What you write vs. what people read

Writing a feminist novel about internalized misogyny, the fierce urge to be understood, and the liberating realization that you probably never will be.

My debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, came out exactly two months ago today. I’ve said many times, it’s an insane pursuit to try writing a novel. The stamina required given that (at least for most of us, going in cold without an agent) there is a very large chance it will never get published. Then the vulnerability needed to put yourself out there for hundreds of pages—all you, no one else—sharing your gnarliest thoughts, the more specific the better. It’s wild so many of us try doing it. But the thing that keeps us going, or at least that kept me going through the ten years it took to land a book deal, was the unending urge to express parts of myself, and, ideally, for those parts to be understood.

Many novelists like to talk about the art of creating characters, “meeting” their characters as they come to life on the page, being surprised at what their characters do. I have never grasped or related to this. I write from a wildly personal place. So much of my fiction is based on my lived experience. Edie, the main character of my novel, is largely based on my younger self, albeit a very exaggerated version that zeros in on the darkest, most shameful and demented whims of her personality. And Peter, the male lead, is an amalgamation of various men in my life—some of whom I love dearly, some of whom I do not like very much at all. Regardless, almost all of the raw materials in the story were mined from my life. And so, for better or worse, it all feels terribly personal.

For example: Like Edie, I also (mortifyingly) had a Matrix poster on my freshman dorm room wall.

Most people reading this newsletter know I do not come from the writing world. I have a degree in computer engineering from Cornell and an MBA from Berkeley, and spent most of my career in tech. My main goal from a very early age was to make money because I grew up without any. I didn’t actually start reading fiction seriously until my thirties; before that—I’m ashamed to admit—I considered it a waste of time. I say this only to emphasize that I was plugged into a very specific type of patriarchal, capitalistic value system from an early age, surrounded primarily by men in college, then work, before I jumped off the proverbial track, unplugged from basing my self-worth on money and titles, and then surrounded myself with women and fell in love with creative writing.

This winding journey to fiction (not to mention selfhood) by way of all-male, hyper-capitalistic environments is not, I’ve noticed, the traditional path for most novelists, or publishing industry professionals, or even most avid literary readers. Many people who pursue the literary arts do so because they had some basic financial support system that allowed them to consider it (even just mentally; an abundance vs. scarcity mindset) given that there is very little monetary gain to be had in writing, and have mostly not worked in all-male spaces. This is reflected in the characters we most commonly see in modern fiction. My main character, though, has a pretty different pov and background, which can make it a bit harder, especially as a woman-character entrenched in her own internalized misogyny, to find readers who relate via the already established literary channels available.

A common criticism from people who don’t connect with the book is that they don’t understand the main character, she’s too “crazy.” Something along the lines of: Why is she into this guy?? Just drop her dumb crush!! And fair enough. I’m honestly grateful young women on Goodreads (I really try not to look but I’m human) feel this empowered. But Peter (the male lead) is not just a “crush” to Edie, he is the crux of a larger framework of male approval that she’s had to build her whole life around as a woman surrounded by men since her teenage years. Her reliance on him is, subconsciously, a form of survival, without him, without his love, which has sustained her through decades of trauma, she doesn’t know who she would be.

I have a somewhat compulsive tendency to write long emails to people in my life. Sometimes this is a very bad decision, like when it’s to an ex, and then that same ex again 😬. Sometimes, though, the habit is good, even life changing. But it stems from this same arguably childish but most definitely human craving to be understood. There has been incredible reviews and discussions about NOTHING SERIOUS and so many people have reached out who really *get* the book, but you go into a project with all these grand ideas and then it ends up in a neat plot summary, and well, what is Substack if not a place to go long? I genuinely don't know if other fiction writers feel this, but two months out from my book launch, I feel a need to share what the book was about for me. And why I spent so long figuring out how to write a novel.

A big part of what I was trying to explore was how deeply women who have been entrenched in male-dominated environments from an early age can be shaped by men’s influence. How much tuning ourselves to the frequency of that system—a bone-deep need for male approval drilled in by way of professional and monetary validation—distorts our own values and identities as women. How the obsessive, compulsive tendencies that are so often rewarded and cultivated in the fast-past corporate tech world can lead women, especially (judged to a higher degree and on different standards), to seem crazy when the same traits are applied to our personal lives, or legitimately unhealthy when applied to pursuing, for example, traditional beauty standards like thinness. It’s about how so much of what is actually and ultimately good for us and our sense of self, as women, is at odds with what our capitalistic patriarchal system rewards. How hard it is to untangle from that system, and how, when we do re-orient our ambitions and learn to trust our instincts—often the result of the deep, inspiring relationships with other women that we cultivate along the way—our progress and self-actualization can look very different from, and often the opposite of, what society deems as “success.”

It’s also about retribution, and the inequalities that women—single women specifically in this book—confront as they get older. Pressure to have children before a certain age, understanding our own desires around having children (or lack thereof) amidst that pressure, an absolute dearth of men looking for committed partnership with women their own age after thirty-five, how dating apps exacerbate this profoundly, the tension between feminist values and our capitalistic culture, how women often feel they should contribute to a greater social good and the financial repercussions of that pressure. And of course, more generally, how society validates men as they age while increasingly eviscerating women.

Ok so it’s also about class and money. When you grow up without a financial safety net, with a deep fear of being poor, all of your decisions are shaped around that fear. It’s about who gets to pursue their passions and who has to keep their blinders on for survival and how coming of age with blinders on plays out over time.

