Pub day

A book I wrote – had inadvertently been writing for the last ten years – is out in the world today. Writers often speak of “pub days” as being anticlimactic, because nothing really changes on this day. The idea that became notes and fragments that became essays and that eventually became a manuscript – all of that has been happening for a very long time. Even after there is a manuscript, there is the long and uncertain process of finding a publisher. And if you have the good fortune to connect with a publisher, there is still at least a year of editing and fine-tuning and fact-checking before the manuscript is sent to the printer. Usually, the book is printed and shipped to warehouses at least a week or two before the actual pub date. In my case, boxes containing copies of my book arrived a week ago, and I have been marveling at its material weight, smell, and texture. This part – feeling the thingness of what was once merely an idea, a nugget of a thought – this part of publishing a book is magical.

This book is about homecoming and motherhood and the gifts and burdens of inheritance. For most of the time I was writing, I didn’t know it was a book because I was still living all of its chapters in real time. I was writing to figure things out and questions I was pondering on different topics – new motherhood, language loss and re-acquisition, being sandwiched between caring for younger children and aging parents – became essays, until one day, I looked through my various files and could just make out the murky shape of a book, like the ghostly image of a photograph as it develops in a shallow dish of solution.

But a book is incomplete without a reader. Which is why I don’t at all think pub dates are anticlimactic. It’s a wonder I was able to connect with a publisher that believed my manuscript should become a book and now that it is, it feels like an immense honor to be able to share the book with future readers. In many ways, this book no longer belongs to me; each copy is an occasion for the combination of text and images within the pages to connect with a reader – in positive or negative ways – each of whom will ponder the same questions and topics from their own perspectives, through the web of their own communities and lived experiences. What happens in that moment is also magical.

Thank you for being on the receiving end.