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This stage of writing may be my favorite. The brush strokes are broad, but the shape of the thing is coming together. There are glimpses of ideas and images that are brilliant (I believe we need to tell ourselves we are brilliant more often, so yes, I am standing by that word — brilliant!!!!) that remind me of why I read and why I write.

Here’s the Thing: I Love June

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What do I love about June?

• Fireflies: I think one of the few things I miss about living in Vermont is the fireflies. (Vermont is a beautiful place, but I am not meant to be that far from the ocean, and I learned that the hard way!) In June, the world becomes green again, and the fireflies are rampant in the misty, still-cool nights. Fireflies are needlessly whimsical. How lucky are we to have them?

• Outdoor showers: The other day, the wind was BLOWING in Rhode Island. I’m talking 45 mph gusts. It was cold and windy, and the perfect time for an outdoor shower. It was a sensorial dream: the wind, the hot water, the soap suds, looking up at the powerful wind blasting through the trees. Outdoor showers make me think we are here to experience pleasure

• Swimming, even when it’s frigid: Growing up, my mother would often quote her father, who died before I was born but who was an ocean lover, a sailor, and a lifeguard. “The ocean cures all.” I’ve always found this to be true. All I need is to be submerged, to smell the salt, to feel the cold, to remind myself that I am alive, that I’m just a little drop in the ocean.

• First sunburns: Sunburns are not good. They are bad. However, I do love a little pink in my cheeks, a little dusting of freckles gifted from the sun. I like that sun-stoned feeling you get after being outside all day.

  

• A crispy cold white wine at the beach: I worked in restaurants for a long time, and I always loved wine service. I love to suggest a weird, esoteric white wine made by a female winemaker to people having dinner, and I love to drink said wine on the beach. A sip of white wine with salt water still on your lips from a cold swim? Forget about it!!!! I love her wine

• Disco Night!!!: Captain Nick’s Bar is featured prominently in JUNE BABY, and that is because I think it is a perfect dive bar. On Mondays in the summer, Captain Nick’s has disco night, and there is nothing quite like ripping up the dance floor to the Bee Gees after a long beach day. I love to dance!!!! I love the Bee Gees!

What do I love about JUNE BABY being out in the world?

• The messages from people who have felt seen by the novel: These mean so much more than you know. It is a beautiful thing when humans are vulnerable with each other. Thank you to the readers who have been vulnerable with me. I feel very privileged to hold your feelings <3

• When people who love Block Island say they feel the island was well represented: This matters to me SO MUCH!

• The discourse about Ruth and her journey as a character: I love conversations that highlight the complexity of women in fiction. Why?

  I love complicated women.

  I love to read about them, I love to write them, and I love to be friends with them. Writing to me has always been about not self-editing, about letting a character feel the full scope of their emotions, even at the risk of them being likeable. I do not strive to be likeable. I strive to be kind and true to myself, and I strive for my writing to be honest. I won’t lie and say it hasn’t been difficult at times. I always knew that Ruth and the book as a whole wouldn’t be for every reader, but I wasn’t prepared for how protective I would feel over the characters. It’s a new experience! One I am very privileged to feel (I am so lucky that so many people have read the book and have so many feelings and thoughts about it!!!!) but one that is new, nonetheless. I’m learning on the job each day!

  

• The people I have connected and reconnected with. I have truly felt so much love since JUNE BABY has come out. People I haven’t heard from in YEARS have reached out, and I feel like Ruth and JUNE BABY are connecting me to people in ways I could’ve never predicted. Thank you for that.

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JUNE BABY is officially a National Bestseller!!!!!! I can’t thank you all enough for the support and the love that you have shown this book. I poured all of my heart out into it. Thank you for receiving it so well. It is astonishing.

Click to buy JUNE BABY !

JUNE BABY was also listed in the New York Times Book Review’s “Summer’s Best Beach Reads” !!!!

To be on this list with these authors?!

Incredible.

In the two weeks since JUNE BABY has been out in the world, people have tagged me in and sent me pictures of the book on their beach blankets, and I have received wonderful messages from people who resonated with the story, from those it has frustrated, and from those who want to experience the beauty of Block Island.

Thank you for all of those messages.

What I’m listening to:

“Move on Up” first found me in the form of the movie Bend it Like Beckham, a movie that I, as a young, aspirational soccer girl, found incredibly formative and inspiring. Work hard. See what happens.

It is the best song to dance to when you need to get some energy moving, but also I tear up when I hear “remember your dream is your only scheme, so keep on pushing.” That is how I have felt these past ten years that I’ve been scraping and inching toward this goal. <3

Bird Theater:

Do you ever feel like you’re on a set? Sometimes I get this feeling like all the world really is a stage, and if I sit still enough for long enough, the characters come and go, and a whole tiny drama will unfold in the natural world, if you’re only looking close enough.

A book I read over the winter, Annie Dillard’s, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, is a lot about this — the dramas and theater of nature from the largest to the smallest scale. It is gorgeous, and it got me really interested in insects.

Four or five summers ago, I looked up one day and noticed a sturdy bird’s nest above our front door. There were a pair of gray birds with brown heads, and I caught their eyes as they huddled there, cozied up, before one of them swooped out, dove low, and then soared high onto a branch.

