On Leaning In
e.g. If You Love It Let It Kill You; McGlue; Nightb*tch; and my own dang book
Hello friends,
March has been a month! I went to Puerto Rico with my parents for my bachelorette party (yes, I did my bachelorette with my parents, lololol); I caught a cold; and I have been eyeball-deep in edits for Until Death.
(Will I be linking to my deal announcement constantly until the book comes out? Yes. Or at least until there is other stuff to link to, like a COVER and PREORDERS.)
This round of edits marks my… seventh? draft of this book. I actually love doing edits; the opportunity is such a gift, and even when the work is grueling or frustrating, it never feels like bullshit, which is my new standard for work these days. But one of the things no one ever told me about doing multiple rounds of edits is how insufferable I would eventually start to find myself! It turns out that after you read your own words and voice and characters and jokes enough times, you get a dawning sense of, like, No one should take themselves this seriously. None of the bajillion blog posts on querying or Being A Published Author that I’ve read ever indicated that this was a feeling I might have, so if you ever have this feeling, well, you heard it here first, folks.
Still a gift, though.
I’ve also been teaching my annual six-week fiction workshop with the MetroWest Writers’ Guild. I’ve asked my students to pay close attention not just to where they can improve (that’s my job), but to their talents and individuality, to the little gems they bring to the page. I think it’s just as important to know what you’re doing well as it is to learn what you’re doing badly.
I’ve been paying attention to this stuff, too, in my own edits, so that I can lean into the good stuff as hard as possible, so that I don’t inadvertently erase it while trying to fix something else. That good stuff, after all, is what we’re here for! (In my case: highlighting the way wedding-planning makes people crazy; staring the horror of dementia right in the face; building in some good old-fashioned body horror; and writing in a very spiky narrative voice.)
So, in today’s newsletter, I want to talk about LEANING IN.1
Nightbitch
Last fall, I watched the movie version of Nightbitch. In my opinion, this is a movie that pulled its punches and shouldn’t have. If you’re going to have Amy Adams scramble around her lawn like she’s a wolf and eat live cats, just do it! Let Amy Adams rip people’s throats out with her bare teeth, you cowards!
The film’s narrative also took a hairpin turn partway through, and ended in a place that didn’t feel earned to me at all. Without spoiling anything, I came away feeling like the movie wanted to be making a specific point about motherhood, but it ultimately shied away; but in so doing, it lost its electric current. If you’re going to say a thing, you need to say it with your whole chest.
TAKEAWAY: Whatever uncomfortable thing you’re saying in your creative work, say it with your whole chest!!!
If You Love It, Let It Kill You
In December, I read an ARC of Hannah Pittard’s novel IF YOU LOVE IT, LET IT KILL YOU, which is coming out July 2025. In this novel, Pittard starts by saying, “What follows is pure fantasy,” and then writes what appears to be an openly autobiographical account of the events set forth in this amazing Vulture article. This is, to me, as bold as it gets.
TAKEAWAY: Be as bold as it gets.
McGlue (et al.)
We all know by now that I’m a huge Ottessa Moshfegh fan. I just read her 2014 novella McGlue, which is an absolute high-wire act, totally submerged in both its extremely bizarre voice and in the way it delivers information in dribs and drabs. I love a high-wire act of a novel — others that come to mind are David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (which Stephen King called a “literary stunt,” and I don’t think he meant it as a compliment, but I do); Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth; and Philip K. Dick’s absolutely psychotic The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — where it’s obvious the author had a wild idea and just took it as far as they possibly could.
TAKEAWAY: Write the high-wire act! Fear is for the weak!
Here is what I am saying: You should do the creative thing you’re doing as hard and aggressively as you possibly can. Full stop. Even if it’s spicy or unlikeable or weird.
And if you don’t, if you pull back from it because you’re afraid you can’t do it or afraid it won’t sell or whatever, then… then I think you should have. Leaning in might make your work more polarizing, but I also think it will make it better — a word I use here not to mean “higher-quality according to an external standard,” but to mean “more in line with the Platonic ideal of the thing you wanted to make.”
After all, there is a reason you sat down to make the thing in the first place. There’s a reason you decided to write a story, or paint a painting, or practice an instrument, or crochet a funny little cartoon animal, instead of going for a walk or, like, watching TV. Figure out what the reason is and do that.
I have actually never read Sheryl Sandberg.
Yep. This is amazing.