No, My Book's Not Done Yet—and That's Okay
The work of the book had always been about learning to listen.
The idea showed up half-formed, a kind of premonition. It descended like high-desert wind. It was January in Santa Fe and I was hungry and cold—conditions I’d set for myself, that I had the privilege to set for myself. The temperature hovered a few clicks over nothing.
After seven years of keeping off the 80 pounds I’d lost, the cold pulled five of them back onto me. Then ten. Something was changing, though I wasn’t quite sure yet what.
Except for the part of me that was.
Since I’d started losing weight—a success story; an antidote high on a shelf I’d reached for as long as I could remember—I’d noticed something was off. The impossible size-four jeans I pulled from the drawer once a week like a litmus test; the visible musculature of my back and arms and abs; the men whose once-unturning heads now reliably swiveled toward me: none of them could quiet my mind’s insistent whisper that something was wrong with my body. It harangued me as I stood in the mirror half-naked, trying to understand what, exactly, I looked like. Wrong wrong wrong wrong you’re wrong.
My eyes focused like heat-seeking missiles on everything wrong could mean: the slight but still-hanging lip of my belly; the inch of my thighs that still rubbed. The image in the mirror shimmered, oscillated; I could not tell what I was seeing. But I could tell it stayed, this wrongness, a deviance inevitably and particularly mine—one that other bodies, regardless of size, shape, or color, were free from. They were clean, blameless, and beautiful. They were the way they were meant to be.
I could not say how I was meant to be, except not as I had been—and apparently not as I had become, either. I’d first purchased a pair of too-small jeans to “motivate” myself at eight years old (a size eight, then, to match my age). I’d been counting calories since I’d learned to count. And here it was, the reality I’d chased my whole life: I was thin. No one could have said I wasn’t.
I had what I’d always wanted. Why wasn’t it what I wanted?
That January, I’d huddle alongside the heater on the main floor of my snow-covered casita. I’d check on the black widow spider who’d made her home between the warmth and the wall. I’d run down the stairs to my half-basement bedroom to turn on the heated mattress pad half an hour before I planned on sleeping—and I woke up almost every night out of a dead sleep to pull raw, unsalted almond butter from the jar on a spoon, on my fingers. I sat in darkness, alone at the expanse of a dining room table that would have sat six if I’d wanted—if I’d been willing to live and move and eat with people in daylight hours. To nourish myself.
When I started the book, it was called Letting Go of Beauty. I did not want to let it go. I did not even specifically want to write a book. It was more like: I had to.
I’d expected thinness—tantamount to beauty, I thought, and its ironclad requisite—would break my life wide open. Instead, it had merely broken me. My beauty was a cold one, a lonesome one. I couldn’t keep up with it. But losing weight had been my greatest achievement, my religion and identity. I did not yet have the word anorexia in my mouth.
I’d been a good girl: I’d started out fat and conquered the beast, that vanishingly rare feat. Even with my stress fractures and low blood pressure and amenorrhea, my doctors had only praised me. Friends and family were eager to learn my secret, impressed by my willpower, jealous. To eat again, to gain the weight back—to survive—I was convinced would make me a failure.
The first draft poured out of me in four months flat: a retrospective on everything my body had been through, on the strange power I’d always known beauty—thinness—held. Of walking through that power after a lifetime of yearning for it. Of the desperate place I’d come to: the isolation and disfunction, the numbness and hunger.
I was justifying it to myself, this decision-that-wasn’t-a-decision. I didn’t know it then, but I was embarking on a radical shift: I was committing to trusting my own experience, my own body, over what the magazines and movies and even some of the medical professionals had to say. Writing a book was the only way I could make a case to myself that such a cataclysm was safe. It was an apology, an explanation, a request for understanding: I know, I know, I was saying. I was so beautiful. But look where it came from. Look what it cost.
When I finished it—an effort that seemed monumental, though it was only 35,000 words—it felt like the second-hardest thing I’d ever done. I put it in a drawer for a year and set to living my life, which had filled with color since I’d started eating. I moved across the country—a work-intensive but familiar coping mechanism I’d engaged in half a dozen times by then—this time to Portland, by way of a six-month stint of full-time living in a 17-foot travel trailer. But once I arrived in Oregon, I found myself putting my anchor down pretty quickly. I’d found home in my body, so I was finished running.
