How to dedicate a book

I want to thank everyone! So much gratitude!

On Wednesday, Michael (Wheaton, of Autofocus Books, but we can be on a first-name basis around here now, yeah?) sent me Leave in layout.

When I received the final edits, I said it felt 60% real and that it would feel 80% real when the preorder link went live, so I guess now we’re at 70% real? Or maybe 65% real, and the cover art will make it 70%? We’re getting realer and realer, is the point.

Michael’s email asked for a few simple things like, you know, any front matter I might like to add and my acknowledgements. Easy peasy things to write, now that it’s time. No prob.

How do you dedicate a book that includes real stories from real people’s lives? How do you thank all the very many people who have supported you and your book over a multi-year process, how do you adequately express in the space of a couple of pages max what that support has meant? My gratitude for some of these people is overwhelming to even think about, let alone try to capture in a sentence or two.

I have a running list of names that I started last summer, but I’m still worried I’ll forget someone. I wish I’d actually drafted the acknowledgements instead of just listing people in my notes app, but perhaps it’s better to write it all in one go, get all awash in emotion and then send it off. I can light a candle and concentrate on all my good feelings for these wonderful people and then hit send and hope the energy lands where it’s needed.

This week in writing

So much! In addition to my acknowledgements, I’m still working through my revision of the essay I wrote in Chelsea Hodson’s class. It reached that point this week where I started to feel like maybe it’s a total failure and no one will ever want to read it and I should just scrap it, and that’s how I know it’s almost there. Why does art work this way?

I’m also combing through the other essays I’ve drafted over the last few months and deciding which to prioritize for getting across the finish line next so that I can start to submit. Some of my dream magazines (like VQR!) are open right now and most have short submission windows. I’m feeling some time pressure to get something done and out the door, so I added a tab for essays to my submission spreadsheet and am getting organized.

I was also asked by my dear friend Rachel León to contribute an essay to a ROCKFORD ANTHOLOGY (!!!) that she is editing for Belt Publishing! As long-time subscribers of The Next Novel know, I have a Rockford novel that I’ve been working on on and off (mostly off) since 2020 and my process, when I was deep in it, was research-heavy. There are so many Rockford questions that I would love to explore that the hard part could be choosing, but what I’ve come to understand and love about essays is that you don’t necessarily have to choose. Maybe you write toward all of them and eventually their paths cross, or a new and better question arises.

This week in reading

You all. I finished All Fours. What a novel.

Things I love in a novel:

• A super voice-y first-person narrator who has lots of opinions and is maybe kind of delusional.

• A narrator who makes objectively bad choices.

• Access to both how the narrator sees the world and how the world sees the narrator.

• It’s about serious things, but it’s funny.

• It seems to be about one thing, but then you realize it’s about something else, or it becomes about something else (and then something else, and then something else) before spiraling back to the original thing, at which point you realize that the meaning has multiplied exponentially.

• Extreme weirdness.

All Fours does all of this. It’s about perimenopause and love and friendship and marriage and art and motherhood and birth trauma and fame and sex and the U.S. and aging and I’ve seen it called “baggy” but I would call it “capacious,” which is exactly what a long novel should be. (Short novels do it differently.)

I was deeply affected by this book, mainly the birth trauma thread. It was hard for me not to read everything that happened to the narrator as resulting from her birth trauma, but I know that’s not quite the right take. Still, whenever the narrator experienced a flashback of her fetal-maternal hemorrhage, I thought, “Yes! This is why you are here! Deal with this!”

There is a scene late in the book (I don’t think this is a spoiler but if you are a zealot about even spoiler-adjacent information, I guess you should have stopped reading a few paragraphs ago but you can still stop now) where the narrator and another woman who has also experienced fetal-maternal hemorrhage repeat together, over and over again, “I can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe this happened. I can’t believe this happened.” These women, whose babies are no longer babies but kids, are looking for healing in the power of language, in the power of putting words to a feeling, and also in the power of human connection.

Listening to Miranda July’s voice repeat this phrase was honestly healing for me. I cried, and now it’s bringing tears to my eyes just to tell you about it, and I’m so glad I listened to the audiobook because now I have that powerful phrase in my head like a mantra in case I need it.

The downside of listening to the book is that I wanted to underline so many things and come back to them later, but I mostly listened while out walking and so the exact sentences I loved remain just beyond my grasp, but I did bookmark one quote in the audiobook, from that same scene (punctuation = my best guess):

“No reason” was turning out to be a major theme in life. Generally speaking, when real pain was involved, there was no reason. No one to hold accountable, no apology. Pain just was. It radiated with no narrative and no end.

This sentiment is so similar to a feeling I write about in Leave, when I had the “no reason” realization following my birth injury:

I feel almost disappointed that there is no one to blame. In a way, it would be easier if there were. Instead, I am left with free-floating anger and sadness and nowhere to direct it, not even at myself. 

This novel really did its work on me. Have you read it? Can we talk about it? What in the world do we read next?