Why I Need Your Help with My Novel

it deserves to be evaluated on its own merits

fucking gorgeous cover

Two months from today, my first novel will be published by Coffee House Press. I’m very excited and very proud of the book. I’ve mentioned its origins before. Over the years I’ve been asked by many people to write a mental illness memoir, and in fact was told by someone at a major publishing house that he could get me quite a large advance for one, should I write one. But my story is not worth telling; real mental illness is not cinematic, and my real mental illness has been a monotonous and painfully boring slog, one that has ruined my life but in a slow, grinding way rather than a dramatic way. I could have written a memoir, could have gotten a big advance, and perhaps could even have completed the book without writing anything genuinely dishonest. But the attempt still would have been fundamentally disingenuous and contrary to my basic beliefs about psychiatric disorders. So I set out to use fiction to convey the reality of bipolar disorder, to stay grounded and real but using the allowances of fiction to present a story people would actually want to read. The result is The Mind Reels.

More than anything, I just want you guys to read it. And, yeah, I want it to sell, obviously. I want Coffee House’s faith in me to be rewarded, I want to maintain my opportunity to publish books, I want to be financially successful. Obviously. But I also think that this book has value as a depiction of a badly misunderstood disorder and of severe mental illness in general, which has recently been subject to endless distortion through media and politics. I think it stands as an example of an alternative to the endless romanticization of mental illness and to the refusal of our popular culture to depict such illness in all of its ugly, mundane pain and destruction. And, you know, I think it’s good. It’s a good book. So preorder it, read it when you get your hands on it, review it honestly on Goodreads or Amazon or Substack or wherever else, and have conversations about it. That’s all I’ll ever ask, honest engagement. And to entice you, if you aren’t already enticed! I have posted an excerpt on my personal website. Please give that a read and see if it intrigues you.

And now here's a part that is admittedly self-serving but also important.

Yesterday I was looking around to see if there were any new reactions to the book out there. I have been doing that a lot, which I think is understandable given my excitement. This has always been one of the weird things about media: searching around for responses to your work is seen as somehow low status within the industry, which I find very odd given that I naturally care about my work and its reception. (It’s also odd because media people tend to be exquisitely sensitive to their reputations among their peers; caring about being popular but not about being good is, I’m afraid, the norm.) I’ve always been interested in seeing what people have to say about my writing. I have no idea why that’s seen as worthy of ridicule among people in media and frankly I don’t care. So I popped the title in the BlueSky search bar and, surprise surprise, found media people lying about it.

It started out with my old buddy Jonathan Katz, who’s on the Good White Man list and has been periodically demonstrating how not-mad he is about it ever since. Katz had found something I had written on Substack Notes about how liberals had neutered their own ability to respond to Trump by monstering anyone who tried to engage in internal criticism. Standard stuff, you’ve heard it before, I certainly stand by all of it. I will tell you that I find that behavior pathetic - going onto a forum that someone else doesn’t participate in to hold them up for mockery, borrowing on their preexisting lack of popularity to make yourself more popular. I will never understand such behavior among ostensible adults. You can mock it all you want, but when I have a problem with someone, I let them know directly. I send a lot of emails telling people when I disagree with something they’ve written or said. People in media love to make fun of that practice, but a hit dog will holler - they make fun of it because they’re congenitally passive aggressive and don’t like real, adult conflict. So I told Katz how I felt. But ultimately, who cares about a random Substack note, right. What I do care about is misrepresenting a book that’s not available for readers to evaluate yet.

So this is just flat-out dishonest. There is no facet of the main character’s life that is more clearly established in the beginning of the book than her fundamental ordinariness and her acceptance of it; that is core to everything I am trying to do, narratively and thematically. Here’s a quote:

She was the opposite of an unrealized genius; everyone was modestly satisfied by her performance, and not a single soul ever talked about her greater potential, not even her parents. She floated up to the level of B+ advanced mediocrity she was destined to reach, and no higher. In all things she put her head down and marched unwaveringly into the unexceptional spaces every one had predicted she would occupy.

That’s literally on the third page.

It’s such a weird thing to lie about. I’m quite sure that the person in question was just trying to mimic Katz in borrowing my preexisting lack of popularity among the lib journo set. And she seems young, and this kind of behavior is deeply enculturated in media professional circles, and it’s a profession full of immensely insecure people, so I’m inclined to be forgiving. But, you know, when someone asks a question about a book that you’ve said you’re reading, and you give a flatly wrong answer, and it’s pointed out to you that it’s wrong, the thing to do is to say “Sorry, I was wrong.” Instead she complained that she hasn’t read the book yet. But if that’s true… why are you answering Katz’s question like you know the answer? And, for the record, I of course didn’t write the marketing copy she quoted contemptuously. How do all of these writers not know this stuff?

So then she pulled out a couple of quotes from Pamela Paul and Andrew Sullivan that Coffee House had provided in its marketing materials and acted like they were quotes about the novel. Katz followed suit, as did a bunch of other liberal journos who were eager to get in on the fun. Had they bothered to look at the marketing materials that she linked to, they would have seen that these quotes had nothing to do with the novel; they were quotes from Paul and Sullivan about my writing in general, which Coffee House had pulled as part of marketing, a perfectly ordinary part of the promotion process. So far as I know, neither Paul nor Sullivan has read the novel. To be clear, I would have no problem with sharing their opinions on the novel if they had them to share; I don’t have any ideological purity tests that I require people to pass before they read or praise my work. (And, for the record, Paul’s reign over the Books section of the NYT was best that section has been in my decades of reading the paper.) But the two actual blurbs, as in from people who have read the book, are from novelists, Adelle Waldman and Andrew Martin. Again, it’s right there in black and white. Why lie like this? It’s so bizarre.

