The Lost Book

How Editors — and Dogs — Kill the Creative Impulse

Dear Republic,

We continue with Project Week and Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s wrenching account of writing a book she didn’t want to write.

-ROL

THE LOST BOOK

I was under contract for a book about the way dogs learn. I had been researching it on and off for almost eight years until the day the localized microburst of divorce broke apart my small world. Incredibly enough the newspaper was silent on the subject. That’s when it came to me. The divorce was not a tragedy, but it was our tragedy.

Overnight, I could no longer remember what the book I was supposed to be writing was about, or why I once wanted to write it. I looked back on the time when I apparently did know the same way I tried to remember the previous life as an ancient Egyptian queen a storefront spiritualist assured me I once had. At the moment there was no concern beyond trying to find where the thousands of pieces of my former life had landed so I could gather them up from the tall weeds and hammer them back together. But a new mystery was about to challenge what remained of the unbeliever in me.

I thought I had euthanized what had been an animating passion in my unmarried life, for the same reason I had started to refuse myself the comfort of the admittedly insipid music I found so healing: the scorn of my husband, whose taste a united public opinion lauded as incontestable. Of my many character flaws, which My Celebrity helpfully enumerated on his way out the door, one in particular struck me as bizarre, unmoored. “And I could never be interested in something like motorcycles.”

But again and again, motorcycles had saved my life.

They were doing it again.

I pleaded with my editor. I can’t write the dog book anymore. But I can write a different book about an aspect of motorcycling that is revelatory, incredible.

Well, ok. But I still want the dog book.

***

Two years later, at night, after our son was in bed upstairs in the tiny new house, I spread out on our diminutive kitchen table the folders into which I had separated notes and clippings about dog cognition collected over the course of many years in my previous life. Here was evidence I had gone to seminars, conducted interviews, engaged in online groups and taken classes. There were piles of printouts, booklets, xeroxes from dozens of books. Books themselves, Post-its porcupining the margins. The hanging light over the table made mirrors of the windows surrounding me in the nook, beyond them an unseeable blackness that should have been a source of horror to a woman alone in a small house from which no other habitation could be seen, her young child asleep in a blanket of innocence upstairs. But the true horror was in the immensity of this material I had to somehow corral and distill into a story—a tower of pure science that resisted narrative. Fought simplification. Defied every effort that must nonetheless be applied to transform it into something it was, in its essence, anything but.

The deadline was dizzyingly soon.

The only alternative to somehow producing this book was to give back the advance on royalties. But that was gone, signed over at the bank on this panic buy of a house just weeks before the start of the school year in a different district offering my son the ability to remain in grade school through year six instead of attending a middle school among the high schoolers. He was not ready.

Finally, after days of rereading, a story began crawling out from the piles of stuff on the table. It was a better subject, hiding underneath this mountain of data, and one that had never been explored in popular form. I could be the first. My editor had always trusted me, and anyway this was now the only book I felt certain I could write. Long experience had taught that good subjects were wily creatures, hiding at the edges of the woods where their brown coats camouflaged them from easy visibility.

The only problem was that the story was not really about dogs. Dogs had merely led me to this hidden quarry, where it waited in startling perfection. I couldn’t believe my luck. I begged my editor yet again.

This time, she would not yield. She wanted a book about dogs.

My agent shrugged. Give her a book about dogs, she said. I hung up, picking the handset up again to slam it into the holder. I buried my face in my hands then swept some folders off the table, spilling their useless facts across the kitchen floor. I had to write something I could not. This was not what I had been experiencing lately in these months of wonder. This was not a case of pretending I was fearless before discovering that all fearlessness is pretending. This was not receiving gifts from the universe in a moment when I thought there was no future. This was being told to swim the English Channel tied to an anchor.

Every word in the eventual book ended up the same one repeated for two hundred pages: impossible. I did not believe in what I was writing, and it repaid my faithlessness in full. Every sentence I had laboriously compiled until there were enough of them to call it done was haunted by a ghost book, one that had died before it had the chance to be born. With awful yearning I imagined that book: rich, big, passionate. Nonexistent.

I opened my box of author copies, sick to my stomach, then folded the flaps back up so I wouldn’t have to see them. I was so ashamed I never announced the book on social media. A few days into publication week I had just set out on a three-day motorcycle trip. As I was sitting down to lunch in a diner a few hours in, my phone rang. It was my editor, barely controlled anger in her voice. I excused myself from the table and took the call in the hall to the bathroom. “You have one review on Amazon, did you know that?” I did not. I had planned to never look. “You’ve got to get every person you know to write a review.” I told her I’m sorry, I certainly would.

But I wouldn’t. The thought of asking people I would have to see again—people I cared for—to read a book I wished had never been published was excruciating.

No reviews appeared in any general publication. I never saw it in a bookstore, even those with extensive pet sections. It was neither a dog book nor the book I had longed to write. It was nothing.

Every one of my previous books had been released in paperback a year after the hardcover; I assumed it was simply decreed, like Daylight Savings. Not this one. For fifteen years running I had already been at work on the next book by the time the previous one appeared, but now not only did I not have a contract for a new book, I did not have an idea for one. The rushing stream of passions I could only truly experience by writing about them, which I had been lucky enough to do for the length of my professional life—my very self, as I conceived of it—had trickled to a stop. What was once a river was now an empty indentation floored in rapidly drying mud.

The notion of a single pivot upon which life turns completely around, so that forward becomes backward, is something that only occurs in movies, a requirement of the narrative arc that begins and ends after 120 minutes. But this slow collapse of my belief in my work, preceded by its objective failure, was indeed the sole hinge on which the door of my future was already beginning to close. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t going to reopen no matter how hard I battered on it, pushed with a shoulder that only became bruised. The more I tried to make things happen, the less came to pass. I was living through the Great Dwindle.

Two years after the dog book became history at its inception, two years without a new book in the works for the first time in two decades, at last, I had an idea for a new one. It came to me from somewhere off in the distance, waving as it got closer, bigger and bigger. I didn’t know exactly why an admittedly strange concept appealed to me so much, but I knew its elusive eeriness was somehow central to its meaning. I would figure it out in the course of writing it. That’s the way it always worked: A question as the genesis. A book as an answer.

Excited, I began to construct a new proposal. Like every fresh start, it seemed more promising than anything I had ever written. I eagerly sent it to my agent.

Well, I don’t know. . . . But she sent it to my editor, as we were contractually bound.

My editor said, I’m sorry.

Next the agent said, I’m sorry.

She couldn’t think of any other publisher to whom she could send the new proposal, she said. She just wasn’t feeling the book.

What she was feeling, I knew, was enthralled by her new partnership with a rock star whose memoir had vaulted to the top of the bestseller lists. She was about to accompany her on an extensive tour. Certainly, the deals for dozens of foreign sales, the sub rights, the editions in every format known to man, had to have been all-consuming. Then there was the near-immediate commencement of work on the celebrity’s next book, first coming up with the idea for what it was to be about. Although that was doubtless secondary to the most important matter. Her name.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of The Place You Love Is Gone and other books. She lives in the sticks and rides motorcycles.