At the End of a Curse

One book deal and two months later.

Hello Loves,

I sold my book!

I really wanted to bury the lede here. That’s what I usually do. I sold it in the fog of the holidays, in the middle of performing a Christmas show from a wheelchair, completing novel edits, signing my memoir contract, rehabbing the knee, and celebrating the birthdays of my two favorite people, I have a lot to catch up on in this newsletter, almost two months after my last one.

Regularity is not my strong suit, and I gave myself permission last year, to write this substack when I wanted to, not on a schedule that I imposed on myself to try and build a platform I have no idea how to build. Here, in Gen-X-land, I feel simultaneously nakedly present in public and also like I might be hiding in a cottage down a long dirt driveway in the hills somewhere, not in the center of a huge city. So, in the idiosyncratic manner that I’ve chosen to maintain my relationship with readers and friends, here is that long overdue announcement, that buried lede once again: the memoir is sold!

The Mourner’s Bestiary: a Memoir of Sea Change is coming on October 15, 2024, on Row House Publishing, distributed by Simon & Schuster, wherever books are sold. You can read my first book, my baby, my blood and bone. I cannot wait to share it with you all.

Not only is the memoir sold. It is sold in a wonderful deal, to a wonderful house, and a wonderful editor, by my wonderful agent. I feel so accompanied in this project, and so crazy about the goodness of all involved. Row House Publishing is a team of absolute heroes, working to change the face of publishing in terms of economics, financial transparency, and the voices that get to have a place in public life. I love them all. I have been looking for that thing in publishing that feels as good as it feels to make a record with a group of people you trust. I’ve been looking for a great band. And these people, they are a great band.

Gina Frangello, my new editor—the remarkable writer of so many great books, including her last book, the stunning memoir Blow Your House Down—will be working with me over the next year and a half to sharpen the book I’ve written into a beautiful knife edge, cutting and useful. She has told me already that she’ll ask me to stretch for deeper, more present writing than I could do on my own. And, Beloveds, I cannot wait.

Through the entire process of writing this book, I have been thinking about the ending of curses. My family called our disease a curse. The relentless tick of disasters in ecocollapse feels like a curse. The bad fairytale magic of a divorce like mine feels like a curse. The failure and poverty of decades as a basically invisible creative person can feel like a curse.

Finishing a project as you want to see it, regardless of whether it sells, can feel like breaking a curse. Selling that project to people you have never met, who want it because they love what you made? That’s the kind of curse-breaking that does something like echo down the generations.

And, my book, The Mourner’s Bestiary, is a book about generations. It is of course, about the four generations of my family that have been impacted by polycystic kidney disease, a two-hundred-year tour of bodily collapse and the search for healing. But it is also about the generational nature of ecocollapse, the way it braids into human life, the history of places we love, and the animals within those ecosystems as they cycle through their generational response to destruction.

Still, even though this is a book about mourning, none of it, none of it, is recounted with a perspective of desperation or terror, not the incurable disease, or the losses of climate and biodiversity collapse. Because, as someone who has witnessed the latest installments of a two-hundred-year curse and its slow reversal, I can tell you, I believe in the power to heal that comes when you write a new narrative for yourself and your children, and I think we have to power to do that collectively for the planet. Mourning, unlike grieving, is a ritual, done in public, that makes our losses collective, and makes their healing collective too.

I finished the draft of the memoir a year and a half ago, writing the truest language about the generational curses of my family of origin, the traumas of growing up with an incurable genetic disease, with people terrified by it into alcoholism.

When I wrote about my last days with my mother, the real desire to heal the pain we shared before she left the world, I burrowed into the text for hours uninterrupted, bleary and exhausted. When I finished the scene of her death, I got up from the computer, walked, shakily, into the bathroom, and threw up for twenty minutes, then took to bed and slept for two days. When I woke up, and the story was on the page, released from my body, what replaced it was a peace so deep that I was a little lost. Around me was the possibility that a new story could replace the one I’d documented; one I could write into the book and into my own life. And I’ve been writing it ever since.

In the year and a half since, I have honed the book, sent it out on submission, waited as it failed to sell, gloried in its eventual sale. I’ve waited in the company of the novel I started even before the memoir, a book I also love, that I was finally brave and skilled enough to tackle and grow into what I think is another damn good book I’ll be able to share with the world someday. In the year and a half since, I’ve also started on The Wonder Drug. In the year and a half since, I’ve been able to imagine more years before PKD strands me in worse health. In the year and a half since, I’ve seen the popular discourse about biodiversity loss, interconnectedness, environmental justice, and the need for massive, systemic change that belongs to systems, not only individual people, grow from a fringe discourse to the mainstream. I’ve seen people talk and write about eco-grief in public in new ways, change how we talk about collective power. It is astonishing, on a personal level and a global one.

“It is like all these fairytale curses are just winking out,” I told my therapist this week. “And now I’m on the other side of them and I have to learn to live a new way.”

“That’s right,” she said. “From your new kidney drug treatment to your book.”

“And Dex turning eighteen. Which means that the parenting agreement that has bound me to my ex-husband and the difficulty of that relationship is about to end. In days.”

“Everything is changing.”

I’ve worked and hoped for changes for so long that sometimes I have to sit down and think about things. I have to let my brain slowly rewire. I have to wait until a stupid grin fills my face and then think, oh right, I am very happy.

My story, my memoir, my family, is in the Uncanny Valley, between the seriousness of my health condition, and the possibility of a new narrative. The planet is too, between the floods in California and the new global biodiversity agreements. Here we are, living in both things at once. All I can do, is to try not to bury the lede when something wonderful happens.

Raise a glass to me and my book, somewhere. I am very happy to share that with you.

I’ll write soon.

Eiren