How Should an Author Be?

My next book, An Honest Woman, comes out in a month, on August 13^th. Most of it was written in 2021 and 2022 after I realized that I was unlikely to be let off the hook for the contract I’d signed in 2018. I spent 2019 and 2020 imagining that my agent and publisher would stop asking me for the manuscript and move on with a shrug, which is not so outrageous a fantasy.¹ Surely no one wanted the book to exist that badly; I certainly didn’t. I’d only sold a book in the first place because I thought the sale would prove something about me or my writing but immediately I realized it didn’t and couldn’t, and that I’d stepped on the rake of mainstream validation for the nth time, breaking the few intact teeth I had left.

The book—or rather the idea of the book—that I’d sold in the proposal was a blend of feminist cultural criticism and personal writing that immediately felt/was dated in its conception and, worse, wholly irrelevant in its anticipated content. During the pandemic’s first months, amid the BLM summer marches and my fantastically delusional belief that everything was about to change for the better, this awareness became acute: nothing could have been more frivolous and boring than my possible book. As frivolous and boring, sure. But more? I don’t think so. Had I written it, I wouldn’t have been able to ask anyone to read it once it was published. Such a book would deserve to be ignored and forgotten, and would have been.

Ever the Libran problem-solver, I tried to instead write something that would justify its own existence. I think the final result is pretty good. My biggest hope for An Honest Woman, the hope that fueled its creation, is that it will inspire its readers to love more thoughtfully, to love better. My second hope is that it finds those readers, the people for whom it’s meant. Everyone has my blessing to read it, of course—who am I, Anthony Comstock?—but I’m very big on not asking anyone to waste their time, especially now, and no book is for everybody.

If you like my writing, I think you’ll like this book. Its organizing narrative is a story I’ve never told before, so that will be new to you even if you’ve followed me for a while. It has way less sex than my previous books, which could be a plus or a minus depending on your taste, and it’s much shorter. I tried to distill everything I “learned” from sex work during my two decades of doing it, and I don’t expect to write about the topic again because I finally have no more to say. (A collective sigh of relief is heard around the world.)

This summer, like that of 2020 and all summers in between, is challenging for me because of the relentless reminders of our accelerating mass extinction. (By “our” I’m referring to mammals, animals, most complex Earth-bound life forms.) I know we—human beings—will keep kicking for a while. I think even by 2100 there will be humans left alive. There are so many of us all over the place. And obviously the planet will be fine. If we could check on her in a few millennia, we’d probably be like “damn, babe, love what you’ve done with the place.” But I don’t know how one can take the measure of this moment (weather disasters, genocides, AI, the U.S. election, the senseless production of this type of garbage, the profound, soul-killing meaningless that seethes at the core of American life) and fail to see that the situation is going to get worse, much worse, and then worse still, very soon, which raises the question of purpose in each act and decision. Also, I’ve despised heat since I was a child. Real ones know summer has always been the worst season.

To promote a book in this context is difficult. I’m happy to tell people about it and I hope everyone who reads it is glad that they did. I’ve been so touched by how many people are supporting it, and me. It means a lot. But hawking the book is fraught because hawking calls my attention to the wrong things. I don’t want to be tempted toward hoping (or, Lord save me, expecting) to earn out my advance, for instance, or to receive any particular reception from readers and reviewers. I don’t want to feel in competition with other people who have books coming out this year or anyone who’s ever published a book.

I also don’t want to have to think of myself as a product, which I recognize is a bit rich given my former line of work. But the main reason I last quit sex work wasn’t the actual face-to-face labor, it was the marketing. These days sex workers, even in person workers without OnlyFans accounts, have to operate like influencers in order to advertise and, for me, that extracts too much regardless of the compensation. It’s been wonderful to not take or post pictures of my life (or pictures that might fool people about what my life is like.) To not think about how I look is bliss. To not feel pressure to own or wear or buy things to impress other people is bliss. I feel like I have a shot at being my real self, that the circumstances have never been more amenable for me to become whatever I’m meant to be and live in the way I was meant to live.²  

I know it’s annoying to others when I maintain certain boundaries or stick to my little principles but my time, my equilibrium, and my few public projects (the podcast, this newsletter) are precious to me. I need to protect them as best I can. I must have outlets, collaborative and otherwise, that are not shaped by an income imperative. I have less money than I used to and what money I have matters less to me and that is a state of peace for which I can only give thanks. Continuing to feel this way is more valuable to me than most things, including a high rating on Amazon or Goodreads.

My book costs money to make and costs money to buy and its presence as an object in the world moves money around—I get it. I’m a woman who lives in the monetized world and I’ve published books before. And yet: money isn’t real and I’m trying to pare my life down to the essentials and get closer to the truth. I might be doing a piss poor job of it, but I can say definitively that hitching my dreams for the future on my book’s “performance” is not going to help.³ Regardless of whether I achieve a single glimpse of ultimate reality before I die, I don’t want to waste the rest of my time thinking about my face or my writerly reputation. I want to think about God and meaning, if those are in fact two separate phenomena.

Anyway if you have some question about my book to help you ascertain whether or not you should read it, please ask and I will answer. I am, after all, a known HW (honest woman). If you already want to read it but don’t want to buy it, request it from your library! If you don’t belong to your local library, fix that!

Here’s hoping we make it through this summer and last until the next. ❤️ 

1  My advance was pretty modest, a totally negligible sum to one of the big five, and I know people who’ve owed their publisher a book for so long that it seems reasonable to conclude it will never come.

2  It’s a little strange to write and believe this because if you catch me in my darkest mood, I don’t even want to be around anymore. I thought about peacing out way less when I was heavy into sex work but I can get into why I suspect that is at a later date.

3  I don’t mean to disrespect any of the (wonderful) people involved in this endeavor. I’m simply trying not to die by the sword, which rather famously requires not living by it, either.