Below— some book recs and below that, a little rant about people who are dead to me, and also “One Weird Trick” I have been using on an almost daily basis for the last year that has really improved my life.

I was in Boston for a few days last month and stopped by Grolier Poetry Bookshop on my pal Kit’s recommendation, and to say hello to his friend James who is, it seems, the only person who works there. James edits a new-ish literary magazine called Duck, which he gave me a copy of (thanks, James!) and I think y’all would like it a lot.

At Groiler, I ended up buying, for no particular reason, a copy of Greenhouse by Jack Paradise. Lo! The wild high of buying and immediately reading a book because your subconscious was like— yeah, gimmie dat.

Greenhouse is a novella about a gay couple and their kid living on an island in the somewhat near-ish future. Wonderful book, calm and elegant. There’s a sense of some kind of discord happening elsewhere, off the page, or maybe that’s just a feeling I can’t help but assign to any book set in the present, recent past, or near future. Discord in all directions.

Since Greenhouse was so well-made and pleasing to hold, I looked up the publishing house that made it, which was new to me— Publication Studio, an international network of 11 studios that collectively produce and distribute their titles. I don’t totally understand how it works, but whatever Publication Studio is doing, I am pretty sure I am in favor of it. They’re in Hudson, Glasgow, Vancouver, São Paulo, Paris, etc. Why not Mexico City, my pals? Let me know.

Much of what I’ve been reading lately is following a kind of color scheme, so here it is.

Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette was a gift from my friend and fellow writer Maryse Meijer. The language is totally refreshing and electric. It’s Bessette’s 1953 debut and it was translated from the French by the brilliant Kate Briggs. Definitely worth reading if you find yourself feeling hemmed in by the average rhythms and textures and sentences we most commonly find in novels. And maybe this isn’t the most flattering word for a book, but I think it’s had a medicinal effect on my writing. It got me out of a confusion or a slump.

The Loves of my Life is Edmund White’s last (as in final) book. It was published just a few months before White’s death in 2025, and I’d been meaning to get a copy. As the cover says, it’s a “sex memoir” and though I’m not yet done with it, I know it’s going to be delightfully frank to the very end. Sometimes a person might say “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, I’m just going to write whatever I want,” but really no one gives less of a shit what other people think than a gay man in his 80s. It’s raunchy, tender, a little bizarre in moments. ¡Viva Edmund!

And Dog Days by Emily LaBarge is out now in the US and it’s our Irregular Book Club pick for August. (August 9th most likely.) There’s tons to discuss here. LaBarge is doing something really interesting with the essay form (as the book feels more like an essay to me, but technically I guess it’s a memoir.) It’s out now with Transit Books, a small press I just totally adore. In the UK it came out last year with Peninsula Press.

Recently in an interview with a Spanish journalist (para El libro moebius, Alfaguara) I found myself talking about the people who are “Dead To Me.” By this I mean if I saw any of these people in the street, I would walk the other way and if they tried to speak to me I would pretend I didn’t hear them. In the interview I was thinking—oh shit, how did we get here? Shut up, Catherine. Stop talking. I’ve never had anything like media training and I run my mouth in the stupidest ways during these things.

It’s a short list, the dead-to-me list, but I’ve often wondered if it’s ridiculous to be a person who does such a thing. No, that’s not true— I know it’s ridiculous to be such a person, yet I’m the one in charge of this behavior, and it remains firmly in place.

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Years passed. I became a novelist. While writing a scene set in a real Italian trattoria, I gave all the Italians forks and spoons, so they could eat their spaghetti the correct way. The book was published, no one mentioned the pasta, and only when it reached my Italian translator did the truth come out— what do you mean? What spoon? We do not eat anything like this.

It seemed I’d been defeated, until finally, just last year, I watched Moonstruck, which stars Cher as an Italian-American diva who eats her spaghetti marinara with a spoon as her dutiful aid.

The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained here. Past entries include:

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-Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of the Hermit. One part existential detective novel, one part Thomas Bernhard homage, very funny, very dark, completely unpredictable. It was sort of like I Heart Huckabees about grief, if the lead had also been a recently transitioned man confronting his Midwestern family.

-Listening to the audiobook of something you loved when you first read it 20 years ago, and think of as one of your favorite books, but haven’t revisited in a while. I started doing this a while back, first with The House of Mirth.

-Kevin Sampsell’s Baby in the Night. A baby starts going out in his neighborhood alone at night because he thinks the moon is his absent father. An impulse acquisition after hearding Kevin read at the Frontera Festival in Dallas because the reading was so great. (Isn’t that the best way to find a new book?)

-Join us for the next meeting of The Irregular Bookclub on May 17th! We’re talking about Donald Antrim’s story collection, The Emerald Light in the Air.

Now this week’s rant—

I’ve been thinking about it for years— the insufficiency and impotence of using the accusations “self-indulgent” or “overly personal” in a work of literary criticism —but any time I tried to put it in writing, I felt pre-tired of the argument I’d been making in my head, leveed at no one in particular, and I’d give up before getting too far.

But last month the Irregular Book Club met to discuss Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, so I read the few reviews I could find online about it in preparation for our discussion. Two of the three were hugely disappointing.

I first read Sedgwick’s memoir in 2020, and I found it unusual and valuable in that it goes into great detail about her relationship with her therapist and the contents of her therapy sessions in the immediate aftermath of surviving breast cancer. (She died of cancer a decade later.) The book takes Japanese form of haibun— a kind of travelogue interspersed with haiku— so, at times the prose breaks into verse, then back to prose. I see it as an attempt to articulate the journey into the mercurial, private, transformative space of therapy for all those years.

While there are many books about therapy and psychoanalysis from the professional’s point of view, there are very few books (or even archives) out there that detail the experience from the patient’s point of view. (I’ve been looking for more— if you know of any, let me know.)