The birds are Eastern Phoebe’s. They have a small, round body — the kind that makes me wish I could know what it would feel like to cup one gingerly in my hand. I live on the second floor of a two-story house, which means the Phoebes and I are close to the canopies of branches that surround our New England home. I watch them flit from branch to branch, over my head, next to me, and away. I really do feel like I share the yard with them, and that is something that feels good to remember. We are sharing the world with others! Friends, strangers, critters, and insects alike!!

The Phoebes are a monogamous pair, and although it was the plan to remove the nest over that first winter (not my idea), we forgot, and when we learned that Eastern Phoebes live upward of NINE YEARS and often return to the same nest every spring, there was no way we could evict our neighbors.

Last summer, I was sitting on our deck and saw the babies take their first flight. It was the best theater I had been to in years.

We started the day at The Today Show, and I can’t believe I didn’t fall down from nerves, but I felt good! My wonderful team sat with me and gabbed about everything under the sun so that I didn’t have to think about being on live TV until I was actually sitting there on live TV. Thank you, !!!!

The launch event we held at the Music Hall Lounge was sold out!! I walked out onto the stage and saw a sea of my favorite people plus strangers standing in applause, and let me tell you. I will remember that image in my mind forever. I will not take it for granted.

Lara Prescott, the international bestselling author of THE SECRETS WE KEPT, was my moderator, and I loved our conversation. I’m so excited to get to talk about JUNE BABY!

I was recently talking to about how I had started a Substack, but I had let it fall off because I was confused about what it should be. I didn’t want to rob the ideas I have been marinating for my next novel to share in a weekly newsletter, but she encouraged me that it didn’t have to reflect those thoughts at all. It could be whatever I wanted.

So, I’m giving it another try.

My partner and I have this joke where I start a sentence with “Here’s the thing,” as a jumping-off point for a soliloquy.

I’ll say this, and he’ll interject with “You’re listening to ‘Here’s the thing’ with Shannon Garvey.”

So I’m going to start that. I’m not in the business of hot takes. I could never have a podcast, but I do have thoughts: a swirling witches’ brew of thoughts at all times!

So without further ado.

Here’s the thing: I think that (light) trespassing should be legal during lilac season.

The lilacs are out in their purple and white froth, and I cannot get enough!!! For what New England deprives us of during its long winters, it gives back to us in its fragrant flowers, fruits, and clouds of pollen.

I love to huff a lilac, and when I’m walking in my neighborhood, I will step a few feet into your yard if you have a lilac bush. That scent! Heavenly. I’ve also noticed lately that many a lilac bush is situated on the edge of a property, hanging over a fence and into the sidewalk. It was probably planted there for sun and street appeal, but I like to think that it might also have been planted there as a public service.

Come one, come all to enjoy these beauties, they seem to say.

Although their flowers and their scents are short-lived, their stalky and wild branches are the kind of bush I always imagined in fairytales. Ones that would hide enchanted houses and snag at your dress as you traipsed through the woods, Winnie Foster style.

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Speaking of Tuck Everlasting, while I have always been a wild brute who doesn’t like to be constrained in fancy clothes or think about being a woman in times more oppressive than this one (blurgh), I have always loved white linen Edwardian dresses. Think of the kind Alexis Bledel wore in the film adaptation.

Fun Fact: I rented this movie from the library one summer when I was nine (maybe?) so much that my mom had to beg the librarian to let me check it out again. It emotionally wrecked me, and I remember sitting in the cool of my basement by myself on a hot summer day thinking about Winne and Jess and the brevity of LIFE. I’d love to unpack more how much that novel/ movie meant to me sometime.

In my mind, I’m wearing a loose white linen dress and I’m climbing over your fence to smell your flowers.

So, if you see me on your lawn, maybe just let this one go. I won’t clip ‘em, I won’t steal anything other than a sniff.

Deal?

JUNE BABY!

Rolling her body like a stick, Sara held her arms out in front of her, and watched the water slide over her inner wrists, the blue veins move into the shadow of her dancing ligaments as she wiggled her fingers.

“I read somewhere that Whales — their whole bodies — are as sensitive as the skin on the inside of our wrists,” Sara said. Her words felt loud

The friend looked at her, confused.

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine being that huge,” Sara said now, leaning back so that she was floating, so that her ears were muffled with water. She spoke to the sky. “Imagine being so massive and so permeable, like a giant pulsing heart. You can hear for miles and you’re bigger than everything else you see.”

Sara had loved whales as a child, had wanted to be a marine biologist and study them in the wild, had imagined herself diving off boats bobbing in deep blue waters without fear. She was told in college that everyone wanted to study whales, that jobs were scarce, that the world was dying, and that it was a defeatist field to be in. Sara hadn’t wanted to listen, but she got bored in the introductory course that had mostly been all about mangroves and switched to the business school in her second semester because her mother said her cousin was in marketing and she “loved her job.” It had seemed like a temporary solution at the time, but that was ten years ago now.

