In This Moment of Solitude, Books Can Be Our Passports

At the beginning of March, I experienced a new joy: I published my first book, a collection of essays investigating how Americans make meaning of their lives and what they do when their systems of meaning-making begin to break down.

This book was roughly seven years in the making. In writing it, I did quite a bit of traveling through America: I went to a Shaker colony in Maine; I flew down to Laredo to attend a borderlands debutante ball where the girls dress up to honor George and Martha Washington; I frequented autopsy suites in Cleveland; I drove out to a dust bowl in California. But mostly, I sat alone in my room and wrote.

Writing a book is fundamentally a solitary and stationary exercise. Some people are naturally good at this. I am not naturally good at this: I like movement and adventure and collaboration. I love the part of my job that puts me in contact with new places and people. I found writing a book to be many pleasurable things; I also found it lonely.

So I was looking forward to what came next: the travel and socializing that comes with book promotion. This was supposed to be the time of unloneliness, of planes and trains, a brief interval of movement and people and conversation, hugging and discourse. Once the book is out, it is the job of the writer to be with people, to be in the world for a little while before going back to the quiet of the desk. This has become impossible.

The challenges and anxieties of authors shepherding books into the world pale before the ravages of a global pandemic. Nothing puts a professional disappointment into perspective like worrying about the health and safety of your loved ones. Still, the writers I know — in between calling their older relatives and fetching groceries for immunocompromised neighbors — are reeling in reaction to canceled book tours and the grief of knowing that something you have worked so hard on may miss its chance to find an audience. There is uncertainty about the future of our industry, and all industries. Strangest to me is finding myself at home still, pacing the same old floor, now joined in this stationary, solitary routine by everyone I know.