On the psychodrama of publishing a novel
MONARCH is 2! + an excuse to reshare my convo with the incendiary Jessica DeFino
The story of publishing a book only fits in one genre: psychodrama. You do this Thing (write the book) all on your own for a very long time. The Thing isn’t just a Thing, but is ultimately a representation of your deepest interiority. Then, you ask somebody (an agent) you’ve probably never met if they want to chaperone (submit to publishers) your book (which is now called a debut) into the world. Then you wait for a long time, and get a lot of rejections (except they’re called “passes”) that try not to be personal but often use language like “just didn’t fall in love with it” (this is a quote that I feel comfortable sharing because it is so oft used as not to point to any specific editor). This language, as opposed to the clinical critique of a workshop, actually does the opposite of what it’s intended to do: it confirms that your book is personal, is in fact an extension of you — and that nobody wants it/you. Yet! You keep refreshing your email, which makes me think of my favorite dialogue in Michael Clayton:
[the phone rings]
Michael Clayton: There's no play here. There's no angle. There's no champagne room. I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess the easier it is for me to clean up.
Mr. Greer: [points to the phone] That's the police isn't it?
Michael Clayton: No. They don't call.
In other words — agents only email with no news. If somebody finally wants to buy your book, they call.
And then you sell a book and think you’ve done it: you’ve achieved The Thing. But like most achievements, it’s very possible to get to the summit and only gain a new vantage that shows you more, higher summits.
The next summit is publicity, which happens sort of at the same time that you are revising your book at your editor’s instruction. My editor,
, was amazing and so there was a real Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum feeling. A sense that the work is hard and often humbling, but it’s going to be worth it because you know when you’re done, your book is going to go out to critics at the The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times. You might see your name in the Grey fucking Lady and they will put a “Ms.” in front like it is 1914 and you are Edith Wharton.Then you wait. During this period, I often thought of something
told me about butterflies: during the chrysalis phase, they melt and turn into a “sentient goo” that retains memories. This is what I mean when I say publishing a novel is psychological. For a very long time, you can’t do anything but think about what’s going to come next and, probably, go crazy. It’s some real self-imposed Yellow Wallpaper stuff.For me, this interminable stretch stretched even further because of the pandemic. Not just because of the vague way time slurred without the punctuation of events, but because of the specific way paper production stopped and delayed the printing of my book. In retrospect the extra month I waited for the book to come out was no big deal. At the time though — it was extra purgatory in the chrysalis, extra rumination that the sentient goo version of myself would be imprinted with by the time the book eventually came out.
When MONARCH finally emerged (sorry — this metaphor is cringe even to me), it was profoundly exciting. It was like watching myself be born, but I got to decide who I was and where I came from. That lasted for about a day, then the book morphed from being mine to being everybody’s, or, worse, nobody’s. This is the point in the psychodrama where the main character walks around questioning reality and wondering if they even exist. Occasionally, you catch a glimpse of yourself (a new review pops up in your Google alert) or you get the sense that you aren’t invisible at all, but actually immortal (the book gets optioned for film or nominated for an award). But mostly — you wonder what’s real and what isn’t and you don’t even have your one true Thing anymore, your talisman, your sacred object that keeps you tethered to yourself: your book.
At this point in my own publishing cycle, I was at the LA Times Festival of Books to speak on a panel about speculative fiction.
I bought a hematite ring from a witch with a shop above The Last Bookstore. The ring was supposed to break when I’d ended my bond with an obsession. The obsession I assigned to the ring: my fixation on the success of my book. Later that day, I sat at a signing table next to T.J. Klune in the middle of USC’s romanesque revival style campus. I’d seen David Duchovony (guarded by what I presume was his publicist) in the green room minutes earlier and heard a snippet of Amanda Gorman’s amplified voice floating across the green. Somebody with a very professional camera asked to take a picture that I assumed it was really going to be of T.J. It was of me, though, and it was Getty images.
That image is like a slide in a lepidopterist’s mounting glass. A crystallized image of me — lightly sun burnt, tired, nude bra showing beneath a lanyard strap — at the end of the cycle.
Two years later, the hematite ring still hasn’t broken. I don’t yearn for it to snap like I used to, though. After the publishing and publicity cycle of the novel ends and the book is, in the eyes of the industry, dead, a Lazarian thing happens: you get to see people the book was actually written for (not critics, not bookstagramers, not booksellers, not librarians, and not people on Goodreads) react to the book. Sometimes, you even get to talk to them and you get to hear that the Thing that meant so much to you means something to them as well. Over the last couple years, I’ve heard from women who were teen pageant competitors, from assault survivors, from former cult members, and from a victim of Harvey Weinstein’s.
I’m profoundly honored to be a part of their lives, but I think it’s more true to say they’ve become a part of mine. I’ve always thought of books as beacons, but they’re a lot more like a message in a bottle. It’s very rare for a book to find an audience at all, and rarer still when the audience sends you back their own message. And that’s the end of the psychodrama, isn’t it? The moment when the main character meets someone who saw what they saw; who can confirm, yes, the gaslight was on the whole time.
One of the people who has most made me feel this way has been
, who I spoke with about beauty and reality and cultural programming upon the paperback release of MONARCH a year ago. Since then, I’ve met DeFino’s readers, subscribed to many of their own substacks, and have gotten to experience the spectre-like feeling of living in the aftermath of the publishing cycle.Here’s my conversation with DeFino at The Unpublishable. I hope it makes you feel like your reality is a little realer.
❤️❤️❤️
Candice, I always feel like it was a little bit of magic that brought us together for your book. I can’t believe it’s been in the world for TWO! YEARS! And of course it’s finding the people who were meant to find it. 💕🖤 Also: I found Jessica DeFino through you and am so glad I did!