Today the Dream Happens

RAVISHING comes out today!! And here's what I'm thinking about!

Dear friends,

On my twelfth birthday my best friend I unwrapped the perfect gift from my best friend, K. The package was a thick rectangle, obviously a book, but not one I expected. The title: How to Publish Your First Novel. I screamed, lunged, hugged her. I was so excited that my mother later told me I had been rude to the other guests, having not shown a modicum of the same emotion toward their gifts.

That was the dream, then, to publish a novel. I remember reading the passages on proper word count over and over again, for whatever reason. I remember carrying the book around with me wherever I went. What I don’t remember is why it was the dream at all. But I have theories.

I was a lonely child. Not quiet, but bad at talking, at saying the right things. I was the kid in class who somehow always made the joke unfunny. I didn’t do soccer, like the popular girls. I was smart in a way that made parents like me, made my peers notice that I was showing off. I wanted, badly, to be important, for there to be some ultimately benign, but scary accident that would jostle everyone out of their dispassion for me.

In brief, I wanted to be seen.

When I wrote, I was taken away from that desire. Time was taken over by the pencil against the page, later by the fingers on a keyboard. Sometimes I got the sentences on the page right, and then there was a phantom thrill in my mouth, like I’d eaten something particularly good. I still get this. Telling good stories was and continues to be one of the things that gives me a visceral satisfaction. The kind that makes my body feel like the home of all the mysteries of the universe in the universe.

But as soon as I put the writing away, I remembered again how much I craved notice. So when my parents, my teachers, and my peers began to see how much I liked writing—and that I was good at it—I believed it lucky that the thing I most enjoyed was starting to get me the attention I had been quietly begging for.

From Notes from Your Past, a really interesting project that reimagines South Asian portraiture. Read a full interview here with collaborators Reva Bhatt and Simrah Farrukh. In it, they discuss the colonial lens that was used by white men photographing South Asian women in the past. As Bhatt and Farrukh work to disrupt this framework, it makes me think about how my conceptions of attention come from the white, capitalist mindset that has been bestowed upon me. For example, the idea that everyone should turn toward you (as if you are the performer, commanding attention) vs. all of you turning toward each other (as of you are all the creators, sharing the attention).

At that time, I wanted to publish a book because I believed it would be the best way to get myself valued in a society that requires that you “understand your worth.” I’m not sure that I understood, back then, that being read isn’t just about impressing your readers, but that it’s about co-creating knowledge between writer and reader. I didn’t realize that being celebrated for your work is a bonus, that overall just helps you reach more people so you can make the conversation wider and deeper.

It’s lucky, then, that since my youth I’ve had ample opportunity to rethink the phrase “being seen.” To recognize that when I’m seen it isn’t about just “me” but “we”/“us”. Thanks to my many friends, colleagues, loves, family members, and fellow writers, I’ve experienced moments of euphoria in relationship with others: Times like when my now-husband and I talked about grief while driving back from a concert, the wide stretch of the Arizona desert ahead of us. Times like when my MFA friends and I stood in line to see the corpse flower bloom. Times like when my siblings and I swam as far out in the ocean as we felt safe and then body surfed waves together. In those times, we were experiencing the world together, making sense of it together.

It turns out what I want isn’t for people to look at me, define me, and understand me. No, what I want is to open my life to others and let them open their lives to me.

Now, I’ve had so many people tell me that publishing a book is a great accomplishment. And yes, in a way it is. I can’t say I don’t want the book to be recognized as a symbol of the great vulnerability it has required to say things that a lot of people don’t want to hear. I can’t say I’m not going to post things on social media about the book, because of course, it’s nice to get that recognition. But publishing being an accomplishment is really only the surface level of what this all means: an opportunity to be part of other people’s worlds, an opportunity to experiment with and shape our collective thinking. That, alongside the excitement I feel in the act of creation, is where I see the most joy.

Thanks to all of you who have let me in today and every other day.

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A Dose of Updates

Ravishing is out today! Read a copy now! 💄💉✨

My beautiful book cover by Kimberly Glyder.

• Ravishing is out! You can order her online/at your local bookstore and grab her there. But you can also ask your library to get a copy (always encouraged).

Come see me on tour!

• I’m going on tour! I’ll be doing events with Emma Copley Eisenberg, Roxane Gay and other great authors that aren’t on Substack. Come see me and we’ll have a great time. Plus, you can get some stickers by Shebani and bookmarks 😉.

And some classes! (Free!)

• Join me for EMBODY, SPEAK, RELATE, a special series of no-fee, online classes celebrating Ravishing. Because the novel is an ode to community, care, and resource-sharing, I’ll be using these open class spaces as places to share what she has learned about craft through the writing of her book, as well as places for further exploration and discovery in a group setting.

  Join me for 1, 2, or all 3 virtual sessions, for free!

  • Optional donations to Blue Stoop, who is hosting the classes, are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated. The classes are open to all, with 50% of seats set aside for BIPOC writers and disabled writers, in honor of book’s characters.

xx,

Eshani