It’s about loving and hating the men in our lives simultaneously. Most women I know have a guy friend whose behavior they don’t entirely approve of. For my generation of women (elder millennials, “xennials”) in particular, entering adulthood at the height of the “cool girl” era (long before Gillian Flynn called it out in Gone Girl) and trying to be one of the guys, male friendships were abundant. Then, sometime in our thirties, popular feminism exploded, #metoo happened, and we all kind of woke the f* up to behavior that was actually really not acceptable. This left us in a sea of stale male friendships with fresh new goggles on, trying to understand which were actually worth it and which were a remnant of a dated, ingrained need for male validation. And so it’s about how awakening to our own feminism impacts our relationships with the men in our lives, how and when we should hold them accountable, the power we hope we have vs. the power we’re allowed. It’s about the utterly terrifying, thrilling experience of falling for women after decades of studying and practicing dating mores with men.

So anyway, you write a book and you think it’s dealing with all these complex, profound ideas—you have to believe that, it’s the fuel that keeps you going through the many many years it takes to write and re-write and publish a novel. But it feels impossible to get an agent, you’re swimming in rejections and drafts, and so you read the books that are getting published and you take the feedback in your rejection letters and you try to keep the pace up, create action on the page, focus on “plot.” You delete long musings and snip your social commentary—not remove it entirely, that’s the whole point of the book in your mind but at least give it a real good haircut. Then take out all “non-essential” backstory and whole chapters filled with flashbacks. And somehow you get a book deal and your through the moon, it’s a top five f’ing publisher, and it gets into young readers hands because that’s who they’re marketing it to and it’s a page turner and a mystery but it’s not really any of that to you, actually, to you, it’s cultural commentary on class and gender and societal expectations, to you it’s a coming of age story about an elder-millennial woman untangling from decades of internalized misogyny, to you it’s about someone whose life didn’t go as planned despite (or maybe because of) her ambitions, and now a part of her she’s not very proud of wants a sort of possibly futile revenge.

And so it’s all very complicated. And you start to question yourself and wonder if anyone is getting any of this?

And of course they are. I have gotten so many touching, thoughtful notes from people articulating back to me exactly what I was hoping to do with the book. But two months post launch, momentum starts to slow and one can’t help but wonder… is that it? It’s not, again, of course. Notes and opportunities and posts still regularly save me from myself. Plus, the beauty of books is that they exist independently, ongoing, it is not a single transient event. But every now and then I feel an aching need to know that it’s real, like it’s still there, living out in the world.

And so I turn, again, to Goodreads.

I know. A writer should never turn to Goodreads.

Almost every author I know stays away. The site attracts a very specific type of reader, one not always representative of the broader reading population. Still, I can’t help it. Because I’m a sucker for self-harm? Because I can’t help but indulge my own bubbling self-hatred, slap myself with the brutal opinions of a stranger to shake me out of my own subterraneous depression? Who knows. It’s kinda like looking up an ex’s social media, you know nothing good can come of it, but you need to feel a flash of that person in your life again if only to remind yourself that you don’t want them in your life at all. Anyway it was early on in my Goodreads self-torture, when I searched primarily for the bad reviews, needing to understand what people didn’t like and how I might make it better, that I learned some women couldn’t relate to or understand my main character.

Anyway what I did today, in honor of it being two months out in the world, was log back into the hellscape of Goodreads and filter on the five star reviews. Because the people who did get the book really got it. Many admitting, however shamefully, that they connected deeply to the main character. And that’s kind of the point. To explore the more shameful sides of ourselves and the ensuing growth of those sides. It makes me especially happy when women in tech say they loved and connected with it. Here are a few of my favorites:

This one made me laugh 😂…

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There is nothing like putting your self out there and having someone else catch it, get it, understand all the little things you’re trying to piece together into the shape of a story. This book will not reflect back the best parts of yourself, but if you’re interested in the darker, messier parts, this is, as one reviewer describes, a kind of funhouse of mirrors. It will not leave you settled with a neatly tied bow, but the ending, to me, is a “happy” one, despite the darkness that surrounds it. Mostly, it’s meant to spark conversation, awareness, and maybe even some self-reflection.

Eventually, we reach a point as writers where a book is what it’s going to be, the most realized version of itself. And then we need to move on to the next, and try all over again. And that’s kind of the beauty of this torturous urge to to be understood. You can never do it perfectly and completely, and even if you think you have, even if there’s not a single word you would change, you yourself inevitably change and so you’re forced to start all over anyway. And so we keep writing, in the hopes of figuring it out again and again, getting a little bit closer to ourselves, and finding our people along the way.

A note to subscribers:

Over a year ago, I paused all paying subscriptions. This meant that if you signed up for this newsletter in the last year or two, there was no paid option. Back when I made that choice, I had income from my day job and didn’t want to put pressure on myself to write this regularly. But now I do not have any income and I put a lot of effort into this newsletter. So I’ll be un-pausing paid subscriptions and I am infinitely grateful to my paid subscribers for the support.

If you enjoy this newsletter it would mean the world if you upgraded your subscription. I’ll continue to be as transparent as I can about the publishing process in addition to musings on writing and and identity and re-invention. More personal and sensitive posts will be limited to paid subscribers. And if there are specific topics you want covered, I’m all ears! Thank you so much, truly, for the support.

A deep-dive article I loved this week:

What Porn Taught A Generation of Women, The Atlantic — very up my alley in a million ways and speaks specifically to my generation of elder millennial women.