The Conception
I think it's time to tell you where book babies come from.
My book reached a major milestone this week. On March 25th, it had been a whole 365 since it was officially into the world.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year since debut day. I took that day off work because I had live just as a real writer for just one day. I didn’t want to be asked if someone could turn in a late assignment, nor did I want to struggle with attention spans or explain why the poem we were analyzing in class was more important than Tik Tok—or any of the other things that plague a teacher’s life. I just wanted to live the author life I’d imagined as a kid, the one where my books paid for things like pink corvettes, live-in chefs, and fully-restored Victorian mansions.
It’s been way longer than 365 days since I started writing We Never Took a Bad Picture. Like way, way longer. It began with a line that wouldn’t shut up: Silver was the wrong color. Those taunting words churned in my head, while I tried to revise (again) the novel that would eventually die in the digital drawer. What did it even mean, silver was the wrong color? I acquiesced to the line eventually, and when it landed on the page, it meant a woman in a Hallmark stationary aisle, planning an anniversary party for 50-ish years of marriage to a man she had a knot of complicated feelings for.
But, it actually began before that. In 2014, a pregnant me took my first Porch class. The Porch was in its toddler years and the class took place on co-founder Susannah Felt’s dining table. It was six (maybe eight?) weeks of writing fiction. I submitted a story about a grandmother and her granddaughter’s wedding day, and their clashing generational lenses. The grandmother had paid for a perfect wedding for her granddaughter to mask her dissatisfaction with her own, to mask the fact that she had married at all. The story wasn’t that great—but the story seed began germination in that workshop under Susannah’s fabulous teaching (did you know she has a novel coming out in June? Have you preordered yet?)
It was 2018 when I first typed out the words: Silver was the wrong color. That was the year I met Gloria and Artie and tried to figure out what made their “successful” marriage so awful. Meanwhile, 2018 was its own kind of awful.
Like any human who has lived, I have a collection of “bad times.” Never have they ever happened in rapid-fire succession…until 2018. That was the year my IUD got painfully wedged in my uterine wall. It was the year of my second ectopic and the lifesaving surgery that rendered me officially sterilized without my consent. It was the year I fractured my foot. And so on and so on. But, the worst thing of that year was the absolutely crushing, devastating loss of my Pandora cat. Even almost eight years later, I can’t type up many details without sending myself into a crumpled emotional state. I scooped up a sixth month old Pandora from the Long Beach pound in January 2002 and had to say goodbye to her under the harsh fluorescent lighting of an emergency vet on September 23rd, 2018. The day after Tallulah’s birthday. Three months after she’d turned 17 and we’d baked her a cake, after she’d played with the catnip rainbow toy we gave her as a birthday gift.
Some people know the story of why September 23rd as her final day was so significant. But you, Substack universe, may not. Pandora was first diagnosed with kidney failure while I was pregnant with Tallulah. Every cat parent knows that diagnosis means the hourglass has flipped over, that time is running out. Usually, it runs out quickly. Somehow, miraculously, and with the help of fluids and frequent vet visits, she made it four years in later-stage kidney failure. There was a scare earlier in 2018, a month or so before she was actually gone. I held her on the couch we had to cover with plastic because of her geriatric accidents and begged her to stay.
“Please. You have to make it until Tallulah is four. That’s how old I am in my oldest memory. Please make it until she’s four so she can remember you.”
Do you see? She sat with us while we sang to Tallulah over an oversized vegan donut and the four lit candles. As soon as Tallulah went to bed, an official four-year-old, Pandora declined. She went under my writing desk, where she stayed until I moved her to my bed, into a nest of blankets, and tried to will her to get better. She never did. And do you know the saddest part about that? Tallulah tells me she can’t really remember her all that well. I should’ve told Pandora a different age. She would’ve held on as long as I asked. She only stayed alive as long because I had asked.
That grief penetrated every inch of my life, including my writing. Pandora’s death birthed the death of Teddy in We Never Took a Bad Picture. That’s not a spoiler. You know in the first few pages that he’s gone, and you know that both his death and his life are the undercurrent for everything unsaid between these two main characters. I no longer only write for the sake of therapeutic catharsis, the writing of this novel did help me process and survive my own grief. It also helped me understand the prisms of regret, ambition, adoration, dreams, and “settling down.”
In the 365 (now 369) days since my book baby entered the world, I’ve had the surreal experience of meeting people and hearing how they interpret this thing I’ve created. They don’t know about the Porch class; they may know nothing of my Pandora cat. They don’t know that I’ve long mused on how different generations, different people, interpret marriage, family, parenthood, the human experience. They just know that they met these characters and they affected them, for better or for worse.
really loved the book! excited for the new one too. thank you for sharing this.