What it feels like to be read

& how to write privately with that knowledge

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First, a note about my latest piece: last week New York Magazine published my review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Dream Count, which is out today. Despite Adichie’s talents as a storyteller and my longtime admiration of her work, I thought the book had problems.

Here’s a taste of the piece:

Adichie… once excelled at the fundamental novelistic task of parceling out her sympathies and critiques between subjects, never allowing any one character to be wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong. In turn, her fiction felt lively and polyphonic. By contrast… in Dream Count, she maintains only a superficial interest in different perspectives, and she abandons the novelist’s task of placing those perspectives in narrative conflict. In doing so, she neglects the moral and thematic intricacies innate to a good social novel.

It is interesting to publish a review so close to my own novel’s release, especially a largely negative review. For me, it’s a reminder that I will be read, too, and that I can’t entirely control how people respond. Several trolls have attacked my social media account expressing their desire that I suffer “vitriol” as karmic retribution for my criticism of Adichie’s work. I have empathy for all writers who fear bad or mixed reviews; I also know that to release a book is to surrender it to the world and all of its judgements, good and bad. It totally sucks to have to do that. Maybe I will indeed experience vitriol! Anyway, that drama of yielding private work to the ~public~ is the subject of this newsletter.

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Shortly before I published my first novel, a more seasoned writer asked me how things were going. I was vibrating with nervous energy, high on having sold a book at all, let alone to a publisher invested in my success. I understood that I had won the lottery, and I was terrified of letting everyone — including myself — down. I feared bad reviews; I also feared no reviews.

This writer clocked all this and told me — gently, warningly: “Having a book changes nothing.” She watched my face fall. Then, she added, “But, also, it changes everything.”

Here’s what I think she meant — and what I mean, when I echo her words to students, as I often do. On the one hand, success materially changes us — any of us. After publishing, I suddenly got to exist in public as a writer. For me, this was a big deal!¹ On the other hand, publishing a book does not fill the bottomless pit of need for validation that is many writers’ souls. Many writers spend a lifetime hoping to create a thing that fully expresses some part of us that is inaccessible in daily life. We hope that when our book exists in the world, we might exist anew.

I think often of this episode of Heavyweight about Moby, who, at the height of his artistic fame, felt most alone

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Completing a project does remake you. I spent years hung up on the ~achievement culture~ that is the central concern of my first novel, Gold Diggers. Finishing that book was an exorcism. Writing Goddess Complex also took me somewhere new — as I recently told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, I became less afraid of this period of life during which everyone is deciding whether or not to have a kid. But that’s writing, not publishing. And, in the face of publishing, the glorious private satisfaction of finally articulating something elusive can feel insufficient. Most writers don’t just want to express ourselves; we want to be seen and known and understood. Obviously, this is a recipe for hurt feelings; as Philip Roth said once, with every book, a writer’s skin gets “thinner and thinner until they can hold you up to the light and see through.”²

I got lucky with the first novel; I encountered a lot of readers who completely understood the book. I also encountered some didn’t get it or didn’t like it. I had conversations with people that were bizarre and sometimes racist. I got some weird emails from angry uncles. As is the case for many writers, even the good stuff felt exposed and sometimes uncomfortable. I let stuff get under my skin.

My old Hindi textbook really understood the drama and vulnerability of publishing

I am of course thinking about all of this because my new book comes out next week, so I thought I might use this edition of “Only Ugly First Drafts” to think broadly about what it means to create anything in private with the knowledge that it may, one day, be subject to public opinion — that, in fact, the reward for “succeeding” in private is to exist in public.

There are varying schools of thought about how to exist in public as a writer after years of writing “in the cold,” as some put it. There is the, “Don’t care what anyone thinks” school of thought — be proud of what you’ve made, regardless of how it lands. If you really don’t care, LMK what drugs you’re on. There’s the, “You will care, and you just have to manage those feelings,” school of thought, which my therapist espouses, and which, with respect, is a lot easier for her to say for one hour in that cozy little room! There’s my friend the novelist Andrew Ridker’s approach: “No dignity!” he often declares. Even if people like your work, the fumbles of making things and hoping people like them is undignified, so we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.

There’s also what my former professor Sam Chang once said in a speech to a room full of debut authors: “Protect your inner life.” I think often of these lines, in particular:

Hold onto that part of you that first compelled you to start writing. Hold onto that self through the vicissitudes of “career.” A writing life and a writing career are two separate things, and it’s crucial to keep the first. The single essential survival skill for anybody interested in creating art is to learn to defend this inner life from the world. Cherish yourself and wall off an interior room where you’re allowed to forget your published life as a writer. Breathe deeply. Inside this walled-off room, time is different—it is flexible, malleable. We’re allowed bend it, to speed it up, slow it down, to jump forwards and backwards, as our minds do. We can to circle back to our thoughts and memories picking and choosing the most meaningful to us. There’s a hushed, glowing sound, like the sound coming from the inside of a shell.

I reread Sam’s Rilkean wisdom often. She’s right: all acts of creation are private, and putting work into the world is public, and the two things are not just different but actively sit in opposition to one another. But what exactly does one do to protect one’s inner life?