Hi, Toast. This week I finally met Brilliant Novelist and Friend of The Toast Celeste Ng! We met and hugged and had a long lunch and talked about everything and she signed my copy of her book and I somehow managed to behave like a nice, regular person and not an overly emotional fangirl. And then I got an ice cream sundae. Truly, I am living all my dreams.
Speaking of dreams: If Misty Copeland Were Your Girlfriend
“Don’t even get me started on reading outside. There is wind.” I LOVE JAYA
I got to talk with Alexander Chee again and it was a delight:
I had to learn how the person I am can best live with the writer I am — the human part of me had needs for companionship, ego satisfaction, the protections of health insurance and dental insurance. Some of the best advice on being a writer I can think of is to take good care of your teeth. (The emergency funds for writers are typically inundated with emergency dental requests.)
For writing — the biggest lesson of the season for me at this point is that readers really are willing, even militating, to follow writers into risky territory. Risky new novels like Sunil Yapa’s The Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of Your Fist, Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You, Idra Novey’s Ways To Disappear, Charlie Jane Anders’ All The Birds In The Sky — these are all in multiple printings. Or look at the recent success of Sarah Manguso or Claudia Rankine or Saeed Jones or Maggie Nelson.
I speak to so many young writers who still have various cynical ideas about how one gets ahead. Really, just do your best work, stand up for yourself, stay close to your excitement. Yes, the asymmetry between effort and reward in writing is the hardest part of it in many ways — the things you work on forever that receive little or no acknowledgement or pay, the things written quickly that pay enormously or that fly around the Internet, viral — but just keep writing.
This is a wonderful essay by Anne Marquette on asexuality and atheism, and what it means to define yourself based on what isn’t there.
Toast Historian in Residence Mo Moulton is winding down her wonderful Downton Abbey column for us, and this week she fielded your historical questions! Ask Mo Anything
PROBABLY MY FAVORITE THING ALL WEEK: How to Tell if You’re in a Flannery O’Connor Story
Oh, yeah. You’ve got time.
As some of you may recall, I’m editing a couple of essay series on adoption for Catapult, and the first series — all pieces by adopted writers — launches next week. I’ve had a lot of fun working on this; it has truly been an honor and a joy. I’m so impressed with everything they do at Catapult, and I urge you to read their site and buy their books and pitch the excellent web team over there if you have any interest in doing so. I’m quite excited about this series, so prepare to be linked!