And I don’t know why I was surprised, but two of the published reviews I came across were critical of the book for, it seems, making the critic uncomfortable with its disclosures. (Though there is this one incredible essay about the use of failure and error in the book.) The Publisher’s Weekly review just came right out and said it: “Sedgwick's reflections can come across as tediously self-indulgent.” Another, longer review in the Fall 1999 issue of Rain Taxi seemed extremely confused and confounded by the book, and both wanted Sedgwick to tell less and tell more—

The result of so many disclosures is not exactly a tone of intimacy, nor is it altogether off-putting: if anything, the reader feels perplexed by the author's motivation—or is it compulsion?—to put affairs of so confidential a nature on such public display. The disclosures might be better understood if they served to elucidate Sedgwick's academic writing on sexuality, yet they have no discernible bearing on the politics of queer identity or the oppression of homosexuals. This absence of any meaningful connection between Sedgwick's work on gay studies and her own sexuality is never really examined in the book, and it only makes her erotic revelations all the more puzzling.

First of all— a writer’s motivation is totally beside the point when it comes to a critic’s work. You’re not reviewing the writer; you’re just reviewing the text.1 Second— a memoir, a book formed of the author’s memories and personal revelations, is indeed a confession. It is full of disclosure. It is full of personal details. Now, if someone cornered you at a party and started telling you personal details such as these, I’d call that perplexing, over-sharing, trauma dumping, etc. The context is not appropriate for confession. But the space of a memoir is always appropriate; I don’t think its possible for an author to tell too much in that space— or rather, the only person who decides what is too much is the author. As readers, our job is to make our own sense of it or else give up.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing to critique in a memoir in general, or in this memoir in particular. The language sometimes gets soupy and unclear. It’s a bit repetitive at times. Occasionally, I felt a little claustrophobic while reading. It’s possible that these bits of discomfort could have been avoided if Sedgwick had found an alternate path to take through the story.

But the accusation that a memoir (or even a novel) is self-indulgent— what is that really about? The self is always the subject (at least in part) of a memoir. The subtext to these kinds of accusations is kind of Who Cares? Who cares that she has these memories or feelings or desires? Well, I do. I care. I care how other people understand their lives and make sense of them and narrativize them. That’s why I like reading essays and memoir. Not because I think this memoirist’s life is uniquely more important than someone else’s, but because no one’s life is more important than anyone else’s.

There’s a moral judgment at play here, too. The writer who has indulged herself in public has made an ethical failing. She has told us something she wasn’t supposed to tell us. She had misjudged her own significance in this world.

It feels related to this idea I posted over a year ago that for some reason I still occasionally get notifications about—

Ultimately, I think when a critic accuses a memoir of being self-indulgent or over-sharing or too personal, I think what we’re seeing is the critic’s shame or discomfort over the level of disclosure on display.

It’s been almost a year since I put out The Möbius Book, which is at least half a somewhat straightforward memoir. (You can pre-order the paperback if you were waiting on it.) Since it was my first nonfiction book after 10 years of novels and stories, I thought a lot about what it would mean to share specifically personal details from my life and therefore from the lives of other people I’ve known.

My father was the only person I spoke to who was upset about what I wrote, not because it wasn’t true, but because it was true, and also because there was one story I told briefly, but not in full.

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I’ve been trying to write this post about how and when and why to ask for feedback on a writing project, but a few things have gotten in the way, mostly the manuscript I’m still chipping away at, and the fact that my habits around getting feedback on my writing have changed a lot over the years. I’ve been trying to remember what I used to do when I was a younger writer, and why I do things differently now.

(For some reason, sharing writing projects with friends reminds me of the Victorian practice of using leeches for various ailments, hence the above image.)

Feedback from Friends

With the first novel I published, Nobody Is Ever Missing, I had to do an email autopsy to discover that, yes, I did give a draft of that novel to at least three writer friends who all wrote both poetry and prose. I’ve never written poetry with any seriousness, but I feel like poets and visual artists tend to give the most useful and yet totally unexpected advice. They have a way of finding undertones in a text that the rest of us mere mortals can’t quite name or see.

I must have talked to my friends about the draft in person, though, because I don’t have any of their notes in my emails. I remember them all being super supportive, as friends usually are. The main thing I think I was asking them was, Is this a thing? And the general response they gave me was probably, Yeah, could be! Maybe it wasn’t super helpful on a textual level, but I was still trying to echolocate in the project.

When I first began writing what became that novel, however, I thought I was writing short fiction, so I published at least a few pieces of it online back when there were all those lo-fi, tiny, & wonderfully alive lit magazines all over the internet. (RIP Elimae!) So that was a form of feedback— or rather, it opened me up for feedback from people I didn’t know. We used to just email strangers on the internet because we’d read their tiny story on a tiny blog and loved it— do people still do that? I don’t know where the young-young writers are publishing fiction online anymore, but I can’t underscore enough how the 2007-2011ish blog, small press, and online lit mag world pushed my writing in the most lasting and important ways.

Workshop Feedback

I wrote that first novel in the years after I’d finished an MFA in creative nonfiction. Doing an MFA, at least for me, was a funhouse mirror of feedback, so much feedback, and so much conflicting advice, that I felt in some ways that I had less of an idea of what kind of writer I wanted to be when I left. I think what had actually happened is that my previous certainty about what I wanted to write and why I wanted to write it had fallen away under scrutiny— there was something more honest I had to discover once the degree was done.

But I had chosen to study nonfiction partially out of my early 20s belief that there were lots of very specific things I needed to learn about writing nonfiction while the writing of fiction (which I was doing mostly in secret since I was a kid) seemed to be something I would either get better at doing over time, or eventually stop doing. There was something about the fiction writing process that seemed uniquely private and un-learnable. (I have more complex feelings about writing education now.)

