On December 31st, 2023, Eileen Cleary posted a beautifully worded Facebook announcement that my book, It Will Have Been So Beautiful, was available for pre-sale. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know it would happen on New Year’s Eve—2024 would be so boldly delineated right from its first hours. Ritualist that I am, I’ve been overwhelmed by all of the calendar milestones—my 25th wedding anniversary, my 50th birthday—that this year has marked. An intense person, I’m easily overwhelmed, and this year has come at me like a tsunami.
Case in point: I was supposed to put this reflection up on New Year’s Eve, but I’ve been delayed by perfectionism, imagining that if the time were right, I would compose an eloquent post summing up what has been a monumental year—a post that would say things in a clever, pithy way—neither too short nor too long, with the right balance of humor and mordancy, intimacy and wit, true in a way no one knew was true until reading it that very moment…and because of that, it would defy all algorithms, reach all sorts of people I don’t know, and those people would share it, maybe read my book and post about it, and others would share that, etc. And now it’s January 2, and a hurried, somewhat disjointed, long-winded earnestness will have to do.
In some ways, that does sum up this year. I’ve spent a lot of it hoping to master this social media thing, only to discover that I’m REALLY slow, partly because of said perfectionism, and partly because honest writing takes a long time. There is a whole discovery process before you can get to anything worth saying.
I started off strong with the help of some experts who helped me build a gorgeous website and a social media presence, plan two amazing book launches (one online and one in person), and set up a surprising number of readings, interviews, conversations, and other events. But as the months of promotion have gone on, I’ve found myself more and more recalcitrant.
Like so many good things, the fact of a first book is paradoxical: ostensibly, it’s what all writers are supposed to be working towards, a veritable apotheosis. But “first” implies that there will be a second, etc. A debut is supposed to start something new, a career as a published author—but talking about the book requires writing a ton about something that’s already been written, at the expense of any new work you might be doing. And that begs the question: what if it’s not the first, but the only book?[1]
The months before and since the election have felt sad and desperate. In October, I saw the news from Switzerland and was able to understand it outside of the liberal DC bubble enough that I spent several nights crying in front of my in-laws, who were sympathetic but more than a little bemused. On November 6, I stopped reading the news, which has made social media all the more of a problem.
I’ve cleaned and organized every inch of my apartment instead of thinking about what is ahead—and the more I post about it, the more it seems like the book is the sum of my life, and I want to scream from behind the mask here. Here I am, bleating in my little piece of cyberspace, which itself is a vast waste of precious resources. (A topic that is a new obsession of mine: more on that here, here, here, here, and here.)
But people have so little time of their own time, so who am I to claim that reading my book is a good way to spend it?
People tell you not to berate yourself and your achievements—that’s not what I’m doing. I know what this book means to me and the people who love me and have been rooting for me for years, and most of the time when I read through it again, I’m very proud of it.
But it’s important to be real: I’m saying that publishing a book is important, and it’s not, and that the “achievement” is also hugely down to luck. Do I want you to read my book? Of course. I desperately want you to read my book. I wrote the poems for me, and then I made them into a book for you. But I know that having that book out there for sale means very little in the scheme of things. It’s an incredible gift, and it changes your life, but the world goes on—continues to go on, continues to go down. I think what I’m really asking—what I’m always asking—is why work so hard at finding meaning in everything when the world is straight-up doomed?[2]
I need to declare that the book is NOT an apotheosis. I never really saw it that way, partly because I didn’t expect it to happen. However, when I weigh this year in the balance, I’m aware that I didn’t believe in my own potential in the same way two years ago. For decades, I kept to myself and shared little with people whom I don’t know.
This year, I’ve reconnected with people from high school, college, graduate school, and even childhood; I’ve texted with dear friends who recognize the moments I’ve written about; I’ve read in front of audiences who laughed with me; strangers have told me it seems like I’m writing their own experience. I’ve been intensely social, spending time with all my families, all my villages—people in Switzerland, DC, NH, California, Colorado, France, Italy, and further afield. Since Thanksgiving, I’ve seen no fewer than seven different beloved friends (who live in seven different states), none of whom I’d seen much of in the last 5 years.
The week before Christmas, I had a lovely dinner in Northampton with new friends, and I planned a dinner with another new friend in DC for next week. I’ll be going to Costa Rica in a few weeks with my 80-year-old mother-in-law (in part to escape DC during the inauguration and first few weeks of the incoming administration). And in February, I’ll be teaching a class about novels, a passion I’ve not had the chance to indulge for almost 20 years. My life is incredibly rich and varied.
In the end, what I was hoping to say about this year—in that heart-stoppingly original way—boils down to gratitude. It seems simple enough, but what’s held me back is that the word itself feels generic. Social media has further eroded the particularity and the intimacy of word-based interactions, and unless it’s in a poem, I don’t know how to write to strangers and friends simultaneously. Words shared between humans—speech acts—should take into account who the giver and the specific recipient are.
There is no blanket post in which I can thank people, because there is a particular gratitude I feel for each person who has encouraged me to keep writing or send work out, offered me a spot at a reading, attended a reading, interviewed me, listened to an interview with me, taken the time to review the work, appreciated and respected the vulnerability involved…and most of all, those who reached out to say you were reading me.
It takes me forever to say something quite simple. That’s because I don’t think simple conclusions should be easily accepted. You have to wrestle to keep believing. The new belief I’m referring to is due less to publishing a book than to what having a book made me do—venture forth with a lot of fear and a little faith, and discover that people are still kind and generous and will welcome you whole-heartedly into a community, just because you are human, and full of love and fury and confusion and need (but mostly love), and you are there.
Happy New Year. It will be hard, no doubt, but here we are. Thank you for making that struggle feel worth it—which is, for now, for this year, enough to keep going on. I hope to see you out there soon.
AUTHORS NOTES
* TL; DR: many of you know this is the grammatical tense of the book title, “It will have been….”–also called the future perfect. I could teach a whole class about this tense; it embodies what I love about language: a compact way of expressing a huge paradox, something impossible to know and yet known, an uncertainty expressed as certainty. It expresses a deliberate, stubborn naivete: longing but not nostalgia. I’m saying, more bluntly than usual, let’s love what we have.
[1] Does that matter? It shouldn’t, but it does. It does in part because I liked setting the poems up as a book—which is something I hope to write more about in the future.
[2] This is why honesty is a problem and why it tangles me up in syntactical knots and triple negatives: I don’t think you’re supposed to say the world is doomed, but saying “The world is doomed” doesn’t mean I don’t hope it’s not doomed. It means I’m 50, and I know how much the mind is a formidable foe when it comes to hope and belief. I think that’s why I use winding and discursive syntax in the poems so much–I’m trying to recreate the process I go through when making decisions/reaffirming belief. There are so many things I have to consider and move on from before arriving at any conclusion, and I don’t necessarily ever move on from despair—I just try to put it in its place. For me, this is the only way to choose hope, by confronting the absurdity of it first.