No One Talks About How Embarrassing This All Is
As my long-awaited publication date approaches, I find myself in a state that can only be described as emotionally untidy. I am excited and nervous, relieved and restless, and possibly a few other contradictory sets of emotions that don’t immediately come to mind.
Writing a book, I have recently learned, involves an astonishing number of small, fussy activities, all of which take longer than expected and none of which you ever feel completely finished with. If you were to ask me when I wrote the very first word of what would eventually become Mean Higher High Water, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that it took years of writing and rewriting, of hunting for the right word, all the while hoping that someone, someday, might read those words, but never quite believing it would happen. And then suddenly it’s less than a week before publication, and the whole thing becomes unavoidably real.
Now that publication date is looming, however, the dominant emotion I keep circling back to is not pride or triumph or even terror, but embarrassment.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO READ ALL THOSE WORDS I MADE UP WHILE I WAS ALONE?!
It is embarrassing to ask anyone—strangers or friends alike—to spend their hard-earned money to buy my book.
It is embarrassing to ask bookstores to stock my book.
It is embarrassing to ask readers to review my book. (Honestly of course, but preferably in a way that suggests they didn’t regret the experience.)
Publishing a book has been a lifelong dream, even if for much of that life it lived quietly in the background, like a piece of furniture you stop noticing until you trip over it. I’ve been read to or reading for my entire life. Thousands of books have given me pleasure and knowledge over the years. (Once, while reading on the 1 train, I encountered a scene of self-surgery described so vividly that I had to get off early at Columbus Circle, where I briefly and uneventfully passed out on a bench. Thanks a lot, Dexter Palmer!) And now that my own book is about to exist in the world, it feels as though I’m adding a single grain of sand to the other side of the scale. Small, but somehow inevitable. I am deeply grateful, genuinely humbled, and still, unmistakably, embarrassed.
Not because I think the book isn’t good. It is good. It’s the best I can do with the skills I currently possess, which seem to fluctuate daily. Nor because there is anything scandalous or untoward in its contents. I am fairly certain that I caught all the typos.
It’s just that asking people to care about something you made, even briefly, is an inherently awkward business. And there’s probably no dignified way to do it.
Unless you’re Zadie Smith.
