XVII. Post-op

; or, Three Months of Trauma Plot + A Tour

First things first: I’m doing a little WEST COAST TOUR in a couple weeks!!!

LA! Monday, 7/21 at Stories Books & Cafe w/ Aiden Arata

Oakland! Tuesday, 7/22 at Womb House Books w/ Elisabeth Nicula

Portland! Thursday, 7/24 at Powell’s w/ Lydia Kiesling

PLEASE COME I LOVE YOU!

It’s my very first time on the West Coast, I’m paying for the trip out of pocket, and I’d really love to do a bigger tour for book #3, so let’s show my publisher and booksellers that I can pack a house :) I’ll be reading from Trauma Plot as well as some new work! And of course I’m so so honored to be in conversation with Aiden, Elisabeth, and Lydia—three writers I admire deeply. Let’s fucking goooooooo, et cetera …

Plus, a BONUS Philly trip next month!

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So where have I been?

Like any stunningly beautiful and ‘whicketly talented’ woman, I assumed I was too resilient and perfect to have my back blown out by the post-publication slump—especially as Trauma Plot wasn’t a debut, so, technically, I’d made it through a release cycle before.¹ I was (of course) dead wrong, and found myself in a deep depressive period after my launch week balloon popped. It’s a strange thing to be attended to like a celebrity for ten days and to wake up on the eleventh having realized you’re the exact same profoundly exhausted bartender you were before the book came out. I did a lot of press and a few (brilliant!) people reviewed it, but I went a bit subterranean after, and have only just started meaningfully clawing my way up from the muck over the last few weeks. Thus: no newsletters, little freelance work², no significant prose projects.

It isn’t writer’s block, a condition countless hacks complain about and that I don’t really believe in³, but (I think) a reconsideration of what my writing life might look like going forward. What will help me make writing books until I’m dead as sustainable as possible? As Charlotte and Harron and I have frequently discussed, we’re working writers, and always will be, whether we’re read or celebrated or in the zeitgeist or not. Writing is a vocation, a dailiness—it’s an irremediable fact of my being in the world. It didn’t begin or end with Trauma Plot, but I’ve felt a need to shut up a moment, to be private, to re-situate myself.

It’s easy to imagine something like a book publication revolutionizing your world. This, you think, will be my moment. Oprah will pick me; Reese will pick me; EmRata will pick me, and I’ll be a bestseller and A24 will adapt the book and my publisher will offer me seven figures for whatever bullshit proposal I give them next! No one is immune to delusional thinking, and of course this trajectory wasn’t impossible—it’s just incredibly rare, and for me it didn’t happen. Anyway, as I’ve said before, fame doesn’t interest me—I find celebrity both frightening and incredibly dull, in any case from the outside looking in—but I guess some needy, desperate part of me truly believed I’d be able to finally quit bartending come March 26th, ha! As I think Trauma Plot reveals, I’m an unbending optimist—even a fantasist on occasion—despite my own tempestuous history, despite the escalating horrors of our geopolitical times.

(On which note: I think I’ve also been struggling to speak in a direct manner with an audience engaging directly with me, because I’m finding the state of things so demoralizing as to be nearly paralytic. When I submitted the manuscript of Trauma Plot, I still had a quite genuine feeling of hope—not because catastrophe wasn’t already everywhere, but because I had a sense there was a little breathing room left to us, that we could alter the path in some way. We’re now almost two years into the genocide, looking down the barrel of a full-blown reboot of the War on Terror, and watching what was barely American democracy before now tip into a significantly more powerful Orban-style autocracy. The BBB’s passage this week is terrifying; the hyper-consolidation of ICE’s budget and power alone should be enough to knock the boots off any of us. I’m worried I’m about to lose my health insurance. I’m nervous about the increasingly well-orchestrated attacks trans people are facing. Many are being snatched off the streets and sent to god knows where, while dozens of Texan children were wiped away in a flood over the weekend. In return, we’re offered the usual thoughts and prayers from the selfsame government leaders ensuring catastrophic climate events—like a river rising 26 feet in 45 minutes—occur with increasing frequency.)

So yes. It’s a challenge to figure out how to live and write as if anything about this moment is usual. I feel frivolous. I feel scared. I feel violently porous—I cry over all of it and everything lately, like each second is the last possible one in which to cherish a thing. My mind is foggy; it has been for months. And yet I still have to get out of bed each morning: walk the dog, do the laundry, honor deadlines, go to a job that’s slowly killing me. I fell in love recently and that’s sustaining, it’s truly wondrous—I feel unimaginably lucky. Love at the end of the world—what else is there? I try to check in on my friends and family oftener. More and more I feel like you just never know.

As for the book—it came out and my day to day was functionally unchanged. Two weeks ago, I was bartending a nightmare shift: election night, a Tuesday, and I was—as usual—solo, when 200 drunk Zohran canvassers stormed in. Believe me, the results were thrilling, summoning the only sense of electoral hope I’ve had in years, but getting through the actual labor of that shift was a real challenge. I don’t believe I’m “above” my job but I do remember thinking: what the fuck am I still doing in this position? How have I accomplished so much in the world I actually want to work in without being able to pivot from an industry I’ve been burned out on for the better part of a decade?

After five or six hours of nonstop chaos, I had the chance to walk outside for a minute and catch my breath. Someone walked up and told me how much they admire my writing work, which lit up the night for me, but then I had to go back in and continue cleaning dirty glasses and being talked down to by people who can’t discern the difference between a human service worker and an iPad they’re shoving their pay app screen at. It’s not that I’m “too good” for bartending, but that the job has become exponentially shittier than it once was. And I never loved it to begin with.

Most days I really do think: it’s the fucking phones, but it isn’t only that. We’re in an era of overwhelming disintegration; the social contract is one crucial part of this. Also the rumors are true⁴: I’m older now, and my body, sadly, has a shelf life. Eleven consecutive hours of physical labor flatten me in a way they didn’t before. I wish I had more patience for the thoughtless behavior, the rudeness, all the tedious stupidity, but it’s gone away. If I’m a bitch, well then I’m a bitch. One thing I decidedly won’t do while we’re all crabs in the same escalatingly boiling water is kiss anyone’s ass for a two dollar tip.

I’ll confess: I have been writing poetry—love poems, and lots of them. After good girl, I thought maybe I wouldn’t work in that mode again; that I could be a lyric memoirist, but otherwise, some fire in me seemed to have been snuffed out. Maybe it’s just that I manage to birth a book of poems every time I fall in love. I’ve got about 50 pages and counting, so it’s entirely possible my next book will be here before I know it. I’m taking them (and the man they concern) on the road with me. I feel nervous but excited about this—I’m deciding, despite all the terror, despite all the uncertainty, not to recoil from the world or my vulnerability. I reject wholeheartedly the defeatism, the doomerist inclination. I will stay soft. I’ll remain permeable—to love, to hope, to my fundamental belief that people can change and adapt and be better than we have been, that the paranoia and hatred undergirding our present isn’t destiny, just a temporary crisis to be overcome.

Hope to see you out there soon—

xoxo

Jamie

1. To be fair, good girl dropped during the first COVID winter, at the height of Omicron, and my Zoom launch basically felt like what I imagine screaming in space would.

2. I did do a short piece on #metoo under Trump 2.0 for The Drift! You can read it here.

3. I do believe in fallow periods! And they’re indispensable—you’ve gotta marinate sometimes!

4. Actually they’re not … forever young, baby!!!!