Amy Waldman / Features / Untitled Books

Amy WaldmanSMALL c Pieter M. van Hattem 2011.jpg

At night, my first reading, then drinks at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Someone has a galley of the new Murakami novel, 1Q84. It is passed to me, and minutes elapse, during which I am inhaling sentences, before I notice the silence: everyone at the table is watching me... read.

Photograph: © Pieter M. van Hattem

Amy Waldman

"Amy Waldman is the national correspondent at The Atlantic. An expert on the Muslim world and the many faces of the War on Terror, Waldman recently launched her debut novel, The Submission, and is still trying to figure out how her 80-page scrap turned into a 300-page book."

Sunday

The publication date for my novel is two days off. With extravagant and mostly toothless glee, my 13-month-old daughter walks for the first time, as if to say, "Take that, Mom - there are things much, much more impressive than writing a book." Her twin brother is unimpressed by either of us. He prefers to be carried.

I try on, for my husband, a dress I bought for my upcoming book party. He looks at me in horror and says, "You're not going to wear that, are you?" I had bought the dress because, in addition to being beautiful, it had buildings silk-screened on it, and one of my novel's main characters is an architect. But my husband - who often saves me from myself - points out that something about the confluence between the buildings and the folds of the dress suggest the ruins of the World Trade Center, whose destruction (and the resulting competition to build a memorial) are at the heart of my novel. He's right. Maybe, in some macabre region of my subconscious, that's what drew me to the dress. What kind of subconscious is that? One that should be, like the dress, stuffed away in the closet.

Monday

The book party is tonight, and, as usual, I have terrible pre-party anxiety. Yet I find that worrying about my book's publication makes me forget about the party entirely, even as worrying about the party makes me forget the book. I resolve that in future I will have all my anxieties come in pairs, so that one can distract me from the other.

The party, to my surprise, is great fun, a lot like a wedding, with old friends and random attendees, except that my husband's toast this time dwells on his "romantic rival," also known as The Book. Everyone with an iPhone or Blackberry is approaching, device held out like they want to read my barcode, to ask if I have read Michiko Kakutani's review in the next day's New York Times, or if I want to. I don't. At the end of the night, as I finally relax, my best friend from high school reads it aloud without asking. That's what friends are for.

Tuesday

Regret the fun of the previous night, since I have to leave my house at 7am for a radio interview. I am ushered into the studio with the utmost consideration and warmth, then, when the interview ends, hurried out like an ignominious interloper, left to find the exit on my own. Publishing a book is like that: every time something swells your head, you can be sure a humbling is around the corner.

At night, my first reading, then drinks at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Someone has a galley of the new Murakami novel, 1Q84. It is passed to me, and minutes elapse, during which I am inhaling sentences, before I notice the silence: everyone at the table is watching me... read. I am returned to an insalubrious memory, in which I pulled out a book at a baseball game with my boyfriend's family. The game wasn't bad, the book better, the relationship soon over.

Wednesday

I have a mild migraine all day, probably due to Tuesday's margarita. Too much tequila, too old for tequila. On the subway to another reading, the headache worsens, and I feel like I'm about to be sick. I stumble out of the train and make my way to a McDonald's in Chinatown, where I mutely join a line of unseemly length, sweat beading above my brow. I manage not to throw up on the woman in front of me.

The reading, at least, is enjoyable, because the bulk of it is a conversation with Courtney Hodell, my editor. She ponders how the 80-page scrap on which she bought the novel turned into an 800-page first draft, and how that became a 300-page book. I'm still trying to figure that out myself.

Thursday

One of the odd things about publishing a book is that it's a lot like running a small business. There are endless administrative duties - emails to be returned, blog posts to write, social networks to man, schedules to keep track of, websites to maintain, appointments to keep. And yet I became a writer partly because I wouldn't be able to hack it as a small businesswoman. And because I like being able to justify large stretches of doing nothing while my brain "works" on whatever it is working on. Becoming a novelist had allowed me, I thought, to become more fully myself. Now it's forcing me to be someone else entirely.

In the afternoon, an interview with a nice young woman from an often snarky paper. Do I yield to the niceness, or guard against the snarkiness? I was a reporter for 15 years, during which I conducted thousands of interviews. Now, as a novelist, I'm on the other side. I examine the transaction in a whole new way: What, exactly, is the journalist after? How will whatever information is secured be used? I see how much subjects may withhold - how much I am withholding - because of those anxieties. It makes me more convinced that so journalism often reports half-truths, which are not the same as lies.

As I am thinking about this, Nice Reporter says that aspects of the tabloid journalist in The Submission resonated with her --"the fake friendliness" with sources, for example. She feels shame about this; did I, as a reporter? Yes, I say. I make a joke about her possibly being "fake friendly" right now. We both laugh nervously. I am starting to feel like one of the (non-journalist) characters in my novel.

Friday

Some interviews, more housekeeping, a good nap. After four nights of being out for the book, I am home to put my children to bed. Selecting which books to read to them requires balancing the babies' love of repetition with their parents' desire for variety. We inherited boxfuls of children's books, a boon, but an indiscriminate one. I often wish I had someone to wade through the slush pile. Too many children's books, too much children' music, for that matter, have forsaken intelligence or wit or poetry, as if those things are an adult privilege. We seize on any exception: 'Folsom Daycare Blues' by a singer named Ralph Covert; a children's book, The Shadow and Her Wanda, by the artist Paul Chan, that manages to incorporate Goethe.
Tonight the babies are tired, and my husband and I have our usual debate about whether it's legitimate to skip to the end of a book so our pre-literates can get to sleep. I say yes. My husband, a completist, a greater respecter of authorial integrity than the author he is married too, disagrees. He speed-reads, aloud.

Saturday

A free day. We head to the Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The neighborhood, where I used to spend a fair bit of time, has gentrified so much it's almost unrecognizable. And it's mobbed - gone are the lonely cobble-stoned streets of memory. Some of this has to do with the new riverfront park, which is finally giving New Yorkers more access to their waterfront. Sprawling lawns overlook the Statue of Liberty; kayakers bob in the water. We find a stunning path, mostly ours alone, along which foliage presses in so high and dense that the city slips away entirely. No less than the lawns, it must have been created, but it feels like a preserved shard of wildness that someone forgot to sweep away.

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The Submission by Amy Waldman is published by Cornerstone Publishing.
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Monday, 5 September, 2011