What's in a title?

Enchantment UK publishes today!

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:

Happy Place

You're Booked

The Shift Podcast

Goop (with, as my friends keep saying, actual Gwyneth Paltrow)

The Waterstones Podcast

Maria Popova’s The Marginalian

Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper

New York Times Well

NPR interview

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