I don’t know if any of that was true, even back then, but it felt true at the time. I don’t know if I learned anything specific about writing a good essay—all my work was very bad at the time—but I’d like to think the lessons landed deeper and maybe I’m still learning them now.1 The whole time I was there I felt like a total idiot who had gotten a scholarship for this program for no good reason at all, but a few months ago I came across the essays I used to apply to the program, and while they’re not at all excellent, they were much more promising and alive than anything I wrote while I was actually in the MFA. Maybe sometimes we have to get worse at writing before we can get better.

Mentor Feedback

The essays I wrote in college got me into graduate school, I think, for two reasons. One was that they displayed a kind of urgency and useful ignorance; I wrote them all in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, when I was twenty, twenty-one, and I didn’t realize I wasn’t an investigative journalist. The other reason was that I had a great editor and teacher, Martin Pousson, who would mark up every single line of every single essay I wrote for a year and a half. He could unpack a 5 page draft for like 2 hours, raising a million new questions and giving me plenty of things to go read and learn from.

A lot of people go to MFAs out of this belief that we need feedback about our writing in order to get better. There is some truth in this—as you don’t want to get trapped in your own self-feedback loop—but there’s also some risk when it comes to showing your work to other people. Martin took giving feedback to a fine art; I don’t know anyone who can read a text the way he can. Lord knows that over 2 years in an MFA, you’ll probably phone it in sometimes, but getting or giving half-assed feedback feels pretty terrible.

And yet! Well-timed feedback from a trusted source can be absolutely invaluable in your writing process.

But when is it a good idea to get feedback on a novel manuscript? What about a story, an essay? When is it maybe a bad idea to ask for advice on your work? And how do you know what kind of advice to seek out?

Who is a good source of feedback on a manuscript? How might early readers change or challenge your process? Is it possible that certain kinds of feedback could totally ruin a manuscript for the writer? Or is the ruinability of a manuscript a sign that the project was doomed anyway?

All of the above will be addressed below, but first,

An admonitory tale—

I used to know this writer who once sent me a manuscript he’d just written. I mistakenly assumed he wanted to know what I thought of it as a work-in-progress. After all, he’d just written it. The ink was barely dry.

Naturally, I had notes! There were parts of the plot that simply did not add up, and areas that felt emotionally vacant. It was a cool concept, a solid first draft, but I thought he would probably want to revise a little.

Turns out he did not want my opinion, unless my opinion was that it was the best thing I had ever read in my life. I soon learned he never wanted anyone’s opinion about anything he’d ever written because in his estimation no one knew how to write his work better than he did.

At the time—almost done writing my second novel—I was still encumbered by the idea that I needed other people to confirm that something I had written was working or not working, accomplishing its goals or falling flat. I did not feel like I could judge my work totally on my own, because there were things I’d written that I thought might be mediocre, but then turned out to have real meaning to readers, and there were things I’d written that I thought were pretty great that turned out to fall apart under the slightest outside scrutiny.

But this dude2 wasn’t asking for my advice about the work— he just wanted me to appreciate the fact that it was already, in his estimation, fantastic, and definitely done. He never, as a rule, asked anyone for advice on his writing.

And the thing is— this is not an entirely incorrect position to take! No one can fix your work for you. No one can tell you what to do with your manuscript. No one knows your end goal better than you do.

But that is not what getting feedback is about.

You don’t seek out a reader’s response on your work because they are an authority, but because you are ALSO not an authority on your work, as much as it may sometimes feel like you are.

OK, but then who is the authority?

By the end of writing a draft of something, you should be pretty clear about some of your intentions for the text. You should have an idea of what its underlying, subtextual topics are. It’s important that you don’t go seeking someone’s feedback on your work before you’re clear about those goals.

The work itself is the authority on itself; not the writer, nor the reader.

But you also have to remember that you are the most contaminated reader of your own work, even though you are the only one who can write it. You know both too much and too little. You might be very proud of something you’ve written that will ultimately be useless to other people, or you might be a bit confused about something you’ve written that will have real utility to other people. There are the intentions you have for the text as its writer, but fiction has a way of creating it’s own agenda, outside your control or awareness, and usually you need another pair of eyes to see those other forces at play.

Feedback is not a quick fix

Feedback is not a perfecting process, but rather an exploratory process of figuring out what your options really are and to erode your own certainty about how things MUST be in this piece of writing. Probably the most meaningful guidance you will ever get in your writing life will take years to actually show up in the process.

When I was a younger writer, it was hard for me to understand or even see my writing at all until someone else had seen it; over time, I have a better eye for seeing my own work for what it is, for getting a manuscript closer to becoming itself before I bring it to other people, but I know I still need my first readers and editors to accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish.

Here’s what I feel like I know about who/when/how/why to seek feedback after about 20 years of getting and giving various kinds of feedback, and producing a not small amount of work that’s been greatly helped (and sometimes totally stymied!) by that feedback—

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April 21 - Harvard University 6pm/ Writers Speak / A conversation with Laura van den Berg
April 23 - New York University 7pm / A reading and disc…

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My friend Kendee had been recommending the Neapolitan Quartet to me for at least a year because she wanted to talk to me about it. I had tried to start My Brilliant Friend, the first book in the series, a few times but it had never felt quite right so I took the recommendation with a grain of salt. But then, the last time I was staying at her house, Kendee sat me down and was like, “Listen, I love you, but if you don’t read the Neapolitan Quartet very soon there will be PROBLEMS.”

Point taken! I started reading it a couple weeks later. There’s nothing like a well-timed and friendly threat to really get me into a 1240 page four book series.

And listen— Kendee was totally right. When I finished reading the first one, I immediately went out and bought the second. When I finished the second at the beach, I started reading the excerpt of the third immediately on my laptop. I’m now done with the third—I had to take a break to catch up on the Proust reading club I’m in—but I will read the fourth the minute I get it in a few weeks.

