Choose yourself

and the joys of a small life

At least fifteen publishers turned down my first book Help Me!

People liked the writing, liked ‘The voice’ etc etc but it wasn’t one for them. Why? They didn’t know what kind of category to put it in. Was it self-help? Memoir? Smart thinking? Apparently each of these categories has a distinct section in bookshops and it’s important to know which one the book fits into.

I thought it was all of those categories and surely that was a good thing.

But it wasn’t, apparently.

Another thing I was told was that sustainability was in fashion at that time. Publishers were looking for books about sustainability and this wasn’t that.

That was true. The only thing sustainable about Help Me! was the scene about me taking wine bottles to the bottle bank and feeling embarrassed. And actually I think that scene was cut in the end.

And so there you go. A great book that nobody wanted.

I knew that Help Me! was good. The idea to try one self-help book a month to see if they work was a good one. The writing was funny and the information in it interesting. It was a cheat’s guide to self-help but with jokes.

At that time the self-help industry was booming. Even people who were snooty about self-help were being influenced by it. It made no sense that nobody would want to read this book.

I had put everything into it. I had moved back in with my parents to write it - having pushed myself to my usual stage of exhaustion and brokeness by doing the experiment to extremes. After a year of writing (and 2 years of turning life upside down with doing mad things) it was done.

Now nobody wanted it. I remember sitting on my mum’s beige velour sofa after yet another rejection email. I was upset. In one of those rare moments of doing the right thing, rather than getting drunk, angry or giving up, I closed my eyes to meditate. I am an occasional meditator, I have phases of doing it regularly and phases when I don’t. At this point I was out of it. But still I did it.

I felt the usual fight to settle down but eventually I did. The warm bath feeling of sinking below all the anxious thoughts started to happen.

And then the word Picador came into my head. The word kept repeating and it felt like someone was banging my forehead at the same time. Not an aggressive bang but a real ‘pay attention’ bang.

It was the same kind of intensity that I would often experience when I woke at three in the morning with an urgent inner voice asking ‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ I now think that was my soul urging me to make changes in my life. Obviously I ignored it for years.

This Picador Picador was just as insistent.

I got off the sofa and emailed my agent and asked her to send it to Picador. She told me that Picador was quite a literary publisher and it most likely wouldn’t be their thing. I told her that I would buy her a drink if they laughed at her but please could she send the book to them. I went onto their website and saw a face I liked. It belonged to a man called Kris Doyle.

It was strange that I picked a man but I saw his face and I liked it.

Please send it to Kris Doyle, I said.

She did.

A week later Kris was in touch. He didn’t know why he related so much to a woman’s mid-life crisis but he did. He had passed it around the office and everyone form the big boss to the accounts team loved it.

We had a meeting with Prosecco and cake and I fell in love with everyone. They wanted the book. After the book that nobody wanted was a book that everybody wanted. The Americans, the Canadians, the Germans, the French. In the end it was translated into 25 languages which is the stuff of dreams.

Why am I writing all this?

Today I saw a post about memoir being dead and publishers not wanting it anymore. It made me think about categorisation. How we live in a world that wants to put everything and everyone in boxes and how stupid and limiting that is.

I thought about how much we miss out on when we meet someone and think, oh they’re just this… and put them into a box that means we don’t need to open our minds and hearts. How much we hurt children when we put them into boxes of being academic or not. Sporty of not. How much we cut ourselves off from fundamental parts being human by saying we are not creative.

I thought about the US election, and the commentary about the Latino vote, the female vote, the black vote - as if all the people in these groups thought the same way.

It’s all bullshit.

Businesses might be set up to run like this, but humans aren’t.

My neighbour Nelly is one of the most extraordinary humans I have ever met. When we were first getting to know each other I was totally confused. One minute she said she was a boxer. The next a film director. The next she was talking about the university she ran and the orchestra she started at NASA. Is this woman mad, I wondered? A fantasist?

She isn’t. Nelly has done all these things and more because she not only refuses to put herself in a box, she doesn’t even see the box. Everything is connected to everything in her mind. I had to work hard to understand her. How is fashion connected to space? How are you a university lecturer and also have a licence to drive lorries? My mind couldn’t compute. Sometimes it still can’t but I’m learning to see things differently. Everything is connected to everything.

Sometimes I come on Substack and feel overwhelmed by how much is here. How can my voice be heard? Why would anyone read my writing when they are so many brilliant people here? But there is room for all of us.

Because of the long covid stuff I have been reading posts about chronic illness and there are so many here - including those by Dr Vicki Connop who has been teaching me how to calm my very nervous nervous system . I’m increasingly drawn to stories of older women, especially those who have not have children - and they are also here. I am inspired always by Sam Baker, Jody Day, The Oldster, Advantages of Age and Jaci Stephen. As I try to unlearn my people pleasing ways Natalie Lue’s newsletter has ben invaluable.

Nelly’s approach is ‘pluralistic’ - which is a word I had never head of. Pluralistic Anything pluralistic involves a diversity of different ideas or people. A pluralistic society is a diverse one, where the people in it believe all kinds of different things and tolerate each other’s beliefs even when they don’t match their own.

There is room for all of us.

There are so many ways to do things now. Doing them might mean letting go of old, entrenched stories about what success is, what the path should look like. Yes getting a book deal is a big exciting thing on one level, it is also (usually) low pay for a huge amount of work. Is there another way to think and write and connect with people? Yes, here. The ever brilliant Sarah Wilson is writing her book chapter by chapter here, but instead of writing in isolation, her book is being fuelled by people’s comments and thoughts. It’s a collective project. It’s an exciting thing to be part of.

I thought about James Altucher’s idea of ‘choosing yourself’. Instead of waiting for others to tell you your idea is good enough, or there is a market for it - tell yourself that. When I was getting all the rejections for Help Me! a friend asked me what I’d do if I didn’t get a book deal. I told her I would self-publish, printing the book out and stapling it myself if I had to. And I would have done. In fact there are a lot of ways that self-publishing can be a better route than traditional publishing.

I also thought the term ‘minimal viable audience’, which I think is a phrase that Seth Godin uses. We don’t need world domination - in fact, success on that scale looks traumatic. We only need to find a few people to think our work is of use and of value. Money is an ever present worry but I’m trying to trust that if I keep following my heart and doing things in the way that feel right to me, there will always be enough to keep a roof over my head. So far that has been the case.

When Trump got elected, I felt weirdly energised. It was clarifying. I can’t do anything about Trump but I can try to live my life well and look after the people around me. As global news becomes more cataclysmic, my approach to life is getting smaller and smaller. And actually it feels good to focus on my little patch of ground. If you want to change the world, go home and love your family, as Gandhi or Mother Theresa or someone said.

I was thinking too about the Picador meditation and how we have so much more power and wisdom than we realise. When we step out of the boxes we can get in touch with our intuition and our deep knowing.

We find our own way.

We choose ourselves and each other and that is how we build a new world.