I thought I would be happy once my debut novel Broughtupsy was published. My novel represents nearly thirteen years of reading and writing and revising and learning and writing some more—all of it printed and bound between two smooth covers I can now squeeze in my hands. To my surprise, Broughtupsy was featured on over 30 Most Anticipated and Recommended Reading lists. Vogue called it “soaring.” Elle called it “a deft debut.” It’s been shortlisted for Canada’s Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and also named a best book of 2024 by Elle, Electric Literature, CBC Books, and Debutiful. Publishing a novel at all is a commendable achievement. I should be thrilled. So why am I so damn sad?
In the weeks after launching Broughtupsy, I stopped exercising—which, if you know me, is a cause for major yikes; I’ve been an avid gym-goer for almost twenty years. Writing became torturous. I hardly saw friends. All the usual rhythms of my life withered in the wake of this momentous thing I had done.
In the place of my usual routines, I started having one then two glasses of wine with dinner then a cocktail or three before bed. I began slacking off at work, taking longer and longer to respond to emails as I entertained fantasies of going on three-day benders. Three days doing what? Didn’t matter. Just something intense and fun. I gorged myself on carb-heavy foods that flooded my brain with dopamine—but as someone who’s formerly obese and now lives on the edges of pre-diabetic, I knew those foods would make me feel sick. Still, I ate and ate.
I figured I was just tired after all those years of striving, that of course I wanted to swim in good feeling and finally have a rest. Thirteen years is a long time—too long, perhaps. Efforting that much was grueling. It left me undone. Of course my reaction was intense after so many years spent dreaming, I told myself. It’s fine, I’m fine, this is just me trying to adjust.
I realize now that the drinking and bad eating was an attempt to contrive the elation I thought I was supposed to feel. Publication is a good thing, a happy thing. Yet it left me bereft.
After some time, I did what I always do when I’m bogged down yet keyed up: I forced myself to read in order to get out of the echo chamber in my head. I started first by trying the newest Zadie Smith; no dice. The latest Atwood met the same end. I flipped through Rushdie, Rooney, Everett, and Erdrich before settling on a new edition of an old collection I’d read years before.
“The twelvemonth and a day being up, I was still at a loss,” Ali Smith writes in Artful, her wise and wily essay collection on the frenetic intricacies of producing story. “If anything,” the passage continues, “I was more at a loss.” Smith’s essay imagines a life following the death of a beloved partner, depicting the physical and psychical paralysis that can unfold after such an ineffable loss. The point of the essay is to explore how time functions in fiction. I read the opening paragraphs again and again, glossing over Smith’s narrative discussions, fixated on this fake lover, her bodily self a staid façade against her swirling grief.
The speaker of Smith’s essay finds that, within this sorrowful shroud, she cannot read. She cannot write. She cannot do any of the things that previously defined the dynamism of her living. I clutched the book close, feeling the tingle of recognition that stems from seeing your emotive self reflected in the genius of someone else.
Like Smith’s narrator, I’ve recently passed my own twelvemonth and a day. Broughtupsy came out in paperback a few months ago, meaning it’s been just over a year since my novel first arrived in stores. But I’m only just now starting to realize how getting what I wanted launched me into what Smith in her essay calls “this world of sorrow”—a way of living that is forever deprived of one’s most desperate need.
I was twenty-two when I started writing Broughtupsy. I was living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, completing my first Master’s. Back then, I was bright-eyed and eager, driven and naive. That was also the period when I couldn’t keep a girlfriend longer than a few months. They floated in. We fucked. They floated out. I kept writing.
Eventually, I finished what I thought was a short story collection. That collection later became the flashback sections of Broughtupsy. I didn’t know that yet, so I (naively) considered the book done and submitted the collection as the thesis for my MA. After graduating, I moved to Vancouver where I was broke and yearning as I crashed on my sister’s couch. Desperate for money, I started doing frontline social work, working to help manage the city’s homeless shelters. As the new kid, I got stuck with the night shifts, 9 pm to 9 am. I didn’t mind. Working the night shifts meant long stretches of unbroken quiet, just me and my books as I thought about verbs. Most nights, I would hunch over my desk to hide any view of my notepad, filling the page then scribbling down the margins as the sky lightened and stars disappeared amid the hazy rise of blood-orange morning.
