Hello friend,
It’s been a horrible time in the world and a bonzer last week for All This Could Be Different. My brain is vainly sorting through the cognitive dissonance of this. I’ll tell you about the book’s recent good news.
But first, I want to tell you the story of the book.
The journey of ATCBD is tied to another novel. It had a name but now I call it Novel One, or when I’m feeling wry, Novel Zero. For over seven years, beginning in my early twenties, I worked on a book about a family living in Oman who immigrates to the U.S., and the main character’s transformation into a Washington D.C. antihero. I wrote it in fits and starts, first through short stories and then bands of prose that lay between the stories like connective tissue. When I lived in DC I wrote primarily at night — the hours between 11 am and 2 am were the most mine in my overbusy life, felt most private and alive. My plan was, had always been, to write at night for years, and perhaps in my fifties, once I’d saved enough money to justify it, take on the risk of a second act. A second act as Writer.
At some point, I found myself wondering what to do next for my day job and feeling dissatisfied by the options. One evening, Phil, after one more circular monologue from me wondering about nonprofit marketing versus comms for issue campaigns versus, I don’t even know, working at a foundation, waited for me to stop talking. Then said very matter-of-factly, “I think what you want is to be a writer. So be a writer.”
This was in late 2015, and the comment took the wind out of my sails. I was huffy at first, but there was more good sense in it than I first wished to admit. I began to try to write a few hundred words every other day and try to save more money.
What finally convinced me to send the grad school applications I had been working on, even as I continued shit-talking MFAs, was the 2016 election result (lol). My emotions were roiling, baroque. I went to protests, I organized protests. Every day I felt like I was going a soupçon more insane. What I wanted was perspective and time to think. I needed to leave DC.
The short of it is that I was rejected from most creative writing programs I applied to, and also got into Iowa, a program I had almost not applied to because it seemed ludicrous. Like a moonshot. The other program I was accepted into would have left me in big debt, which was a non-starter for me.
I mostly forgot to celebrate getting into Iowa because I was so determined to Be Pragmatic and to lose as little of my hard-won stable life as possible. Praveen gently suggested over dinner that there was value, even creative potential, in a geographic displacement. Well, maybe, I grudgingly conceded. But I would do freelance and contract work, I said, I would visit every month, I would speedwrite my novel and graduate early and come back. All foolishness. Foolishness that came out of fear for the risk I was taking.
I can’t find my actual complete MFA statement, but I did unearth this fragment of it, and am currently cracking up:
I am young, mobile, and believe with the observed stupidity of the young that this is as good a time as any to cast aside a decently-paying job with benefits in service of the Muse. (Sing, O Muse, of the difficulty of living on a $15,000 stipend when one hath children or a mortgage!) To paraphrase Ron Swanson from the TV show Parks and Recreation, I am applying to _____ because I tire of half-assing two things.
I seek to whole-ass one thing.
Who let me in anywhere???? Anyway. We whole-assed it. I worked on Novel One throughout grad school, submitting sections of it in workshop and receiving mostly thoughtful, generous feedback. (For the writers reading this: I now believe that you should almost never workshop a novel, or a section of it, until you have completed a draft that has a beginning, middle, and end.) I described my plan for the book and shared the first 40 pages with an instructor who said I was trying to weld a bed to a car, to cram two different and perhaps oppositional novels into one. They were not even a little wrong, but I didn’t know enough to know what to do with this.
I kept changing the parameters of Novel One based on the (good) feedback I was getting, kept starting it again, and a cold awful realization began to vein through me.
I did not actually know how to write a novel. This despite having hundreds of pages of attempt at one. And, more alarmingly, I slowly began to realize that the current state of creative writing pedagogy, programs, and workshops, is not configured to teach emerging writers how to write good novels. Short stories, sure, maybe. I asked every published writer I could get my mitts on to tell me how one wrote a fookin novel and the general responses reminded me of the time I, personally ambivalent about these matters, asked my mother to give me the inside scoop on pregnancy and birth.
(What she’d said was, “You’ll know it by doing it. Doing it teaches you how to do it. That is the only way.” And then she added, in a moment of wild shameless propaganda, “No, I don’t remember it being painful. It was so very beautiful.”)
I left Iowa and headed to NYC with a complete draft, in that it had a beginning, middle, and end. The manuscript had some things going for it. The sentences were good, as was the characterization. The Oman sections, multiple friends said, were fire. But it was a distended mess. Way too many characters and places, stuffed like a turkey with Big Themes. I was acting, I realize retrospectively, like I would only ever publish one book. So I tried to make it carry everything that mattered to me.
Still, I would give myself one more year to finish things, make it work, I told myself. I had some post-grad fellowship money, I would freelance my little booty off, and we would Edit This Book into something great. Okay! Alright!
I wrote every day. I also made this meme.
Nine months later, I was so depressed that getting dressed each morning felt like walking on a bed of nails.
I had made way less money freelancing than I had hoped. My bank account overdrafting again for the first time in years. I’d worked on Novel One nearly every day, including most weekends, and at this point I felt as though I was polishing firewood.
