Wild-looking sea creatures

Joy, the state of things, phone boundaries, + 9 days til Leave launches

It’s a weird time to have a book coming out, even a book that is expressly about some uniquely American horrors ($30,000 hospital charges for standard labor and delivery, gun violence, Nazis among us, lack of national paid family leave, etc., etc.).

On Friday, while watching Octonauts and the Great Barrier Reef with my kid, I looked up crown-of-thorns starfish to see what one looks like in real life and got this:

Listen, all we want is universal healthcare, national paid family leave, well-funded public schools, meaningful environmental protections and action to stop climate change, LGBTQ+ equal rights, a free press, billionaires to pay their fair share, and to be able to learn about wild-looking sea creatures without THIS nonsense.

I have been trying to stay out of panic mode. Panic mode doesn’t accomplish anything for anyone. I have been trying to protect my brain and have kept up with the phone boundaries I set for myself with the new year. (I can’t imagine the anxiety spiral I would be in if I hadn’t done this.)

But even if you only read the news once a day, you can tell it’s not great for people who like democracy.

Sarah Thankam Mathews

, someone I admire not only for her artistry but for her moral clarity and courage, wrote about how it is right now in the U.S. and included this link to a Project 2025 tracker that shows how many of the Project 2025 objectives are either done or in progress. It’s not fun to realize that 81 out of 293 objectives have already been completed in just 24 days, but it is helpful to see the list laid bare — more helpful than trying to keep tabs on the onslaught of headlines.

I highly recommend reading Sarah’s whole post, which includes things we can do instead of giving in to despair along with wise gems like this:

You need a reserve of psychic strength to weather this time, and crucially, to act in it. So build it up. Protect and nourish your body and your mind. Find ways to connect to other people, to good art, to some form of political practice, and to the earth. Talk about how you feel, but not endlessly. Turn outwards, from your phone and from yourself, towards other people. Have something or someone to care for. Help someone, and preferably not just one person, to care for you. Leave the house reasonably often, see and watch and read real art, have a fitness or health practice, do things that make you happy and feel present in your body.

Well said. Really, read the whole thing.

So, yeah, it’s a weird time to have a book coming out. When people ask me how I am, my immediate natural response is, “Amazing! Wonderful! Great!” And then I see the look on the person’s face and realize they didn’t mean to ask how I am personally, they meant to ask how I am dealing with all this. But I refuse to let Donald Trump and Elon Musk ruin the personal joy I feel seeing my book, a project on which I worked very hard for years, finally make its way into the world. No, just no. And it feels even more important to me now to make space for people to tell their birth stories, to identify how the things that happen to us during and after birth are often dictated by the larger systems we’re living in that affect us all. To share our honest experiences and find points of connection with other human beings. To clarify together just what we’re fighting for and then fight for it.

This week in reading

I finished Erica Stern’s Frontier and wow wow wow I loved this book. I have never read anything like it. I immediately began writing about it. I don’t know what that writing will turn into yet, but I love it when a book does this.

Then I got pulled back toward Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives. Just as I was getting back into it, Rachel Aviv published this piece that provides some eyebrow-raising context on Malcolm’s project and Katie Roiphe published this piece on Malcolm’s journalistic reputation and the more complicated realities. A very interesting time to be reading Malcolm, one of my all-time favorite stylists. Makes me think we might be getting a Janet Malcolm biography soon.

This week in writing

I wrote one sentence of the novel, but it was a good one.

Mostly I have been writing about what I’m reading, prepping for a review and an interview and this class on writing from memory, and working on my letter for 100 Days of Creative Resistance. (It’s not too late to sign up! These brief daily letters have been helpful for me!)

This past week was the final week of this round of the Ungodly Hour Writing Club, and it was bittersweet to say farewell in the Zoom on Friday. I’ll still be doing my work at an ungodly hour, but it’s always nice to have company.

This week in Leave news

Preorders have shipped!

If you preordered directly from Autofocus, you should have received an email like this:

And if you preordered from Lofty Pigeon Books, they just received their shipment and I’m going in this week to sign books!

Next up: we celebrate.

Alright, you all. Love your people. Be kind to your brain. Take care of your body. Call a friend. We’re all in this together.

Love,
Shayne