Here she is! My strawberry lemonade Sappho, the face of my fifth book. I’ve had a crush on this 1877 painting by Auguste Charles Mengin for years. It was the wallpaper on my computer screen during the year that I describe in The Dry Season, and it was a touchstone while I wrote the book. It hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery, at about seven feet tall. To face her will give you heart palpitations. Well, if you’re me it will.
The book is finished and it publishes on June 3, 2025. You can preorder it anywhere you buy books. If you preorder it from my local bookstore, Prairie Lights, I will personally sign it to you before it ships.
I talked to Elle Magazine about the book and its cover in an exclusive preview. I also published this essay in the New York Times last week, which offers a glimpse into the subject matter of The Dry Season, as does this detailed Q&A. I’m not going to write about that here, though. I want to describe something else: where I am right now.
Here is a funny place to be, in the transitional space between writing a book and publishing it. When I published my first book, I had been waiting for and working toward that moment for most of my life. It was not easy to find a publisher. I planned and paid for my own book tour, said yes to every interview, and read everything that was written about the book. I wanted to give my work the best chance I could to find the right readers, and I knew no one else was betting much on its success.
I believe it did find the right readers, and that was very fortunate. What a thing, to want something my whole life and then get to experience it. My childhood dream came true. However, the prevailing feeling that I remember from that year was…anxiety. Which is not a feeling at all, but the whir of a secondary sensation, one that estranges me from my true emotions. It was an odd kind of disappointment, to realize that publishing a book would not satisfy or change me in the deep and permanent manner that I had hoped for, though I kept that hope a secret even from myself.
What had changed and satisfied me in unprecedented ways was writing the book. Maybe I had to publish it in order to fully realize that. It turned out that building a life around artistic practice—and all that came with it: community, mentorship, teaching, self-reflection, patience, humility—was the experience that defined me, not publishing.
When I reached the liminal valley between writing and publishing my second book, I walked into my therapist’s office and told her I had a goal and needed her help. I wanted to prepare myself mentally for publication. I wanted to remember more than my anxiety, to have realistic expectations, to have some spirit left at the end of the publishing process to start the next thing. I suspected that the best way to achieve all this was to tease apart the task of writing a book from that of publishing it. So, we got to work.
The result of that work did not inure me to the demoralizing aspects of publication, or from my own ego. It did not turn me into the kind of writer who doesn’t read any reviews of her work. But it did change the way I relate to the whole process. It allowed me to stay in my gratitude, to stay connected to myself and my beloveds throughout the experience. It made it more possible for me to enjoy it.
If you’ve read Body Work, or anything I’ve ever written about writing, or probably anything I’ve ever written, you have a sense of what creative practice means to me. It is the primary means by which I grow. It is an aesthetic, psychological, spiritual, intellectual, and cathartic process. It has oracular power. Memoir, in particular, is a kind of truth serum for me. I believe that it has saved my life (literally).
Publishing, on the other hand, is a professional process which, if done well, allows me to keep writing at the center of my life. It is an enormous privilege that I get to keep doing it, for which I am grateful every single day. It is not, however, the work that makes my life meaningful. It does not show me the value of my writing nor determine it.
I’m not here to complain about the incredible privilege of publishing. Only to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between being and being perceived. Between an artistic process and a commercial one. This discernment can mean the difference between a happy life and an unhappy one. Between a sustainable practice of art and an unsustainable one.
Not that publishing doesn’t have its pleasures! The heart work of publishing is getting to connect with the people I hold in mind as I write. When I am at my desk, I don’t think of audience per se, but I do hold a conception, however opaque, of the reader who most needs the thing I am making. I try to do my best work for her. And thanks to publishing, we have met many times: at colleges and bookstores and literary festivals all over this country and others. This job has allowed me to connect with a vast community of people who share my most private thoughts and feelings, the experiences in which I once felt alone.
Like most memoirists, I am a secretive person. The idea that memoirists are oversharers who crave attention is erroneous; we are usually people who have hidden large swathes of ourselves in order to appeal to others, to feel safe. By the time we write our memoirs, those concealed parts have become too heavy to bear. The problem with secrecy is that it isolates us, alienates us from the companionship engendered by a shared truth. It is much easier to control groups of people when you alienate them from each other by encouraging them to feel shame. Hence the political power of articulated experience, what Audre Lorde called “the transformation of silence into language and action,” or what Dian Million coined “felt theory,” or what D.W. Winnicott meant when he wrote “It is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.”
Anyway. I have been so moved and encouraged by the kindred spirits I have found as a result of publishing my writing. It gives me hope when hope is hard to come by.
The Dry Season is deeply personal, like all my previous books, but I’m happy to say that it has more of a sense of humor. In life, I’m quick to laugh and a bit of a clown, but my writing has always been more serious. I needed that space to confront the hard stuff. Over the years, I’ve set down a lot of my secrets and learned to keep fewer. So, there’s more room for levity on the page. I’m really excited to share it with you, and to read from it in June when I go on tour. I hope to see you then.
