July 2024

July now, and I decide to return to the work in progress I began years ago. Another memoir, along the lines of Wah! (Things I never told my mother), which was published a few months before the publisher went into liquidation. On good days, I blame Wah’s low sales on this. After all, I tell myself, it was shortlisted for the Highland Book Prize along with Ali Smith (!!!) and Douglas Stuart (!!!!). Other days I begin to think it’s the book’s fault and I should stop feeling aggrieved.

I decide to not let the current status quo of being shunned by the publishing world affect me. I will not! Anyway it is just a blip and I will look back on this year as my literary horribilis annus.  I begin work on a short story inspired by a descent in a gondola down Mount Jacinto.  The gondola had spent the previous five hours dangling half way down the mountain while the terrified passengers did…I had to make it up…were they praying? Finding ingenious ways to urinate modestly?  Texting their last wills and testimonies to their lawyers? Confessing affairs or other dishonesties to their loved ones?  The gondola was fixed now, apparently, and we were heading down the mountain. I was with my daughter who for the last decade had lived 6,000 miles from me and who I missed with a ragged chronic ache.  I watched her, while she watched her true love – the boyfriend who wore his covid mask below his mouth and perpetually smiled.  This kind of irritated me, but at the same time he made me feel calm and happy. (He would be dead in a month, but no one knew that of course.) Half way down the mountain, I was sure we were all about to plummet to our deaths. I was angry with myself for being dumb enough to get on the poorly repaired gondola. Suddenly the conductor played Sweet Caroline full blast, and my daughter’s boyfriend pulled her into an old fashioned dance. Everyone began dancing, or at least singing. Even if you hated that song, it was almost impossible not to sing along. It made me feel like crying in a good way. Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good.

Meanwhile every time I opened my emails, I expected to see a message from a publisher with the good news.  We are very pleased to…your impressive work. One day, a message with these exact words arrived and I had three minutes of euphoria – long enough to begin drafting how I would announce the good news – ever so casually, as if this outcome had always been inevitable. Or how I would turn all the rejections into a funny anecdote which I would tell from the stage after accepting the Booker Prize. How talented rejected writers everywhere would take heart from my story. Then I read the contract. The publisher gave me three contractual options, and all of them involved me paying them. Oh, the chagrin!  And then, the relief that I hadn’t told anyone. And then the shame, because outwardly I think self-publishing is fine, but the truth is I am a snob.  I feel it is fine for others, but below  me. Oh, the many layers of self-loathing, and summer has never been my favourite season anyway. Is anything worse than a blue sky when one is blue inside?