my modern love essay changed my life

on luck, randomness and the real work of trying to become a writer

Trying to get your work into the world as a writer is strange. You write for years, mostly terribly—that novel you started when you were 18 about some guy who was an asshole. That historical novel you presented to agents at SLICE’s Literary Conference in 2018, which got interest, but that you never sent because the manuscript was nowhere near ready even to your amateur 22-year-old eyes. That other historical novel (why so many historical novels?) you started when you were 23 and jobless for which you did zero research required of historical fiction.

But then, tired of your terrible writing, at 25 you begin enrolling in workshops—The Writer’s Center, Catapult.¹ Your writing is still bad and for some reason historical even though you don’t read historical fiction, but it gets better.

You get accepted into an “advanced” fiction workshop after being rejected the year before. You get accepted into an M.F.A program. Professors start to tell you things like, “This is the best story I’ve ever read by a student,” and “You could send this to The New Yorker tonight.”

And you do. You send that story to The New Yorker that night. But surprise! The New Yorker doesn’t publish it. Nor does [Redacted], [Redacted], [Redacted], [Redacted] or [Redacted].

But The Paris Review, your dream publication, does offer you a hopeful rejection:

We regret that we are unable to publish it, but we like your work and would like to see more of it.

You send them a second story. They don’t publish that either.

In December 2020, about to move out of your mom’s house and needing the extra cash, you search for gig work on top of your day job. You consider delivering DoorDash on foot (you don’t have a car). Everyone who cares about you tells you this is a bad idea. You remember then that you have a skill: you can write, sort of.

Scouring the internet for writing opportunities, you stumble upon Modern Love. You’ve heard of the podcast, but have never read the column. Not understanding that Modern Love is kind of a Big Deal, you read a handful of the column’s essays, internalizing the style and structure, then write your own in a week. You submit it, hoping the $500 will mean a new couch from Wayfair.

In March, you get an innocuous email in your Gmail inbox:

Hi Haili,

I like this piece - both what you're wrestling with and how you don't oversimplify in wrestling with it. I'm booked up for the near future but hope to work with you on it within the next couple of months, if that works for you? Let me know.

Thanks, and best,

Daniel Jones

Modern Love editor 

Because you’re for some reason still living in your mom’s house even though you have your own place, you run down the hallway to her room to tell her. You understand that it’s a big deal for your first publication to be in The New York Times. But you do not actually understand the big deal it will become once it’s out.

Feeling energized, you send that short story from before to more places. You are pummeled with form rejections.

Your Modern Love essay is published in April 2021. You’re warned about the trolls that will find you, especially as a female journalist of color on then-Twitter. But the first few days are all praise—the surprising cohort of married women who identified with the piece, the Hollywood writer who wants to turn the essay into a T.V series à la Sex & The City. “A la SEX & THE CITY?!?” Yes, à la Sex & The City.

But then, Men On The Internet come marching in. Whatever. You ignore them. You can’t, however, ignore the member of the solo polyamory community who tells you they are disappointed in the piece. This message stays with you for years.

You read about how Modern Love can change writers’ lives, about how sometimes agents reach out looking to sign them based on 1,500 words. Ha! you think.

Then, you get an Outlook email with the subject line: Hello from book agent.

The message asks if you’ve ever wanted to write a book?

BWAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA!!

You want to say, are you interested in two poorly researched historical novels and a half-finished novel about an asshole whose name no one remembers?

After a delightful phone conversation, the agent signs you based on 1,500 words.

You think, this happened to Brit Bennett, this happened to Sally Rooney. You will probably never be a Brit Bennett or Sally Rooney, but this one big, dumb-luck thing has also now happened to you.

For several months, you work on a since-shelved reported memoir, but in secret, you work on a novel loosely based on your misadventures in polyamory, a product of your supreme lost-ness in a landscape in which you’ve encountered almost no stories with Black poly heroines.

You send it to your agent who wants to work on it with you. Over three years, you revise it, turn it inside out, spend eight months rewriting it from scratch. But it’s the novel of your heart, written for the younger self you’ve since aged away from, so you’re willing to do anything, everything for it.

In September 2024, submission still feels lightyears away. You feel stuck, stalled.

But on the day you feel capital “d” Done, having forgotten all that big, bright luck years earlier, you get an innocuous email in your Gmail inbox:

Dear Haili, 

In honor of Modern Love’s 20th anniversary, we have selected essays that we think would be ripe for an update for a feature we are tentatively calling "Letter to My Younger Self." 

Do you have the time and interest to participate?

You are a woo woo, tarot reading, failed Buddhist, bad Christian, sometimes vegan Sagittarius, so for you this is a Sign.

The Sign says: Your career is not dead. There’s Nothing until there’s Something. Here is Something.

It turns out you are one of 12 essayists selected to write a follow-up. The column has at least 500 essays which means, once again, you are lucky, lucky, lucky.

The piece is published two days before you send the final draft of your novel to your agent, the one who found you because of that first essay. That messy, grasping polyamorous piece that planted the seed for that messy, grasping polyamorous novel.

“The timing is kismet,” your practical Capricorn mother tells you over the phone.

The stories you’ve slaved over for years in workshop, that were ready for The New Yorker, have yet to be published anywhere. Meanwhile, your three published pieces were all written in under a week, none of them ever workshopped.

You laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

You also think: maybe this is what it is to be a writer—subjected to the whims of fate and randomness and stupidity and luck. Or simply what it is to be alive.

At 28, you still write badly—that romantasy novel set at a witch college. That Manhattan murder mystery in which a Carrie Bradshaw-coded private detective flounces around the city solving murders in Ferragamo. That novel regretfully saved on your Google Drive as “White baby daddy HBO drama novel."

Bad, good, rejected, chosen, painstaking, pulled from your ass—you keep writing.

1. R.I.P Catapult classes!!!!! :’(