You are not your worst review

You’re just a person on a trail and one day you will die.

It’s there in the book, the anticipation of the bad review, but I didn’t expect it to come directly to my Light Phone in the form of a text. I finish up my last table but don’t find the mental release that comes at the start of my weekend.

In the next moment, I’m screaming down the highway, “I can write about whatever I want to write about! I can write about whatever I want to write about! None of you can stop me!” I try not to notice that I sound like a crazed literary villain.

Five days later, at my signing, I look composed and smart with my legs crossed at the ankles. I try not to think about the text or the dark side of memoir as the young woman in front of me watches my shaky hand as it scribbles words on the title page of the book. She doesn’t know who I am, but she looks at me like I’ve done something brilliant. I hope she likes the book. I hope she never gets drunk and wanders the streets like a marionette.

If you listen to my episode of The Unfocused Writer podcast, you might be able to find the exact moment where I gaslight the past version of myself—the one who wrote the book. I talk about how I have gained wisdom with the passage of time, and I didn’t want that wisdom to leak into the version of the story that I wrote.

I didn’t gain wisdom.

During my conversation with

Christopher Robin

and

KiKi Walter

, I’m frank about how I think the paid subscription model of the Substack platform is what finally spurred me to publish a book in the first place. Perhaps that is a simplification, but the path did follow this trajectory: first I start a Substack, then I gather paid subscribers, then I imagine that Substack is something that I could make a living doing, then I start paying to join

Sarah Fay

’s workshops and listen with rapt attention to every strategy she suggests.

I get really bummed when she talks about what turns people paid because I don’t offer a “service.” My paid subscribers are paying $80 a year while writers who I think are much better and more popular than me are charging $35 a year. I change the price of subs but then I think if my paid subscribers find out what I’ve offered the new paid subscribers they’re going to be mad at me. I’m not worried that they’ll unsubscribe. That would be nice if they did. It would be a definitive action—something I could just know and grieve and move on about. I’m more focused on them just being out there spread across the country and the world, being mad at me.

So what I decide to do is comp their subscriptions for a year. Then this weird thing happens where Substack doesn’t send anyone including me a notification that this comp has taken place, so I just keep comping years from people’s subscriptions until some of them are comped all the way to 2026. The helpers at Substack tell me that there’s really nothing they can do to reverse this, which is fine because I have psychic crises about paid subscriptions anyways.

I still want to get paid for my writing though, so I decide I’m going to strategize and write stories that the paywall cuts off at exactly the moment when the reader wants to know more and then is compelled to pay. This strategy works and I collect more subscribers to replace the ones I’ve lost, but this other thing happens when I post something paywalled. I lose a handful of free subscribers!!

Then I decide I’m just going to serialize my memoir on here but only send it to paid subscribers and not to free because I don’t want to piss them off and have them unsubscribe. This means that hardly anyone reads my hooks and I get a long period of no one converting to paid. That’s when I say “fuck it,” hire a developmental editor, and focus all the strategizing on writing a book.

Because selling a book is easier than selling a subscription. So, thank you, Substack for making it so uncomfortable that I had to publish a book.

Nanowrimo Crow

“I’m not going to, but I could sue you.”

It’s one of those things that hits hard in the moment, reaches a crescendo in the middle of the night, and then as I share it with first my daughter and then my sister and then one by one, everyone who loves me, I check in to make sure I’m okay.

This is what the person said. They said my book was reality show trash and that I just get off scott-free in it. That I should have revealed more of my darkness, more of the things that I did when I was drunk. Is it true? Am I okay? Has everyone been reverse-gaslighting me into thinking I wrote a good book?

The morning after someone tells me the book is trash I ask my daughter, sister, and friend to go on a hike with me. They don’t know that I’m using them to get exercise and ensure that I’m not a trash-pedaling villainous writer without wisdom. They unwittingly assure me of this by navigating the hills at my side. We find a bag of rotting zucchini and tomatoes in my trunk. Every horse poops on the trail. Karli still hasn’t read my book. I think about the most embarrassing things in it. I didn’t hold back. I include a bad love poem because I thought it was important. I didn’t save myself from looking foolish.

I think it’s even more scary to admit the things you did when you were sober and can’t use alcohol as an excuse. I could have written a much longer and more juicy book about all the things I ever did when I was drunk. I could have started in adolescence and taken the reader all the way into the present, naming things that that I both did and would never do but did anyways. But I don’t know. I think that’s boring. What’s more exciting for me is what happens when you became conscious and aware and can’t escape yourself.

I think I’m okay.

We spend a day cutting our own hair and watching Love is Blind. I’m disappointed that Leo wasn’t included in the couples who got to continue being on the show because I think he’s a psychopath. And I’m not sure that Angelic girl who accepted his proposal is as sweet as she pretends to be. She has no idea how to captivate a man without her looks, completely breaks down and we are subjected to a series of scenes where she cries and pouts about it. Fascinating.

I keep coming back to this question of whether or not I am okay. Is it okay that I did this? I wonder how it would be to not be surrounded by people who love me. What if I got that message and went home to just my kitties and my books and comfortable furniture? I would be tossing and turning with that question.

I was on the balcony of a cruise ship with Grandma this summer. She paid for me to come along on through the middle passage of Alaska because she loves and likes me. She’s the one who passed down the love of books. We sat and watched the ocean as it rolled beneath us, and she told me the story of her mother’s last words. I see that I’m going to keep asking and answering the question and looking for assurance that I’m acceptable right up until the very end. All I can do is hope that the people who matter are the ones who stay by my side.

Right before she died, my great-grandma, Corky asked her daughter, “Am I okay?” The cancer had been taking her slowly, but now she was in hospice. She was holding on, clinging to what was left of life, sad and scared.

Grandma Carol looked into her mom’s eyes and said, “You’re wonderful. You’ve always been wonderful, and you’ll always be wonderful.”