The other side of the pillow

coolness, rejection, and pain

Some news: My second book was rejected by my publisher. If I look at the Kubler-Ross grief map, I’m presently somewhere in the depression part, and maybe rounding the bend.

I really, really, really strongly considered never writing about this or addressing it in any way until it had worked out. Only once I had sold the book somewhere else would I shed any light on this part of the story, because at that point, it would have been transformed by time and events into something triumphant rather than something painful. (All pain becomes triumph eventually.) (Or it can, if you choose to tell it that way.) And that reserve seems like a good idea, because optics and identity are a big piece of publishing. If it’s true that nothing succeeds like success, it would follow that nothing fails like failure.

And to a great degree, this is how writers are: You’re not supposed to let anyone see you breaking a sweat. Overlays of your artfully arranged notebook and flat white ONLY. Pictures of you in brutalist art museums ONLY. Or pictures of your Parisian amuse bouche when your overseas publisher flies you out for a little junket of some kind, ONLY. Repost it when someone with a verified account on Instagram posts a story in which they’re reading your book, ONLY. You don’t hide your rejections so much as pretend they never existed. You don’t take a picture of the desk covered in banana peels. You don’t go to the National Book Awards and say, “Glad you like my outfit, but I’m usually covered in cat hair.” Forensically, anyone can tell that you’re just another human—there is your writing, after all, which presumably shows much evidence of suffering. But that has also been alchemized.

I know I’m addressing social media here as much as (if not more than) the culture of professional writers. Maybe the pre-internet ones didn’t think so much about the construction of a writer self as a parallel fictive project. Although if you’ve listened to the Once Upon a Time at Bennington College podcast, which examines the origin stories of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem, you’d see that this hobby/obsession predated Instagram.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because the subject of coolness is also central to the novel that was rejected, and coolness—or detachment, or blunted emotional affect—is also central to the reason it was rejected. This isn’t totally a surprise; I knew while writing it that this book was a massive departure from my first, and that it might really surprise people. Or be illegible to them, even.

But what about Renata Adler, Ottessa Moshfegh, all of the contemporary literary vaporwave set? How about Joan fucking Didion? Why are some writers celebrated for detachment while others are told it’s a mistake?

There are a lot of nuances at play here, and I’m not trying to make an argument so much as spill out the contents of my backpack: I think that when I wrote this second book, I was pushing back against something I didn’t like about how my first book was often construed as wounded white girlhood. (Gag.) I also think that Kerosene, my second, is a great book, and that I’d rather get a strong negative reaction than a tepid one. I think that there’s an outsized expectation for femme-presenting people to manufacture feeling. I think that, as a bipolar person, there are ways that my affective registers won’t make sense to others if they’re looking for themselves on the page. I think that a lot of the affect in this particular book is actually anger rather than blankness, and that anger can be an oddly invisible emotion (especially coming from femme-presenting people, for whom the sadness paintbrush is the given tool). I think that a lot—a lot—of the writers who are celebrated for their detachment are rich/white/skinny/masculine (circle two). I think it’s highly possible that I’m right about all of these things and there’s a better version of my book that somehow manages to show more of its cards. And probably the writers I consider cool and detached are not necessarily considered cool and detached by other people (including the writers themselves!). And there’s a difference between the aesthetic alchemy of detachment in a piece of writing and the aesthetic alchemy of detachment produced via selectively arranged photographs and massive omissions.

Anyway. Last night, I took a beautiful two-hour-long walk with my friend N and her blind pit bull, Mister. I told her about this problem of coolness, and she said, “Well, don’t you think that we both finally succeeded in our relationships because we stopped trying to date cool?” (A necessary aside: Both of our partners are extremely cool, but they are also sweet, honest, and have a deep capacity to care about the world. Whereas before N and I both did our time chasing cool: compulsive liars, nihilists, and messy … just messy. Sunglasses, cigarettes, and shark eyes.) And she’s right. You don’t marry cool. You can’t. It’s not there.

She also asked me what cool was about in my high school experience. Her coolness map came from inside her family. For me it was high school, where there was a small, but very charismatic, group of cool kids. I knew them through my best friend’s older brother, I explained, but also because a lot of them were in the marching band, as was I, and for that reason we were kind of aligned in opposition to the rest of the school culture. (Weird that the most alternative subculture was the same one that played at every football game and pep rally, but there you go.) Years later, at a party in LA, I would talk to a musician who swears he knew me from that high school scene, but I didn’t remember him, and I didn’t remember being part of it. “Ohhhh,” N said. “So you were one of the cool kids, but you didn’t think so. You know, that seems very like you, actually.”

N also said: “I think on résumés you should also have to list all the things you tried for and didn’t get. And all the times you kept trying.” Which, I have to admit, is a spectacular idea. It says a lot more about a person when you can see how kept showing up and trying. And it says a lot more about how things really happen.

Mister, the blind pit bull, needs little cues whenever there’s a curb or a puddle. He’s got the opposite of shark eyes: they’re luminous, like mother-of-pearl. And so full of feeling, even if he looks at you without looking. He will happily walk past dogs straining against their leashes with zero awareness. Sometimes, he’ll begin to pull you over the edge of a ravine or walk right into a small child. There is zero cool going on with Mister. But this is essential to his magic. And—I’m just going to brag here—Mister loves me. When I roll up, he croons arooo-aroooo-aroooo and smashes his face all over me with hectic kisses. It feels really good to be loved by not-cool, moon eyes, happy man.

Somehow, coolness is the Rubik’s cube I have to solve with regard to this novel, which I’m going to take another pass at before it goes out again. Part of me still really doesn’t want to tell you any of this. The same part that thinks I would rather be cool than be loved, that thinks I’ve somehow been given a different set of rules than other people. So maybe I begin to solve the puzzle this way, by saying what I would love to hide.