Just yesterday I realized I’d fallen out of touch with a couple of older friends that I admire and think of as extended family. I’d gotten their Christmas card, delayed by a month because that’s how mail works in Mexico, and kept it on the kitchen counter for a while to remind me to write to them, but I kept forgetting. Then just yesterday I remembered and sent them an email, writing out a summary of the several difficult things that have happened in my family since November (not to mention the wars, both domestic and international, that my home country has been waging) and I was like, wow, no wonder I’ve been reading so much and forgetting to get in touch with anyone.

Dissociating into books has been my number one coping mechanism since the 1990. That kind of reading every spare minute you have reading because you can’t really think of anything other than the characters in the book. Of course, a work like the Neapolitan Quartet is widely known to be a page turner of the highest quality. (I was suspicious of how good it could be, given how out of control popular it has been, but it really nails the magic ratio of internality/weirdness and a gorgeously paced plot.)

But then I was looking at my bookshelf and thinking of stranger books that I personally found intoxicating in that particular way.

So I put together a list of 15 of them for Bookshop.org and they’re offering 15% off (until April 1) this list if you use code BSO15.

Below I attempt to explain what makes these books unputdownable—

Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski

This one is 100% mood. It's life happening in the smoking car of a train barreling through the United States, mostly the south, as seen by one of the most unsung heroes of the personal/impersonal essay that the 20th century produced.

The Door by Magda Szabo (translated by Len Rix)

One of the most thrilling books about one strange woman’s indescribable power over another. A Hungarian classic first published in 1987, and the main character’s name is Magda, same as the writer, and they share a resemblance, so don’t anyone tell me it’s trendy or contemporary for an author to make that move in 2026.

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund)

I’m going to write something about all of Vigdis Hjorth’s books very soon, but this is probably the most intense of a very intense bunch. But if you’re upset by very bleak Norwegian family dynamics, just skip all of Hjorth. If that’s your thing, read everything she’s ever written and maybe start here.

Embers by Sándor Márai (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

Another classic of Hungarian literature, this one much more saturated with revenge and early 20th century vibes. This is on backorder at Bookshop.org but just go ask your local bookshop or library for a copy.

Theater for Beginners by Richard Maxwell

This is one of those mercurial books about creativity that I keep returning to. Ostensibly it’s about making theater, but really it’s about making anything. I think I discovered it because Miranda July recommended it somewhere years ago.

One Sun Only by Camille Bordas

After reading the first novel Camille wrote in English (she’s French, published a few books in French very young, but now lives in the States and writes in English) I’ve been reading her short stories as they’ve appeared, about one per year, in The New Yorker. They are so peculiar and take so many strange moves. This is my most anticipated collection in years.

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré (translated by Holly James)

My friend Zoe just read this book and was texting me that she found it heartless and kind of emotionally terrifying and thus found the book insufferable. I loved it for all the same reasons! She called the author “hipster gay Camus” and she’s not wrong!

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (translated by Natasha Lehrer)

I started a whole book club because I needed to talk about this book, and also I wanted as many people as possible to read it.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Contemporary young folks literature that has a huge debt to this book and not enough of them talk about it, I think. Do the youngsters find it cringe that it was written by a white male Millenial? I do not care. I love this book forever.

My Death by Lisa Tuttle

A precise, short, obsessive book narrated by a women trying to get to the bottom of a mystery about an artist she admires, but also feels haunted by.

The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits

This book invented a whole new kind of memoir. Also it’s really really funny about midlife, family life, writing, everything. It’s also one of those books that, when I was reading it, I would only put down to take 100 notes because it loosened up my thoughts in that way.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt)

Another precise, urgent, short book, this one about a woman and her child moving to an apartment, or rather looking for a new way to live. It’s a very calming, meditative read and yet also really fervent. If you’re confused about what to do with yourself, or you’re in a transitional state, I think you’ll feel the urgency here, though it’s subtle.

Loop by Brenda Lozano (translated by Annie McDermott)

Of all of Lozano’s books, this one remains my favorite, though it’s close. It’s a beautiful, coiling book about young love and young creativity and living with your influences. Marcel Proust is sort of a character. It’s really funny and fun.

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

Read this one last year, two times in a row, to try to get to understand it. In some way it is an attempt for Toews, author of several incredible novels, to describe why she writes, but in order to answer that question she has to tell the story of her sister. It’s absolutely full of sentences you have to sit with, copy into your notebook, come back to. Totally essential, vulnerable, and as always with Toews, really funny.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

I read this on a weekend trip during which I was supposed to be spending time with people I did, at the time, like being around, but in retrospect I realize I liked reading this book a lot more. A great place to start with Kitamura if you somehow haven’t already become a rabid fan.

As promised, the ridiculous story— again starring my personal hero, The Very Scrupulous Copy Editor— about working on edits for a story forthcoming in The New Yorker.

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The partner is the sort of man who never, emotionally, ceased to belong to his high…

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I love copy editors so much.

I’ve never been one of those writers who think the copy editors are all drunk on power and are always trying to mess with their prose. (Literally I’ve heard novelists say this.) I don’t always agree or accept every edit, but I love every suggestion; I love seeing a document through someone else’s eyes that closely. I leave a lot of colon-parenthesis smiley faces in the comments.

When we stopped doing paper copyedits, I first felt really sad reading all the track-changes comments, but now it sometimes feels like I’m passing notes with my friend, or chatting very slowly on AOL Instant Messenger in 1998, and even though the copy editor rarely even has a name within the document, you do start to get a sense of their personality over the course of the hundreds or thousands of edits and comments.

In fact, when I first got on Substack I thought— this is never going to work. I will have to hire a copy editor, and I’ll never be able to afford to both pay myself to write and pay a copy editor to find my mistakes.

Instead—my Substacks just have a lot of typos, and I just live with my shame.

