I picked DOG DAYS to discuss with y’all because I found it both extremely personal and vulnerable while also being rigorous; it pushed me to think about fiction and philosophy and art and psychoanalytic texts in new ways.

One part of what the book is grappling with is the idea of “selling” a traumatic story. By this I mean both literally selling (by publishing a book that begins with something horrible that happened to LaBarge and her family in 2009), but also selling in the sense of convincing yourself and/or others of some kind of truth that might be (or should be or could be) contained in the facts of your life, and especially in its most difficult stories.

DOG DAYS changed how I feel about writing from life, both in fiction and in nonfiction, both as a reader and a writer, so I’m looking forward to our talk in August 9th. (If you want to be a part of that discussion, you’ll need to be a paying subscriber by then, as I’ll send the link out either that morning or the day before.)

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The book also examines how it might be possible to create or recreate our lives through studying art, viewing films, and reading literature. LaBarge’s writing suggests that the act of noticing which images and scenes and ideas have affected you the most deeply can be a pathway towards asserting order over the inherent disorder of experience.

As I read, I kept a running list of the works LaBarge cited (I’m told this list actually exists in the back of finished copies, but I was reading an ARC.) Anyway— here is Part One that list, with some images & links.

Nearly Every Artwork Cited or Discussed in DOG DAYS by Emily LaBarge, Part One:

Mrs. Doubtfire - dir. Chris Columbus - This is admittedly a wild and unlikely start to a decidedly high-brow syllabus of art and literature, but when you read the book, you’ll understand why.

Agnus Dei - The Edward Higginbottom and the Oxford New College Choir recording

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb - Van Eyck— Clearly you’re going to want to either see this one in person or get a really high res image somewhere.

Agnus Dei - Francisco de Zurbarán— You might recognize this one from a certain cover as well.

Franny & Zooey - JD Salinger (If you didn’t already read this freshman year of college, you should give it a try. If you did already read it in college you’re probably old enough to read it again.)

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As I watched him drink the air, it was easy to imagine Cheskie thinking: “Yes, I’m doing it, just as it should be done. I am drinking water.”

Then he’d limp away, his thirst sated.

For the last year or so he always had that look on his face, you know the one— it’s the same expression anyone makes when they walk into a room with real intent, then can’t remember what they were doing.

Why did I come to my office? Oh right— scissors.

Sometimes in the middle of eating, Cheskie would stop, walk away from his bowl, stare at a wall, look at me, back at the wall… wait, wasn’t I just eating my dinner?

Food had long been a difficult thing for him. He is the only dog I’ve ever known who was never food motivated, never begged beneath the table, and lately he’d stop eating much at all. But even when he was younger, when baristas in dog-friendly coffee stops would give him a little treat, he’d look at it like— that? you want me to eat that little fake bone? who do you think I am? He never ate them.

He fell down about, oh, I don’t know, fifty times a day. Unless he decided to stay in bed all day, which he sometimes did. Lately, while taking a shit, he’d sometimes loose his balance and fall into it.

Earlier in June we found out he had a rather large tumor on his spleen that would easily spread to his heart, and may have already done so. Daniel and I had already decided, after his mobility and appetite took a nose dive in the last year, that we wouldn’t put him through any kind of surgery if he ever needed it. Cheskie also had a heart condition, food allergies, seizures, fainting spells, a tendency to throw up whatever medicine he’s given, a newly discovered problem with his spine, and deteriorated hips from a car accident he was in as a puppy, long before we knew him.

A few sad, slow days after it became clear what we had to do, it hit me that I had been living with a paradoxical understanding of the nature of our relationship with Cheskie. There’s a hierarchy between pets and their owners that we usually don’t consider; it’s easy, even, to delude yourself that your life revolves around your pet when it’s always been the other way around. Making a decision about how his life would end—on what day, in what manner, and for which reasons—revealed this unpleasant truth to me which of course had been there all along. I couldn’t stop crying.

The dogs and cats we keep in our homes have obviously evolved, and been bred, to suit our human needs; all domesticated animals have been separated from nature several times over, and those separations remain a strange fact in their lives. Yes, pets are given certain rights within our so-called civilization, but they’re all our prisoners. Happy prisoners (maybe, hopefully), but prisoners all the same.

