Things you will do in the month before your memoir launches

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Hello,

In the weeks before your book is published, you will enter a very particular frame of mind. It will remind you a little of the final weeks of pregnancy, that combination of dauntedness and preparation. You realise that you want to make a soft nest for your book to land in - or is the nest actually for you, a soft, safe place in which you can lay with your heart newly exposed? Either way, there is no such nest available. 

In place of it, you will busy yourself with a litany of surface concerns that you wish you were too sensible to entertain. You will lay out your clothes across your bed, and try to understand which of them make presentable outfits. You will, quite honestly, wonder how you ever managed to get dressed in your whole life before this moment; your ability to choose seems to have entirely unravelled. You will stock up on mascara, and face powder, and even a compact of bronzer that you don’t know how to use. Still, on your next Zoom call, your face will moon up on the screen, pale and shady all at once. You will wonder whether you should whiten your teeth.

In your next therapy session, you will spend fifteen minutes talking about the impossibility of finding the right lighting, and compare your appearance to one of the vampires in Twilight. You will be aware that your therapist thinks that you’re really talking about something more profound, but think: No. It’s definitely about the lighting.

The anxiety dreams will come, of course. Or perhaps it’s better to say: the dreams will come. In your sleeping mind, the joy and worry are muddled together into a reflecting pool. Everything is heightened, and symbolic, and a little deranged. You comfort yourself with the knowledge that they are not as bad as the dreams you had before the release of your last book. Those ones had you waking in the middle of the night, convinced that you were about to become one of those literary scandals in which the author is discovered to have faked their own life. More than once, you found yourself sitting at your computer with an open email, ready to confess your deceit to your editor, only to realise that there was nothing whatsoever to confess. Nevertheless, some vicious corner of your brain retained the impression that you were a fraud. It didn’t need a reason. 

One night, this time around, you will dream of a landscape full of white rainbows. The next day, a woman in a waiting room will tell you that she saw a white rainbow on the beach that morning, made out of fog and spring sunlight. You will endure the strange sensation that your inner life has sprung a leak. 

When people ask about your book, you will freeze. What can you say about this enormous idea that has lived in your head for so long? It’s like trying to regurgitate a watermelon. You will feel a little shy about it anyway, because these thoughts that you put on paper were quite private, really. You will feel foolish for thinking that. You never will be able to make sense of the push-and-pull between wanting to write, and for your writing to be published, but simultaneously not wanting anyone to read your words.

You will find, in some gratitude, that when interviewers ask you about your book, you can talk about it quite fluently, as if another self clears her throat and takes over. You will have the distinct sense that this self is nine years old, and has been offered the chance to read in assembly.

You will continue to scoop the cat litter tray each morning, and to unload and load the dishwasher, and to cook dinners and pack lunchboxes. As you do this, you will wryly smile to yourself, because you thought the literary life might involve a bit more actual writing than this, and definitely more cocktail parties. 

You will tell yourself that you’re thankful for these grounding influences, without fully meaning it.

A jiffy bag will arrive containing a finished copy of your book. You will hold it like a newborn, weighing it in your hands, turning it in the light. You will undress it, easing off its dustjacket to admire the naked hardback within, which looks so serious and timeless. You will re-clothe it. You will not let anyone else in the house touch it without clean hands and serious intent. You will be slightly despondent that they don’t exhibit the same rapture as you. 

You will call your hairdresser in panic, and revise your stance on control underwear. You will wonder again if you should whiten your teeth. 

You will brace yourself for a storm, and worry that the storm won’t come. 

And while all this is happening, you will see your book in everything. Each news story you read, each conversation you hold: it is all you can do not to say, ‘I wrote about that.’ These ideas that you have nursed into being will seem not relevant so much as intertwined, knitted through the fabric of life in a way that is irresistible to you. You have to share this because it is urgent and necessary. 

This is where it will begin to make sense: all that doubt, all that squirming visibility. It is not an I that you are seeking to communicate, but a we. You write these raw-hearted books as a way of saying, I think this might be something that we are feeling. You, yourself, never really wanted to be seen, but you always felt that we deserved to be.

That we is not everyone, though. You will remind yourself that you don’t read reviews.

Enchantment is published on 28th February in the US - if you don’t have a local indie, here’s how to pre-order.

It arrives on 9th March in the UK. Please consider pre-ordering. 

If you’re in Spain, Sweden, Germany, Poland, South Korea, Lithuania or Romania - it’s coming very soon!

Live Dates

In person - UK only!

I’m thrilled too announce that my interviewer at Waterstones Piccadilly will be Helen Macdonald - AND that there will be cake!

Online in the US:

Saturday March 4, 2pm PT
Book Passage, Elliot Bay Bookstore, Rakestraw Books
In conversation with Pico Iyer
Tickets: here

Tuesday March 7, 7pm ET
Books & Books, Oblong Books, Wellesley Books, Skylark Bookshop
In conversation with Priya Parker
Tickets: here

You can find links to book tickets for these events here.

The next time I write will be the cusp of publication. See you then.

Take care,

Katherine

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