Announcing… my second book! I’ve been sitting on this news for four months. It took several weeks to finalize the book contract and then it was summer, which is a bad time to announce a book, because the publishing industry goes quiet. Finally, late last week, I got to go public with one of those Publisher’s Marketplace screenshot posts. A Woman Like That will be published by Gallery in spring of 2026. This book means everything to me. It’s a memoir about how a DNA test connected me with my half-sister Kathy, who my mom placed for adoption in 1965, twenty years before I was born. I already knew that my mom had been sent away in shame to a home for unwed mothers. But, after finding Kathy in the spring of 2022, I had all these questions about this fracture in my family’s past—and my mom couldn’t answer them because she had died years earlier. So, against the backdrop of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, I set out to understand what happened to my mom back in 1965. I learned that she had been pulled into a sexist and racist system designed to turn “bad girls” into proper women, wives, and mothers. It was meant to control women’s sexuality, and bolster marriage and the white nuclear family norm. I realized that my own life had been shaped by my mom’s past: I had tried to run from it—as a sex writer exploring taboo subcultures and as a young woman grasping for “sexual empowerment”—but I had still inherited my mom’s shame, along with the world that shamed her. So many of the keywords in that book description could be keywords for this newsletter: women’s sexuality, bad girls, wives, mothers, marriage, nuclear family, sexual empowerment, and shame. It’s no coincidence. This book that I’ve been quietly writing in the background has so obviously influenced the focus of this newsletter. My posts here often specifically target the wife-whore dichotomy, whether it’s writing about the use of “porn star” as a punchline at the DNC or slut-shaming on Love is Blind or my 10-year wedding anniversary or Hollywood’s virtuous makeovers of maternal sexuality. Again and again, I find myself critiquing heteronormativity, whether it’s the way individual women are blamed for standard issue romantic disappointments, the ploy of selling marriage as the solution to the inequity in women’s lives, or the unpaid care work of motherhood, opposite the paid care of sex work. If you search my newsletter archives for the phrase “desire,” you get a dozen hits, which, actually, seems surprisingly low. When am I not talking about women’s desire? I’ve been writing about sex and feminism for most of my career, but my work on this book has given me a very particular lens for looking at the world. That lens is about the control of women’s bodies and sexuality, which sounds abstract and academic, until you apply it to, say, our “pick me” moment or the slut-shaming of Britney Spears. As I’ve been knee-deep in historical research for the past year and coming up for air twice a week to write this newsletter, it’s been uncanny and unsettling to realize how directly relevant that research is to contemporary discourse. The influence goes both ways: this newsletter has influenced the book, too. The likes, the shares, the comments, the paid subscription upgrades—they’re all a form of regular feedback that has helped me fine-tune my approach, both to the newsletter and to the book. So it feels kinda perfect that just days after I announced my book deal, I finally unlocked the Substack bestseller badge. While I try not to pin my sense of self worth to such arbitrary benchmarks, this one means a lot to me. Over 100 of you agree that I should be paid for the work I do here every week.¹ The act of routinely writing about current events for this newsletter has also been a big part of finding the “so what” of this memoir. I’m not just writing about my family’s story—I’m writing about a patriarchal history that stretches back thousands of years, and one that is still very much ongoing. With all the recent rhetoric around marriage and falling birth rates and childless cat ladies and so much else, I’ve just been screaming to myself: THE WORLD NEEDS THIS BOOK. Well, the world will get this book—and subscribing to this newsletter is the best way to stay updated on its release, and to keep shaping what it becomes. 1 Raechel Anne Jolie, one of my favorite newsletter writers, recently said that my paywalled weekend link roundup is worth the price of admission alone, because it keeps her “completely in tune with the buzzy feminist discourse,” noting that “curation is a skill and time-consuming.” And the always excellent Alicia Kennedy underscored the value of finding “someone whose taste you can tap into and trust when we’ve lost so much else space for this kind of stuff.” Let me be your someone, if I’m not already. Seriously, bestseller badge aside, I am still laughably far from making a living off this newsletter. I write one essay and one link roundup post a week. That’s roughly 96 posts a year. If even a fraction of those posts bring value to your life, I would be so grateful if you upgraded to a paid subscription.
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četvrtak, 12. rujna 2024.
'A Woman Like That'
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