Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. I recently learned it's been 510 days
since my fifth novel "Turtles All The Way Down" was published,
and if I'd written just, like, a paragraph or two each of those 510 days,
I would've at least finished a draft of a sixth novel, but I haven't
and today I want to talk about why.
This came to my attention, by the way, because the paperback edition of "Turtles All the Way Down"
is being published today in the United States.
It's like the hard cover, except less expensive
and also the cover is softer, and there's a Q&A in the back,
and we fixed a couple typos.
But yeah, I haven't written a novel in the last 510 days,
partly because I've been working on other stuff -- Crash Course: European History,
our project with Partners in Health, TV and movie adaptations,
but then again, I've had some kind of day job for most of my writing life.
The truth is a little more complicated.
"Turtles All the Way Down" has been very generously received, both by critics and by readers,
and I want to emphasize how grateful I am to have a large audience
and even to have my book reviewed in places like
The New York Times and The Guardian, let alone positively.
But the process of publishing the book was very difficult for me.
I realize this is the pinnacle of champagne problems,
but I was really overwhelmed with fear about whether people would like it,
and whether it was a good and useful thing to put into the world,
and whether it was the best book it could be, and so on.
Also, and this is the champagniest problem of them all,
when you have a lot of success, it can start to feel like
everyone has to develop an opinion of your work,
even if they aren't particularly familiar with it or particularly interested in it.
Like I haven't seen "50 Shades of Grey," but I still feel like I have to have an opinion about "50 Shades of Grey"
and I kind of do have an opinion?
Although maybe the opinion is wrong-- maybe the movie's amazing.
But when that happens -- when you make a thing that people like,
or, in some cases, dislike so much they define themselves in opposition to it,
it can be pretty destabilizing.
Writing stories has always been, like, a way out of myself--
trying to inhabit other people's consciousnesses can give me a break from having to inhabit my own.
But publishing those stories is about something else:
a complicated mess of wanting people to like me, wanting to be "successful,"
hoping that my stories might be useful or important to the people who read them,
and wanting to pass on some of the gifts that other people's stories have given me.
And so for at least the past, like, decade, writing for me hasn't only -- or even primarily -- been about writing.
It's also about touring and publicity and movie rights,
all of which I am ridiculously lucky to stress about, but which I nonetheless find stressful.
And all of that together means that-- for the moment, anyway,
I'm not really able to write much fiction, but I haven't stopped writing.
Instead, I started writing in a place that felt quieter and safer to me,
where people who liked my work could find it,
but people who didn't care to probably wouldn't.
I started a podcast with a somewhat weird premise--
reviewing facets of the human-centered planet on a 5-star scale
and gave it a hard-to-spell name: "The Anthropocene Reviewed"
and for the last year and a half, I've been writing about
everything from scratch-and-sniff stickers and the Taco Bell breakfast menu
to the practice of Googling strangers.
And it has been so fun and so fulfilling to explore a new kind of writing
and to seek out places where my personal experiences connect to universal ones,
like I was way too into scratch-and-sniff stickers when I was a kid--
an early symptom of my long-term fascination with virtualized experience --
but I didn't understand the strange and beautiful chemistry of those stickers
until I started writing about them.
The pleasures of unexpected discovery turn out to be similar, whether you're writing fiction or non-fiction.
I do intend to publish more novels-- many more, hopefully,
but in the meantime, I'm very grateful that the ones I've written are still finding new readers.
Books are quiet and interior experiences in a very loud world,
and so are my favorite podcasts.
So, regardless of the medium, I just want to say: "Thank you for listening."
Hank, I'll see you on Friday.