Dear friends,
I’m just going to put this up at the top, because I’m too excited about it…
My book is coming out with THE Roxane Gay, hopefully in 2024! I am so grateful for the people in my life who have helped me get to this point. I called out some of those supporters in this Twitter thread, but I’ve certainly missed many who have had so much impact on me and my writing.
This newsletter is all about this moment, the debut book deal, in my creative and professional life—and I’ll likely have more updates in the future as well. So if you’re interested in Ravishing, definitely subscribe/stay subscribed, so that everything comes straight to your inbox. And if you think others might be interested in Ravishing, be sure to share this newsletter with them!
I had a near constant worry (thank you, OCD) that I would “one of those writers” who just stopped writing after the MFA. I thought about this all the time—it pounded in my brain. What would happen if I graduated and then completely gave up on something I swore was my life calling? Would I be lying to myself, or to everyone?
Even though my thoughts were, let’s say overdramatic, I also think they weren’t unique to me. I have talked to countless MFA graduates who have worried the same thing as me. Most of them are terrified about coming back to 9-5 work, never finding time amongst adulthood’s responsibilities, and becoming isolated from their writing community, thus not having the accountability partners they’d become so used to. (I should note that many MFA students are actually dealing with work and other adult responsibilities during their time in their MFA, so there is some degree of privilege to being afraid to leave the safe womb of the university. Not everyone actually has that bucolic experience anyway—only the lucky ones really get to go to a program and just write. Even I, with all my class privilege, worked an extra part time job while at the MFA.)
So many people are battling worries about if not now, then when. Tied up in that is the concern of losing momentum. Not only artistically, but also as a figure in literary spaces. Will that agent that talked to you at your program’s meet and greet remember you three years later? And then, of course, there are the worries about if your book is tied to a particular cultural moment, and if you might miss out on “striking when the iron is hot.”
Because I was so concerned about my career trajectory, I entered into my MFA program with a very clear idea of the project I was going to embark upon. I believed I would finish my manuscript in the summer prior to my thesis year, meaning I could spend all of that year revising and readying the work to go out to agents shortly after.
Spoiler alert: none of this happened.
Here’s what did: I had lunch with one of my dear professors who told me the idea for the book was good, but that I should stay open to the possibilities of whatever would happen to my art. (This was, by the way, the same astute professor who later told me I spend so much time planning my writing that I never actually get to doing it. Ouch. And also, yeah.) Over the course of the program I grew less and less interested in the book I had proposed. I wrote other things, including a flash fiction that would later grow into the book I just sold. But I didn’t know that then. Instead, I kept moving forward. I met my now-partner and we lovingly dealt with a ton of life crap, which happens when you’re on the cusp of graduating. My thesis wasn’t something I was supremely proud of—and it wasn’t at all a complete book. In May of 2019, I graduated. That same month, I was hospitalized for ten days, in Denver, CO of all places. Two months later I moved to South Carolina—a state I’d never expected to be on my trajectory, New England baby that I was—and I was looking for a full time job while healing from a second hospitalization. I didn’t make any progress towards my book that year.
I knew I wanted to write about that flash fiction that kept haunting me from graduate school. Carmen Maria Machado had once told me it was pretty good, and that gave me some kind of confidence. In 2020, I actually got back to it. (Obviously, that year was Year One of the pandemic in the US. I’m not advocating for productivity during a global crisis. It just happened to be a way for me to make it through an awful time. Having my book to work on gave me structure that I needed—and because I was a remote worker who still had her job, and was thus financially stable, I was lucky enough to be able to work on it.)
Back in 2020, the story was still more about white girls than I wanted to actually write about, so I gutted it and started anew. Over time, there was lots of gutting! So many people made helpful comments here and there that made me want to make big paradigm shifts in the novel. And most of the time, those shifts were vital to getting the book where it is now. My progress with this book was far from linear, and even though I did have a pretty constant engine moving me towards finishing it, it wasn’t anywhere like the idealized vision of writing a book that I’d clung to back in 2016, 2017.
I finished the first big draft of the book in December 2021. I sent it off to a group of students at Emerson College who gave me some excellent feedback. I revised. I then sent the book to other readers in the Spring. I revised again, as it goes. Finally, I was ready to send out to agents in June 2022. I signed with my wonderful agents in August, and we went through three-ish rounds of revisions as well. I sold the book in December. It was one of the most intense years of my life. In a way, it was what I had envisioned things would be like (that rapid pace, that intense obsessive attention to a project)—except it happened years after my MFA graduation, in Philadelphia instead of in the Southwest, and on a book I never knew I could have written. In fact, I couldn’t have written Ravishing in 2019 because I hadn’t yet experienced the all the things I needed to in order to write this book. I hadn’t been in the ICU yet. I hadn’t experienced love entwined with the scariness of chronic illness at its worst. I hadn’t processed my teens and early-twenties enough.
When I was applying to MFA programs back in 2015, my main mentor and recommender told me that I should wait. He said that I needed more life experience before I could go on to be a writer. I told him that this is what I wanted to do, and that I would get that life experience by uprooting myself and moving across the country. I stand by that. And I stand by the fact that I did have life experience already, especially due to my identities as a chronically ill Indian woman. But I also think he had a point. Stories come from what we see and experience, yes. But those stories also need time to ferment inside of us, before they are ready to effervesce into the world. It is difference between writing something that just portrays the who, what, why, when of a moment vs. writing something that investigates, dissects, understands, emphasizes with, contradicts, questions that same moment.
In other words, everything will take the time it needs to take.
I would love to say that I’ve learned my lesson. That I don’t have any anxiety about the new manuscript I’m working on, and that I have not thought about deadlines or word counts or the market. Unfortunately, old habits die hard. Or, as I like to think of it, it is natural and human to worry about something you love, something that is curled so close to your heart.
But the thing that gives me solace, and I hope will mean something to you too, is that what I have in my hands now is better than I ever could have imagined it. And so whatever I am dreaming up now is just a whisper of what could come, even if it takes longer to appear than I’d hoped.
Thanks for reading Surya Means Sun! If you want to connect with me outside of this newsletter, you can always follow me on social media @__eshani. I also have the following cool thing(s) coming up…
Upcoming reading: Philly friends, I’d love to see you at the Personal Velocity reading on 2/25 at 7:30 PM. I’m planning to read from an essay in-progress about eating disorders and chronic illness, and I’m so looking forward to hearing what these other great writers are going to be sharing too.
And as a reminder, stay subscribed to this newsletter if you want the most up-to-date info on my book, Ravishing, right in your inbox. 💕
this is so lovely, Eshani--very generous of you to share the story of your novel, and the idea that "everything takes how long it takes" is something I'm holding close, too. xo