I'm writing a book

It's called 'How To Build a Village'

There is no use in burying the lede here: I’m writing a book! It’s called How To Build a Village, and it’s about how to regain the physical, in-person support and extended kinship that our ancestors had by default, but modern life has drained from our lives. It’s part first-person narrative, part reported social science, and it will be published by Flatiron Books (Macmillan) in the US, and LEAP (Bonnier Books) in the UK.

In my twenties, during Twitter’s heyday, it seemed like the viral-tweet-to-book-deal pipeline was alive and well. Perhaps because of that, in my thirties — even after I’d quit journalism and mercifully stopped tweeting — I still had some vague sense that once you had a sizeable audience and viral essay or two to show for it, book deals were the next obvious (and very attainable) goal.

The reality I experienced was laughably different to that. Getting to the point of this announcement took a few years, one proposal that didn’t sell, parting ways with one agent, writing an entirely new proposal based on the seed of an idea contained in the failed one, getting ghosted more than once before I found my new (excellent) agent Emily, and then several more rounds of edits with her expert guidance before we were ready to go out on submission to publishers.

On top of nearly full-time paid work and taking care of a toddler, it took many hours of unpaid labor, thousands of words that never saw the light of day, and a delusional amount of self belief that this book not only needed to exist, but I was the one to make it happen. There were many times I was sitting in a shitty Starbucks on a Saturday morning — my husband having gifted me a couple child-free weekend hours to work on it — wondering why on earth I was wasting my incredibly limited free time on a project that might, once again, never see the light of day

However, there was a really clear reason I didn’t give up, and it had nothing to do with me. It was all of you.

When you’re attempting to sell a non-fiction book via proposal, you hear over and over that you need to prove to publishers that there’s a distinct audience for your work. This is understandably frustrating for writers, and I’ll admit, there have been times when I didn’t understand this. How can new ideas and emerging writers ever enter the mainstream if you have to already have an established audience before you even get a chance?

But when I finally got to the point where I was sitting in front of interested publishers justifying why this book should exist, this constraint started to make sense to me. In those conversations, I felt incredibly confident in what I was selling, so much so that I didn’t even feel like I was selling it — I was just telling the truth. I wasn’t waiting for validation, because I already had that.

Writers who become mothers often feel like they have to make a choice: Become a writer who almost exclusively writes about motherhood and risk losing your wider audience, or carry on as before, pretending that your intellectual and creative foundations somehow survived the transition unscathed. I couldn’t abide by that binary, and so a few years ago, when I started writing about my experience of becoming a caregiver and mother, I took a conscious creative risk: I wanted to do it in a way that would be as interesting to non-parents as it would be to parents.

Taking care of other people — the friction, the repetition, the cost, and the surprising rewards of it — is strategically buried by our economy and value system. So it’s no surprise my life pre-kid was almost entirely devoid of it. The writing challenge I set for myself was essentially to reach a prior version of me. Make her see that her life could be richer if she went out of her way to include the friction of care into it, even if she never went onto have a child. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it felt interesting to me to try.

But wow, you all really met the challenge. The more I wrote about it, the more my audience grew, and continues to. Though I don’t have hard data on the parents versus non-parents that comprise this audience, I feel like I’ve heard more from the latter category since I started writing about my experience as a parent. Every comment, every email, every piece of feedback helped disrupt the limiting binary I once feared.

So when I initially had the idea for a book of this particular title almost exactly a year ago, I knew it couldn’t be a parenting book. It had to speak to everyone. Despite the cliche “it takes a village to raise a child,” the village doesn’t make logical sense (not to mention historical or evolutionary sense!) if it’s only parents involved. Plus, parents aren’t the only ones suffering for lack of a village, everyone is. Many of your comments and contributions that I’ve previously featured in this newsletter were part of the proposal — and will eventually be part of the book.

When I talk about the confidence I had in those meetings, that’s where it came from: I knew this was the book that needed to be written, because you’d all proved that people were ready to hear this. That these identity categories which keep us suffering in silence, wondering “why do I find this so hard?” were perhaps ready to give way to something more mutualistic. To both of my publishers’ great credit, they immediately got it, too.

It’s an insight that not only shapes the book I’m writing, but more importantly, it has given me a much-needed source of hope in what feels like a terminally dark world. I’m writing this book because I really believe that we can do better than this, that we all deserve more support than we currently have, and most importantly, that we don’t have to wait for crumbling systems to get more of it into our lives.

What does this mean for the newsletter?

If I’m being honest, my publishing cadence has already decreased a little bit here, and that may continue for at least the rest of this year and early next while I finish the first draft. A lot of the interviews I had planned to use for this newsletter will now be reserved for the book, because that’s just the way these things go. I have great trust you will all understand. As we talk about a lot around here: creative output is not an inexhaustible resource!

I also want to start doing some regular (maybe seasonal?) “village check-ins” where I share with you what’s been working in my life, and you all can sound off in the comments about what’s working in yours. As the seasons change, I have a post in the works about some things that worked for me in the warmer months — expect that in the next couple weeks.

In addition, I want to bring you along for the ride of writing this book and getting it out in the world. So I plan to invite you into my creative process a bit, and I may have some more bonus offerings for paid subscribers on that front. (Just like the Live workshop we did last week, which was so fun!) If there is anything specific you want to know about selling or writing a book, let me know.

Otherwise, you can expect the usual, including essays and posts that aren’t about this topic when the mood strikes me, which I’m sure it will. As usual, everything will remain free and un-paywalled.

I’ll finish by saying thank you, so much, again. To paying subscribers especially — who get very little extra in return for their money — and to every single person who has read, supported, and shared my work in the last few years. You made this topic feel alive for me, which is what enabled me to go from working on an unwieldy draft in a Starbucks to announcing a book deal in two countries.

The amount of gratitude I have for that is genuinely hard for me to put into words.❤️

Thank you for reading. I keep all my content free for all subscribers, but paying subscribers give me the time and space (aka childcare) to write on these themes—so please join them if you can! You can also support me by liking, commenting, or re-stacking this post on Substack, or forwarding it to a friend.