It's Book Week here this week! I’m excited to say that I’ve sold a novel to Coffeehouse Press, titled The Mind Reels. It’s the story of a young woman going insane, slowly at first and then very fast. I’m really happy with how it turned out and I’m excited for it to get into the hands of readers, which should happen in Q4 2025. It’s gonna be hard to wait for people to get the chance to read it! Really really hard.
Kudos to you for resisting the lure of the "mental illness memoir" route. There are multiple perverse incentives to go that route - not only financial ones, but the clapbacks that sadly come with this genre ("that Freddie - he's so brave!"). It's tough to fault most authors for taking advantage of them. Everyone's gotta make a living, right?
That you took the time to think about it in this depth and make a choice that favors both honesty (and the readers) speaks well of you as both a writer, and a person.
Coming from a place of near-zero knowledge about the publication process, I'm interested in why it takes 18-ish months for a novel to be published. From your post, it sounds like you've finished the writing part, and it's going to take that whole time to edit/print/ship.
Congratulations on the sale, and for branching out into fiction. Being in the middle of a writing workshop myself, it is so hard to get yourself to stretch and grow outside of your comfort zone, and being behind the woodshed, as you say, can be an incredibly frustrating place to be. Will be looking forward to preordering this.
Congratulations! I look forward to reading it, and will resist asking the sort of questions (which mental illness, reason for choice of female protagonist, etc.) that I'll either find in book, or you'll get asked in infinite podcast interviews.
Congratulations! Writing and publishing a novel is MAJOR.
And may I say as a dabbler in writing fiction & nonfiction myself, you genuinely _amaze_ me. You write so prolifically & so well! There's very rarely a sharp or a flat in the words you pour out——and that's why I upped to a paid subscription.: I don't always agree with your opinions, but I am in absolute awe of your ability to articulate them.
I was hoping a little that "why I won't write a mental illness memoir" was going to be followed with "and why I wrote a novel instead". I'm not much of a novel reader, and I'll admit I'm surprised to hear that a novel is what you were writing. The first paragraphs suggest that the novel will do what the memoir couldn't; I'd be interested to hear about that in more detail.
Congrats on the publishing contract! Well done! I’m excited to read your novel and appreciate your explanation of why you didn’t write a memoir. (I as well don’t like to discuss my therapy and circumstances even with my family and friends).
I look forward to reading it. I agree with your decision on the memoir - most of my manic episodes ended like waking up from a 3 day bender with no memory of what happened and a joyous post-episodic experience of finding out what I had done. Even if you could remember and make it interesting, no one should have to relive those events again, even for profit.
It’s interesting that you ran into the same problem writing about mental illness that Tim O’Brien ran into writing about his war- the truth is banal and does not convey the experience
His solution in *The Things They Carried* was to basically make shit up into a nice, audience friendly narrative and then explicitly spell out that he’s lying, that the truth evades description, that the interesting lies are the closest he can get to getting the reader into his own head.
Kudos to you for resisting the lure of the "mental illness memoir" route. There are multiple perverse incentives to go that route - not only financial ones, but the clapbacks that sadly come with this genre ("that Freddie - he's so brave!"). It's tough to fault most authors for taking advantage of them. Everyone's gotta make a living, right?
That you took the time to think about it in this depth and make a choice that favors both honesty (and the readers) speaks well of you as both a writer, and a person.
I'm interested in whether you write better when you're manic.
Coming from a place of near-zero knowledge about the publication process, I'm interested in why it takes 18-ish months for a novel to be published. From your post, it sounds like you've finished the writing part, and it's going to take that whole time to edit/print/ship.
Congratulations on the sale, and for branching out into fiction. Being in the middle of a writing workshop myself, it is so hard to get yourself to stretch and grow outside of your comfort zone, and being behind the woodshed, as you say, can be an incredibly frustrating place to be. Will be looking forward to preordering this.
Congratulations! I look forward to reading it, and will resist asking the sort of questions (which mental illness, reason for choice of female protagonist, etc.) that I'll either find in book, or you'll get asked in infinite podcast interviews.
Yay! Excited to read this Freddie!!!
dude i am so excited for this! i honestly think your fiction/literary nonfiction is your best work and i'm really excited to read it in long form
Congratulations! Writing and publishing a novel is MAJOR.
And may I say as a dabbler in writing fiction & nonfiction myself, you genuinely _amaze_ me. You write so prolifically & so well! There's very rarely a sharp or a flat in the words you pour out——and that's why I upped to a paid subscription.: I don't always agree with your opinions, but I am in absolute awe of your ability to articulate them.
Congrats, man. Will read.
I was hoping a little that "why I won't write a mental illness memoir" was going to be followed with "and why I wrote a novel instead". I'm not much of a novel reader, and I'll admit I'm surprised to hear that a novel is what you were writing. The first paragraphs suggest that the novel will do what the memoir couldn't; I'd be interested to hear about that in more detail.
Ballsy. Even for people who write well, writing fiction well is fucking hard. Good luck.
Congrats on the publishing contract! Well done! I’m excited to read your novel and appreciate your explanation of why you didn’t write a memoir. (I as well don’t like to discuss my therapy and circumstances even with my family and friends).
I look forward to reading it. I agree with your decision on the memoir - most of my manic episodes ended like waking up from a 3 day bender with no memory of what happened and a joyous post-episodic experience of finding out what I had done. Even if you could remember and make it interesting, no one should have to relive those events again, even for profit.
“ If I wrote a mental illness memoir that was true, it wouldn’t be interesting, and if it was interesting, it wouldn’t be true.”
Reminds me a bit of what Tim O’Brien said about how to tell a true war story in The Things They Carried.
It’s interesting that you ran into the same problem writing about mental illness that Tim O’Brien ran into writing about his war- the truth is banal and does not convey the experience
His solution in *The Things They Carried* was to basically make shit up into a nice, audience friendly narrative and then explicitly spell out that he’s lying, that the truth evades description, that the interesting lies are the closest he can get to getting the reader into his own head.
congrats, and i can’t wait to read it.