But I wasn’t finished with the book.
Fast forward to April of 2020. I’m wearing the 40 pounds I earned back—the happy place my body beelined for within six months of my letting myself eat normally. I’ve fallen in love for the first time in ten years—the first time since before the thing churned itself into disorder, disaster. I understand, at long last, that I can claim the word anorexia—that I’d not been successful; I’d been sick.
When I pull the manuscript out of cold storage for my then-partner—also a writer—to read, I think it’s trash. She doesn’t. When I write an essay at the intersection of recovery and sexuality, she has an idea: what if I wrote the entire book as a memoir in essays, with each piece revolving around a certain food? (L, you’re almost certainly not reading this, but if you are: thanks.)
So I did. I spent all the rest of that year, and then 2021, rewriting my story, this time with this new formal container. I officially finished the manuscript in December of 2021. I was so fucking proud of that book. I’d adopted the current working title—one I like so much I’m afraid to share it here. It had a unique and themeatic narrative structure! It had epigraphs! It had three distinct parts! I took it to Tin House in February of 2022, expecting to win my facilitator’s unvarnished accolades. I pitched it to several agents, one of whom requested the full manuscript within minutes of receiving my query letter.
And then I realized—in part due to my facilitator’s so-so response, in part due to the agent’s encouraging rejection, and in part due to the shivering of my own internal compass—that it just wasn’t done yet, no matter how badly I wished it so. Worse, I wasn’t ready to finish it. I couldn’t, physically. Every time I opened the file or flipped through the printed manuscript, my entire body froze.
It was crushing to have to put it down, to realize that—yet again—I’d reached a false summit. But the work of the book had always been about learning to listen to my body, and its signals were clear. I needed more time. More wisdom.
Now we’re coming up on halfway through 2023, somehow. Another fallow year flew by. The book is still not finished—is not, I have come to learn, even close. But I’m working on it again. I have it open in another window this very afternoon. For the first time in a long time, I can see the cracks the where the light leaks in—the places where the story has room to unfold, to grow.
There is so much work still left to do, especially for something I’ve thought was finished twice already. I’m sure I’ll think it’s finished again before it is. I am at once enamored and exhausted of it. It is elusive and demanding and mine. It is the story I hear louder than anything else.
And it is, of course, about a change of heart: my commitment to feeding myself, no matter what, instead of prostrating myself on the altar of a body shape I was never meant to inhabit. But the process of writing it has demanded has offered some heart-changing of its own. This book has taught me more about commitment—about staying still through discomfort—than any contract I’ve signed, any relationship I’ve been in. It’s taught me in a profound way about its own topic: taking up time and space, processing and creating and existing without arbitrary limitations. It has grown me up, this work. It has made me more persistent and patient and honest—honest enough to hold the self in my pages accountable for the myriad ways in which she fucked up.
And here is the biggest heart-change of all: although I want my name on a shelf as bad as any other writer, I am so glad this book isn’t done yet.
In the interim, I’ve been able to follow the crush-like energy of other projects: I’ve written songs to sing in front of strangers and drafted unrelated essays and poems. I’ve made friends and moved house and fallen—again—in love. I’ve landed, for the first time in a long time, acceptances in literary journals and a handful of new bylines. I’ve started this newsletter.
And I’ve learned to have faith that my book is still there, waiting; that I can come back to it by and by, in my time—in its. It started as a premonition and then bore down on me as a must, as everything. As another something to knock off my to-do list.
But that’s not how this kind of writing works—and not how life does, either. It needs time to simmer. That’s where the flavor comes from.
So I will allow that time, gladly. I will let the book spread out like my thighs, whose stubbornness and survival inspired it. And in the meantime, I’ll go on living the life that story gave me back: all the richness and connection and change and loss that words, as powerful as they are, can never do more than point at. I’ll go on, finally, feeding myself.