My new book, Little Universes, came out today. On a day in the middle of a global pandemic, when all bookstores and libraries are closed, much of the world is in some form of quarantine, when readers spend more time devouring updates on the CDC website than novels, when getting a package in the mail is a cause for stress and Lysol wipes.
I’ve done one signing: I wore gloves while I signed a cart of books, pushed toward me from a safe distance by a masked bookseller at my local indie. There will be no book launch, no events, no pictures with my cheek squished next to readers holding my novel in their hands. That’s as it should be: My book is pubbing on the week that COVID19 is projected to hit my country the worst thus far.
The woman it’s dedicated to—my best friend—is a nurse whose hospital does not have a mask for her to use during one of the worst pandemics the world has ever known.
My sister, who inspired much of this story about sisters, is a single mom trying to homeschool two kids. My entire publishing team is in New York City, which is expected to be pummeled by the pandemic this very day, trying to keep themselves out of medical tents set up in Central Park while also somehow finding the bandwidth to promote a book to a world that is falling apart.
The only person in my family who will likely be able to read my book is my dad, who’s a truck driver who loves audiobooks. The last picture I got of him was a selfie in a laundromat in which he wore gloves and a mask. We had a discussion about whether or not he was applying enough bleach on the surfaces of the public showers he has to use at truck stops—showers used by people from all over the country crossing multiple state lines—and how he had to cancel a load going to Brooklyn because he’d have to quarantine for two weeks after and he can’t afford to do that. Should he get that small business loan the government is offering? What would he do if he got sick? Where would he even live, since his truck is his home?
Every time I’ve posted something about my book since the pandemic hit the world in earnest, I’ve felt conflicted: Is it okay to take up a few moments of people’s time right now to share about a book I love, an offering I made for the world, something I think will help them during this crisis, but would require them to do nothing but read words on a page for a while?
Is it okay to feel sad about what having this book come out now means for me and my career when the entire world is suffering through a shared crisis? Is it okay to celebrate the long, hard road I’ve walked to write a book that, to me, distills everything I know to be true?
Since most of the people reading this are writers, I will tell you what I tell the writers I work with, and tell myself. I will tell you how I answered the questions above:
Right now, the people on the front lines of this crisis are our health care workers, scientists, and policy experts. Our job as writers is to bear witness to what’s happening, and to be foot soldiers in the fight for morale. Hold space for others through our words, whether they provide escape or solace or clarity.
But when the dust of COVID19 settles, it’s the artists who will be on the front lines of the crisis.
The artists who will be keeping the world afloat through the waves of grief and loss and uncertainty that will threaten to drown us all. When the people of the world open their doors and step back out into the world en masse, a world that will no doubt be significantly different, it is the writers and painters and musicians and makers of things who will be taking their place to do battle with humanity’s greatest enemy: The fact that we and everyone we love is going to die, and to be okay in the face of that. To thrive in the inhospitable environment of mortality.
And that’s where Little Universes comes in.
I think my book and the universe conspired together to have Little Universes come out during a global pandemic.
Just look at the epigraph, a piece of Tracy K. Smith’s devastatingly brilliant poem, The Universe As Primal Scream:
I’m ready
To meet what refuses to let us keep anything
For long.
I always say that our books are our teachers, and Little Universes has been my toughest and most rewarding one thus far.
Like all good teachers, it never stops instructing me. Little Universes is about impermanence, about how nothing is for keeps; but the deeper lesson, the one in its tender beating heart, is how to be okay with loss and uncertainty. Really okay. No matter how much of it you experience. No matter how many times the rug is pulled out from under your feet.
In the book, Hannah and Mae lose their parents to a tsunami—the experience is as horrible as it sounds. But they learn something vital as they rage and grieve and curse and question—a truth I believe only the hardest lessons can teach us:
The same wave that threatens to drown you also has the power to carry you safely to the shore.