She thought of the whale watch she took her last boyfriend on, how it had been her birthday but she had planned it, how they had followed a mother and a calf at a distance. Sara had watched the two tales lift in synchronicity and fall, had kept her eyes on the spot of disturbed water waiting for them to reappear, imagined how far the two had traveled side by side. She remembered the boyfriend complained they hadn’t seen much, how he had then gotten seasick on her shoes.

“Do you think that’s how fetuses feel?” the friend asked, laughing. “Like a giant beating heart-whale? Except they’re cramped.”

Lifting her head, Sara looked at the friend, confused, not getting the comparison. Turning away, she swam further out in the water toward the sun.

Sara’s period was four days late. She thought about her uterus and underwater, felt against the skin of her soft belly as if she could determine whether there was blood in there waiting to fall — she couldn’t. The friend started to say something else, but, diving under the surface, Sara cut her off and pulled against the water as it grew colder around her. She pulled herself deeper until the pressure built in her head and she grew scared of what else might be below with her. She remembered hearing once of dead deer washing up in this creek sometimes, of their fur matted, their bellies bloated, seaweed wrapped like braids around their long thin legs. And suddenly she felt like she did when she was a child, scaring herself at her thoughts of what was lurking in the basement, running up the stairs so quickly that she fell and skinned her shins, blood seeping out of the shallow scrape in slow, small dots like pores of an orange. Claustrophobic now in the water, she turned and rose as quickly as she could to the surface, her body jerking against the imaginary corpses floating around her, their bodies in her mind suspended in water.

Above the surface, all was sun and heat. She took rasping breaths of air and felt blinded. Her eyes were slow in adjusting to the world.

A rocky island sat far out in the distance, and as they swam toward it, their voices carried over the water.

“I can’t imagine being pregnant — having something growing inside you,” the friend said. Sara ignored her.

Nearby, a blue heron flapped its wings and landed on the outer branch of a pine tree. The bough shuddered, bending under the weight of the bird until slowly, all was steady.

When the women reached the island, they climbed onto the rocks, their bodies low and their arms reaching across the sharp terrain, trying to keep in control.

“I feel like the first fish that came to land — primordial,” the friend said to Sara.

They were careful not to touch the barnacles while they looked for the crabs that darted away into underwater crevices, wary of their presence. On land, it was so hot that the women’s skin began to dry instantly, patches of white salt rising from their legs and arms. They looked back and realized they had swum a long distance.

Two more swimmers occupied the rocky island in the center of the creek. A white-haired woman and man sat far apart from one another, as if they were worried about spreading disease. The two were dry from their time spent out of the water and seemed engaged in a deep conversation, barely acknowledging the women on the small, shared rock. Sara couldn’t help but feel she was intruding on something intimate, and soon Sara and The Friend crawled back down into the water and glided back out across the creek. Even as the day wore on and the swimmers left the rocky shore and the sun dipped under the tree line, the man and the woman were still sitting, their conversation unbroken.

Sara returned the next day to the same spot, alone this time, and waded out into the water. She felt the creek mud squelch between her toes. Turning to look at the island, Sara saw the white-haired woman and the white-haired man reclined in the same spot as they had been the day before. Sara couldn’t stop staring at them. It was almost as if they had never left. She imagined they had stayed up through the night talking on the rocky island, remaining still and waving their hands every so often as the water came up with the tide, reaching their toes. She imagined crabs growing bold and crawling over their bodies while the stars faded and the sun blossomed from gray to gold.

She looked for the heron to see if he, too, remained, the pine branch still swaying under the weight of the bird as it had been the day before, but it was not there. She turned over in the water and inhaled, watching her belly fill with air, feeling the way the water carried her, listening to the sound of her heart pulsing in her ears.

Yesterday, we revealed the cover with and ! Here she is!!!! I love her so much. I feel so honored that the designers nailed it so perfectly. To me, this feels like Block Island. The greens, the blues, the yellows!! The font!!!

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She feels like a book that will be at home with you on your beach blanket, in a coffee shop, sticking out of your tote, in your bicycle basket, coming with you to the park in your passenger seat, and that makes me feel so… comfortable.

The fact that I think it reflects the novel so well gives me such a comforting feeling. I can’t wait to hold it up high, cradled in a stack close to my chest. This novel took four years and a lot of work, and I can’t wait to see where she goes in the world.

Each step of this process is as surreal as the next, but there is something about seeing your name on the cover of your novel that is brain-breaking. My editor asked me on the phone yesterday if it’s starting to feel real, and I think I muttered something unintelligible, but the answer is maybe? A little? It’s pretty hard for it to feel real.

We sent the novel out to a list of writers hoping for blurbs in mid-September, and we’ve gotten a few incredibly kind words back. That makes it feel real. It’s my favorite part about writing: sharing words with others, seeing what stays with them, what feelings it produces, what conversations we can have about it. That’s the best.

