Letting go

Housekeeping stuff, since It Is That Time of Year:

• The Salt Grows Heavy comes out May 2nd and… that’s not a long time off, jesus christ. If you’re inclined, please consider pre-ordering. Pre-orders do for authors.

• On May 3rd, I’ll be heading to B&N Tribeca for my first live launch event. I’m genuinely kind of stunned that this is happening, but also sick to my stomach with anxiety. I haven’t done a live event like this before and just AAAGH.

• On May 4th, I’ll be headed off to Gibson’s Bookstore for another tiny event, and again, I am excited and terrified. Oh god.

• Then finally, on May 5th, I’m going to Brookline Booksmith for an event with Paul Tremblay. I am very concerned about this event as well but am soothed by the fact that Paul is very tall and I can at least hide behind him.

Anyway.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we carry pain through our lives and how we justify the burden of that agony to ourselves, to those who see us lumbering under its impossible weight. How it rots as the years pass, how it can seep into us, becoming a poison — we see evidence of this all the time, in the people who perpetuate the abuse they suffered, the ones who become abusers themselves.

How it is easier sometimes to hold onto the familiar, to have old scars reopened over and over again. Easier the devil you know than the strangeness of a world without it. I read a triptych of stories that brings to mind these musings, and they’re as follows:

Chi Hui’s The Woman Carrying a Corpse encapsulates the thought better than I ever could, and I’m struck by the lean beauty of its translation. It is short, poignant read that nonetheless stuck in me like a fang.

Similarly, Alix E. Harrow’s Six Deaths of The Saint continues to haunt mercilessly. The story is a familiar one: a girl is called out of obscurity to serve as a weapon. She conquers nations all in the name of a prince’s smile. It’s a familiar story, as is its denouement, its ache. How often have we been made to serve someone else’s story, how often we’ve been made to do the things they cannot, told we’re not good enough until we can fulfill the ambitions they themselves could not satisfy.

And in Lina Rather’s A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, we see too what happens when people are made into tools, into conduits for another’s obsessions. It beautifully articulates as well the difficulty in surviving in a world as a marginalized person, how you must carve yourself small freedoms. I’m in love too with the quiet rage of it, the trembling fury that whispers through the pages, asking what if we can remake the world, what if we can make it kinder, better. What would we do with that power?

I’ve been thinking as well about a conversation I had with my personal trainer. He told me that some people define themselves by their injuries, and I’ve not been able to get that out of my head. We talked about what that meant, what recovery means, what it takes to relearn a new body, to bulletproof yourself against re-injury. Maybe it’s because writers live in eternal metaphor, but I couldn’t help but think about trauma and what letting go of trauma means. The boundaries we need to draw, the work we need to do to ensure we’re not hurt again — while still striving to move past the thing that tore us apart in the first place.

It’s complicated, I think.

As always, a cat photo. I hope everyone is doing well.