how it feels to deliver your manuscript

and other lonely triumphs

Last Wednesday, I dropped a bound copy of the book I’ve been writing for three years at an agent’s doorstep. It cost me $136 to rush the job at FedEx. I was annoyed about the price until I held the manuscript in my hands, stunned by its shape and heft. Driving away I felt both triumphant and lonesome.

Over the decade I’ve spent writing, I’ve realized…the finished product isn’t mine. The ideas come to me and I steward them with care and hopefully, increasing skill and some luck timing the market. I’ve learned the hard way not to over-identify with my work but, still…as soon as the book was out of my hands, I felt like I’d left a giant piece of myself behind.

The sudden absence of the MS reminds me of the blown-open days after a baby is born: one, ripe, fulsome thing becomes two things and you are one of them, newly alone. You expected to feel light, but you’re hollow. My immediate postpartum eras have been the proudest, loneliest times of my life.

At Thursday’s camp pickup, my friend Happy pulled up behind me in her electric Ford F150. Happy’s hotter than the mudflap girl and magnanimous, too. She makes everybody smile, goofy and bashful. Me, especially.

“I submitted my book,” I announced, leaning out my car window, tearing up while the kids scrambled into our backseats.

“Oh my God congratulations!”

“I’m sad. I feel so lonesome.”

“Come with me to the fire department. I’m giving blood.”

“Can’t. Swine flu scare.” Parents pulled their kids away. All that French ham in the year 2000 has me forever marked.

Happy offered to meet for coffee. She wore a mini skirt and pointy, chic shoes. I wore bike shorts with butter smeared across the butt—I noticed the stains hours later when I shucked them off to shower and shook my head at the swine flue blurt. Intimate revelations and absent-minded dishevelment are classic postpartum stuff.

Despite my thirst for company, I couldn’t make conversation at the coffee shop. I was emotionally wasted, having just been through the massive, private transformation of bringing something enormous out of myself. I know this slackness well because, towards the end of each pregnancy I’ve wanted desperately for the weighty, anticipatory period to end, but when it does, I don’t rest…I collapse.

Birth of the Pearl from the Kingdom of the Pearl // Edmund Dulac

My psyche’s unsettled. The night after I sent the book, I dreamed of being pregnant with a mollusk, blackish-brown and wet. I held the creature in my palm and watched it wriggle. Then, I tucked it into the film compartment of a Pentax so it could nap. It disturbed me to put my fetus into a closed, plastic bed. “Where should this baby be growing?” I wondered. I knew, obviously, that it was meant to be inside me, though it couldn’t be put back. In another dream, I noticed a white spot on my head. I moved my hair to reveal a circle of calcified brain growing outside my skull. The dark interiors have become exterior, slid into spaces that project the imaginal outward. The world seems too bright. Searing.

It’s a vulnerable time, walking around with my depths revealed. The book is my effort, and it’s my dream. Until now, I could pretend the draft was perfect: no flaws, no quirks. I imagined it could be everything to every reader. Now, other people will have their own relationship to the story and it will have to stand for itself like a kid in the wild.

There’s so much work left to do. I’ll fight for the characters, shape the plot, move the arc towards its highest potential on the page and in the industry. Your relationship with something you’ve birthed doesn’t end at birth, obviously. But I miss the pulse between me and the story and the watery, quiet darkness where my ideas worked their way through me like gifts I was given. I made the book and the book made me, quietly and privately for years and years. Delivering any creation is a cord cutting. And I’m never quite ready to let go.

Yours,

Isabel

PS: Thanks for abiding my irregularity the last few Sundays. I hope to resume my weekly(ish) cadence soon.