Two years later, I left social work. Well, I left Canada, loading my leather couch onto a freight pod headed for Iowa City, Iowa. My second Master’s. There, I wrote what would become the present action of Broughtupsy—though, again, I didn’t know it. I thought I’d written a standalone sequel to the story collection I’d finished years before. While I was there, I got better at the girlfriend thing before graduating with my MFA and moving to New York City. My grandmother had a place with a spare room in Brooklyn. I became her personal mail fetcher and errand runner in exchange for somewhere to sleep.
New York is where I fell in love—with City living as well as with Her, my beloved. I was an adjunct professor in English back then, which meant shuttling to three universities across two boroughs where I taught six courses a semester to barely cover my bills. It didn’t matter that I was exhausted. I felt content. I adored the thrum of the City and the warm velvet of my beloved’s voice.
Amid this relative peace, I returned to my story collection. I re-read my novel. Then I looked again at them both and let out a loud, “Fuck.” I finally saw that they were two parts of the same whole.
While stitching the two projects together to make Broughtupsy, I switched jobs and switched agents and boxed up my things at my grandmother’s to move in with Her, and—listen, my point is this: through multiple degrees and relationships and cross-continent migrations, writing Broughtupsy was my constant. It was the safe and stable throughline that gave shape to my life.
Are you a writer?
I am.
What have you written?
Oh, I’m still writing it.
And now I’m not. I’m not writing anything at all. Am I still a writer? The market would say yes—but me? If it were up to me?
“[T]he item of mortality,” Smith writes, “could mean the whole book.” I am holding Broughtupsy, the whole of it. The dust jacket crinkles. I have lost my companion. I am bereft.
Melodrama.
Surely my brain is just being sensational, making me preen like a prima donna in the harsh light of coveted praise. My book fared well and I have the audacity to be sad?! My languor feels stupid, self-serving, and dumb. I asked a few of my writer-friends what they thought, to gut-check my feeling and deliver me out from under the weight of my gloom.
“Well, I will say this,” responded Rufi Thorpe, “I think with my first book it was WAY harder and way more intense. There is something… traumatic? About publishing a book? I don’t know why it should be traumatic to have your wildest dream come true, but it is.”
Rufi was writing to me from her home in California. As I read her email in my New York apartment, my skin prickled and tingled, recognition seeping like slow heat.
“I sometimes wonder if there isn’t something almost metaphysical happening,” Rufi said, “whereby taking something imaginary and making it real, even in book form, you have to give up some part of your own spiritual energy.”
I scrolled up to start her email again while wishing I could’ve folded the country like a paper napkin. I wanted nothing more than to push my living room right up onto her backyard so I could jump the fence and give her a hug. Because I wondered if she was right. Perhaps I had given Broughtupsy too much of my spiritual energy. Maybe I had made it too vital a part of the dailiness of me.
“It costs me a fortune. It hurts like irony,” Smith’s narrator says of a deeply cherished memento from her beloved. I scribbled a note in the essay’s margins and crossed out the ‘me’.
It costs a fortune. It hurts like irony.
My phone pinged as other writer-friends responded to my signal fire, each affirming the same: this sucks, you’re not crazy, no way around it, price of the ticket, it’s totally weird but completely normal. You are not going about this all wrong.
I wish someone had told me this grief was coming, even if it wouldn’t have made its arrival hurt any less. I would’ve hired a personal trainer to keep me exercising. Maybe I would’ve asked my wife if we could cool it on the booze, at least for a little while.
But someday soon, my twelvemonth and a day will be up—and I, like Smith’s narrator, will find myself in “brand-new time.” The depression will dissipate. I will revise the contours of myself to meet the circumstances of my changed living.
Till then, I’ve decided to give in to the depressive logic where up is down and pain is good. Pain means that my work means. I’m choosing to believe it will be a blessing if I am so lucky as to suffer an oeuvre’s worth of loss—each one glorious and operatic, metaphysical nuance splashed across the pages in elegant black print.
“Yes,” Smith writes of her narrator settling into life after loss, “yes, the light is much better here.” My light is coming. I am soon to be seen.
FICTION
Broughtupsy
By Christina Cooke
Catapult
Published January 23, 2024