I’d given large sections of the manuscript to friends and they had given me kind and good feedback. But what I could tell, without them saying so, was that they were bored by it. That it was difficult to read. Also, if you write a main character who feels almost identical to you and you haven’t thought through the borders between yourself and them, it can make you feel deranged if people don’t care for said main character. It can feel, silly as this is, like a rejection of you.
I’ve made a huge mistake, I thought. I’ve deluded myself, humiliated myself. I was out here welding figurative beds to cars and writing six hundred pages of bullshit, and now I’m barely earning enough to keep myself afloat. I am not, I never was, a writer.
I don’t enjoy reflecting on the period between Nov 2019 - Feb 2020. A textbook major depression spiral. I isolated myself, I compartmentalized, I denied myself good things as punishment for not “doing enough.” A semi truck blasted down Bedford as I waited to cross the wintry street, and I felt a sweet, terrible siren song of longing as I stared at it barreling down towards the light, towards me; just one step, a honeyed voice murmured within my brain, just one decisive step might be what you need, might be something you can actually do. I lied to most people about how I was if they asked. But then I finally broke down and told Phil that I was having intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation. Various people who loved me encouraged me to be honest with myself about how bad things had gotten with my mento health. Noah and Shireen reassured me that they would still love me whether or not I wrote a good book, or ever wrote a book at all. This seemed absurd to me at the time, but nice and useful to hear.
Jose and I went to Bar Pilar in DC and he told me to pause working on Novel Zero. Give yourself a break, he said. You haven’t in years. Stop. Just…stop.
So I did. Weeks later, in March 2020, my freelance gigs began to dry up. I found myself staring at the walls of an apartment I left less and less. I was compulsively reading the news about a coronavirus sweeping Wuhan, then new countries. I made a small stockpile of canned food in my apartment. Increasingly, I felt certain that things would soon start to pop off in New York, and that many people would not be okay. After some dithering, I put up the first flyer for a mutual aid network in Central Brooklyn that I called Bed-Stuy Strong. I wrote about its beginning here, and someday, will try to tell a larger story about my time in BSS, a collective I have such love for, and from which I made the difficult decision to step down from this year, to whole-ass writing once again.
BSS has broadened in many ways, but back then functioned as primarily two things: an online community of care and also a redistributive food security operation that supported many thousands of people. It was electrifying and all-consuming; it was very stressful and it meant everything to me. With my comrades I worked intensively behind the scenes, having little appetite to be a very public leader of anything, beyond the needful occasional statement to sound an alarm, to raise more money.
Over the course of its first year Bed-Stuy Strong raised and redistributed $1.2M dollars in grassroots donations (median donation $68) and supported 28,000+ Brooklynites with a week or more of groceries or other survival needs during the pandemic. The network has created multiple other civic and organizing initiatives, from bringing free Wi-Fi to public spaces to vaccine access outreach to abolitionist support of incarcerated New Yorkers. What we built in that year was the work of so many, including and especially people like Hanna, Hadass, Jackson, Chris, Alyssa, Alex, Derek, Sky, and others, who exhibited an astonishing capacity for egoless vision, leadership, problem-solving, and straight up grinding.
What BSS gave me, among much else, was renewed purpose, the chance to commune and build with some of the smartest people I’d met, new space to practice and sharpen my politics, and protection, again and again, from alienation and despair.
Crucially, it gave the renewed belief that I could be good at something. I’d experienced ego death, and now was navigating a rebirth of sorts.
And what my heart was telling me, by the summer of 2020, after the longest lull I’d allowed myself in a few years, was that I still wanted, more than anything, to write.
I had a few months left of fellowship money. I’d lost my last remaining steady freelancing gig months ago. I applied for pandemic unemployment benefits, and began, once again—since Bed-Stuy Strong was at that point a full-time unpaid job—to write at night.
I picked up the first ten pages of what I thought would be a long short story titled Milwaukee, that I had pictured as a satire of the modern office meets disaffected queer romance. I thought, well, this isn’t a short story, but there’s something alive here. The voice that emerged on the page and the character attached to it felt preoccupied with these big questions around love, material precarity, deep friendship, and growing up. Felt large enough to hold a novel. It wasn’t like the book I’d pictured being my first, the immigration-and-ambition doorstopper. You’re going to write more than one, I told myself. It doesn’t have to be everything. It just has to be good.
So I wrote my new, queer, millennials-in-Milwaukee novel. I left the characters and setting and premise of Novel Zero behind, thanking them for what they’d taught me. Keep it tight and propulsive this time around, I warned myself. Seduce the reader; first withhold and then give them something good, again and again. Make them laugh. Pay attention to structure. Only one year of time covered in the novel. No more than 4 important characters at any point. Separate yourself emotionally from the protagonist. Everything that happens has to have a downstream effect or it fucking gets cut.
Both these things are true:
I wrote like somebody trying to swim back to the shoreline after getting dragged out.