The decision to euthanize our dog made clear to me something of which I’d only previously been distantly, theoretically aware. We were never just two friends, two little lives passing the time in each other’s comfort. There was always this unspeakable difference between us, one I’d been able to overlook in my affection and in our little habits. It’s a difference of language, and agency, and autonomy, of course, but no pet—no matter how communicative or intuitive— ever escapes their core subservience to us. If you love animals, as I do, as I think most pet owners do, there is something really terrifying about this agreement we’ve made with them.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to sit on the ground with Cheskie more often. He’d developed this practice of pushing his face against my chest or my armpit, and we could hang out like that for a while. Unlike every other dog I’ve ever known, he didn’t lick people’s hands or faces. He licked the floor, and sometimes upholstery, but never people. (I’ve always wondered if this was because he wasn’t licked as a puppy.) Instead—he just pressed his entire weight into me, usually with his forehead.

In theory, euthanasia (for both pets and humans, when the time is right) makes sense to me. But in practice, having to make this decision for a creature who cannot consent to it has been one of the most unbearable things I’ve ever experienced. In the days between accepting his predicament and saying goodbye to him, I knew his days were numbered, but he didn’t. It’s a weird, inverted grief—awaiting the day of his escape from earth—to say nothing of the grief of his absence. After the long-haired and prayer-bead adorned doctor left, I started frantically cleaning the house— crying, cleaning, noticing the places in the house where he used to sleep, the big plant he used to strangely nuzzle, the corner of the patio he liked the most.

My brother’s kids had an amazing cat named Russell for many years, and a few years ago Russell was attacked by a dog and died. (I lost my favorite cat, Snoopy, the same way, in the same neighborhood, decades earlier.) When my mom asked my nephew Colin how he was feeling about Russell’s death, he quite casually said the wisest thing: “Oh, everybody has to live with a dead cat.”

He was like, 5 at the time, and a Scorpio, naturally.

Living with the dead—whether animals or people—is of course one of the most fundamental and yet almost unlearnable lessons of being human, so I keep trying to channel whatever it was that made a 5-year-old know this innately. I would not say I’m anywhere near that wisdom yet.

Strangely enough— our next read for The Irregular Book Club is called DOG DAYS, but it’s not really about dogs. It is, however, very worth your time. (It’s gotten rave reviews all around, including this really smart one from Jamie Hood.)

The next post will be a reading guide for the book, and if you want to join our discussion of it in August, you’ll just need to be a paid subscriber with an internet connection. :)

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She said she liked my tattoos, specifically the placement of the two on my shoulders. She’d been obsessed with placement ever since she’d gotten a new piercing and the piercer had pierced too low on the lobe.

Looks fine to me.

She took the earring out—see?—and passed the cigarette.

It was, I agreed, a little out of line, but when the earring was in, it was impossible to notice.

You could let it grow back together and try again, I said.

I’m not going to do that.

I understood. Neither would I.

So it just becomes something you live with.

She passed the cigarette back.

Ok, sure, right.

I never saw her again.

The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained here. Past entries include:

I remember when someone explained to me—I don’t know, several years ago now—that the word delusional now had a cute nickname: delulu. That’s when I knew they must have built a new fast track to hell. If being unable to comprehend reality gets a cute re-branding, you can be sure the fascists are winning.

Friday night I was having dinner with four of my favorite people in Mexico City. One of those people is the mother of another one of those people, and while mom person was putting the small person to bed, the rest of us somehow started talking about AI even though I am strongly done with having conversations about AI. (Yes, let it cure cancer, let it invent something that removes trash from the ocean, No, I don’t want it to raise children or teach or be therapists or do anything creative. Done. We’re DONE. I AM DONE TALKING ABOUT THIS.)

