I Didn’t Want Feedback. I Wanted Praise.

I did a public reading, and I didn’t die.

Sarah tells me to tell them I don’t want feedback. I don’t want feedback, right? No the piece is already published. She says tell them you’re publishing a book and you just want to practice reading in front of people. I’m at this community creative collective thing and brought this essay I wrote about the simultaneous events of being super broke in a beater-car whose oil I can barely afford to change and buying an eight ounce sixty-five dollar candle.

I tell Sarah, “Thanks coach.” She’s the one who told me about this event and signed me up for a spot. We sit and sweat and witness the charming thing that happens once a month at this yoga studio. It’s one of the hottest days of the year, in the triple digits, and my thighs stick to the chair. If I adjust position during a silent moment it sounds like velcro unvelcro-ing, so I must time my fidgeting for moments of guitar strums or post-reading applause.

Sarah is so lucky, she’s one of the first to read. She says it’s just something she wrote today while nursing a migraine and suffering through broken air-conditioning. She gets claps and laughs and hits all the notes of her essay with precision like a born performer. The room loves her and as she sits they praise her and ask when she’s going to turn it into a one-woman show.

I spent the day whittling my piece down so that I was sure it would be under seven minutes, yet all the other adorable little yahoos seem to be extending their time well beyond the seven minute mark. I wait for my turn for three hours. The moment takes me back to times in school when I would not do a project because I knew it would culminate in a presentation at the end. I would just skip that week and often not even start on the project because I could think of nothing more terrifying than commanding a room. I listen to the songs, poems, excerpts from novels and cookbooks and off-the-cuff storytelling. I marvel at the ability of the facilitator to be able to grab something from everyone’s work and show it back to them as a gorgeous reflection of themselves. I start to change my mind about feedback. I want to hear what he has to say about mine.

When I stand, printout quivering in my sweaty palms, and begin to speak, my voice doesn’t sound like my voice.

I tell the room that I haven’t done this in over a decade but that I’m about to publish a book about my first year without alcohol. My sounds seem small and shaky like I’m on the verge of tears. Why do voices shake? Are my vocal cords afraid? They’re just words vibrating out of the mouth. What is there to fear? I push on though, grateful to have the page in front of me.

It reminds me of climbing. The time when I was in scampering up 150 feet of granite in Joshua Tree and I realized that if I didn’t look down, I wouldn’t know how far above the ground I was. It was just me and the wall in front of my face. I just had to find the best spots for gripping and lifting. If I focus on the letters in front of me, I don’t have to look in the eyes of all the people who look back at mine. I say “fuck” a lot in the essay. I get laughs. Even with my fear and my shaky voice, there are people who laugh at all the right parts.

I am about to go back to my seat when the facilitator stops me and motions for me to sit down just like all the others had. I lower myself into the chair and face the room like I’m in the front of a firing squad, but hopeful that the firing squad is going to pelt me with wonder and awe.

“Is that a part of your book?”

“No it’s just something I wrote that comes after.”

He talks about the vignettes I wrote, and the fact that we live in a tourist town and of the wealth disparity. I begin to feel like he’s trying to make me feel better about being poor, and other people nod like they get it. But no, it wasn’t just about being poor. It was also about being stupid. And it was about feeling sorry for myself, but it was also about laughing about feeling sorry for myself. I start to feel like he’s kind of trying to therapize me for feeling the wealth disparity, and his wife says, “The humor, too!”

Ah this is what it’s going to be like. Me writing this stuff but being like, ‘No, it’s okay.’ I do dumb things, but they’re meant to be laughed at. Please don’t try to make me feel better. It’s like when you fall and someone gets all this concern and asks if you’re okay, like that’s the worst thing you could do.

Don’t ask if I’m okay.

Just laugh, and it won’t hurt so bad. You can’t tell people how to receive something, though can you? Can you? No, I think it’s only the shaking of the voice that you can perhaps try to control. With practice.

We are less than a month away from publication day, and I’m not confident about my blurbs. I think I need a better elevator pitch, and I’m still waiting tables. When people say that publishing a book is nothing like the way you expected publishing a book to be, were they talking about things like this? You guys, I‘m scared. You guys. My voice is shaking.

What do we think of this as an elevator pitch?

To quit drinking as an act of creativity rather than punishment is what made this attempt different from any of the others. In this story of new sobriety, it is the clarity that comes from that one choice that changes everything in ways the author never expected.

Should I say “the author” or “Julie?” Tell me how to do this. Thanks. Or am I supposed to make it more casual?

This is the story of what happens when a gray-area drinker treats sobriety as a creative act rather than a punishment. In this raw memoir, she discovers that no one is coming to save her, and that for too long she has been getting in the way of saving herself.

I’m thinking the second one. The first one is insane, right? I think it’s screaming, “I WROTE THIS. I’M A WRITER!” Tell me in the comments what you think.

ALSO, for people who have read the book, I’ve been thinking I should put in a foreword from the author as an onramp so no one is confusing it with journalism or self-help. What do you think?