It should go without saying that your integrity is most apparent not when it comes to treating people you like well but when it comes to treating people you dislike well, when you insist on being honest about people who are unpopular just as you would insist on being honest about people who are popular. Basic stuff. Basic adult integrity stuff. Basic character stuff.

Katz’s fixation on me is not the issue. He’s clearly been badly stung by my criticisms of him and I suspect that he’s an insecure person in general, hence this periodic effort of his to hang me up for ridicule on BlueSky, a network tailor-made for anxious liberals to theatrically laugh at things they’re scared of. What is the issue is this tendency for people in my industry to say things about me or my work that simply are not true, and to be utterly unreachable when it comes to asking them for basic accountability. What are a bunch of adults doing, going on social media to “own” people and then refusing to admit when they've perpetuated a lie in doing so? I just don’t understand grownups who behave this way. All you have to do is say “you’re right, I was just going with the crowd and said something that wasn’t true, my bad.” That’s all it takes - “my bad.”

I will again ask the rhetorical question I’ve asked many times: do people not have an exit strategy from acting like this? From doing Twitter as they slouch into middle age? From acting like middle school students online? Is speaking in tired memes in an effort to get complete strangers to briefly offer their approval not inherently a behavior you should age out of? What is it gonna take, exactly, for people to leave this plainly childish set of behaviors behind?

People always respond to this sort of thing by saying that I should just ignore it, that you can’t engage, that it makes you look worse if you push back…. And my whole career has demonstrated how misguided that thinking is. Not pushing back just lets people get away with it, and I’m quite sure that the absolute lack of any consistent standards of basic honesty in media culture stems in part from the fact that it’s considered embarrassing to fight back. So I fight back. And, look, this stuff has consequences. Like six weeks back I saw someone online mentioning that they were excited for my book, and then someone else immediately popping up to say that they shouldn’t read it or praise it, because I’m transphobic. As readers here know, I have been arguing in favor of trans rights for my entire adult life, including support for trans people’s right to use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity, the right of trans children and their parents and doctors to make their own decisions regarding gender medicine, and the basic fairness of allowing trans athletes to participate in youth sports. The idea that I have transphobic views is just a lie, advanced by people who want to disqualify me and who don’t care about bending the truth to do so. And I’ve paid a price for holding the views I do, as anyone would in this business.

I don’t want people to lie about my views on trans rights, or abortion, or Palestine, or immigration, or anything else because the truth is important, and also because I don’t want people who don’t know better to be hurt by the lies, and yes, because I don’t want to suffer career consequences based on views I’ve never held. Call me crazy! What I can tell you is that the disaffected, “why do you care dude” attitude that suggests that I should just roll over to this shit instead of pushing back has done nothing for me throughout a nearly twenty-year career of controversy. You don’t push back, and this shit just festers, and people like Katz go on lying in an effort to get internet strangers to like them. That’s how you get the absolutely bizarre massive Twitter meltdown that happened in 2018, where hundreds of people reacted to the supposedly racist content of my first book - which I had not written yet. You constantly roll over and do the too-cool-for-school thing with this stuff, and that’s how you get a culture where dozens of people were lying about my novel yesterday and then mocking me for saying that, actually, lying is bad. No, fuck that. You have to stick up for yourself.

What I can tell you for sure is that, if Katz has written any novels, I won’t be commenting on them because I haven’t read them, and if I were to read them, I would share my honest opinion about how good or bad they are regardless of his supreme lack of affection for me. I've done that before, many times, praise people who see me as their enemy, defend people who dislike me personally, stick up for people who have told lies about me. It would be an insult to my own dignity to not be honest when it came to people who haven’t treated me very well. For example, Nathan Robinson is someone who has tried to unperson me in the industry, including by spreading the transphobia lie, and yet I’ve public praised his socialism primer multiple times in multiple venues. Because I really believe in this shit, you know? I believe in books and ideas and argument and all that stuff.

The reality is that there isn’t much book media left, which means that every little petty bit of bias that my novel encounters will be amplified. It’s bad enough to be a consistent critic of liberalism trying to publish fiction; books media is so dominated by liberal Democrats that it makes Fox News look like a world of great ideological diversity. Will the New York Times cover the book? I don’t know. I recently publicly complained about their bad labor practices with freelancers, which you rarely see; to be clear, freelancers constantly complain about the labor practices of the New York Times, they just don’t do so publicly because they can’t risk losing the opportunity to write there. Well, despite all of my cynicism towards the paper, I trust its various firewalls and the integrity of its people not to influence whether or how they cover the book. But that’s the institution; within the actual big unwieldy ship that is the NYT, it would probably be easy for any given staffer to keep the book off of whatever list. Will New York cover the book, despite the antipathy that exists towards me in that building? I doubt it, but I’m holding out hope, even if they do their usual thing and hand it to Andrea Long Chu and say “savage this,” which consistently produces work that’s celebrated by the liberals she has such explicit disdain for. Would the New Yorker books desk bother to put down their martini glasses long enough to read my novel? Hard to say. But my reputation doesn’t help, and it also shouldn’t matter.

So: once again, it’s up to all of you. I’m gonna be swimming against the tide with this novel in every way imaginable, all of the biases of what’s left of establishment media. That’s why I need the help of readers like you. And, yes, it’s of course self-serving of me to say that. But it’s also true. The book deserves to be read and evaluated and reviewed on its own merits, and I’m afraid that I have little faith in the institutional integrity of this industry, especially given how little there remains that still covers fiction. So I’m counting on all of you to help me make The Mind Reels a success. Read the excerpt, if you’re inclined. Preorder it at the bookseller of your choice if you haven’t, ask your local library to carry it, review it on Goodreads or Amazon when you’ve gotten a chance to read it, discuss it on social media, and spread the word. Even if you hate it.