The Books I Didn't Sell

The Vasa Museum in Stockholm is one of the best museums I’ve ever been to, dedicated to possibly the worst ship ever built.

You know from the start that the ship sank—the museum’s whole thing is that they dredged the Vasa up from the depths and put it on display, like 95 percent intact. But what you don’t know right away is how and why the ship sank. That story unfolds slowly as you make your way through the museum, and it is…delicious.

The Vasa was built in the early 17^th century, and it was supposed to be the glory of the Swedish navy. When I visited, the audio guide kept going on and on about the majesty of the thing and how King Gustav had it outfitted with an unprecedented amount of cannons, and adorned with all these symbols of how awesome he was. Unfortunately the engineering was not so glorious, and the ship was super top-heavy.

Cut to: Shortly before Vasa’s maiden voyage, the captain tried to demonstrate to the people in charge that something was amiss by having sailors run back and forth across the deck, which rocked that mama like a wagon wheel. Upon receiving this report, Gustav was like, “Seems fine”, and sent them to sea anyway, where, 1300 meters from shore, a gust of wind tipped the ship over and it sank within minutes of launch.

Impeccable, 10/10, no notes.

One of the biggest (literal) flops in history, and the Swedes built a museum in its honor. There’s probably a lesson in that.

Did you know that rejection is part of being a writer? Did you??? Have you ever heard that one before?

Presuming I’m not the one to break that news to you, I’ll just say: This is the sort of thing that everyone knows, but that knowing can’t fully protect you from. To have any sort of sustainable creative career, one has to learn to take one’s “no”s and then say “Thank you sir, may I have another?” In my more philosophical moments, I think of rejections I receive as a sort of karmic retribution for the many rejections I’ve given out in my 12 years as a magazine editor. 

At any rate, there’s no way to wriggle out of having to figure out for yourself some way of swallowing those rejections and metabolizing them.

A brief digression to a “yes”: Last fall, I sold my first book; a couple weeks ago, it became public knowledge. Starting this week, I’m going on leave from The Atlantic for a year to write it. It’s called The Friends We Made Along the Way, and it’s going to be an exploration of how the values that make friendships thrive are often at odds with the values of American culture, and why Americans seem to struggle with friendship so much. That’s my elevator pitch, anyway. Mostly I hope it will be a collection of invitations to think about friendship a little differently and more deeply. But also I hope and intend it to be fun.

In the face of my lifelong dream coming true, and the warm pleasant awkwardness of receiving people’s congratulations for it, I’ve been thinking a lot about the years of failure and rejection that came before. On social media, professional achievements sometimes seem to just arrive one day, fully formed, like Athena popping out of Zeus’s head. But this isn’t actually my first book, it’s just the first book that anyone has wanted to publish.

Basically ever since college graduation I have always been working on book projects “on the side” of my journalism career. But I haven’t been very good at talking about this. For a long time, I hid this ambition from just about everyone I knew. I would hole up at Panera Bread by myself every weekend for eight hour shifts, refilling the same soda and telling anyone who asked that I was “working,” not correcting them if they assumed I meant for my job.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen if I told people—that they would point and laugh? Or worse, ask me to describe what the book was about?

I cultivated this weird and unnecessary air of mystery as I wrote two partial novels I eventually abandoned, and two full novels that I tried my very best to get published. Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, I was carving out a little space for myself as a journalist covering relationships, friendship in particular. Every once in a while, book agents would reach out to me asking if I was interested in writing a book on friendship. When I responded asking if they’d be interested in reading a draft of a young adult novel instead, you won’t be surprised to hear that the answer was usually “No.”

But every once in a while, the answer was “yes.” I got my first agent in 2017, for a YA fantasy novel. We revised it together and then went “on submission” which basically means my agent sent it to a bunch of editors at a bunch of publishing houses, and I tried to forget that was happening so that I could continue functioning during the interminable wait for them to get back to us. The “no”s trickled in, and slowly (so slowly) it became clear that it Wasn’t Gonna Happen.

So I wrote another book. (Thank you sir, may I have another?) A YA mystery this time. My agent did not care for it, and, well, she broke up with me. She was very kind about it, but there’s no other way to put it, really.

One step forward, two steps back. I did my best to revise the book by myself; then spent a year querying other agents (another arduous process where you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting to be rejected). That process didn’t really bear fruit; I found my current agent, the wise and wonderful Kerry Sparks, because she liked a story I wrote about the Midwestern tradition of dressing up statues of geese and displaying them on your porch, and reached out to me. So I owe a lot to porch geese.