Eventually it’s become clear— for me, Substack posts are not in the same category as my books or essays or stories. Mainly this is because every single book or story or essay I’ve ever written has been edited by someone else, then copy-edited and copy-edited again, then once or twice more just for good measure. Substacks (or mine, at least) are more like emails, rough around the edges.

When I got the copy edits on my first novel in 2013 they were on paper. The manuscript was mailed to my apartment and I responded to the red-inked copy edits with a blue-inked pen. This was the standard practice at FSG at the time, though I think by then a lot of other publishing houses had switched to a track-changes Word doc.1

My friend Rebecca (who was then an academic books editor and not yet the author of Murder Bimbo) lent me her copy of Copy Editing For Dummies so that I could decode the hieroglyphics.

What I learned while responding to those first ever edits is that my ability to spell, punctuate, or correctly use grammar was much weaker than I knew. Sure, the prose had its own logic, its unusual yet intentional syntactical tics, but then there were just lots of things that did not make sense. There were so many basic, humiliating errors in that manuscript that when I eventually met one of the copy editors in person I nearly fell to my knees and kissed her hand. Rachel!! I am horrible with names, but I am pretty sure her name was Rachel. Thank you, Rachel.

In the many years since then, I’ve learned that not only do I still make tons and tons of really stupid grammatical errors, but also that I’m not that great and re-learning the things I apparently learned incorrectly in elementary school or never learned at all.

Maybe I have a touch of the dyslexia, I’ve sometimes thought, and maybe that’s true, but I also feel like giving myself a diagnosis is just an excuse trying to cover up the truth— that I’m impatient and flighty and that even though I love writing and reading, I read over my pages too quickly to catch the mistakes. I must have gotten it from my father, as my mom used to regularly text me when I published something literally anywhere on the internet that had a typo in it. She couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I still get such messages, and honestly, I have always appreciated them. My pro-bono, guerilla copy editor.

But the copyediting stage of a book is also full of fun moments— or it least it can be fun, if you have a really thorough editor on your side, like this note from when I was reviewing The Möbius Book:

This Myth Has Been Confirmed!!!!!

I let out a little squeal of delight when I came to this moment. Oh man oh god oh lord there’s nothing this copy editor can’t do— they’re out there Confirming Myths!!!

All this actually meant was that the copy editor had taken the time to go look up a Greek myth about cicadas that I had referenced. I’ve had copy editors point out all kinds of time inconsistencies, also— this was especially the case with Biography of X— though I’m not sure if that’s really their job or not. Maybe they just can’t help themselves.

More recently, I’ve been reviewing the copy edits on my forthcoming story collection, My Stalkers (January 2027). This copy edit has been a little less involved because all of the stories (except one) have been through multiple edits and published in magazines. Instead, the comments have been veering more philosophical, or pointing out differences in FSG’s house style and the styles of other magazines. (Goodbye New Yorker umlaut.)

Like this— should it have been “Wite-Out” (as the brand name is formatted) or just “white out,” two words from the English language that can be used with clarity in place of the brand name?

Copy editors are always saving me from my own stupidity and for that I am so endlessly thankful. There was one time last year when a really really really stupid spelling mistake here on Substack led to acute yet almost debilitating embarrassment, and then, somehow, the most amazing outcome.

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The first is the idea of AI and Large L…

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The day I took New York Food …

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Hi Catherine

I’m wondering if there are tools/tricks/practices/attitudes that can help a writer who has written version X* of the novel, it’s in decent shape but not good enough. I received feedback that was mixed, both promising and also lacking, from an agent at a writing conference. Then I met with my writing group (very important to me, they have been supportive). They shared feedback, mostly positive and also containing numerous notes about things to consider doing to improve the work. My idea is to just take things one by one -- not everything but the points that resonate with me -- and work and work to improve the story. To do so with the knowledge that it won’t be perfect but maybe just maybe there will be others who will enjoy reading it later.

So I’m wondering if as a someone I admire who has written several books and is committed to a creative life, you have any words to share; maybe there are others in the community you’re building who face a similar challenge.

thanks

Michael

* X= 10 but really I’ve lost count and it doesn’t matter. I want to create something that makes sense, that makes people feel something, sad, funny, other stuff too.

Dear Michael & anyone else who is trying to revise something as monstrous as a novel,

First of all— yes, revision is often the most discouraging (as well as confusing, dislocating, and depressing) part of the writing process. You have to forget about almost everything that excited you about the story and see the novel as a machine that is either functioning or not functioning. Self-doubt abounds.

However, you might also discover some sincere joy and satisfaction in revising; when you find a solution that you’ve been seeking for months or years, it’s arguably even more exciting than any of those early days, all that first draft high you might have had.

I happen to love the long term commitment of writing novels. I love that it’s a slow and inefficient process, that it takes years of regular, sometimes repetitive labor. I love that the book that I end up writing differs from what I set out to write, and that the novel accrues layers I wouldn’t have been able to foresee at the start.

That said, a serious revision of a novel is a grappling with the shadow side of the work. Everything you might have had to ignore or fail to notice to get the first draft out will be on the table as you revise and honestly this is sometimes quietly humiliating. Most people stop here.

Whatever belief you might have in your ability to control and manage the process has to be thrown out. Slowness can sometimes feel like stasis, or even madness, so your patience will be critical, and even in your strongest patience yet you may still wonder: Are you revising your novel, or are you going quietly nuts? Is your novel an act of generosity you might give to others, or is it simply not functioning?

I’ve already written about starting a novel, working on a novel, about the various tools you might use when you feel stuck in a novel, and several other aspects of getting through a big process, but it’s interesting to me that you ask about revision this particular month.

I’ve just started a big structural revision of a novel, and as usual I’m often feeling daunted by the task. Though this will be my fifth novel, and my eighth book, I still needed to remind myself how I’ve ever been able to do this. The few writers I’ve known who find this life straightforward and easy are just pretty boring as artists; they tend to be stuck on a single setting and resist change.1

Anyway— here’s a list of strategies that have helped me in the past and I hope will keep helping me now—

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He has little appetite, ignores treats, and does not lick faces …

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First of all— you bet all the girlies are chatting about NAD+? About Tixel who?

