Paperback Writer

A Reason to See You Again is out today!

Today is the last day to get the 5-year anniversary annual rate of $45. Thank you for your support.

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Hi friends.

I wanted to send you a quick note about my tenth book, A Reason to See You Again, the paperback edition of which is out today, hopefully in a store near you but at the very least an easy online order from a variety of retailers. It is a book about family and time and communicating (or not) with each other and also being a woman in America over the span of four decades. I hope you enjoy it.

There are many versions of a book you write.

There’s the book you start out writing with all the hope and inspiration and big, messy dreams for what it could be. And then there’s the book you end up writing after pushing yourself to see what you really know and learning who you actually are. Those two books represent all your intellectual and creative power, and no matter what happens with the book after that, you must never forget that.

And then there’s the book you finally publish, after it’s been sold and sized up and marketed and designed both inside and outside its pages. And after that, there’s the book that gets read right away, sometimes reviewed in print or discussed online, and sometimes just chewed on out in the universe, a chorus of opinion defining this book.

All those books are different and the way you might feel about them is different, too. And you kind of just have to be able to create room in yourself to hold all those feelings. Or maybe you will just start writing another one. Maybe you’re a stronger person than myself and you can just be like, “Screw my feelings, I did the work, it’s done.” Maybe you are capable of just moving on.

There is no right or wrong way to feel about these books.

The best version of the book, if you ask me, is the one right when you crack the code of it and you think, “Now this, this is a book.” And then you show that version to your peers or readers who you admire and want to impress and hopefully they get what you were trying to do and they send you a nice little note or an excited text or maybe they grab you by your shoulders the next time they see you and say, “You fucking did it, girl.”

But also I do like the year-later-or-so version—the final version, really—after all the early readers have had their say, and a fresh round of readers shows up and they’re basically consuming it without any voice of anyone else in their head. They’re just curious about you as a writer. Or maybe they always meant to read it, but time got away before now. Or they only ever read paperbacks because they like the feel of that slim paper version in their hand. Or they were broke before but now they have a little change in their pocket. Or maybe they know nothing at all, it’s just a book sitting in a shop, and it looks interesting, and they decided to take a chance on it.

It’s just a book now. It’s not anything but that. A book in a shop waiting to be picked up and loved.

I hope you’ll give it a shot if you haven’t read it yet.

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.