What Remains

What remains now, after fifteen years of writing a second book, after the agent who adores it but can’t sell it, after the editor who loves it but can’t acquire it, after the agent who takes it on and changes her mind, after all the doomsday market predictions, is this steady, stubborn old need to lay down a track of words on the page.

What remains, after all the talk about markets and platforms and networking and hooks and what is selling and what absolutely is not, is this inexplicable desire to make worlds out of ether. To find out what I’m thinking. To plumb the depths. To create a character from a scrap of memory or a newspaper clipping and watch her appear on a ship’s deck in 1783, uninvited, and welcome her in. To time-travel, as only writers and mystics can. To amuse the hell out of myself, even if what I write doesn’t interest anyone else.

Last week, in response to an agent’s request this past spring, I decided to rewrite my finished memoir one more time. I tore apart the opening and began again, closer to the inciting incident—when the life I’d so carefully constructed began to crack. Then I went through the whole damn thing, day after day, shaping, trimming, honing and clarifying, examining every paragraph and page, asking whether it served the central question of the story.

I revised with my five a.m. coffee and during my workshops and when I was supposed to be editing something else. I revised at night before bed, and when I woke up at three in the morning, getting into a kind of manic hyper-focus. Finally, on Friday, the thing was done. Better, tighter, more urgent, more propulsive, just like she had wanted. I spellchecked it one last time, humming with pride and anticipation, and sent it off to the agent who had invited me to revise and resubmit.

Her response arrived this morning: she couldn’t take the time to read it.

It sounds brilliant, she said. It really sounds like incredible work. But the market is just terrible. Memoir isn’t selling. Things are way too tight. Wishing you all the best.

God, this is a fucking rude industry.

I remind myself that this is not new knowledge. I’ve been through it before. The rug got pulled out from under me even with book number one, which was accepted and published and lauded and overprinted, and nevertheless slow to fly off the shelves and quick to lose its whole publicity budget. It is a fickle, frantic, deeply disappointing industry, even in “success.” Definitely not all it’s cracked up to be.

And yet…

The stubborn old thing persists: this need to spin stories out of nothing, to pin a line of meaning to the page until it pulses like a heart or writhes like a snake. I know my memoir is better because I went back through it one more time. I know it’s good. And this latest rejection doesn’t make me want to stop. It makes me even more stubborn, more inclined to think, Fuck all of you. You can’t shut me down that easily.

And maybe that, in the end, is what makes us writers—not so much talent or wisdom or luck as this pure, perverse refusal to admit defeat, to stop doing what we do.

Because, the deals come and go. The reviewers come and go. Agents and sales come and go. Markets open and close. Somebody decides memoir is dead, or literary fiction is dead, or publishing itself is dead, or even reading is dead.

But I’m still sitting here, putting one word after another.

For better or worse, this is what remains.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.