Here’s more from the quoted post:

In January alone, I’ve done Botox, Emface, IPL, scheduled Moxi / broadband light, seen my orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. I’ve renewed my health insurance and medspa membership. I’ve drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. My current skincare routine is 6-8 steps, my daily supplement stack is 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and a peptide taken subQ, and I’ve engaged at least 5 high-tech tools from my home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc).

This paragraph reminds me of the time I was living in a rodent infested apartment in New York. More specifically, it recalls the day an exterminator came told us that if you start seeing the rodents in the daytime, that’s when you know you have a huge problem. Rodents are nocturnal creatures, careful, trying to survive. If they’re coming out during the day, that means there are a ton of them and they’re very, very hungry.

The above post indicates a mice-in-daylight situation.

This person’s stated belief that everyone is also undertaking (or planning to undertake or wished they could undertake) this many time and money consuming procedures in order to achieve a certain look (a look she’s conflated with her health by putting botox and cancer screenings in the same category) betrays the fact that she did not only drink the Kool-Aid but she is utterly drunk on the Kool-Aid of the Beauty Industrial Complex. Of course she’s not alone. (As she points out, this industry could reach 130 BILLION DOLLARS by 2030. The subtext seems to be… FOMO? Like, don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to make already rich people 130 billion dollars richer and destroy your own sense and trust of your human body in the process??)

And, listen— I know I do not write a Substack about the Beauty Industrial Complex. (You’re already reading Jessica Defino, right?)

I write about reading and writing books. I write about how to manage your time and organize your work during the long haul of writing a novel. I write about the reading experiences that have changed how I see the world.

But I turned 40 last year and my internet changed. Suddenly I’m surrounded by an avalanche of ads (and ads disguised as “content”) that are all trying to get me to spend my money and time on things like botox, which I utterly reject.

Every woman older than me that I admire has told me that your forties are the decade in which you really start to come into your own creatively, and as a human being, and I whole-heartedly resent the forces that surround me trying to get me to turn away from the things that matter deeply and to give a shit about nasolabial folds or crows feet. I love my goddamn crows feet. They’re the evidence that I have still managed to laugh over the years, despite how fucked up the world is, despite how often it tries to tell me I should be a smooth shiny stupid sexy baby all my life.

The post that aggravated me so much is announcing a new series on a fashion blog about all the procedures that “everyone” is doing. And maybe her readers are, for the most part, just like her and doing all this stuff, that they have thousands of dollars to spend on making TINY, RIDICULOUS adjustments to their faces. Or maybe not! I know a lot women who care a lot about fashion, about dressing themselves in interesting and satisfying ways, and a lot of them also fucking hate the idea of botox and major, surgical intervention meant to hide their age.

A few months ago, I was hanging out with some people who were between their mid-twenties and early thirties. The topic of botox came up and I said I’d never done it. One of them was like, “Oh but you look great!” and I know we are almost all prone to enjoy a comment like this, but either this person was lying (I look 40 because I am 40 and I know that’s not the current idea of what “great” really is) or just maybe they still have access to the part of their perception that is rooted in reality. You can look your age and look great, not because you don’t have wrinkles or irregularities but because you DO have wrinkles and irregularities. You can look great because the human face, even in its state of inevitable decay, is a wonderful thing capable of expressing the most intricate emotions, pain, pleasure, delight, disgust, etc.

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I’ve been using Ulysses for a few months now and I’m slowly migrating most of my work onto the platform because it has great design, absolutely zero annoying AI plugins trying to write for you, and it’s really helped me feel less overwhelmed when a project—like Substack posts, for instance— has many different threads to it.

In 2018, I was given a galley of Walking on the Ceiling, the debut novel by Ayşegül Savaş. Having published my first book a few years earlier, I had this desire to know where I might fit in, or whether I fit in anywhere. I wasn’t necessarily looking for writers who wrote similar books to the two I’d written, or any that hoped to write, but rather I wanted to find the writers in my generation who wrote prose that struck a chord not only with the part of me that reads books (she can be pleased by a wide variety of things) but also by the part of me that writes (who is insane, often ungenerous, taciturn, and unpredictable.)

Walking on the Ceiling was satisfying on both accounts. It was a serious book without being dense, a bright book that wasn’t flimsy or superficial. All of Ayşegül’s work since then has somehow toed this line.

I have moved house about a dozen times since reading that first novel (don’t ask) and though I’ve gotten rid of many books (many good books, even great books, as you simply must when you keep moving) I’ve never left behind any of Ayşegül’s work— not that debut, nor her second novel, White on White, nor her third novel, The Anthropologists— and every time she comes out with a new book I bump it to the top of the stack to read immediately. This was true for The Wilderness, a book length essay from Transit Books, and her first story collection, Long Distance, which was recently named a finalist for The Story Prize.

A year after I read Walking on the Ceiling, I happened to be in Paris and wrote to Ayşegül, asking if she’d meet me for coffee. It was cold, or it must have been, because she showed up in a fur hat and a big smile, and we spoke as if picking up a conversation that we’d left on pause just moments earlier, or a lifetime ago. Of course, meeting other writers or artists you admire can go a lot of ways. We can be real assholes, or just weird, or nervous, or cagey. But it was exciting to find a writer whose work I admired so much with whom I can actually talk about all the things.

We’ve seen each other maybe three or four times in person since then, so she’s one of those writer-friends whom I may have spent more time reading than talking to in person, but when we do get together it is a real treat for me. I always learn something, always feel energized to make things, to read, to look at the world with the kind of restless curiosity she has.