Long story short, Kerry and I did the whole submission thing again with my mystery novel and received more or less the same answer. A long, drawn-out naaaaaahhhhh stretched out over more than a year.

I have no beef, truly, with anyone who rejected my manuscripts—they had their valid reasons and begging someone to love you is not a good look and never works in any case. (Also, the “no”s I’ve gotten from book editors have been almost uniformly the kindest rejections I’ve ever seen. I think they’re very aware that every no they send represents a broken heart.)

The hardest thing to come to terms with was not exactly that these books would never be published (in both instances, by the time the dust settled, I was fairly ready to move on), but that I had nothing to show for years of labor, and was now staring down the barrel of the many years it would take to try again.

I have a difficult relationship, as I think many people do, to the idea of wasted time. Some combination of capitalism and mortality is probably to blame. But however much I may have whined to my therapist at the time about how I should just give up, he knew and I knew that of course I was going to try again. I just had to thrash for a while against the bonds of uncertainty first. It’s like the old Samuel Beckett quote: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

But if I had wanted to hide from most people the fact that I was even trying to write these books, I definitely wanted to downplay my failure to get them published.

In his recent essay “The Rejection Plot”, Tony Tulathimutte quotes a Miss Manners book from 1982 on the proper way to take a rejection:

I guess the idea is to mask the stink of failure with the perfume of performative okayness. I get the impulse. For a time, I pretty much followed this advice, confiding in very few people, processing these rejections largely alone, staying “mysterious, not willing to talk the situation over.” But I do not particularly recommend this strategy.

Even now I tend to sum this whole saga up to people as “I wrote two novels and no one wanted them, lol,” which is an accurate, if partial, summary of a decade of my life. Of course in the meantime I was still doing meaningful work at The Atlantic, meeting the man I’m going to marry, hanging with my friends and family, generally living, laughing, loving through various joys and catastrophes. But also, I spent 10 years writing two novels and no one wanted them. I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Lol.

Alan Watt, the founder of the L.A. Writers Lab, writes frequently about how a story requires a dilemma. Not a problem that can be solved, but a dilemma that can only be “resolved through a shift in perception.” Toward the end of the story, the hero has to surrender the impossible idea of what they thought they wanted, and find a way to accept and adapt to reality.

If my dilemma was that I wanted a guarantee that trying again wouldn’t lead to another failure, which is pretty clearly impossible, then I guess the surrender has to be to stop thinking of time spent trying as time wasted. Sometimes you just don’t know that putting more bronze cannons on a ship than anyone’s ever seen before is going to make it tip over in a light breeze until you try it, you know? Lesson learned.

Tony Tulathimutte again:

Maybe that’s partly why these failed attempts can be hard to talk about. They don’t make for satisfying stories. Something doesn’t work out and you can’t accept it until you have to accept it. Surrender, and then life goes on.

The third try was the charm for me, which is not too shabby. The book deal for The Friends We Made Along the Way came together with a speed and ease that shocked me after all these years beating my head against the wall of publishing. I’m beyond grateful, and the point of all this is not to fish for anyone’s sympathy. Just to be honest about how I got here.

Some things are different this time around, most obviously that this is a nonfiction book. I couldn’t say what exactly shifted in me to make me finally ready to write a book about friendship after all those years of people suggesting it. Maybe just that it took nearly 10 years for me to know what I wanted to say. Was that time wasted? I probably will write fiction again, but who knows if you’ll ever hear about it or see it on shelves—check back in 10 more years, perhaps. For now, I’m excited for something different.

The other thing that’s shifted for me in the leadup to this book is that, fittingly considering the topic, I’m being less mysterious about it with the ones I love. I know I’m not blowing the lid off of anything by saying so, but talking…to people… is good. You can give your work room to grow in the fenced-in secret garden of your solitary attention without isolating yourself like a big weirdo. Even the excruciating crucible of describing what my book is about is, you know, building character.

So I wouldn’t say that the solution to the problem of writerly rejection is to build a museum to your flops and let everyone in, but it is good to stop hiding your vulnerability at a Panera Bread. So to speak.

In other professional news: 

The last story I’ll probably publish in The Atlantic for a while (due to aforementioned book leave) ended up with the provocative headline What the Suburb Haters Don’t Understand. But it is, to my mind, a very ambivalent piece about the type of place I (and it turns out, the majority of Americans) come from, about memory and nostalgia and how life happens where you are, and sometimes where you are is an Olive Garden by the highway.

Will future installments of this newsletter be this long? How frequently will they arrive? What topics will they cover? These are just some of the many questions in this life that I don’t have answers to.