We just announced the release of my second book, Famesick, which is available for pre-order. I wrote about the long road from beginning until now on Instagram–printing those words here (see below) and in the coming weeks I’ll be sharing lots about the creative process, exclusively here on Substack, so stay tuned.
When I first began this book, I’d been out of rehab for 30 days. I was in the cloud of delirium that comes with new sobriety — the world was suddenly so LOUD, and I thought that meant I knew what I was hearing.
If you’d told me then that the writing process would take me through the next seven years, I probably would have ripped up my contract and chucked my laptop in the tub.
Throughout my twenties, writing was all pure immediacy. I’d have an experience, put some version of it through the filter of fantasy, and it would be playing on television six months later. Writing was how I processed as it was happening. I hadn’t lived enough life to deal with it in retrospect. I didn’t understand the value of time — to heal us, to make sense of where we’ve been, to actually change the patterns we keep replaying in our work and our art.
The gift this book has given me over the last seven years was that it was always there. No matter what changed — my location, my body, my mind — there was a constant: this place I could go to try and make sense of the story. When we finally set a publication date for Famesick, I felt something like grief. One of my steadiest companions was leaving.
But it’s time.
And I’m so excited to be able to tell you, in the best way I know how, about:
💫 years of impossible magic and years I thought I wouldn’t survive
💫 illness and addiction and heartbreak
💫 the lessons I no longer feel ashamed of having had to learn
Famesick is, ostensibly, about the years 2010–2020 — a decade in which my life changed profoundly and permanently, in which nearly every strand of my DNA reconstituted itself.
But it’s also about illness as teacher, body as tattletale, our societal relationship to women on the edge, and the conditions that create art vs. the conditions that create happiness. (Also: being in Hollywood while watching from the sidelines, like a goth girl at the cheerleader’s slumber party, wondering if she can call her mom from the landline without being overheard.)
It’s about me — but whenever I write about me, I hope, deeply, that it’s also about you.
Pre-order Famesick here. I can’t wait to see you in April, book in hand, ready to talk.
Woo hoo!!!
Oh this sounds great! And the cover is totally eye catching too