to fall.¹

It’s January 2020 and you have a problem.

(This is not a Covid story, though, in two months time, the pandemic will upend, take, alter millions of lives. The ‘you’ of this story doesn’t know this yet though.)

What you know is you’ve just turned 25 and are in an open relationship with your college boyfriend of (counts fingers) 5 years. The problem is this: Neither of you know what the fuck you’re doing. But you are the one who wanted this, fought for this, so you feel the burden of Not Knowing more than anyone.

Of course it’s all been done before—by white married couples in Brooklyn, by gay men, queer people, in the 20s (70s, 80s, 90s etc.), by those people probably in a cult. But you don’t know any of these people. And none of them look like you.

To make matters worse, you fall in love with someone new and what was once only alive in theory becomes real.

You know this is the technical definition of being nonmonogamous—entertaining multiple people—but you have no idea what to do with this. You are the child of 2000s RomComs after all, of classic Disney, of running through an airport with a crushed bouquet…

You’re the only one for me. There is no greater romantic expression than this.

Cue the montage of you scouring the internet, bumbling around bookstores, scrolling through Netflix.

(“What is she looking for?”)

You’re hunting for stories starring nonmonogamous Black girls, Black girls who are the narrators of their own fucked up fates. Love stories that don’t ask, who will she end up with? But instead, why are we making her choose? What happens to her when she refuses to?

You find THE MOTHERS with its bad, beautiful heroine chasing freedom to disastrous ends.

You find LUSTER with its shimmering violet cover like a gentle acid trip.

(You cry seeing “Black woman” and “Open marriage” occupy the same space on the flap and then feel embarrassed that you cried about something this small.)

So many Black books about the past. You know they’re necessary. But you don’t want books set sixty years ago when you are living now. When you are fucking up with all the wide open doors and tight restraints of being a young woman now. And these two books are the only ones you find that come close to what you need.

You feel alone.

But after letting yourself be alone, you choose to give yourself what the world could not.

A story.

You’ve never not been writing a novel. Maybe this isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but it’s the only way you’ve managed to survive the world at all.

The 40,000 words you wrote in 4th grade about twin princesses, a dragon (Reader: it was not good). All the copycats, all the stories where you are the main character.

You were obsessed with the physicality of books. All your stories, you bounded up, gave them covers. You wanted them to last. To honor what was inside them.

Your mom is Concerned that you are too iNtEnsE for an 8 year-old. She doesn’t know yet (and neither do you) that this is what it will take: showing up day after day with a maniacal focus that already belongs to you.

yes, you spelled your middle name wrong, it’s fine though

During the five years you work on your horny polyamorous badgirl novel, you are maniacally focused. You write hundreds of thousands of words. You rewrite them, rewrite them, rewrite them.

(remember, this is what 8 year-old Haili prepared you for):

In a twist of strange luck, you find yourself published in The New York Times Modern Love column when you’re 26. This gets you an agent. Your life changes.

But a lot happens in the world those following years (the end of the pandemic but not the end of Covid, the killing of more than 50,000 Gazans by Israeli airstrikes, campus protests across the country in response. The election of Donald Trump).

You decide you need to rewrite the novel to keep up with the world, preserving the main messy love story but layering in the context of an increasingly chaotic political landscape. There is no way to write a story about a Black girl living, working, loving in the nation’s capital without writing about this. You are writing a romance in many ways, but this does not mean you’re writing a fantasy.

A dumb amount of drafts later, you finally (finally!) finish the version of the book that your agent will send to editors. It’s a month before the presidential election. You are nervous, nervous, nervous, for a number of reasons.

You don’t know what the outcome of the election will be in real life, but you’ve written Trump as the winner in your book.

Your agent sends it out days before the election. You get your first rejection the next morning but you understand this is good: editors are dropping other things to read your book. And they are reading it fast.

Your manuscript gets lost in one editor’s inbox. It turns out it landed in her spam. She digs it out, reads it overnight. The next day, she asks for a call. The novel has been out to editors for two days. Once again, you are lucky.

You take the call from your mom’s house because your WiFi is Fucked Up. Ignoring your request for privacy, she sits at the top of the staircase, listening.

She’s unsentimental, your mom. A no-nonsense Capricorn. When the call is over, she says, matter-of-factly, “Sounded like love at first sight to me.”

You adore this editor. She pre-empts the book the following week.

All these years of Saturday mornings sacrificed to the Creative Process, nights of hands-buried-in-your-hair stress. For it to end like this.

You’re dumbstruck. You’re fucking buzzing. But you’re also something else. Something more important and lasting than being buzzed.

You wrote this note the night before your agent sent your manuscript to editors

Eight months later, those words are still true. You are no longer dumbstruck, the buzzing has quieted. But you are fucking PROUD.

You can’t wait for the world to meet Cat St. Clair: your messy cousin, your wild little Leo sister, your Crash Out Queen. You think she’s going to be one of the most hated women in contemporary literature. You know Men are going to be so Mad.

More than anything, you hope she’s going to mean something to a girl out there who’s bumbling around bookstores, scrolling through Netflix, scouring the internet, searching for herself.

1. An allusion to the light voguing thread in the novel!!!