Ayşegül’s background is extremely varied— she was born in Turkey, grew up in Denmark and Turkey, went to college in Vermont, lived for a time in California, is now based in Paris, and she writes in English. Just like all her novels, her story collection, Long Distance is completely marvelous, so I wanted to start our conversation with something about short stories.

Catherine Lacey: I want to ask you a question that has sometimes been asked of me; I used to think it was a stupid, annoying question, but then I realized I just hated it because I had no answer. How do you know when an idea is a story or a novel? Do you know immediately? Do your stories ever grow into novels or novels shrink into stories? Do you ever go a significant amount of writing time without being sure of this one way or the other? (I feel like there must be some kind of criteria for this line between forms, but I’ve been unable to name it in my own process. I am seeking your guidance.)

Ayşegül Savaş: I often know that my material is fit for a story if it is a single event—I will hear an anecdote, remember something from my past, witness a strange situation. I know very quickly that I want to turn it into a story, though that knowledge is harder to explain. It has to do with an unexpected turn; the way that appearances can be deceiving. I then start to build around that situation—setting, and characters—but those often feel secondary, because the situation is what interests me. The other thing about a short story is that because I am starting from this given situation, I very often know how the story is going to end.

This would be difficult for a novel, which for me is much more about discovery. I’m drawn to the novel form because I want to explore a geography, or setting. And I try to find a character or situation that would be appropriate for navigating that geography.

My novel The Anthropologists grew out of a short story called “Future Selves”, but making the story into a novel required getting rid of the situation in the story so that its landscape (houses for sale in a European metropolis) could become easier to explore.

CL: I love this idea that a story is more of a specific situation and a novel is more of a whole space, a world that needs to be untangled. Did you come to novel writing through writing stories? I find it interesting that writers who write both novels and stories tend to have a different register in each form. How has your approach to stories changed over the years?

AS: I did come to novels through stories, but I think that I was very misguided in my route. I thought for a long time that short stories were a kind of exercise on the path to learning how to write a novel. My first attempts at writing a novel were also to try and stitch together my stories with a loose frame narrative. Not only do the two forms have very different structural requirements, but short stories are, in my experience, considerably more difficult to write, perhaps because there is less room for clumsiness.

CL: Waste is an important part of novel writing and it’s really not permitted in a story.

AS: I also thought for a long time that a story’s success depended on its ability to “show not tell” I would spend a lot of energy trying to show characters’ motivations or desires in all sorts of roundabout ways, losing track of the story itself. It wasn’t until I discovered that I could just come out and say something—make explicit statements about characters and situations—that I began to grow as a story writer.

CL: What was your education around writing like? Who or what has been your most profound teacher? Was there a moment when you realized that writing books was simply what you had to do?

AS: There are many answers to these questions, and I suspect that many different routes brought me here, which is perhaps a sign that it was inevitable in some ways. My greatest education in writing was that, like many authors, I was an introverted kid who read a lot of books. The fact that I might someday write was a vague knowledge I had of myself, though for many years I did not act on it. I didn’t take literature or writing classes at university, and I even thought that those who did were cheating, for some reason. But I can map out the moments in my life when I was very lost or lonely, which also happened to be the periods when I would write. Two years after university, I applied to an MFA program, because I hadn’t succeeded in finding a proper job and I thought it would be the easiest way to extend my U.S visa and be close to my boyfriend. It seemed, once again, a bit like cheating that I could write stories for a serious purpose, without having to pass a math test or study critical theory. I often say that I became a writer because I wasn’t good at anything else, though I also wonder whether I was resisting settling into another sort of career, of committing to another life.

CL: Very little happens in your novels, but your most recent one, The Anthropologists might have the least plot of all, and yet it was a break-out book of 2024, hugely beloved. I remember seeing a critic post something about it online like— how does she make an apartment search so exciting? It was a real vindicating pleasure for me to see all these people discovering your work. While it was on submission, an editor (whom you did not end up working with) suggested the most insane changes in order to make something big and dramatic happen. (I think she even wanted the couple to break up?) Did you have a clear approach from the start about the structure? Did that editor’s comments penetrate at all or did they totally bounce off you?

AS: I always feel a low hum of worry regarding my plotlessness, and comments that call it out tend to embarrass me at first, as if they have called out a lack of craft. I feel a similar judgment when people point out the autobiographical elements in a novel, as if they are remarking on the lack of imagination. But I’ve also learned that faking plot is much worse than not writing it in the first place. Editors who want to force plot onto books whose structure and texture won’t allow it, should know that the outcome will be disappointing for everyone. Neither plot-driven nor plotless readers will be satisfied. My current inclination, when asked for more story, is actually to remove any false promises.

I am also increasingly puzzled by the notion of nothing happening in a book. I suppose what is meant is that nothing extraordinary happens, nothing that makes us gasp, nothing we have not experienced in our own lives—and these are one reason to read books. I love a wild story. Though many things do actually happen in plotless books—just as many things happen in an ordinary day, and we read those books for a different sort of satisfaction.

The structure for The Anthropologists came about bit by bit. First, as I mentioned, I had to strip away the situation from the short story. I had started writing it in the early pandemic, I knew that I wanted to write about the marvel of an ordinary day, which seemed a very exotic thing to me, at the time, and I thought that the episodic format, with very small sections, would be a good way to tell the reader that the book would be about small things. And I knew that the novel would be about a couple who loved one another, simply and undramatically. I had to remind myself of this instinct whenever I began to worry that I should add some drama—it became clear to me that this ordinariness would become a background with the addition of great conflict, whereas I wanted it to be the material itself.

CL: For the record I don’t think a low plot novel exhibits a lack of craft at all. It’s very difficult to write about the everyday in this way. In both White on White and Walking on the Ceiling your narrators have important friendships or conversations with people a good deal their senior. A friend of mine recently declared he didn’t want advice about anything life-related from anyone younger than 60, which resonated. As we’re entering our forties now, what lessons have you taken from your relationships and mentorships with people in the generations ahead of us?

