The High-Low Year

I started this blog, or re-started it, almost a year ago to the day. I wrote about thrillers. I wrote about Kate Atkinson and Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes! The year that came after was more epic. War and Peace. David Copperfield meets Anna Karenina. A year of bumps. Ha. Bumps! Troughs. Pinnacles. Roadrunner-style drops off cliffs. 

Here, dear reader, is an update.

I published a book. A book! My first novel!

Let me pause a moment. As an old friend at the company holiday party recently put it: “We must discuss your book! That is a subject that needs to be discussed.” Indeed!  Because I’ve been writing so long,  I tell people I have very thick skin. I’m used to rejection. This is a lie. I will never “get used to rejection.” I wrote two novels before The Wolf Tone. Each took upwards of six years to write. The first one pre-dated my first child by eight years. I mean, I worked on it for eight years, officially laying it to rest a month before she was born. That broke my heart, giving up on that novel. Same with the second one.

One week ago I launched The Wolf Tone. Technically it was a soft launch; the official release date is January 7, 2019. Then it’s available wherever books are sold. My publisher and I gave local bookstore Country Bookshelf an early release because I love them and I once worked there and for a maybe less obvious reason: because a writer like me, who does not write thrillers or historical fiction or young adult alt-universe stuff, and who takes a long time to finish a book, I need an independent bookstore to be my best friend. Namely I need the people who work there, the ones who face lost readers—those who can’t find anything to get into—and put The Wolf Tone into their open hands. After January 7th,  I will send readers to Amazon, but I’ll do it knowing that Amazon will do zero to promote me.

Having a book in the world feels unlike anything else. If I had to compare, I’d put it close to a wedding. That moment you stand in front of The Public and state vows. My  wedding involved all of ten people, yet they were still The Public. I recall the giddy happiness as we all prepared to drive to the spot by the river. I recall excitement over the planning—it came together pretty quickly once we decided to do it. I recall that on the day, which was blustery and cold, my anxiety about whether it would go smoothly, if it was too cold, if my grandmother would make it up the trail, vanished. Gone, too, was any trace of existential angst, a general sense of gloom that is so familiar to me. Some kind of mysterious wind began to swirl, weaving the long tails of these two energy trains together: anxiety and angst. Faster and faster they spun until they were a maelstrom of air and then—Poof! They were gone. For several hours on that day and into evening, even the next morning, I was free. I was present. I listened to what people were saying to me. I felt my own joy. I watched and felt my mother’s joy, my in-laws’ joy, my friends’ joy, my brother’s and my sister’s joy. It was magical and perfect, because I let it be exactly what it was. 

That was the launch. Unforgettable. The feeling of having the book out in the world, available for anyone to read, whether I know them or not, that’s something I can’t put into words. Neither bad nor good, it seems to be it’s own unique thing, a whole new type of vulnerability. A mix of fierce pride and awful fear. It’s a high-low. It’s Wile E Coyote missing a turn, looking down . . .

And then. I’m at the gym on the elliptical machine and I’m feeling good, just got the message that I’m “40% done with my work out” when, boom. I remember about my brother. He’s gone. I was just starting to know him in adulthood, and we were quite awful to each other in young adulthood, but no. Not going to happen. I’ll never hear him laugh. I turn off my music, gingerly step off the machine, gather my stuff. I go home.

In particular I long for what me, my sister and my brother used to be. Not very often, and it never lasted long, but we were something. Whenever we had the chance, we’d make it a point to walk at twilight in a neighborhood, mine, his, or hers. Inevitably these nights would reach an apex of hilarity, a moment when one of us would remember something, or say something, or do something that would result in belly laughter, the kind of silly cackling that only siblings can create. We are lucky in this, I’m sure. I know a lot of siblings who have never cackled together. The half dozen incidents the three of us shared in this way I will never forget. The reason they stand out isn’t because we were drunk and disorderly and outrageous. They stand out because they were between us, myself, my sister and my brother. We were our own thing, an actual thing. I was working on my relationship with him, and my sister and my brother had their own shared history. But these days, especially this time of year, I miss That Thing We Were.

Not long ago I came upon a video on Instagram of a little girl discovering a kitten her mother left for her in a box in her room. The mother filmed it; she clearly prepared the moment and wanted to document it. My kids later told me that this video was “old;” it went viral several months ago. But it was new to me. What makes it remarkable is not the little girl’s joy as she looks in the box and then looks at the camera with stunned joy, a smile of shock at what her mother has done for her. The remarkable thing comes in the next moment, when her face twists from its nine-year-old sunshine and perfection to a twisted confusion of overwhelmed pain. The smile becomes a grimace; suddenly she is crying, in real pain. It’s joy-pain, for sure: she is happy. With tears streaming down her face, she reaches inside the box,  picks up the furry mewling kitten and cuddles it. You can hear her panicked rush of breath and off camera her mother gives a laugh, not sure this is actually okay, to be filming such a human response to total joy: on-the-spot heartbreak. That is what it feels like, remembering my brother. That precise, lacerating tipping point between terrible pain and utmost joy.  I can actually feel the tears rising, the shortness of breath, the astonishing pain of it. Nothing is crushing me, I know. Nothings is cutting me and I’m not in a car wreck or having a seizure. I am not in the claws of any disease. Yet how I shrivel as the pain shoots straight through a memory like the one of profound hilarity three summers ago when we sat on a bench in the field by the train tracks. I threw the dog’s ball and we all watched it sail up to the roof of the warehouse. It never came back. As if it had been swallowed, we never heard it land or roll. Just gone. How god-awful funny that struck us on that long, Montana twilit evening. My god how we laughed! We roared and replayed it and bent over and shouted, “Whoopsie!” and slapped one another. I wanted it to never end, that belly aching funniness, the connection, the love.

I am not the same person I was a year ago when I started this blog. Saying that feels trite. Of course I’m not the same person. That’s like an adult asking the girl in the video, How did it feel when you held your new kitten? Of course she doesn’t know. I certainly wouldn’t know how to put it and I’m a writer. But watch the video. You know precisely how she feels. You can see just how close to grief joy turns out to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg_vjRKIja