“Amid white sand dunes and star-kissed nights, Shannon Garvey’s tender debut aches with longing as it explores how sometimes the idea of love can outlast love itself. With prose as resonant as a ship’s bell and twists that will keep you on the edge of your beach towel, June Baby is a layered, hopeful meditation on grief, second chances, and the home found within each of us. A sun-splashed, thought-provoking holiday between two covers.”— Emma Brodie, author of Songs in Ursa Major (Thank you so much )

I’ve been pretty quiet on here, which is not best practices, but I’m figuring it all out. I’m starting to write something new, and I really feel like a mental snail when that happens, retracting into my shell and rattling things around in my brain. I feel like I’m watering every thought, every image, every feeling, every experience in the safe space of my quiet, private mind to see what it might turn into, and writing here can feel like mining something that isn’t ready to come out of the earth yet. If I let it linger for longer, it will be something more sturdy, more fruitful.

In unrelated news, I’ve watched the new trailer for “Wuthering Heights” perhaps 73 times. The people who made that trailer did a GOOD JOB. I love when things are absolutely seeping with emotion, and that trailer has that feeling for me. I’ve been listening to “Chains of Love” nonstop. It’s helped me get into this new character in a way that had been eluding me for a few frustrating weeks.

I love finding a way into the story!!!!

For a week this summer, at the beginning of July, I was on Monhegan Island by myself. I was staying in a house converted into small apartments, but during my week of staying there, the house was occupied by only me. The apartment looked out onto a meadow of cattails and up the steep incline of the small island to the lighthouse at the highest point. Red-winged blackbirds trilled and hopped from cattail to cattail outside my window, each bird bobbing and ruffling their feathers as they landed until the reed settled beneath them.

Across the street, a couple was doing landscaping work on their house, heaving away stumps and discarded heavy metal that had rusted in the salt air and lingered in their front yard. Two white geese barked around them, and from my open windows I could hear as all the passersby stopped to comment on the pair of birds, which must have been a recent addition — everything new is of note on a tiny island and must be commented on by all who pass.

“Yeah, Carol doesn’t really like ‘em, but I think they will be good for the yard.”

The geese, Earl and Bess, would sometimes get confused and wander off their front yard and toward the beach. (There are two beaches on Monhegan: Swim Beach and Fish Beach. You swim at Fish Beach and you fish at Swim Beach. Don’t ask me why.)

It has been true for me that it has been difficult to savor the experiences of the past year.

I was working so hard, hoping, and gripping so tightly to get an agent, that when asked, my reply was that if I got an offer right that second, I would be running down the street naked in celebration. When it happened, however, I was unable to really feel it.

I told myself that many people get agents and don’t sell books — nothing was a guarantee. To celebrate then would be to show my hand too soon.

Then, when we went out on submission, and I woke up to an email with an offer from my incredible editor at Random House, I was still somewhat numb, and still clothed, not running down the street. It wasn’t that I wasn’t thrilled, but it was like I was still protecting myself from allowing it to be real. It might get taken away. They might change their mind. I told myself I wouldn’t celebrate until the ink was dry on the deal…. But then it was dry, and I was still having trouble believing it.

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I don’t know why I wasn’t able to feel in my chest my dreams coming true in front of me. I don’t know why it was so hard for me to feel like what had happened was mine, was because of me, that I had earned it, but this feeling continued throughout the editing process.

I tried to savor the experience, to remind myself that this was real, but while I was so grateful and the experience of editing the novel was so fulfilling and exciting, there was never a moment when I felt capable of feeling the truth of it, how big a deal this was for me.

So winter marched on toward spring and summer, feeling this way, and I shipped myself off to the island to work. I was listening to the squawks of Bess and Earl, the calls of the red-winged blackbirds, the curious scuttlebutt of passing neighbors, and the wind rustling the wildflowers in the vase on the table in front of me, when I got an email from Sarah Austin Jenness from The Moth.

At first, I thought it was the emails for The Moth that I regularly get. The ones that are sent out to all subscribers about upcoming events, but the subject heading for the email was “Good News for Shannon!”

Good news for Shannon?? I opened it.

She was writing to let me know that the story I had performed in Boston was going to be on the Moth Radio Hour. In that instant, I felt what I had been waiting to feel for nearly a year, and I began to cry, the salty air blowing in the window.

The story I told in Boston was about how an act of generosity from a stranger gave me the push I needed to commit to trying to make it as a writer. At the time, I was in my senior year of college, about to graduate with a degree in Neuroscience and Behavior, but all I wanted to do was spend time at the coffee shop/ bookstore I was working at and talk about writing and books with my growing group of creative friends. It was the first time that I felt like I was being welcomed into a group of people who loved to read — who loved words, writers, and artists — who lived their lives in pursuit of deep feeling and creative freedom.

It felt like home to me.

Around this same time, I was listening to The Moth every week, often on drives up to northern New Hampshire, up towards the mountains on dark and cold nights. It was the beginning inklings of my aspirations to live as a writer, to work as a writer, to see if I could make this dream come true. The Moth was a representation of that life to me.

So, the wind was blowing through the window, the geese were barking, and I was crying.

It hit me at that moment that that hopeful 21-year-old making cappuccinos and scanning books bet on herself correctly. I felt such deep gratitude to that younger me with the regrettable bangs for taking this chance, for working these nine years towards this goal, inching in this direction, clawing toward the life I wanted to be living.

After quickly responding to the email with joy and gratitude, Sarah Austin Jennes asked what I was up to now, and I was able to share the news that my debut novel would come out in May 2026 — that I was editing it as we spoke.

