February 26, 2025

I Read My Own Book

Yesterday I read my own book, which is not something I’ve ever done before, with any of my books, cover to cover. It was in anticipation of tomorrow’s meeting of the Beyond a Ballot Book Club, which is reading WAITING FOR A STAR TO FALL, and I thought that I should probably reacquaint myself with the story, which came out almost five years ago. And I’m glad I did, first because there was indeed so much of the story I’d forgotten (her roommate Lauren! I love her!), which would have made me the most useless guest author ever, but also because I really enjoyed the book. Like, ridiculously enjoyed it, which I guess makes sense since I wrote it, and therefore it would indeed so viscerally tap into my emotions, but I wasn’t expecting to feel it so much. While most what my main character experiences in this book is not based on my own life, I’d drawn on my own post-adolescent feelings of longing and sad-hoping to realize her character, and so reading it really did affect me in a really stirring way.

I was also glad to enjoy the book so much because of how it was a novel that wasn’t received the way I’d expected it to be by readers. Part of it was the marketing, I think, which positioned the novel as a straightforward romance, which it’s not, but I’d come away with some regret that perhaps I’d been too ambiguous in my approach to the story. This is very much a #MeToo novel, but I wanted to write about the grey areas surrounding that issue, which is not to say that I’m ambivalent about consent, and rape culture, and unequal power dynamics, and how some men get away with everything while women are torn down so easily, but I found it really interesting to think about a workplace relationship from the point of view of someone who thinks she has more power than she does, about what it means when some women choose the side of the oppressor, about being sure of yourself when you’re too young to really know (and how patronizing is that) and how all these ideas that really do muddy the water.

However there were people who read this book and thought I’d written an anti-feminist screed, and there were even people who congratulated me for my bravery in writing an anti-feminist screed (YIKES!). To which I say, we all bring our own baggage and biases to every book we pick up, but it sure made me think that avoiding ambiguity might actually be advised, and that the reading public might in fact require clear and direct messaging instead of broad spaces to think around in. (I don’t REALLY think that, but I also don’t want people thinking I’ve writing a novel in defence of predatory men!).

But I was pleased to read the book just like a reader, instead of as the writer I’d been when I’d read it so many times pre-publication in draft form, and to discover that I really do think I got it just right, and if not everyone got it, well, so be it. But I was pleased with what a thoughtful, nuanced, and subtle story this is, which is what I think that a novel operating in a grey area has to be.

So weird to be reading this novel about politics in such a different political environment from the one that I wrote it in though, sheesh. The book is absolutely fictional, but was inspired by a politician whose downfall made way for our current Ontario premier, who has been such a disaster and who is predicted to win his third straight majority when we go to the polls tomorrow. (Does this make me think differently about the other smarmy guy who we could have had instead? Not really. And don’t worry, after that scandal that “ruined his life,” he did manage to be elected mayor of a city he hadn’t even lived in. These guys do okay…) I also wrote this novel in 2017/2018, when the new US presidency seemed like a blip, a fluke, and everything is so much more awful now. Even worse, my novel features excerpts from made up news articles/opinion pieces and the one by a female right-wing tabloid columnist that was supposed to be paranoid and crazy—about how #MeToo was going to generate a backlash that made broken men absolutely dangerous, “you ain’t seen toxic masculinity yet”—reads as horrifyingly prescient.