This fever
Hi friends,
I’ve been obsessively rewriting the first novel I ever wrote—which was, as most first tries are, embarrassingly bad—so much so that I put it in a metaphorical drawer seven years ago, and didn’t look at it again.
Until August 19.
When my agents were like “We want to read it!” and a panic-fever burned through me and I rewrote 95% of it—95,000 word, in six weeks (!)
It’s better than it was but still… I don’t know.
I wrote the novel the first time after my mother had her fourth stroke—the one that debilitated her, that changed her in ways I’m still unraveling—and I was staying with her while she recovered.
(She didn’t recover.)
(But these are the words we use about health and hospitals and dementia, even though they are not the right ones.)
While I was helping my mother, my body refused to adjust to being on the east coast, so I was awake until 4am every night, and what else was I doing? Might as well take a stab at the great American novel!
The woman who was my …