The feeling continued to stay with me — the longest it has yet — as I left the apartment, waved to Earl and Bess, and walked up the dirt road to the lighthouse. Sitting on the top of the island, looking out at Manana and the ocean, I allowed myself to savor, really for the first time, how far I had come in the nine years since that story took place.

Although it is hard for me to say out loud, and even harder to put down into words, I was proud of myself in that moment. I am proud of myself.

The episode is really special. The other stories are moving, funny, and human — as all Moth stories are. If you give it a listen, I hope you enjoy it.

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It has taken me a few weeks to publish this post. I have written it, abandoned it, revisited it, and hated it. When I started this Substack, it was my intention to tell the story of writing the novel, and the season of my mother’s breast cancer is a part of that story. I know that. She knows that. It is the truth, but writing about it in this quasi-essay felt almost repulsive to me. Making meaning out of it, even when there was meaning that was very much made out of it, felt wrong. Making the words sound nice and bringing the arc around, even when there was an arc that I felt occur within my chest in real time, made me sit on the words, not wanting to share them.

Here goes,

I started what would be JUNE BABY in the summer of 2022. Those days, I was writing longhand and was finding my way into my main character’s heart and mind midmorning, before waiting tables.

I have often found the feeling of writing to be as if I was moving through a house. Sometimes, the door to the next room is obvious to me, but sometimes I find myself in a room and it isn’t clear how I find my way out of it. It’s as if I can see a party outside, through the window that I want to go to, but it isn’t really clear how I get there, or if I can even get there. The window? I try it, but it is too high or it won’t open wide enough for me to get through gracefully. I may spend a few days in that room looking until I finally notice the door. It’s right where it should be. It’s as if the door has always been there, but I was only just able to see it.

These bursts of clarity in writing are joyous. They can also be difficult. Sometimes, you know where the door is, but you’re not ready to walk through it.

In those early days of writing my novel, it became clear to me that the story hinged on my main character, Ruth, having lost her mother when she was young to cancer. I don’t know why this became a fact of the story, but it was. That was the pain that formed my character.

But even though the door was in front of me, I was reluctant to walk through it. I didn’t want to imagine what that pain might feel like, didn’t want to familiarize myself with the ins and outs of cancer treatment, didn’t want to put myself in the mindset of going through that with my own mother. I tried to find other ways out of the room, but none of them worked. The door remained the door.

I am not generally a patient person in life. Sometimes it feels like there is a thrumming, dramatic motivation within me to get where I want to go, to seize the day. But when I am writing, I find that I am calmer with myself, more trusting that the solution will arrive if I try a few methods, if I look around the room enough, if I don’t get down on myself for not already knowing where the door is. It will come. It will show itself to me.

Reading the above sounds to me like the videos that my algorithm is feeding me these days — videos of beautiful women with mountains for backdrops, or arranging flowers in a gorgeous kitchen, or acting coquettish with the camera as they bring an Aperol spritz to their lips, a European ocean behind them. They tell me to trust myself, that everything works out the way that it should. ‘Believe us, and you’ll end up somewhere beautiful like this,’ they seem to say.

This is not something I walk around believing. It would be nice to have that zen, that trusting clarity, but unfortunately, I generally prefer the overthinking route to life — the turning of things over and over in my mind.

I think that writing a novel requires both of these qualities. I certainly know that I wouldn’t have written JUNE BABY if I wasn’t turning over my mother’s cancer, the weighted choices of one’s late twenties, motherhood, and the loves we get to take with us vs. the ones we need to leave behind, in my mind.

I also wouldn’t have written JUNE BABY if I didn’t have the patience to sit in the room, at the page, and trust that the door would arrive when I was unsure of what happened next, to experience the joy and the clarity and the peace that I feel when a new door would appear, and to know if I were to walk through it, the story would unfold with more clarity in front of me.

It was late February when my mother called me to tell me that the tumor was, in fact, cancerous. The rest of the information would follow sometimes like a torrent it was impossible to stay afloat on, and sometimes like a trickle.

The tumor was small enough to be categorized as stage one, but it had grown outside of the duct and was therefore considered invasive. There would be surgery, there would be chemo, and there would be radiation.

My mother and I are very close, and it felt, in some fucked up way, like I had manifested this, like my thinking about it had brought it about. Beyond that, my unfortunate imagination was running through every scenario, playing it out in vivid detail — the fear and the pain she was going through, the possibility of a recurrence, imagining her hair falling out, her inability to ride her bike or sail, the things that fuel her life.

I was teaching a college course, taking my own classes, working at the restaurant three nights a week, and I was crumbling through all of it. The classes I was taking felt hollow, like a waste of time. Reading and writing felt far from me, and at the restaurant, I felt so fragile, like I would break any second, and often escaped into the walk-in cooler, my sobs condensing in front of me.

It was the first time I found myself in a therapist’s office looking for advice on how to cope with what I was feeling and how to help my mom.

“Well, what does your mom say she needs?” the woman asked.
“She said she doesn’t need anything,” I replied.
“Then you have to respect her wishes,” she said.

While that is usually baseline and sage advice, it felt like a window to me and not a door. People close to me implored me not to emotionally take on what was “not mine,” and to listen to what my mother said she wanted.

