“Oh my gosh — are you so excited about your new novel coming out?”
Wow! No. But thank you so much for asking! And for revealing that you are not a writer. Because here’s the thing. If you were a writer you would know that excitement is not one of the Five Stages of Publishing a Book, which are 1) Preemptive shame; 2) Panic; 3) Horror; 4) Retroactive shame; and 5) Envy.
If you are a writer, you’re probably rankled by the fact of this column because you know that if you’d been assigned it you’d have done a better job. Or maybe you’re not reading it at all because you’re busy fanning yourself with a big wad of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant thousand-dollar bills or googling the words “massive pleasure boat.”
Advertisement
Alas, envy feels bad, for one thing, and for another, it’s disgusting. The news is coming in from a besieged and massacred world, from warming seas, from treeless, desiccated lands. Am I really going to check my presales on Amazon? (Apparently yes.) Am I really going to compare them to other people’s? (I am.) Also? I am going to scroll jealously around Instagram to find out that someone’s book is being turned into a limited series on Netflix. Someone else’s is a Book of the Month Club pick. Someone got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly (who referred to my new novel as “slight”). Someone’s book post generated an enthusiastic comment from Reese Witherspoon. Someone has 100,000 followers. Someone has written, to me, “You deserve all the success in the world.”
Do I, though?
I know it’s not unique to writers, the twinned life of the tragic and ridiculous. Anybody could read a news story about famine while simultaneously adding leave-in conditioner to an on-line shopping cart. But there is something so grotesque about the way writers do it. About the way I do it. But if you hit the shame piñata with a stick made of shame, it will eventually break open and what will rain down is shame.
I once excitedly emailed a writer friend about my book deal, then added: “I hope you’re not secretly like me, where everyone else’s good publishing news is like a knife in your eye.” And she responded, “I’m the ‘rising tides lift all boats’ type.” I literally had never heard that expression before. I feel more like other people’s lifting boats create weird swells that send seawater drenchingly into my hull or bulkhead or whatever the nautical word is that I don’t know because I don’t actually have a yacht like you do. “Oh, please,” a friend said, when I expressed envy over her spot on The New York Times bestseller list. “You think you just want to be on it, but then even when you are, you’re not high enough on the list — and you’re not there for long enough.” I believe that this is true. Want what you already have and you will want for nothing.
Advertisement
Instead, I marinate in envy like it will season me to the bone. Part of this practice involves reading all of my one-star Goodreads reviews. These are actual quotes from them:
“1 star, and that’s being overly generous”
“Rubbish”
“Cloying and meandering”
“This was the worst book I came across in a long time”
“it was just a bad book idk how else to say it, it was just such a drag to read”
“Couldn’t finish it. I just got tired of the main character.”
Honey, believe me: I get tired of “the main character” too, if you know what I mean.
But this is not the whole story — and it’s not quite the real one either. What if I focus on the bad things because I’m actually terrified of how good things are? Picture a gargoyle on a building: eyes rolling, tongue lolling, warding off evil with its disgustingness. What I’m trying to say is that I am the grotesque stone face. But I’m also the evil being warded off and the building’s architect as well as the person inside longing for safety. I look directly at the ugliness — the bad reviews, my bad personality — to ward off the fact that the thing I want can’t actually be gotten from literary success. The thing I want is more time — time without end — with the people I love.
Advertisement
If I pretend that I’m not the luckiest person in the world, then I can forestall catastrophe. I believe this is called magical thinking. Or preemptive grief. Or superstition. Or insanity. And whatever it is, the tides are rising. I have big-hearted readers. I have happy adult children. Lovely living parents. A husband and cats and friends and a life that I adore. My little boat is still afloat. I am soaked, yes, and I am afraid. But just between us: I am whatever the opposite of drowning is.
Catherine Newman is the author of the new novel “Sandwich,” and “We All Want Impossible Things,” and she writes the Crone Sandwich newsletter on Substack.