The Salt Grows Heavy is out in the world

Being an author is weird.

You spend an inordinate amount of time alone, furiously writing about fictional people, and thinking of ways to make them to suffer. Then, if publishing buys the book, you spend even more time working on edits, copyedits, and whatever else is needed of you. Once all that is done, the book comes out, and this thing you carried in your ribs like a heart, this quiet beast you loved for so many long solitary months, is suddenly public property.

And regardless of what you write and who you are, someone inevitably comes by to say by the way, I fucking hate this.

After a few months, if you’re lucky, if you’re not burnt out already by the process, if you have a contract that lets you keep writing, you repeat it again.

(“You could just not write anymore, lol” I hear some folk saying and well, you hush.)

I’m a mess before every launch and it was no different this time around. The day before release, I spent most of it wanting to throw up from sheer nerves. The day of launch, I was mildly stupefied with both relief and exhilaration, hope and a deep-set worry that The Salt Grows Heavy wouldn’t find its readers. I’m still worried. Offering your heart to an indifferent universe is never easy.

All books are metaphors for something percolating through the author, I think. Whether it is a need to memorialize a moment, an obsession with a subject, or a way to process some strange circumstances, every book draws from something vulnerable and precious.

The Salt Grows Heavy is about a lot of things important to me but mostly, it is about love. Not the tidy romances of Hollywood or wholesome familial affection. It’s about the stuff that exists between: love that comes after loss, love that had been mutilated by trauma and thus cannot be offered in its entirety, love when you’ve never been taught love and only know it at an amused remove, love when you have nothing to offer but the promise you’ll sit there and hold their hand as they die.

Anyway.

The Salt Grows Heavy is out in the world. If the book appeals to you, please consider buying it or requesting it at your local library! As always, I leave you with a cat photo as I panickedly get ready for my event tonight at B&N Tribeca. (It’s at 6.30! I’ll be in conversation with the wonderful Danny Lore!)