My mother was a manic-depressive novelist, and in her journal she wrote:
“America; Capitalism; distinction between manic and hypomanic seems largely economic: I buy seventy-five dollars worth of books in forty-five minutes; sincere manic buys Cadillac dealerships for all his friends in same period of time.”
Perhaps not clinically, but it’s been a manic couple of months for me; only I haven’t been buying, I’ve been selling. My new book, as I may have mentioned once or twice, called Soccer Dad.
This relentless marketing campaign (combined with my day job of running my company) has been enabled by a (mostly) Dry First Quarter that I embarked on just to alarm my drinking friends.
But it’s powered by a ravenous self-fueling internal brushfire that must thaw a winter world full of too-busy people who might introduce the book to too-distracted people who might tell a lot of other too-overwhelmed people that they ought to stop what they’re doing and buy my book—convincingly enough that they actually fucking do.
That’s hard to sustain, and remain sane.
On the phone with my sister last Friday morning I told her I felt like a P-47 pilot on the way back to the base looking everywhere for targets of opportunity and trying to find things to hit with the rest of my bullets before the big Pratt & Whitney went through the last of the fuel.
On a Zoom call with my publisher later the same morning, we were walking through the publishing distribution process, but I sounded like I was on cocaine. At one point, I babbled that my goal for this book was to have it do well enough that the publisher would want to do another book, for which I have about 1/4 of an idea.
“Hey,” I heard myself ramble, “you wanna hear about it?!”
(Or am I writing my next book right now?!)
I had some bourbon Friday night, for everybody’s good.
Saturday’s hangover broke the manic trance inside of which the only difference between the Holy Bible and Soccer Dad is that Soccer Dad is new. Which allowed me to absorb a few things, including the fact that the nation I live in started a war with Iran. (Do you think Trump waited to launch Operation Epic Fury until I briefly paused Operation Soccer Dad?)
My hangover allowed me to see myself as other writers might see me, and ask a few questions you might ask, like:
Q. If a book is really valuable and appealing to people, is it really necessary for a writer to hustle this much to sell it?
A. Yes it is, and even this is usually not enough to sell a lot of books in a non-reading society.
Q. How can you stand this? Are you a writer, or are you a door-to-door salesman?
A. First off, myopic obsessions are good in times like these. Also: I actually like a lot of this, because the sales job—via podcast and media interviews and connections with everyone who’s read the book—means conversations about the book that writers don’t usually have otherwise. It’s fun to hear what parts matter most to whom, and to hear the stories the book inspires them to tell me (in this case, about parenting, which of course is about love). Listening to me talk about all this a couple weeks ago, a writer pal told me on the phone, “I hope you’re enjoying this.” I told him sincerely, I am.
Q. Okay but seriously, this isn’t what you set out to do when you became a writer, is it?
A. I don’t know, Mom. “Will never get books published,” you wrote in your journal, adding in desperate parentheses, “(Agent enthusiastic, optimistic; have at least two more must write.)” These hills are not unfamiliar. You also wrote, “Believe I come away from [bipolar] experience with essential clarity: books, picnics, singing, kissing—everything else is fly shit. Water heater sprang sincere leak today; car still isn’t ready; raining hard outside as well as in family room. Nevermind. Piper stopped vomiting this morning; [I] wrote four pages; seven-year-old son plans to bake cookies this afternoon; new Joyce Carol Oates book on coffee table.” If not writing, then what?
Q. Do you want your own daughter to be a writer?
A. Absolutely not. And she doesn’t want to be one, luckily. When she sensed the madness this book was creating inside me (like, early last summer!) she asked me how I would handle it if the book didn’t sell a lot of copies. “Oh honey,” I told her, “I’ll be absolutely fine.” She looked at me very skeptically, not knowing nor being able to imagine how many failed projects I and the hundreds of writers I have known in my life and work have endured, and how few successful ones we have ever celebrated.
Q. What’s on the other side of the trance?
A. Immediately after promotion ended on my last book, I spent a very unglamorous summer of endless weekends spent driving Scout from one college soccer tryout to another—chronicled, of course, in Soccer Dad: “In the precious moments when she wasn’t sleeping or being tortured by [friend-FOMO on] Instagram, Scout was trying to get the old man interested in the debut album by a singer named Olivia Rodrigo. ‘Dad, isn’t this song so sad?’ And when I couldn’t bring myself to conjure enough enthusiasm for ‘drivers license’—’Yes, honey, she’s got a nice voice’—we slipped back into unhappy, anxious silence.” Of course, that trip ultimately led to this project. And I can only hope the aftermath of this leads, emotionally or materially, to the next thing.
Q. You know this is crazy, right?
A. Yes, but how do you organize your life?
