What's in a title?
Enchantment publishes in the UK today - and thanks to your amazing support, I learned yesterday that it’s gone straight to #5 in the New York Times Bestsellers, and #1 in the US National Indie Bestsellers! NUMBER FRICKIN’ ONE!! I had absolutely no expectation of finding myself there, and particularly not within a week. I am completely beside myself. Thank you.
Hello,
Writing is an intuitive process for me. It never emerges from the bright side of my brain. At the very least, I think that words come from a part of my mind to which I have no access, but mostly it feels like an act of mediumship. I seem to channel books from somewhere. I don’t know where. But I do know that the connection is intermittent and a little glitchy. My lines are plagued with static.
Launching a book is a fascinating experience. If you’re lucky, you get to talk to dozens of interviewers about your work, and that repetition creates a new understanding of your words. What do you mean by ‘enchantment’? people ask, and I find myself reaching for slightly different language each time, slightly different framing, always seeking to cut a little closer to the core. Eventually, I find a clarity that I never had when I was actually doing the writing.
The word ‘enchantment’ unpacks so many meanings for me. First of all, there’s the sense that disenchantment is a more familiar term these days, as if we already believe that the era of magic is over. Enchantment has been left behind, the business of Disney movies and unicorn-saturated landscapes only. It feels subversive to reclaim it in an age when we are so determinedly post-optimism, post-hope. It’s the kind of challenge I relish (you may know me from my mission to convince everyone that winter is the best season).
But enchantment can be used in other ways, too. With an indefinite article - an enchantment - it becomes a spell. When I first started thinking about the book, mid-lockdown, it was a word that I used in my notebook to describe my state of mind. I was so blurry that I felt like I’d fallen under an enchantment. Or maybe it wasn’t personal. Maybe the whole kingdom was under an enchantment, engulfed in a fog so dense that none of us could find our way home. I often wondered if there was a counter-charm to clear it.
And there is another connotation of enchantment - the active sense of casting a spell. That’s the one I like best of all, because our sense of enchantment is not a passive process. It is something that we have to do, a feeling that we need to chase, a mode of perception that we can exercise like a muscle. Enchantment comes to us easily as children, but we adults have to meet it halfway, battling against the multifarious darknesses that lurk in our lives. That only makes it a richer experience as we age - for grownups, enchantment is full of complex, bittersweet notes. As I’ve said repeatedly in these last few weeks: we can wait a lifetime for enchantment to arrive unbidden at our doorsteps, or we can make a commitment to notice it every single day, everywhere we go.
I probably put it better in the book, on a day when the static was quieter:
“Enchantment cannot be destroyed. We just have to remember that we need it. And now when I start to look for it, there it is: pale, intermittent, waiting patiently for my return. The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass. The glint of gold in a stream. The words that whisper through the leaves.
‘May I disappear,’ wrote Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace. ‘When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.
That is what I am searching for: the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.”
Enchantment is out now.
Links to buy are here: UK /US/Romania. Other languaguages coming soon!
Just in case you’d like to catch up with any of my reviews and interviews, here’s a selection from the last couple of weeks:
Goop (with, as my friends keep saying, actual Gwyneth Paltrow)
Maria Popova’s The Marginalian
Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper
Join Alice Vincent and I on IG Live on Monday 13th March at 7pm.
Take care,
Katherine
Website | Patreon | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US
"...the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world". This is such a beautiful idea. The idea of enchantment makes me think of Mary Oliver saying that we should "pay attention, be astonished, tell about it." Can't wait to get a copy of the book! 💫
Hurray!!!