a supposedly fun thing I'll probably do again

book, blues, bliss

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Last year I was at an event in Northern California where I felt a little out of place. Most of the other people there were working on sophisticated technology and I was not. Everyone was very kind. I floated from conversation to conversation feeling shy, and found myself listening to a man explain that despite being a beloved blogger he would never, ever write a book. Someone else asked why not. I don’t remember the man’s exact words, but my interpretation was this: he said, Writing a book can ruin your life.

I shuddered because I was at that point four years into writing a book, and it was ruining my life. Friends had stopped bringing it up over dinner; S pointed out that whenever he asked how it was going, a dark shadow would cross my face; I was in the middle of my third rewrite, and still was unsure that it was any good. Between 2022 and 2023, I had taken a job as a copywriter for around 9 months. I liked the job, but everyone else who worked at the company seemed a little befuddled at why I was there. My ostensible answer was stability—I wasn’t sure that I could count on my Substack income to continue to grow, and at that point I was unsure about how to diversify—but the truth, looking back, was that working on the book had made me so distressed that I needed to pour my attention into something, anything else.

It started in 2020. I had seen Ottessa Moshfegh’s anecdote that she started writing after reading Alan Watt’s The 90-Day Novel. At that time I had been considering doing a CPG company inspired by Chinese traditional medicine. I had just gotten married, and I was waiting for my green card to go through. I felt like a total failure as far as my work life was concerned. I had absolutely no clue what to do next. So I thought: why not write a novel?

At that point of my life I did not have a consistent writing practice. I took notes constantly, but I only wrote pieces longer than 500 words maybe, oh, two times a year. The most valuable idea I got from The 90-Day Novel was basically the idea that I should write 1000 words every day. This made the whole idea of a “book” digestible and less intimidating. After all, if a book is 80,000 words, that’s only 80 days… right?

I sort of assumed that because I liked to read, and had obsessively consumed novels my whole life, I would naturally understand how to construct a novel. Wrong. I found myself wondering things like… what is a chapter? What is dialogue? What is plot? How should time pass? I wanted to write about a character somewhat like myself, and I figured that all I had to do was describe my own life. Wrong. The thing I discovered pretty quickly that writing fiction was not that much like “describing your own consciousness.” It was something much more like, “performing something interesting on the page.” I had no clue how to do that.

*

I fell for your expressiveness, your gentleness. But you put me through an emotional experience that I just couldn’t tolerate. You said, This is what you wanted. Why couldn’t I say to you—that’s true, but I just can’t take it? Well, I said it, and then I came back, and we acted like everything was okay. I didn’t want to make you feel more ashamed than you already were. Between you and the book, I was shredded by my own isolation, an animal ready to chew off its own limb. Always in my own mind circling, circling, circling, bloodying my knuckles on the bars of my cage.

Did I try to explain that? I burst into tears, I’m sure. I got angry, and I sulked, and sometimes I took too long to reply to your messages. You said, In the beginning when I met you, you were so nice, you didn’t need anything from me.

From Bluets: 181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking.

182. In the Phaedrus, the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon. The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it—whether it cripples the mind’s power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness. Given the multiple meanings of pharmakon, the answer is, in a sense, a matter of translation.

Growing up, I loved and needed the depressive female writers who taught me about seduction, betrayal, collapse—they were my emotional and literary education. But there was also the practical side of me, the side that was addicted to the performance of competence. I always knew that I wasn’t the Jean Rhys character, drinking and fucking herself to death. I was always more like Jordan Baker, preoccupied with survival. But I felt that what people loved about me was the yolk inside the shell, the vulnerability, the possibility of despair.

*

Most of the time I felt lucky. I spent a lot of time laughing, checking the likes on my Substack posts, going on long walks with friends, sprawling on the floor with my dogs. I was doing something that had been so extremely pleasurable for me as a kid that I had decided at age 8 it would be my vocation. But it was hard to live with the feeling that I was getting nowhere.

My life was circular in the most literal way: I walked around the city, I wrote, I decided what I wrote wasn’t very good, I rewrote it. This went on for multiple years. I felt untalented and like an idiot. On Twitter tech people said that the novel as a form was becoming obsolete and writers said that all contemporary fiction was boring.

I didn’t understand why I was eking it out when no one asked me to, no one needed what I was doing, I had nobody to prove anything to. I didn’t understand why I was putting all my eggs into a basket riddled with holes.

You said: You’re so great. It’s just the circumstances.

My friend said: My favorite thing about you is that you’re trustworthy over a very long period of time.

S said: You want a lot of things. Some of them are not reasonable.

*

Why do people do things that are punishing? Because they’re addicted to pain? Because they believe at some point, it will become rewarding?

At some point I started wondering: I am persistent. But am I also insane? Do I, in fact, have bad judgment?

Many years ago, I decided I needed to become more contained. When I met you, I realized that I had compressed myself beyond recognition. In helping you understand your needs, I started recognizing mine. I couldn’t talk about them, so instead I wrote. Then my writing started tormenting me. It serves me right—the kind of person who thinks writing a book would solve her problems deserves what she gets.

*

My therapist told me to articulate my needs to you. She said that I didn’t bother to communicate them because I had not been raised to believe anyone would change their behavior based on my feedback. I started out as the kind of person who would rather write an entire book—who would write an entire blog about communication—instead of just, you know, talking about their feelings. But the act of writing itself has opened me up.

From The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy: And I wondered how much of my relationship with the buddhist, how much of my relationship with life in general, is a literary exercise—whether I write about it or not. How being a writer and living in a postmodern world, all life is a text. Of course this has been theorized up the wazoo, but I’m not talking about theory here, I’m talking about a cognitive shift, a gut-level viewing of life as a text. A fascination with what’s projected on the veil of illusion.

I don’t have anyone to blame but myself. For some time I’ve been obsessed with Elizabeth Hardwick line, Style is fate. I took Merve Emre’s seminar on Lolita last year and one particular topic of discussion was what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss”—“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” I’ve spent my life chasing that bliss in love and work. It’s been an elliptical search, to say the least. I wouldn’t tell anyone else it’s the right thing to look for.

*

I got an agent for the book recently, which was very exciting. My first thought was, How soon can I write another one?