AS: I’ve always had friends who were older than me, not because of that fact, I don’t think, but their qualities as people. (Perhaps because I had a very close relationship with my grandfather and knew from a young age that older people were not just there to impose authority then disappear to their own worlds!) I can’t say that I’ve learned lessons from them—not more than the lessons of any other friendship—though there is a sort of relief to not being stuck in your own perspective, to seeing that life is so much vaster than our generation’s immediate concerns and worries.

I also enjoy the different registers of social decorum that we practice with different generations. It may stop us from getting too comfortable in our slouchiness, in our slang, and our sarcasm!

On the other hand, as we are now getting older, having close relationships with younger generations—not as mentors but friends—is essential for not getting stuck in our ideas and attitudes.

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CL: Your sentences are so vivid, arresting, and yet so subtle. So far, at least, I see you working almost like a miniaturist, with a careful, yet still playful sense of what a sentence can or should do. I wonder if you have a philosophy of the sentence, or any kind of rubric for your syntax. Is there any kind of visualization or sonic guide for what a sentence should be?

AS: I do often tune into the sound of sentences while editing. I don’t think this purely an aesthetic process—paying attention to the harmony, idiosyncrasy, and the blank spaces of a book can dig into mysteries in the text we did not know existed. Poets, of course, essentially work from this knowledge—”tell the truth but tell it slant”. There is an innate intelligence to the writing process, to what we are able to extract, which we can’t articulate in our daily lives, and the most direct way to access that intelligence is to pay attention to individual sentences.

I’ve also noticed that my sentences are becoming simpler compared to my earlier writing which was more lyrical, and more overtly melancholy. I’m not actually sure why this is happening, but I feel as if I am trying to strip down experience in some way.

CL: You have a child now, and you’ve mentioned to me that having a child makes you “smug,” sort of in the way that being in a happy, committed relationship makes a person “smug,” and how this smugness is the enemy of writing fiction. And yet— having a child is a transformative, challenging enterprise that expands your life (perhaps in both pleasant and unpleasant ways). I don’t know anything first hand about the smugness of parenthood, but I do know something of the smugness of being in a happy relationship, and about the smugness of being an aunt to some really brilliant, interesting kids. How do you keep your smugness in check?

AS: The smugness of parenthood (“look how beautiful my child is, look how intelligent!”) doesn’t actually translate to the writing life, in my experience. Trying to write with a young child, having suddenly lost a great deal of freedom, spontaneity, and time to daydream, is actually a lesson in humility. Whereas the smugness of a happy relationship—one that allows you to focus on your passions, gives you confidence to experiment and to express yourself, provides companionship and support—is both a source of energy but also perhaps too great a comfort. You and I also talked about becoming too comfortable in life as a hindrance to good writing, a way of being cut off from the rest of society and growing deaf to its concerns. I guess one has to stay alive, alert, sensitive; to not settle into the orbit of one’s couple but to use its binding energy to include others.

CL: Can you tell us a little about how your nonfiction book, The Wilderness, came to be? I understand it was an assignment, that Transit Books came to you asking if you’d like to contribute to their incredible Undelivered Lectures series. What was your idea and how did it change as you worked?

AS: That book was actually one of my first lessons in parental humility! Adam Levy and Ashley Nelson Levy—the amazing founders of Transit—asked me to contribute to their series when I was weeks away from giving birth. I was still in that dreamy, self-focused state of pregnancy, and I proposed writing about the Anatolian myth of the Scarlet Woman, an invisible being said to visit the postpartum mother in the first forty days after birth. I also suggested tying this topic to a larger lecture about invisibility—maybe I could go into things like electricity, or even gravity? It seemed as if the postpartum period was somehow not grand enough, or not very intellectual. Adam wrote back suggesting that I could, also, think about the invisibility of the postpartum mother. At the time, his suggestion seemed a little random, because I didn’t think I would be invisible at all—I was still this glowing pregnant woman going for long swims and making broths and accepting seats on the metro!

Further hubris: I proposed writing the lecture in the months following the birth, having taken plenty of notes in my first forty days. (Adam and Ashley, parents of two young children, politely pointed out that this might be a little ambitious.)

I knew, days into having a baby, that I had no interest in the abstract ideas I’d proposed; that it would be difficult for me to write down a single sentence per day; and that the experience was untranslatable. I did not want to deliver a simple diary of my postpartum days, having committed to a “lecture” (though the dailiness of that time was taking on mythical proportions, and I could now see that the Scarlet Woman was not a myth at all, but a visitor in our household!) Still, I couldn’t come up with a framework for talking about what had happened that felt at once true and capacious enough to hold the many contradictions I was living. My friend, the poet Meg Fernandes, pointed me to Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things, which proposes “wildness” as a way of reimagining the queer body, free of categories it has previously been tied to. His book gave me the idea of wilderness through which I could try and navigate this time, while anchoring it in the forty days we spent inside our small apartment. Another surprise for me was how much the postpartum experience has to do with one’s own mother, of being mothered—again, it was a lesson in humility, in understanding our need for others—and this narrative (of my relationship to my mother and of my mother’s own postpartum period) became a key aspect of the book.

Thank you very much to Ulysses for sponsoring this interview and making it free to all.

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Gabi gave me a second reason (after the depleted ability to orgasm1) to never get Botox: it weakens your ability to be an emotionally engaged reader.23

Then I discovered a third reason—

During the twenty-first century, women and openly queer people have created more art, film, activism, books, films, and expression of all kinds than at any other time in human history. Not only that, but these works have been widely celebrated, given awards, earned real money, and changed the culture.4

Is it any coincidence that this has also been the era in which we’ve devised a substance meant to hinder one’s ability to express emotions with any real personality or the hint of a human flaw? And who is buying this substance? The women, the queers.

Put simply— Expressive feminine faces have been deemed culturally undesirable at a time of maximum female expression.

The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained over here.