Crying in Barnes and Noble

Photo by Joel Lee

I tear up when I browse through bookstores. Not in an obvious way to others, but in an excruciatingly nagging way, as if just a fraction less of self-control will send me over the edge - have me sobbing amongst the stacks of my local Barnes and Noble, or God forbid, in the trendy atmosphere of Myopic or Quimby’s. Crying in a chain bookstore seems reasonable; crying in an indie bookshop, that’s just desperate.

I cry because seeing the books, en masse, makes me feel helpless. Here lies all these people, neatly in a row--they’ve all managed to compile, streamline, edit, condense, craft, formulate, narrate, grind, print, collaborate, bind, present. I sit with my work scattered among journals, and cut-off essays saved as first sentences, within my Microsoft Word’s targeted save folder. I’m writing three books right now. Similar to my reading style, I cannot lock in on just one project at a time. I’m usually reading anywhere between three to seven books simultaneously, sometimes putting them down for months at a time, yet seemingly able to pick up right where I left off whenever I’m ready to return. Rarely, a book will grasp me with such a hold that I must read it cover to cover instantly. This typically happens with memoirs or non-fiction essay collections, which are my favorites. I don’t like reading fiction, unless I can tell the “fiction” of it all is probably for liability purposes. I’m constantly searching for that next book, buying dozens I won’t read for months, in hopes that first paragraphs will bind me to their pages with that fever I crave.

I flip-flop through my personal writing projects daily, opening one file after another, sometimes churning out a dozen pages into one document, then I won’t open that one again for another four months. Usually, if I finish an essay in one sitting, I publish it to GRLCHLD immediately, get it out of my hair and out of my system. I don’t keep track of what I’ve published, and I don’t dare go back to read my own work, so I often worry I’m being redundant. This is probably why I write so frequently in a present tense.

Today, I bought an acquaintance’s new book. A huge, glossy looking hardback published by Pantheon, and sure to be on a variety of ‘Best Of’ lists over the next year. This sent me over the edge. I began to feel a sting in my eyes as I lifted it off the shelf, opening the back cover to reveal the familiar face of the author’s photo, whom I had last seen the likeness of in person, on her rooftop in Brooklyn. Three years ago, we sat in conversation in a group of four women, attempting to coordinate a trip that ultimately never left the subsequent group chat. I don’t remember where we were planning on going, or why, but I do remember discussions of the book. Said book was always a topic when running into each other, and when I met this acquaintance, the book was already three years in the making. That’s the thing about writers, there’s always a book, but sometimes you don’t really believe it until they’re sending you a copy in the mail, or you stumble across it in the wild while browsing. You get so used to hearing about the book, it feels like running into a friend’s partner you’ve never met, while knowing all the gory details from one party’s side.

I started crying because it was real. Not a hypothetical anymore, not “working on a book,” not a Google Doc with a promising title sitting untouched for eight months. Real enough to exist beneath fluorescent lighting, surrounded by the familiar smell of a massive chain store. Real enough to even have a barcode.

I knew it had taken years. Something about that felt deeply validating.

I think I have a tendency to imagine books as having arrived fully formed inside the minds of people more disciplined than myself. As though somewhere out there exists a species of person capable of sitting down each morning at the same hour, opening the same document, steadily constructing a life’s work with the consistency of someone laying railroad tracks. I imagine these people drinking water out of reusable bottles that never smell like mildew. Responding to emails. Remembering special occasions without the use of their iPhone’s calendar alerts.

But the reality is probably much uglier than that. Years of tabs left open. Years of moving commas around. Years of abandoning drafts, resurrecting them, changing titles, reading old passages with either unbearable embarrassment or sudden flashes of tenderness toward the self who wrote them. Years of saying “I’m working on a book” while secretly fearing you may simply be the kind of person who works on books, endlessly, without ever producing one.

Holding that $30 hardback in my hands, I realized the difference between me and the authors lining those shelves may not actually be talent, intellect, or even clarity of vision. It may simply be tolerance for the middle distance. The willingness to continue existing inside something unresolved. The willingness to stand in the embarrassment. Something I can do well in some contexts (*cough* social media), but cannot in most others.

I think this is what scares me most about publishing a book. Not the writing itself, but the sustained confrontation with oneself required to finish it. Essays can be expelled. Diary entries can be scanned and pasted in their imperfect form, and I can even call that “art.” A post can be deleted by morning, but a book becomes an artifact. A fixed point. A version of you that can no longer evolve in real time alongside you. Perhaps this is why bookstores make me emotional. They are full of evidence that people once felt as scattered, fraudulent, and unfinished as I do now, yet still managed to turn themselves into something digestible.

I sometimes wonder how many unfinished books exist invisibly inside any given bookstore. How many abandoned drafts sit beneath the polished ones on display. How many authors once stood exactly where I stood, quietly losing their shit in the memoir section, convinced everyone else possessed some innate organizational capability they themselves lacked. Maybe the difference is simply that some people keep returning to the draft. Maybe a book is less a product of certainty than one of recurrence.

I walked out of the store carrying the hardback in my bag with an unexpected feeling of relief. Not inspiration, and not envy either. Something closer to permission. Permission for the work to take years. Permission for it to exist in fragments before it exists as a whole. Permission to continue embarrassing myself privately.

After all, every book in that building was once invisible too.