Something About Books

So, I wrote a book. It’s out, you can buy it, and I’d be grateful if you did. You can buy it here or here or here, or maybe at your local bookstore (but maybe not, I don’t really know how many actually ordered it or where you live). It’s called The Fight For Midnight. It’s a young adult novel about a teenage boy who finds himself in the middle of the real-life battle around abortion rights that happened at the Texas State Capitol in the summer of 2013. I think it’s a good book! I will not be asking you to buy it a bunch of times in this email newsletter, though; that would feel like a betrayal of what The Gardener stands for. In this house, we believe the good things should be unlimited. (To that end: If your local library is affiliated with Hoopla, which is an app on your phone or tablet or whatever, you can read The Fight For Midnight via the app for free, and then many other books besides.)

Anyway, onto feelings! The book came out June 20, which was one day before the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, and five days before the anniversary of the Wendy Davis filibuster of the law that the book is set around. That week was thrilling! I was on All Things Considered and Texas Standard, got writeups in the Austin Chronicle and from my kind colleagues at Texas Monthly. A few days later, I did my first signing, at BookPeople in Austin. My friend Jessica did a Q&A with me, and then we took questions from the audience. Wendy Davis herself came! It was a good time. In lieu of actual hard sales numbers, I spent a lot of time refreshing Goodreads and Amazon to watch the book climb the charts. Very exciting stuff.

And then… that was that. The book has been out for two and a half weeks, and it just sort of… lives in the world now. Its brief and thrilling climb up the charts gave way to a rapid and less-thrilling slide back down, and nobody is calling to ask me to talk about it on the radio. I know this is how books work—America is not a culture that reads voraciously, the vast majority of books come and go quietly, media interest in anything usually only lasts the few days something is brand new, the book was published by a relatively small press, it takes time for people to actually get around to reading a book even if they do buy it, I wrote a young adult novel where the villain is former Texas Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, etc, etc, etc. When I thought about my hopes and dreams for the book a year ago, that paragraph above this one contains everything I realistically hoped for. I would have been satisfied with less. Mostly I wanted the book to be in the world, and for readers to have the chance to find it, and for it to get enough attention and sell enough copies that it would be easier to sell the next one. Those were my actual goals. I know you don’t publish one book with an independent publisher and then you’re Judy Blume or Neil Gaiman two weeks later. I know how things work!

But there is an anticlimax that, I think, comes with the relentless drive to promote a thing, and the way that it takes over your life for a time, when you step back and realize, okay, probably most of the people I am capable of telling about this book are aware of it now, and they either bought it or they didn’t, and now it’s just out of my hands. For the past few weeks, maybe months, my identity and The Book have been basically the same thing to me. Every jump up the Amazon chart or media request—honestly, every heart emoji dropped by a friend on an Instagram post—felt personally validating. And then the book comes out and it stops. And now, I think, the trick is to recognize that I’m not the book. The book is a thing I did. And it does exist in the world, outside of my hands. I don’t know what will happen to it next. Maybe people will buy it, find it, read it, share it, think about it, talk about it, etc. Maybe they won’t. Probably a small number of people will do those things and that is it, and then I will write another and hopefully a few more people will read that one and then maybe they’ll also look for this one, but at that point I’ll have wrapped up my identity in the response to that book and I won’t think about this one the same way. And on and on, until either I can’t sell another book to a publisher or I can’t think of anything else I want to write, or, like, who knows and one of them turns out to be The Hunger Games. It’s not up to me.

But the book is out there. It is independent of me. I do like what it has to say, and the way it says it, and I think it’s sad in the parts it’s supposed to be sad and funny in the parts where it’s supposed to be funny, and I hope that it does for people who pick it up—especially the young people I wrote it for—what books I read when I was a teenager did for me, which is to feel less alone and more understood, and maybe a little more guided toward who I want to be.

It can do that now. I don’t have to make that happen. I couldn’t if I wanted to (which, I mean, I do). I want more, of course—I want to be on NPR again and for the book to climb the Amazon charts and for a very large truck full of money to pull in front of my house and deposit its contents in my driveway—but those things aren’t the reason I wrote it, and there’s some freedom in thinking about it as a thing that can be found. Ultimately, books are for readers, and all I can really do is write the next one.