Day 3 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you want to shift your life.

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Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you want your life to change, to shift, somehow, in some subtle or particular manner. Maybe you want to transform your practices, your habits. If I can just make myself try something different, you might be thinking. Maybe you want to invent something brand new or special out of your words, because in that action you believe you will be building a new part of yourself. Or maybe you simply just want to look at yourself from a different angle. To see what you can see. To get to the next place in life. One thousand words a day can help with this, be the first step in this process. But you, of course, will be leading the way. Because you can do this, you can write these 1000 words. Starting now.

Today’s contributing writer is Torrey Peters, author of the highly celebrated, internationally bestselling novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times. Elif Batuman called it, “A noteworthy advance in the history of the novel!” Here is a nice, long interview with her on NPR.

Her latest book is the national bestseller Stag Dance, which Miranda July called “Hot, heartbreaking, and thrillingly victorious.” In a review in The New York Times, critic Hugh Ryan said, “A great Torrey Peters story feels like punching yourself in the face, laughing at the bleeding bitch in the mirror and then shamefacedly realizing you’re aroused by the blood on your lips.” I find Torrey a vivacious, hilarious, and fearless writer and am thrilled to have her with us today.

Torrey has asked that her donation go to Glits Inc. She writes to us about living with being insulted:

“The most useful thing I ever heard about the writing life—which is different than writing itself—was a story about Philip Roth, which may or may not be apocryphal. After all, the original source is the guy himself, one of the more self-mythologizing of the so-called mid-century phallic narcissists.

Here’s the basic anecdote: When Roth was courting the actress Claire Bloom, who would eventually become his second wife, she came to visit him. Yet, he ignored her in the daytimes while he wrote a novel. Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey, tells it from there:

She tried reading, planning elaborate meals, and so on, but she had no pressing work of her own and mostly she waited for Roth to emerge in the afternoon so they could take a walk together and begin the pleasant ritual of wine and dinner and reading beside the fire. For the most part they had an easy-seeming rapport, though even then Roth’s occasionally abrasive shtick was apt to rub the genteel actress the wrong way. ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted,’ she murmured at one point, and Roth burst out laughing. ‘But of course you did,’ he said. ‘We all did. That’s what I want carved on my gravestone. Philip Roth. He came here to be insulted.’[1]

A couple years ago, I was on a book tour at a festival in Denmark, signing books for my first book, Detransition, Baby, which (for the sake of simplicity) tells the story of a couple of trans women in Brooklyn. A middle-aged woman, approached me, and in a very heartfelt and sincere way, said to me: ‘You know, I used to find trans women to be very—’ she waved her hand, looking for the word English. ‘Sinister? Well—I did not like them. But now I read your book, and I really feel good about them.’ She got a little teary-eyed when she said it. And I, like a coward, mirrored her teary-eyed emotions and said, ‘Oh, thank you. I’m so glad.’

I’m convinced that signing lines create a unique psychic space for an author. It’s sort of like being a rapid-fire talk-show host. In the space of about one minute, you welcome a guest to your desk, you ask a few questions, emote as sincerely as you can, perhaps tell a joke, and then usher them away. I don’t know any authors who don’t immediately disassociate at the act of signing more than three books at a time.

An hour after I finished that signing line, my dissociation lessened, and suddenly I was furious. I was furious with that woman who felt comfortable telling me that she thought trans women were sinister—that I was sinister. And I was furious with her clear expectation that I would congratulate her on a change of heart. But even more than furious with her—I was furious with myself for doing exactly as she expected. I was mad about it for a few days. And then, suddenly, I recalled that Philip Roth tombstone line: Torrey Peters: She came here to be insulted . All my anger vanished. I got what I had come for.

That European tour was a parade of such indignities. For instance, I somehow ended up on Finnish television, where the presenter began the interview by asking me: ‘You are a trans woman, you write about trans women…now, why should we care?’ It was a question that shocked my American pieties, that knocked me into near silence—but which I now find very fair. After all, I had flown across the ocean, and had sat myself in front of a camera—and for what? To be insulted of course. I had just forgotten. And if you, a writer, have come to be insulted, then it seems fair that you should have to make a case for why anyone should bother to show you even the slightest bit of disdain.

I’m friends with many trans women writers, quite a few of whom, when they publish a book for the first time, are shocked by the apparently undeserved vitriol they receive. The affront that people take at not just their existence—which is bad enough, let’s admit—but the audacity they have to speak! I have really only one thing to say: ‘Here you are: you published a book; you came here to be insulted.’ Some really hate that. But others get it. You go around and you collect your insults. You put them in a box and cherish them.

You don’t have to be famous or even published to collect your insults. Ever been to a writing workshop? Yeah, well, you went to be insulted. Ever emailed your friend a draft of a poem? Sorry, you hit send to be insulted.

The more you do it, the more you realize there’s little difference between an insult and a compliment. Compliments reveal themselves as insults and vice versa. The prizes I’ve been nominated for have been the most insulting experiences of my life, but meanwhile terribly insulting reviews have been the result of deep, thoughtful, and time-intensive dedication to reading my work.

Now perhaps you think all these insults mean that eventually you’ll get a thick skin—that the insults will bounce off of your rhino hide? No. Again to a Philip Roth anecdote (that I only remember vaguely—all errors are mine. Perhaps the story was from This American Life? Whatever—all the best writing advice is apocrypha). As I recall it, Roth was visiting with, Shalom Auslander, a younger writer often posited as an inheritor to Roth's pre-occupations. At some point in the conversation, Auslander asked Roth whether getting criticism and bad reviews ever got easier. In reply, Philip Roth told him, that no, with each bad review, with each insult, your skin gets thinner and thinner—so that by the time you’ve had a long career, you can hold up your skin to the light to see through it like paper. That’s what it means to stay sensitive to the world. That is the writing life.

It's what you came for, you stupid, stupid sucker. Let this be the first insult of many!”

Good luck out there today.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.

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[1] This biography, which took on Roth’s history of misogyny, spawned its own whole parallel drama, which you can read about in this New Yorker piece by Alexandra Schwartz, but for this purposes of this letter, I’m just going to quote from it as the most complete source for the Roth anecdote, the punchline of which Roth himself was telling as early as 1987 in an interview in The London Review of Books.