But I knew my mom. I knew that even if she needed someone to be there, she would hesitate to ask. She might not ask at all. I knew that asking for friends and family to come to her appointments would make it more real, would be to admit more deeply that she had cancer, that she was going through something hard. I could see her telling my dad she didn’t need him, and because he loves her and respects her, he would listen to what she said.

I love and respect my mom too, but I’m also more stubborn than my father is.

The door appeared, despite professional advice, and the certainty of what I would do settled into my chest.

I would be there for all of it.

I was obstinate in knowing that my mom needed me by her side, and it didn’t take long to understand that I was right. I could see — could sense — her become more at ease when I arrived at the house, when we talked about our plan for the appointments, when I packed a small cooler of snacks for the five-hour-long chemo drip — not that she ever ended up wanting any.

I sped down 95 at 80 mph from New Hampshire to Rhode Island Hospital to sit with her in the waiting room, to take notes when they changed her chemo treatment because of an allergic reaction that left her unable to breathe and convulsing in her chair. I sprayed her hair down as it thinned and fit the cold cap on her head, moved the ice packs to prevent neuropathy on and off her hands when it became too much, and tried my best to be there for her.

When she sat in the chair and glared at the wall, turning her head as far from the red chemicals dripping from the bag, I could tell that it was good that it was just me here. She didn’t have to put on a face or pretend that she was fine for my dad, for my brother, for her friends. We didn’t have to talk about it, and that was OK with me, as long as she knew that if she wanted to, she could.

At some point early on in the process, she told me that she wanted me to write about it. She said that so many people went through this, that it would be a good thing for me to see, to know about. I didn’t tell her about my novel, about Ruth’s mother, until long after she was in the clear, but it was like somehow she knew.

And after her last chemo session, she thanked me for being there. She said, “I think you knew.”

I know that it sounds like I am patting myself on the back for being there for my mom — the bare minimum — but I am, in fact, patting myself on the back for going through the door, even when people were telling me that it was the wrong way to go. In writing, these moments may be clear, but in life they are often more confusing; there may be many doors, and all of them could be the “right” one.

That summer did fuel the book, and what I learned during that time did bring me closer to my mother, to my character, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, it would bring me closer to Block Island too.

I am happy to report that my mom is as healthy as they come :)

In a move that many might find insane, I keep my passport in my wallet at all times. Like a talisman of preparedness, it has accompanied me closely since it first arrived in the mail. Because of these close quarters, it is sand-encrusted as most of my belongings become — sand in the pages, in the binding, ground into the grooved blue cover. The pages are coated in red nail polish from a purse explosion event.

It’s a type B passport.

I got it when I was lucky enough to study abroad in Florence ten years ago. In college, I bounced around the sciences for a while until I landed on majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior. I was relatively happy there. It was challenging, it put to use all of my biology and chemistry classes, it stimulated me. I loved thinking about the brain, about why people do what they do. But there was a loud part of me that wondered what it would be like to dive headfirst into the arts.

In Florence, that’s what I did. I took an eight-hour oil painting class, a travel writing course, an Italian course, and a Renaissance History course taught by a man named Marcello Bellini, who wore black turtlenecks every day and took us on walking tours throughout the city to the foot of Machiavelli’s corridor and the church where Michelangelo studied corpses in the basement in order to master the curve of every muscle, the texture of skin.

It was heaven, and made me realize the arts were for me.

But in snowy New Hampshire, months before departure, I organized my schedule in Florence so that all my classes were in the morning, thinking I could use the afternoons to wander across the city, to explore all that I could with the friends I would make. I imagined 3 p.m. glasses of wine at small cafés, visiting museums, sitting on the wall overlooking the Arno together.

I learned quickly that I had miscalculated. Everyone else, in anticipation of going out late into the night, scheduled their classes for the afternoon and evenings.

This meant two things:

1. I would go to class at nine after being out until four some nights.

2. I had my afternoons free, and mostly free by myself.

Don’t be too sad for me — all those things I imagined still happened with my housemates, who I came to quickly love, but there were many hours when my apartment would be empty, and I would strike out into the city alone.

Examining the worn passport spurred me to pull out the journal I kept while I was studying abroad. I have kept a journal on and off since I was seven. These days, I write three pages every morning. The days I miss are usually the days that go awry.

It is very rare that I read my old journals. Usually, it is too potent to read my old thoughts and worries. While reading this one, I couldn’t help but notice the loose handwriting and the occasional use of pencil (never would I ever do that now). But what struck me the most was the lightness of the writer, the gratitude with which she looked around, and how much she was reveling in her solitude.

March 18, 2016
I’m sitting in the grass at Le Cascine down by the river. It’s 67 degrees and feels like summer. My ghostly pale legs that look like they’ve never seen the sun are free and out for the world. A man is fishing over the lazy river to my right and I am happy. I’m in love with spring. The most amazing things happen in spring. Everything is heightened and important. The sun is stronger, the grass is softer. I thrive off of being alone. It is when I challenge myself and feel most at peace.

She makes me smile — sweet Shan.

I realized upon reading this entry how much this has been a through-line in my life, more than maybe I’ve fully realized before.

