What Happens in My Life Tomorrow
And What Happened in It Yesterday and Today
Hello, world. It’s the night before my book’s publication, which you already know against your will because I’ve been bothering you to preorder it—preorders are crucial to a book’s survival and an author’s ability to write and publish more books in the future! I don’t know why but this is what my publisher tells me!—from here, and here, and yes, even here. I’ve been yelling in circles, repeating myself again and again about how 100% of any royalties I earn will go to abortion funds and about all of the incredible people interviewed and cited within and blah blah blah, because that is what self-promotion is (no I do not enjoy it and yes I am very sick of myself).
Tomorrow, what I really want is for libraries (request it from your local library!) and bookstores everywhere to know that people read abortion books. People want abortion books, and more of them, and funny ones and literary ones and romantic ones and all kinds of other ones.
Yesterday, I opened a letter from an old friend’s wife, who had read the early reader’s copy of my book he’d received. The letter itself could make me weep just to remember it—she is a brilliant writer herself and also just a big-hearted, clear-eyed wonder of a person—but what really knocked me out was the gift she’d enclosed.
The bookmark she’d used. The (hand-made, because she’s an artist too, and a musician, just an all-around talented hot kind genius, it’s fine it’s whatever) bookmark that she’d used while reading my book. By mailing it to me when she finished, she instantly transformed the book from a static object to a moving, changing, still-occurring conversation between us.
Today, I drove an hour north to the Maine state house to support those testifying about their abortion experiences and their work in abortion care, walking some of them to their cars afterward through the crowds of Antis loudly praying, wearing t-shirts that said SPEAK UP FOR LIFE, carrying plastic baby dolls and hustling their real, crying babies and stressed out young children through the halls. Some wore Trump hats, some crucifixes, many had buttons and stickers bearing bible verses or slogans with the old familiar rhetoric. The kids make me the saddest.
As I drove, TIME Magazine published this essay I wrote, about why any state of pregnancy or unpregnancy, or transition between the two, is radical and amazing and deserves honoring—preferably with gifts! I love this illustration that Nikki Scioscia created for the piece:
Anyway, I was getting all these nice messages and texts about gifts people have given and received before/during/after their abortions, and before/during/after their miscarriages and stillbirths and divorces—the gifts I was hearing about!! And then I was watching people—many of them mothers and grandmothers, many of them young enough to be their children and grandchildren—give wrenching, vulnerable, brave testimony about their abortions, their families, their work, their lives. And—after they endured the absolute stupidest, cruelest, and most offensive questions delivered by some soulless trashbags in legislative clothing—we, their communities and organizers and supporters and patients and friends, gave them gifts.
Little ones, mostly. Cookies and chocolate and snacks and flowers and cards and hugs and company and escorts and quiet spaces to breathe in, closed doors behind which they could be surrounded only by safe people, when possible.
It was we—and not the sneering legislators who asked them about their “unborn children” or if they’d consider a one-month-old baby being murdered to be a crime (this one really thought he was making some kind of point)—who turned their testimony into a conversation.
We didn’t let their words and their stories hang in the air or be trampled on. We caught them, held them, gave them back and added our own bookmarks. I loved the part where you said xyz and You were so poised and graceful when that motherf*cker called your pregnancy xyz and you shut them down with the correction. Or just, I’m so glad you spoke. I could tell your story made an impact. Thank you for testifying.
Anyway. Catch my words tomorrow please.
Or—if you don’t have $18 or $20 (100% of my royalties will go to abortion funds!!! Don’t make me say it again!!!) or don’t feel like buying or borrowing another book or you’re just not that into my whole vibe—catch someone else’s words. Acknowledge them, be curious and ask questions, add your own words, hell, add a gift.
See you tomorrow, when I’m a published author of a book and you’re someone with whom I’m (still) having a (really, really good) conversation. If that’s the kind of thing you’re in the mood for.
Love you.
HAPPY PUB DAY!!!