Writing a book is not like having a baby

I’ve so often heard people compare the experience of writing and publishing a book to having a baby. I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how this comparison makes sense to anyone.

First of all, a baby gestates for nine months, largely outside of your control, whereas a book has never written itself. When I was pregnant, my body miraculously kept forming my little baby’s tiny liver, the birth mark on her lower back, her long eyelashes, all while I was washing the dishes, and freaking out about the mortgage, and generally neglecting the more profound thing going on inside of my very own uterus.

The morning I gave birth to Stella.

If you neglect a book, it will sit on your hard drive, unchanged, like an insect in amber, forever. There is no inevitability to a book, no miraculous appearance. You have to keep waking up every single day, prepared to battle your own insecurities, and put your fingers on the keyboard. You have to keep believing that the thing you’re making is worth making.

A photo one of my kids must have taken that just showed up on my phone.

Likewise, when a baby is born, it’s perilous, exhilarating, physical, and confusing. One day, you are a person with a giant belly—two people really. The next, you are alone in your deflated, draining, exhausted, powerful-as-anything-earthly body again, and another human also now exists. This other human is not you, but it is of you, and you are now responsible for keeping it alive every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of…well…for a very, very long time. The shock of it is seismic.

Stella day one of year one. This Friday will be year five.

When a book is “born” it’s less a cleaving and more a diffusion, less physical and more theoretical. Suddenly, this thing that I made painstakingly under cloak of creative process is an object, multiplied and distributed far and wide. Or so I see from sales numbers and snapshots. It is not mine to keep alive.

It is no longer mine, really. It it yours.

Next week, August 3rd to be exact, my book becomes yours to make meaning of, to wrestle with, to critique or cry over, to talk about or let grow dusty on a shelf. It’s not my baby so much as it is my 363 page letter in a 402-year correspondence with this country. I can’t wait for your reply.

This is my prom picture with my book. I don’t know why the posture, honestly, but I look happy, right?

Pre-order here if you haven’t yet, pretty please. The book is on Bookshop’s bestsellers list again!

Join us later today for this, which promises to be a provocative conversation about schools in Oakland (but with lots of relevance to other cities):

And mark your calendar for next week. So. Many. Awesome. Conversations:

Links here.