A good marinade
Not a recipe for your summer barbecue.
I wanted to write to you all sooner than this, but I thought I should wait until I had news to share. Now I know waiting for something outside my control was a silly goal. This is one of the biggest truisms in life, and one I keep having to learn: while there some things you can control—or at least sway—in life, timing—always fickle—is not one of them.
Let’s get the news out of the way, shall we? That book of mine which you’re probably tired of hearing about, The Figurehead, will be published in the U.S. by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company. (An self-indulgent fun fact: Hemingway and my personal G.O.A.T. pick Faulkner both had their first books published by Liveright. That I get to share just an inch of shelf space with those heavyweights… I am verklempt!)
The book submission experience was strange and very stressful one. In many ways, it was reminiscent of that awful period of uncertainty that preceded college acceptance letters: waiting for a truly life-altering event, while having to surrender to decision-making beyond your reach. But I was lucky—very much so. The book went to auction, and I got to meet with a number of editors—all of them smart, kind and thoughtful. In the end, like my experience with college admissions, there was one option that felt instinctually right.
While this all happened, life, of course, still went on. Another term’s worth of essays graded, another set of Italian classes finished. (Eppure, il mio italiano rimane al massimo mediocre.) I was tempted to simply wait for the end result of the book deal, but I was also on the cusp of my summer break from teaching—a yawning window of time to hopefully write, but at least marinade.
Marination. I don’t know how else to describe the process of starting a creative project. You have an idea, and you let it steep in your thoughts until it coalesces into something worthy. (I was tempted to say it’s taking a germ of an idea and letting it prove… but that would be mixing my kitchen metaphors.)
This takes time. Months, or more. One needs to think, dwell, question, research, interrogate, become enamored, become distracted. From the outside, this might look like some sort of flâneur posturing: weeks of library trips, museum visits, aimless walks with a notebook in hand, and thinking and thinking and thinking. It’s a bizarre form of gestation, but a vital one. And now, after several good months of marinating, I have the first pages of the Next Thing.
But that will come. In the meantime, more letters—and soon. Or sooner, at least.
Thank you, as always, for following my strange little adventure.