At Last

Two Book Deals and Nine Months Later.

Hello Loves,

At last, at long last, I can announce the big news that I’ve been keeping quiet for six weeks: I sold my novel!!

I am keeping myself from putting ALL the exclamation points at the end of this announcement, because the lack of exclamation points makes this post feel slightly more dignified. But I don’t feel very dignified right now. I feel giddy, and proud, and bursting with good news that makes me want to dance around the kitchen.

I told my agent when she sent me the public deal announcement for the sale of the novel that I was so grateful to her for selling two of my books in nine months that I was going to do just that, dance around the kitchen.

“Careful with the dancing!!!” she wrote back.

“Don’t worry,” I replied, “I’ll go easy on the knee!”

Writing is a long and lonely business, everybody says. But while it is long—this novel began in my sleepless nights as a single mother almost eleven years ago—I have never found it lonely.

First, I have the people in my books. In my memoir, I get to spend time with my parents, with my aunt and uncles, with former lovers and former versions of my kid. I get to spend time with my younger self and to know her better. In the novel, I fell in love with my characters, and got to love them, and figure out how to tell their stories.

Second, I have all the people in my life who care about me and my work: my writing groups, my writer friends, Andy and Dex, my band, my collaborators, my mother before she died, my godfather, my parent’s friends, my neighbors, the list goes on and on. They are all part of making this book, part of the endless reading of drafts, the text messages sending me hope, the rejections I share, the successes I share. For example, my dear friends, Ari (bass-player-ride-or-die-sidey-vocalist-angel) and Spencer were hosting us at their house in Vermont when I had the meeting that sealed the deal for this book sale. And then there are all the people surrounding me, the collective of care, of community, that I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy.

Today, as I announce this book, is the anniversary of the benefit to pay my medical bills for a health crisis I had 2014 on Monhegan Island. It was September 20, 2015, when my best friends and my whole community ran a fundraiser to help me out, to help Dex out by extension, when I was drowning in bills. Parachute Among Anchors, they called it, after one of my songs. There was a GoFundMe and there was a big party with donated booze, and musicians playing, and raffles. It was extraordinary. It got us into a secure apartment, and made sure I didn’t sink into deeper poverty, and made sure that I could eat and heal. Ultimately, the security it brought allowed me to imagine dating again, and about six months after the benefit, I met Andy, and we fell in love and formed this lovely family together that has allowed me so much freedom to work and travel and make these books that I was able to sell.

It takes a long time to make a book, especially if you are a single mom, especially if you have a chronic illness, especially if you have a bad divorce. My community gave me that time, and that grace, and that goodness, and so, it is their success too, this announcement, this book, and the other one too, which is all about the accident that brought me to a reckoning that taught me I could only survive if I opened up to my community about how hard things are.

We’re living in a moment where things are hard all over. The news is exhaustingly full of collapse, crisis, fear. But my inbox is full of emails from people working very hard to band together to make it different, to find the collective ability to heal. My social media is full of activists shutting down MOMA in New York, chanting an adapted version of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Ring the bells that still can ring,” they chant in call in response as they are taken out in zip tie handcuffs for protesting fossil fuel money supporting art museums, “there is a crack in everything,” they sing, “that’s how the light gets in.”

In a call today with a climate activist about an event coming up in October, we were talking about this collective work, and holding each other up, and preaching to the choir because the choir needs preaching to as well, and she reminded me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s quote, “The next Buddha will be a Sangha.”

I’ll have so much more to say as I prepare to launch these two books that my community/Sangha made possible. I’ll have so much more to say about what’s in the memoir, the story of how I survived the last nine years to reach the point where I could make, remake, perfect, and sell these books. I’ll have so much more to say about the books themselves, the craft, the science, the people inside them.

But for now, thank you.

Here, surrounded by my community, the informal Sangha who made sure I could get here, thank you. Thank you for reading and for being part of what holds me up as I work. I’m grateful. I’m dancing.

I’ll write soon.

Love,

Eiren