I spent the summer killing my darlings. Hundreds of them. Some went quietly; they knew what they did; they had it coming. Others required more violence. After more than three decades as a professional writer, I decided it was time to collect some of my favorite essays for a book. How hard could that be? I’ve already written the damn things. All I had to do was gather them up, slap a cover on the pile, and call it a day.
My forthcoming essay collection, Quite Contrary (the name of my first newspaper column in the 1990s), began with an expedition through 30 years of writing, including hundreds of columns, newspaper articles, blog posts, and assorted observations about politics, motherhood, religion and pop culture.
The most recent excavation involved around 750 pieces from my years writing for Splice Today, where I’ve been a contributor since 2012. That’s a lot of opinions for one woman to have. I realized there were two books: one, a beachcombing memoir with sea glass material and stories from shorelines combined with my mental health experiences, and the early essays or “prequel” to that era of my life. I combed through every essay, assigning them to one of four categories: Quite Contrary, memoir, “?”, or cut. The maybe pile became a literary purgatory; one thought is to collect essays into an e-book I could send as bonus content to people who buy one of the other books. The cut pile grew at an alarming rate.
Initially, I was fairly generous with myself. I’d written these pieces under deadline, while raising four children, running a household, and attempting to maintain sanity: my patient publisher who’s receiving the book to write the forward might confirm I don’t miss deadlines even for family deaths and certainly not for “vacations.”
Some essays I remembered fondly turned out to be mediocre; I’ve never pretended to be a literary beacon. Others I’d completely forgotten surprised me with their clarity or humor. Some were so tied to the news cycle that reading them now required a working knowledge of political scandals and celebrity controversies nobody remembers. One or two stories I’d forgotten brought tears or made me feel sorry for the woman who wrote them.
The biggest challenge was determining what deserved to survive. I wasn’t interested in producing a greatest-hits collection based on popularity or nostalgia. I wanted essays that could stand alone, pieces that still had something relatively worthwhile to say years after publication. My first assembled manuscript contained 165 essays and more than 124,000 words. That’s a substantial book, particularly when yours truly weaves tangents about everything from Catholic guilt to reality television.
I eliminated essays that revealed more about my children than I felt comfortable sharing. They’ve grown into adults with their own lives and didn’t expect to have mom’s observations about their childhoods preserved. I cut dated entertainment reviews, repetitive political commentary, and pieces that simply weren’t strong enough.
The process was surprisingly emotional. Every essay represented a moment in my life, a deadline met, an argument made, a story told. Cutting them occasionally felt like erasing a little piece of my history. But I also found it liberating; like trimming pottery on the wheel; each refinement gives the piece a sleeker profile.
Now the manuscript is headed to my longtime editor, Russ Smith, whom I’ve asked to write the foreword. I still have an introduction to write. After spending months deciding what I wanted to say over 30 years, I have to explain why I said it.
Why did I become a writer? I’ll cover that in my current deadline: the introduction for Quite Contrary, releasing next month (at the sea glass festival).