April 29, 2024

On Being Chosen

Photograph of two women, both white, one dark hair, one blonde, both mid forties, both STUNNING, dressed up for a gala event against an enchanted forest backdrop. — A Biblio Bash highlight is a George Pimentel portrait. Here is my photo with my Biblio Bash date, Marissa Stapley!

I’ve had a very fun and action-packed couple of weeks literary-wise that continues with tomorrow’s trip to Waterloo to interview Iona Whishaw about her latest Lane Winslow book. And a highlight was Thursday’s Biblio Bash at the Toronto Reference Library, a gala event at which I was invited to be a guest author. I’d attended once before in 2017 when my first novel came out, and the whole experience was intense, awesome, very overwhelming—plus I got my makeup done at the drug store and told them the look I was going for was “very dramatic” and ended up resembling a drag queen, and I’m still traumatized, no offence to drag queens. This time I had the benefit of hindsight and hired someone excellent to do my makeup, plus I’m about 300 years older than I used to be (pandemic effect) which meant I behaved with aplomb, looked quite fantastic, and drank so little that I woke up in the morning without a hangover, but still had lots of fun. It was a very good night and the Toronto Public Library Foundation raised more than a million dollars.

But I was cognizant through the entire process too that a big part of the experience (and one of its chief appeals, beyond the stunning portraits) was the feeling of being chosen. An exclusive event, an opportunity to mingle with the fancy people and wear a floor length gown. And I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, how much of the reality of publishing is often about the experiences of being chosen, or otherwise. Finishing your book, signing with an agent, getting a book deal, getting an impressive book deal, a book deal with a big press, becoming a bestseller, sustaining bestsellerdom, continuing that success with your next book, winning prizes, getting reviewed in all the best places, being “picked” by Oprah, Heather, Reese or Jenna, and on and on and on. And even when you get chosen on one level, there are all kinds of tiers and ways to still feel like you’ve been chosen (or that you’re falling short) and it’s all so urgent and arbitrary and so little of it (as with most things) is actually within any of our own control. Who gets to matter, to be important, and the pressure—even if you happen to be one of the ones—of staying on top, remaining relevant.

And all of it—it’s excruciating. I spent most of last fall feeling like such a failure, my self-worth so undermined by my latest novel’s failure to launch in the way I had envisioned—and thinking into the future, in which I might no longer be able to publish books at all, to be once again un-chosen by a publisher, and on one level, the stakes are negligible here, life goes on, but on the other, this is my career, and the thought of failure is just devastating once one has built their entire sense of self around the identity of not just being a writer, but one of those rarest of cases—a successful one.

There is a line from the Dar Williams song, “As Cool as I Am“, that I think (ugh!) I’m going to continue to be reminded of for the rest of my life: “And then I go outside to join the others; I am the others.” (You can even get a t-shirt!). So much of my own yearning to be chosen, to be validated, is to be offered proof that I am special and have worth. And of course I am special and have worth, by virtue of my existence as a human being, just like you do, but how to deal with that desire for distinction, for proof that I am not merely one of the others—it’s something else I’m figuring out at the age of almost-45, along with how to look good at a gala.

To accept that I am the others is realize that my sense of value and self-worth is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, and that often nobody else is going to be see it but me, which means that I really have to know it, or no one will.

To quote another line from “As Cool as I Am”: “Oh, and that’s not easy.”

It’s really not, it’s so much easier to be seen by others than to see our ourselves as we really are, warts and all, and not even just accept it, but hold that reality as something worthy and sacred. It’s so much easier to share a photo of myself looking stunning at an exclusive shindig and have hundreds of people LIKE it than to sit with myself and know that this is all I’ll ever be.

But I’m working on it, little by little, building up a solid core, something unimpeachable.