I won’t lie: Publishing has been a painful experience for me from my first book to this, my seventh. Many of you read a piece I wrote last year that went viral, about how bewildering the ups and downs have been. Perhaps, with a different sort of book, helmed by the Heather of olden days who did not meditate, having a novel come out in the midst of COVID19 would have been the wave that killed me dead.
But this Heather is on the other side of Little Universes, a book which taught her that her only job on this planet—her only job—is to do right by the miracle.
We are made of the stuff of stars and, if that’s not WOW enough for you, then consider how many atoms and choices and people and loss and gain and luck and tragedy and mystery had to conspire for you—your individual self—to be here on this planet, at this time. Whether you bow to the Buddha, pray to Jesus, or tip your cap to Carl Sagan, the fact of the matter is that in order to do right by all that brought you into being, you’ve got to show up. Right here, right now.
How will you, writer, do right by the miracle?
Little Universes is one humble attempt I’ve made to do right by the miracle. An offering. I like to imagine placing it before my readers as though they are an altar or doorway in Bali, the novel resting on a banana leaf covered with flowers. To me, it has already done its work because I’ve done my work, the hard inner work of not placing my value or the value of the art I made on how well it sells, or how good the reviews are, or whether it stays in print. I made the thing to help us all navigate this thing, life, a little easier. Mission accomplished.
I sort of feel like God on the seventh day: It is good.
You’re hurting right now. I know that not just because that’s the First Noble Truth—suffering is a part of life—but because you’re a human on Earth during the COVID19 pandemic. I wrote this book during a hurting, and a healing. And so I hope it can give you some of the warm assurance it gave me—tough, but tender love.
Tough: This book and, by extension, the books your yourself might one day write, might totally sink. Drown in the waves of “content” in the world. This book might be a tinier blip than I or anyone close to it hoped for.
Tender: That’s okay. Because we did our job—we did right by the miracle by offering our words to the world, to help make it a little less confusing and a little more bearable for those in it.
As Jo, one of the characters in the book says:
“This one life: It’s all we get. It’s not about the likes and the degrees and the bank account. It’s about the love, man. It’s only about the love.”
I finished the first draft of the book during a major depression, unaware that a new medication I was on for migraine had a side effect of suicidal thoughts. It was a great wave and as I clawed for the surface, I, like Hannah, realized something very important:
“Under the wave, I found out what I was made of. Realized nobody is going to save me but me, that there is sometimes a choice—to stay or go—and that you might not know what you’ll choose until the breath has left your lungs and…you suddenly come face-to-face with the voice in your head, the hidden you, that spark of light that has been singing you out of the darkness for as long as you can remember. And she is wise and beautiful—maiden and mother and crone—and she says, she says, You are enough. And now you have a choice: to float or drown, and if you are enough, then drowning isn’t an option.”
You are enough, writer. Drowning isn’t an option.
Little Universes was borne out of a lifetime of spiritual questing, my own relentless search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe. From walking with monks in a Korean rice field to poking about the oldest magick shops in London, from temples in Calcutta to Midnight Mass in Rome, I have searched and searched only to have my book teach me the most important lesson of all in my darkest hour of need:
Everything you are and need is within you. It has been all along.
So what is it like to publish a book during COVID19? It…is. It’s what happening right here and right now. It is a wave and I am riding it to wherever it will take me.
When I began working on this book, I was ready to meet what refuses to let us keep anything for long.
Today? I have met that great What. I greet her / him / they / it with one of Hannah’s poems from the book:
Last Words
1. Say thank you
2. Say I love you
3. Say these words until you die
So reader, and fellow writer: Thank you. I love you.
Tonight there is a super moon. A time for release. For moving on. I think I’ll go sit outside with Hannah and Mae. Together, we’ll look up, as Whitman says, in perfect silence at the stars, many of which shine though long dead.
Gone, but we can still see their light.
Below is the playlist I listened to on repeat as I wrote this book. It is, as Hannah says, sound medicine. From my heart to yours.
