Still Chugging Along...

In which I give an update on my National Book Award reading project, among other things...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

First, I just wanted to say welcome to all of the new people who signed up due to my guest post over on Sara Hildreth’s Fiction Matters Substack, regarding my National Book Award reading project and how it’s impacted my reading life. If you’re new here, thanks so much for joining us. I took a small break at the end of last year, but I am back—in some capacity—and I can’t wait to tell you all about what ideas I have as we enter into the new year.

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When I first started my National Book Award reading project, I didn’t have time to read other books. I had 450+ books ahead of me, and I knew that trying to sneak in any other reading would just delay my progress. Even when I found myself absolutely despising a certain book (or entire longlist), I kept on trucking, because I had committed to this project and was determined to see it through.

In a way, I was treating this project like a traditional, heteronormative, monogamous marriage—which is funny, seeing as how all I ever talk about is how I dream of having a long list of husbands and many affairs (I’m mostly joking. I love my husband, but also…serial marriage is a family tradition, and I try to respect family traditions.) But the more I read books from the fifties and sixties, I found myself restless and frustrated, shifting into an almost Emma Bovary mindset with my reading. I was unhappy and knew I needed to do something to change it. About six months into my project, I found myself slipping in other reads. I picked up Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, and books no one else was talking about, cheating on my reading project, just for the thrill.

The books I most gravitated towards weren’t my usual reads. Typically, my go-to books were sad girl reads—books by authors like Melissa Broder, Jen Beagin, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jean Kyoung Frazier, and Emma Cline—any book where an American young woman was on the struggle bus and doing potentially questionable things. Now, I found myself reaching for books with a stream-of-consciousness style, books taking place outside of the U.S., and books that explored ideas I didn’t usually care about. My reading project had made it clear to me just how narrow my reading lens was, how accustomed I was to an American style, American politics, and ideas, and I wanted to branch out and be a more well-rounded reader. Cheating, in this way, had actually contributed to my growth.

Looking back, I’ve always been a cheater. I was a bad test taker, and throughout grade school I found myself peaking over to my neighbors' Scantron cards, memorizing their answers, praying they got enough right that it would prevent me from another year of summer school. Of course, this is a different kind of cheating, but I’m sure there’s some kind of commonality to the psychology of those who justify these kinds of behaviors.

It might seem like an odd choice, to frame my reading as a form of infidelity. But it was this feeling of cheating on this project that I had committed to that actually planted the seed for a novel.

Around the time I began reading outside of my project, I started writing a story about two friends, both married, who are considering having an affair. I hadn’t planned on starting a new book project at this point. I’d finished writing a collection of essays at the end of 2021, and part of why I started on this reading project in the first place was because, now that I wasn’t writing a book, I had more free time to read. I also started it to distract myself from the lack of responses to the various agents I was querying. Writing anything outside of these newsletters was of no real interest to me. Still, the story kept nagging me until I found myself exiting out of Substack to scribble random ideas down that I had about the characters talking in my head.

What I wrote about in my guest post for Sara was how this reading project impacted my reading life. But what I hadn’t expected was how it would impact my writing life. I’ve now been working on this novel for a year and a half. Part of why I took two months off at the end of last year was because it had consumed me to the point that I knew if I didn’t get a fully realized draft onto the page, I wouldn’t be able to give a respectable amount of time and attention to anything else. While I didn’t realize it at the time, I was writing about my frustrations with how this reading project wasn’t going the way I had hoped. I went in thinking it would make me a better reader, a smarter person, and that I would love every single book that I read. And while the project has definitely helped me grow, I set unrealistic expectations and then got mad when it couldn’t live up to them.

In the second half of last year, I began to revisit some of my favorite books, analyzing them to figure out how they achieved the things that were similar to what I wanted to achieve in my book. In some ways, I guess you could look at the books I was revisiting as ‘Old Flames’—books I had loved and wanted to experience again in the same way, even though I was now a different person. What I found most interesting was the ways these old books had already inspired the ideas in my book, before I even re-read them. I would imagine that every book that sticks with a writer becomes part of the fabric of everything they write moving forward—if not in big ways, at least in small ones.

Some of the books I revisited were Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, and Memorial by Bryan Washington. Most of these books were about writers, many of them love stories. I studied the ways that Chabon played with time, how he was able to stretch a single moment throughout a dozen or more pages. I looked at how Groff wrote about privilege and inspiration, and how she played with perspective and structure. Chee wrote about how his first novel came to be, and it made me consider the ethics of inspiration, of what you take from the real world, from real people, and how the things you fabricate complicate reality. From Washington, I saw how to capture the nuances of betrayal. A lot of the things these books inspired were already embedded into my novel but re-reading them helped me see how much they had influenced me and helped me reconsider the ideas I was trying to explore in the first place.

Over the weekend, I finally finished the latest draft of my novel. It’s still nowhere near done, but I do finally feel free enough to slowly ease my way back into reading the books I had committed to. I’m excited to see what I think now, after having been away for a bit.

While I don’t think it is realistic to commit myself to the project in the way that I had initially envisioned—I have a full-time job, we are planning on moving in the Spring, and I still want to commit some time to my novel—I plan on covering at least one or two longlists a month. I also have an idea for a new series here, called ‘On Second Thought…’, where I write about a book I’ve re-read, how my thoughts have changed since my initial reading, what I took from it now, and how the book as a whole has shaped me as a reader. I think it will be fun, so stay tuned.

If you’ve been following along for a while, I just wanted to say thank you for sticking with me. It continues to be the greatest blessing to be able to discuss books with smart people, to think more deeply about the ways we read, write, and navigate the world.

Next week, I hope to cover the 2012 National Book Award shortist—which I read at the end of last year—so stay tuned for that!

Until then,

XOXO