I’ve never been antisocial, but I have always enjoyed solitude.

We had a swing set in the backyard that was away from the house growing up, and as a kid, I would take my cassette out and swing while listening to The Sound of Music soundtrack, singing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” aloud to the trees, watching the world rise and fall as I pumped my legs.

I could do this for hours. I have a very clear memory of my fingers growing stiff from cold, smoke rising out of our chimney from a fire inside as my dad and brother watched the Patriots game. I liked looking at the house from the outside, liked noticing the light from inside the kitchen growing more opaque the darker the evening grew, liked watching my family move around. I felt separate but together.

As an adult, and now a working writer, I feel like I am always working to carve out this time. I have found that it can be hard to rationalize this solitude in adulthood. It can be hard to describe its importance to others. I’m aware that taking alone time is often thought of as selfish, as lazy, or sad. It can be hard to separate this societal pressure put on women to give, give, give of their time from my own reality — one where I have cultivated the ability to take alone time. I have zero dependents, and sometimes I still feel the guilt…. I would love not to. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I accept.

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I dream about a studio separate from the house, one that has a lock on the door, one where the sun comes in through the windows where I can create collages of artists I love, one where my mess can spill across the floor in papers, sticky notes, piles of books. I will wake before the sun and trudge through the snow to get to that front door with a pot of coffee in hand and the moon high above me and watch through the window from my computer as the world lightens — or, as Toni Morrison puts it, “watch the light come.”

Listen, I don’t know what a therapist would have to say about all of that alone time — perhaps this isolation is some kind of indulgent self-protection from the anxieties of life, from the work of connection, but I know that I wouldn’t write anything without it. Writing requires a lot of time to wander, even if only mentally.

Considering it from a purely logistical standpoint, this is even more true. When I was editing JUNE BABY and working a 9–5, it meant I was in bed by 7:30 p.m., asleep by 8, and awake by 4:30/5 a.m. to get a few solid hours in before I had to be in the office. There were months when I saw very little of my friends and family, but I did see a lot of sunrises.

I’m not a monk. The rigidity of this routine definitely grew tiring after a while (not to mention how much my body didn’t like sitting at a computer for that length of time — more on this later). I missed laughing with my friends, I missed traveling, but there is also a lot of freedom in that solitude — creative freedom.

My novel is the progression of those hours spent alone on the swing, spent alone wandering across Florence, spent alone working on Block Island. It is where my mind can be most at play, most curious, most nonjudgmental.

Even if you’re in a café full of people, writing is you alone with the blank page.

If you give your mind the space and time to wander uninterrupted, what will come up?

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This summer, I’ve been barreling toward finalizing my novel, going through rounds of edits with my incredible editor. What were once just words in my head will soon make their transition to words on a physical page, printed in a book, sitting on a shelf for all to read. As I read each sentence and the summer marches on, I am increasingly aware of this fact, of the finality of it.

Beyond the edits, I turned 30, quit my job, started wearing a cotton nightgown that makes me feel like a Victorian-era ghost around the house, took back up with THE ARTIST’S WAY, and dove into as many waves as possible.

I’ve yearned to make something lush and summery, to buy fresh cherries or blueberries from the farm stand and bake them into a pie, but it’s been so hot this summer, and the weeks have run away from me so quickly that each time I find myself back among the fruit, my vision requires change: cherry season is over, blueberry season has passed, the bright blue pint containers have dwindled until they’re gone, and the buckets of firm peaches have grown fewer until all that remains is the soft, punctured flesh of the overripe and past gone. The parade of fruit continued until yesterday, when I went and found the bins filled with squash. Small pumpkins stood on the railings, and the first of the Macintosh apples sat next to the heirloom tomatoes.

Summer is fleeting. Blueberry season will not hold. I should’ve learned the lesson better the year before.

The final edits for my novel are due on September 1. As of today, there are nine days remaining to button up all that I can, to scan and kill any cliches, to streamline every sentence, to question every word.

I’m gearing up to say goodbye to the world I created in JUNE BABY, a world I have lived inside with growing intensity for three years now.

Which made me think of why I started this novel in the first place.

I started this novel because I wanted to live inside of it.

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The first semester of my MFA had come and gone. Nothing I had written so far in the program felt like me. There were bits that I thought were good, but I didn’t feel anything for it.

So when I started writing Skinny Legs, the spark that I felt in the language, in the unfolding world of the island, let me know that I was onto something — something that I at least found interesting, found beautiful. I felt like I could really drop into the scene, could feel the deck of the boat beneath my feet, could see the orange, heat-wave sun barreling down the island road.

The world was beautiful, lush, and tormented. It was February around that time, but in my mind I could hear the crickets of late August, could feel the thick summer air as the character traversed the island in the dark.

My novel’s plot is far from that story, but it is set on the same island — Block Island, a place I have romanticized since I was a child, the sun setting behind it as the ferry took us day trippers away toward the mainland. Little me wondered about the lives of the lucky people who got to stay there, who got to see the island change from day to night.

