I was talking to a dear friend on the phone last night; she was holding her four-day-old son as we spoke.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ she said, ‘and your book.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m proud of YOU.’ We laughed.
I thought about this more today, as the drama following Alain de Botton’s riposte to the NYTimes criticism of his book unfolded - lots of marvelling over how angry he became. ‘…why not write a letter and then BURN it?’ remarked one erudite publishing professional who I follow on Twitter.
Here’s the funny thing: when I worked at a literary agency, I saw writers have a hard time following publication. I knew when I wrote my own book that it would not all be peachy; that dissatisfaction in various forms would ensue. But I still didn’t know what an odd assortment of emotions would ensue as a result of me achieving something that had seemed like a pipe dream for my whole life; that in addition to the joy and excitement I would suddenly become hypersensitive. I remarked blithely at a panel discussion just over a year ago - after I’d been contracted to write my book, but before I’d started much work on it - that I’d consider myself lucky to get bad reviews, because it would mean that people were reading it.
But I was wrong. When I got that bad review, my whole weekend was ruined: I felt a certain kind of lowness that I hadn’t felt since I was twelve and many of the girls in my class decided on what seemed to be the flip of a minute that they would cast me out. And the ire towards the reviewer was immense. It would have been so easy to send an email, a nasty Facebook message - for heaven’s sake, to start a whole hate campaign in reaction to those vicious paragraphs. But what stopped me? Thankfully, blessedly, my flatmates were about; my agent was on the other end of the phone. I poured out the vitriol, they listened, and by hour five and a half I was too exhausted to consider doing something stupid with the internet.
The moral of this drawn-out story? Writers can be isolated folk, it’s true, but today I have decideed that every writer needs a literary Lamaze partner: the hand to squeeze, the person to shout at, the individual who accepts that the writer is going to go absolutely mad at moment but who will still generously love them afterwards, and allow any absolutely mad behaviour to be blamed on something like a rush of hormones. It might well be the only way to survive this wonderful and crazy type of career.