I wrote with the confidence of an Olympic gymnast vaulting myself into the air. Writing is thinking. Making successful prose is a confidence trick. I had done my thinking. For once, I knew what I wanted to fucking say.
The work itself, the pages that unspooled from me, told me that something was different this time around. Through my past failure I had achieved an understanding of how the damn thing worked. I felt like an architect building a structure for people to walk through, compared to the experience of wading around at the bottom of a lake I felt with Novel One. This is actually good, I told myself, and I was right. You’ve worked for this for years. You’re doing it. Keep going.
I took walks to calm myself every time I looked at my bank account. I listened to Lose Yourself on repeat (lmao).
In the book I eventually titled All This Could Be Different, I chose to have a story of will-they-won’t-they romantic love between two gay women be the engine, to create a great deal of the book’s propulsion and suspense, before a second engine kicked in: money. The road that the novel would travel, I knew, would be an examination of close friendship and family and life under capitalism. Would ask, what do we owe our deepest friendships? What does it mean to desire someone without understanding their history of pain? What should follow the latitude of youth, taking one’s place in a conventionally ordered world, or pushing on the world itself to reshape to accommodate us?
The world as it is is a thing that is made, so how might it be remade?
At some point during the summer, I asked a couple of my fellow organizers within Bed-Stuy Strong if they would be okay with me doing less, so I could write more and finish the book.
They said yes. They took on more of the labor of organizing for me. I’ll always be grateful for that. ATCBD is not separable in my mind in any way from BSS. It isn’t lost on me that the very writing of this novel, in which interdependence and our commitments to each other are so central, was made possible by other people and a pandemic-fueled investment in a social safety net.
Through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, I was able to stay for the month of September 2020 at Millay, a writing residency in upstate NY. This felt crucial, because all these months I had been working from a cramped apartment, mostly pretzeling myself and my laptop around in my bed, typing furiously. (My body, if you’re wondering, has kept the mf score)
I finished a draft of All This Could Be Different early October 2020. I sent it to various friends to read—some writers, some readers, some of my Milwaukee loves. I incorporated their feedback into edits. I looked for an agent. I heard back from Bill Clegg, who loved the book and so visibly believed in it. I must be dreaming, I thought, even as I talked with manufactured calm to him on the phone, literally what the fuck is happening.
Bill asked me if I wanted to work slowly on revisions over a period of months, or just jump all the way in. At this point, I felt like I might soon crumble. The past year had taken a toll on my body and mind. I could see the shoreline. And my reserves were nearly spent.
Let’s jump in, I said. And thinking of the next few months of looming rent, added, if we can, let’s try to sell it this year.
Bill made me, after much writing loneliness, feel as though I was no longer alone in the trenches. He gave me devoted and detailed feedback on my manuscript. He was stupendously warm and insightful. After we spoke, I spent three and a half weeks furiously editing. Real life seemed less real to me; the faces of my family and friends took on this translucent quality in my seeing, while the faces of my characters appeared to me in near-photographic detail.
We sold the book a couple of days before Christmas. Bill called me. I was sitting on my bed, surrounded by my laundry. We would go with Viking, with an editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, who loved the book and saw it so well. It appeared I would not need to worry about rent or bills for a while. The shock and relief I felt took me out of my body. I put my hand to my face and realized I was weeping.
Book publishing, especially fiction, is very slow, and that has allowed my brain to (mostly) accept that this is real, that this is actually happening.
All This Could Be Different comes out in three weeks, on August 2, 2022. In the last month, it has been endorsed by NPR’s Books We Love, The Cut, Them, Buzzfeed, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Elle. It received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. The lovely Grace Byron, writing for Observer, called it “easily a contender for Book of the Year.” It was just chosen for Vogue’s brand-new book club; they wrote that it was “guaranteed to be one of the summer’s most talked-about reads.”
Whew.
It has been a long road. I do remember it as sometimes very painful, though pain has its own inductions of amnesia, which is part of what allows us to continue to live. And it was, well, very beautiful. It’s in looking backwards that I can say that, that I can see the shape of things.
No book is ever made alone, and this journey is testament to that. I am so grateful to so many people. All This Could Be Different belongs to them, too.
If you’re reading, I hope you can support this book that means so much to me. Pre-ordering ATCBD or buying it in its first week out is what will impact its success in the world most now. If now is not a good time for you to buy a new hardback book, please know that I’ve been there, and that it should be available from most libraries (love the library so much!! perhaps the only mainstream anticapitalist institution we have!) If you’re in NYC, come to the launch at Books Are Magic (8/2/22)! More events TBA soon! And if you like the book, I hope you’ll tell your people about it, recommend it for your book club, or leave a review somewhere. Books are sold, more than anything else, through trusted opinion and word of mouth.
It’s a strange thing. To publish a book is to let it go, to cede control. I gave this novel all I had. Now I’m back at the beginning, trying to make something new. There is no hero’s journey in writing, only the circularity of life, of weakness to strength, then strength to weakness, rinse and repeat. But for now I am watching my book baby board the school bus, waving, hoping for it a good life in the world.