So here is a glimpse ahead into publishing your novel. You will write many, many different drafts before you send it out—with your agent, with your editor. I think, when all is said and done, I will have gone through five with my editor, two with my agent, and at least four by myself, although I wasn’t counting at the time. That’s roughly eleven drafts within the same world, exploring more and more deeply the same pains, the same characters, working to sharpen their arcs, improve the structure, and evoke a feeling.​

Beyond that, I must’ve read the novel… I have no idea, but I’m going to guess something like a hundred and fifty times.

​The point being... You have to fucking love your book, OK?

You have to want to sit down and enter that world every single day.

You have to care about those characters enough to read about their same mistakes, hopes, pitfalls, and dreams a million times over — and still feel it.

You have to want to spend the time (when all is said and done, from first inklings to publication date, four years for me) in your novel, in your character’s mind, thinking like them.

So you should pick a world that you like, you should pick a hero that you love, and you should listen to the small sound in you when something is working, when you feel that there is something more to that short story you wrote, to that song you keep singing in your head, to that idea that you think has something to it. Don’t want to put it down? Don’t.

Because if you can’t stop thinking about it, then it’s likely that someone else out there might feel the same way.

Not to mention the love that it requires to push through the pain of rejection. When you know that you have something special, when you still enjoy sitting down to read it again and again, it gets easier to take “Thanks so much for submitting. Ultimately not for me,” and keep moving.

Note: this does not apply to constructive criticism. Please do listen to constructive criticism. We will talk about this next week, perhaps.

As August winds down, I will be spending some of my last mornings in the manuscript for JUNE BABY. I will be eating the last of the peaches. I will likely not be baking anything.

I will try very hard to savor the experience.

Go eat a peach.

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Welcome to Cloudbusting — a 30-year-old woman’s take on writing, querying, and selling her debut novel, JUNE BABY, to the publishing imprint of her dreams — Random House.

In this newsletter, I hope to share what it took to get me to this point — the choices, the struggles, the early mornings, the burnout, the panic, the joy, and all the small things I have learned along the way.

When I was going through the years leading up to getting *the offer*, I was starving to hear about what it was like on the other side, what might happen, how it all unfolded for others. I was obsessed, (note: we will talk about this phase of obsession) and couldn’t get enough nuggets of hope from reading about what it was like for other people.

Which brings me to the main caveat here: This is just one woman’s experience, one woman’s process, a window into one woman’s overactive imagination, and what one woman wishes she had done differently in hindsight. There are many more qualified and exhaustive descriptions of the debut experience out there: from seasoned authors, rockstar agents, and dream editors.

So why add my voice to the chorus?

I hope only to offer another story to bolster your efforts and share what worked for me along the way. I hope it makes you feel like there is someone out there who has felt how you are feeling now. I hope it makes you smile. I hope it brightens your day, and if you learn something, then blow me down!

Why Cloudbusting?

When I was in the trenches of querying, I had had a few bites for the full manuscript, but was living each day waiting (note: we will talk about waiting) for my phone to buzz, waiting for that one email I was spending all of my time thinking about to come through. To make this waiting easier, I would blast “Marry the Night” by Lady Gaga.

I would pour my energy into screaming, dancing, and crying all of my feelings out into the song. The dance was a hard, pounding, punching, writhing dance so that I was out of breath when it was over — spent.

When I got a rejection, it revved me back up. I interpreted the words and the grit of that song as how I felt about getting my book published. Listening to the passion that Gaga sings with, I thought, I am going to make this happen no matter what. I’m going to strive and drive myself into oblivion, making this happen. I am going to marry the night of the process. I’m going to leave nothing on the field.

That intensity worked for me for a while, but over time, and after many rejections, the song had a gripping feeling that became too much. It had acquired a bitterness to it after so many dances that felt like it was wearing me down and not lifting me up.

Around that time, two other songs came into my life: “Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush and “The Long Way Around” by the Chicks.

I know I’m getting a little woo-woo already here on this first post, but in this one woman’s experience, there is definitely synchronicity and forces out of your control when it comes to achieving your dreams.

These songs were different.

There was a lightness to them, a looseness to them that comforted me.

Like the Sun coming out Ooh, Something good is going to happen. I don’t know when, but just saying it could even make it happen…

And I'm getting it back on the road now, but I'm taking the long way, taking the long way around…

When I danced to those songs in my bathroom, it felt like a surrender instead of a grip, and while I know that that grip is part of what got me that far, it was time to surrender. If I knew I was going to make it happen, even if it took a long time, then I could relax, I could loosen the grip, I could believe in the promise I was making to myself. I keep my promises.

And right around that time, things started to turn. Suddenly, a friend of my brother offered to show my manuscript to his literary agent mother — a connection???? And while it didn’t work out, I felt closer than ever, and then there was the day when an agent emailed over the weekend to say they couldn’t stop reading my manuscript, then there was the first call when someone talked to me for OVER AN HOUR about how much they loved my novel, when they offered representation (!!!), then there was the next two weeks, the flurry of agents who hadn’t gotten back to me who eagerly wanted to read the manuscript, and finally there was the day that I signed with my now agent.

These songs got me through being on submission, I danced out my jitters before every big Zoom call with my editor and with my team, and I still do because the debut process CONTINUES!

Let’s get to cloudbusting :)

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