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My manuscript showed up from my publisher this week. For a couple years, I had Post Its and index cards taped to my wall, mapping out the story that is now contained inside this stack of papers. It’s unbound but all typeset and printed out, thick as an encyclopedia. I couldn’t believe the sheer weight of it. The size. The way it made a satisfying thunk when I gently tossed it up in the air and caught it in my palms. I dropped it on the table, too—a sharper smack. Flipping through, I listened to the pop of pages released by my thumb, the flutter as they rose and fell. I tested all the sounds that I could make with this manuscript, this massive chunk of paper and words that arose out of three years of work. I miss that work. Looking back, the writing of it feels like a once-in-a-lifetime love affair. Tumultuous, of course. Painful. Sometimes excruciating. But, my god, the passion and excitement and obsession. The moments of feeling like this is what it is all about. I do just generally love writing books, but this one was uniquely intense. I’ll be talking plenty about the specifics of this memoir down the line, but for now I’ll just share that it has a new title since I last mentioned it here: My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past. I think that says plenty about its subject matter. My mom has been gone for twelve years and this book meant digging through her papers and family photos, requesting long-lost documents, talking to strangers about her story. It required that I try to bring her to life for the reader, and for myself. No one really talks about what it means to summon someone from the dead like that—and then to say goodbye, again. I fanned the pages of the manuscript in front of my nose, breathing in the smell of ink, freshly baked words. I pressed the manuscript to my face and huffed, long and deep. I don’t know if the ink smells good so much as that I like the feeling of being close to production, the behind-the-scenes of anything, really. I was reminded of visiting my mom’s office as a kid—she co-owned a graphic design company in San Francisco in the nineties and they were always printing and xeroxing, sometimes calling up bike messengers to rush proofs across town to a client. When I was off school or sick, she would set me up in the corner and I would photocopy my hands and then color them in. “Tracy 1992,” she wrote on one of the copies that she kept. The cover page of the manuscript is stamped with the faintest fingerprints—either belonging to me or the person who printed it out at my publisher’s office all the way across the country. It’s so rare anymore to get a letter in the mail—and now, here, my own book sent to me by someone I’ve never met. I don’t know that I have anything profound to say here. There’s no essay, no “take.” But, counter to the incitements of this stupid newsletter-meets-influencer platform, which is increasingly manipulating the way that so many of us write and think, I’d like to be able to occasionally send out emails just to say: Hey, look at this.
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četvrtak, 11. rujna 2025.
Hey, look at this
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