You Know the Sound of Thunder, Don't You?
plus the last chapter of I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
Programming note: I’ll be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin next weekend. Details here.
When we sold I’m Most Here to Enjoy Myself in October 2022, I was given the option of a spring/summer 2025 pub date, which in every practical way made sense. Books are hard to write. They almost never benefit from rushed schedules. Certainly, I’m still aware that had I taken that extra time Enjoy would likely be a bit tighter, and some ideas more fully fleshed out.
However, one of my non-negotiables, in so far as any author gets them, was a spring/summer 2024 pub date. I knew I could write, and publish, into the world as I understood it before November 2024. I was uncertain about after that. For better or worse, there was a sea change coming, that much was clear.
My editor agreed and we worked the editorial calendar backward, concluding that I would need to turn in a first draft in May 2023. Writing a book in six months is no small feat, especially as I was doing Wilder at the same time. But we did it. It was a good decision and one I’m glad I knew to make.
We are very much in a different world right now and not the one I hoped for, obviously. If you’re reading this, I doubt you need me to tell you so. I don’t know where we’re headed any more than anyone else, just that it’s going to be hard, and we’re going to need to figure out ways to fully exist under oppressive, frightening powers and how to best protect those who are more vulnerable. There is plenty of literature from writers who’ve done just that, who are doing just that, many of whom have done or are doing so in this country. [nb. If you have reading recommendations to this effect please leave them in the comments.]
Nearly all of the coverage of Enjoy focused on the sex, which, even though I currently can’t conceive of being intimate with a man, I get it. But the seed of the book — the reason I felt compelled to write it, and the reason there is an epigraph from The Handmaid’s Tale — sprung from a deep certainty that the life I was attempting to witness on the page, the sort of life that 2021 summer in Paris represented, was rare and precarious and could cease to exist very easily. I wanted to contribute even a small amount of proof that it had. From the beginning, I thought of the book as evidence.
On that quiet Sunday walk across Paris, midway through my trip, body sore from pleasure, I was bracketed by two versions of how most stories for women have almost always gone. To my right were the nuns. The centuries‑old tale of how women survived outside marriage and motherhood. On my phone, the news from Kabul and the familiar and ever‑advancing story of women being driven back into the place men preferred them to be: behind closed doors, where every movement and decision requires permission. All action in service to a central character, which as history tells us, is never the woman.
Then there was me. Wedged between the two. A woman alone. A woman who wasn’t required to ask permission. Who could do as she pleased. I was the anomaly, where history was concerned…this story of women doing what they want is so new no one is quite sure how to tell yet.
Would we get the chance to figure it out? I sometimes wonder if I were an alien who could look at all of human history—past, present, and future—would I see the life I’m living and all the choices I get to make as progress, or a would I view it as a blip, a narrow strip of time, before everything inevitably reverts back to the way it had almost always been?
The people who are about to be in charge, the people the majority of this country has just put in charge, do not want anyone to be telling that story. Or any version of it that centers the experiences of anyone who deviates from the worst of masculinity on steroids such as we saw on display at MSG two weeks ago and is now headed to the White House. They are intent on marching us backwards. The quicker the better.
There are many conclusions to draw from this election, and many good people are hard at work drawing them, but one thing we know for sure is this country despises women — is incapable of thinking of women as full human beings deserving of rights — on a level so bone deep it is breathtaking. They want us to stop talking. Stop moving. Stop demanding. Stop deciding. Stop enjoying ourselves. Cease to exist as characters central in our own stories.
In moments of stress I tend to get extremely practical. In horoscope terms, my normally latent Virgo springs into action. No doubt a therapist would suggest this is the result of a life lived with very little outside support; the bridge collapses and you immediately begin to swim. Whatever the origin, it can make for a calm head in an emergency. Which is what we are in.
My first response on Wednesday was, how will one make money in this new world. It’s hard to be useful when your brain is consumed with managing to pay the rent, for instance. Not long after the 2016 election I was in New Brunswick, Canada for a book festival. I took the stipend cheque they gave me and went to the bank down the street with my Canadian passport and asked if I could open an American dollars account and attach it to the Canadian one I’d had since I was a kid. The scene from the Handmaid’s Tale when they discover all the women’s bank accounts have been closed had stuck with me, and I wanted a place to put my money outside the States. I made a half-hearted joke to the teller about this. A woman standing in line next to me turned and said “I live in Maine and I’m doing the exact same thing.” She was not laughing or even half-heartedly joking. She was deadly serious.
Which is to say, one thing to consider focusing on in these next two months are practicalities. Are your vaccines up-to-date? Do you have a supply of birth control? Do you want to stock up on the abortion pill? (Something all of us might consider as an act of future solidarity.) Do you have copies of all your documents? Is your passport up-to-date? If you need visas, are they in order? There is an entire chapter in Enjoy about my dealing with French bureaucracy and it’s there because as a person who travels a lot, and who has also gone through the immigration system here, I understand viscerally the privilege of being able to move freely, particularly as a woman alone, and how easily that privilege can be revoked.
We have been here before. We know what thunder sounds like. There will be joy and enjoyment in the years to come. There is resilience in joy. There will be organizing. And resisting. And grief. And righteous rage. But for now, all the advice I have to offer, should you be in the market for advice, is to listen to the thunder and get things in order while you can.
I’ve included a lengthier excerpt from the last chapter of I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself below.