I was, perhaps, a little shocked that my friend (the one I often call my very-young very-cool friend) confessed that he uses AI to “develop” ideas and “organize” his thoughts or something. Not to actually write stuff, he qualified, but…

My eyes glazed over and I broke into a mild sweat. Was I upset at him for using ChatGPT to do his thinking? No. Well, sort of, but I was more pissed off because I was going to have to, yet again, deliver the lecture about how learning to develop your own ideas and organize your weirdass thoughts is an invaluable part of developing your brain, your filter, your ability to discern real shit from fake shit, and the more you outsource that part of a creative process, the more you are creating a dependence, the more the AI is training you to think like it and not like you.

I was about to say something about how interstitial processes are not to be rushed through,1 that liminal states are the creative process, and that’s where all the good ideas are, and that’s also why being in analysis feels so weird and uncomfortable and yet helpful,2 because it’s neither an internal nor entirely external conversation or monologue, and anyway I was about to say something like that, but then I thought, Oh no, I’m going to throw up.

And I did! I went to my friend’s bathroom and hurled, and honestly I had been feeling sick for a couple days so it wasn’t like the LLM conversation was responsible for it, but I also have no problem blaming LLMs for this, because I do think it’s funny that this was the moment my body gave out.

Have I mentioned how much I hate it when people I love are being delusional? Other people, fine, whatever, let them have their delusions. Let the whole world melt into a fashionably numb blasé puddle of delulu, but my friends?? Not on my watch. Zoe was pointing this out to me recently, saying it is no secret that I have a tendency to really fucking tell a friend exactly what I think of some ill-advised choice they’re making. This has gotten me into trouble, of course, but for the most part this is the kind of treatment I also expect my friends to give me, and thank god some of them have done so. I don’t think I’ve ever had a sincere argument with a stranger on the internet, but I don’t really hold back when someone I love is doing something I find unreasonably stupid, like languishing in a relationship that does not respect their radiance, or falling into one of our many contemporary scams, or not applying for a fucking grant they’re eligible for, or using LLMs in their creative work.3

It was perhaps appropriate that my human and then faltering body was what prevented me from fully explaining to my friend that he was being delusional about the utility of trying to escape his own mortal, imperfect thoughts. My friends all sat with me on the couch, gave me tea, and waited til I was unwoozy enough to go home.

But the thing was— my dog is really sick right now, and my husband was out of town, and I was afraid I would get sick again at home and not be able to take care of my dog, so one of my friends escorted me home, made sure I got settled without falling into a heap on the floor, then she helped take care of the dog, too. I was so thankful to have a friend like her I could have just crumpled on the floor and kissed her toes.

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In fact, that very morning, when I’d woken up and found my dog in a horrible state (not going into detail; too sad) I didn’t know what to do, and the answer ended up being that a friend who lives a half hour away drove down to my neighborhood, picked us up, took us to a vet, made sure nothing got lost in translation, brought us home, then sat with me for an hour to have tea and toast, even though it was already early afternoon and she’d thrown out her whole day just to help me out.

When Daniel, my husband, told his aunt and grandma (whom he was visiting in Spain) that our friend had helped us out like this, their response was something like, Oh, that’s so Mexican. Nobody would do that here.

I don’t think it’s true that nobody in Spain would drop what they were doing at nine in the morning to come help you do some sad but necessary chore, but I will say it does seem rather Mexican to be, what— very kind? Invested in one’s community? Ready to do something caring for a friend?

I used to be delusional about what friendship is or could be, and living here has made me see how wrong I was in the past to never (if I could help it) ask a friend help. I’ve always had this really strong streak of do-it-yourself stubbornness. I suppose such staunch independence might lead a person to write novels, and I quite like writing novels, but I am not the first person to notice that even a person’s strongest qualities often come smuggling their own set of delusions.

Last Saturday, after my LLM-conversation-induced illness, two of my other closest friends came over with supplies for me and my sick dog, both of us pathetic and nearly motionless in the living room. They came over because I asked them to, because nobody is going to telepathically know that you’re sick and arrive with the proper provisions. Both friends also brought flowers, and one of them even hung out with my dog and took care of him so I could take a sorely needed three hour nap. Falling asleep I felt horrible, physically, but I also felt totally great knowing that I know people who will help me—and I hope also criticize me—when I need it.

(The ending paragraph of this post is behind a paywall because that’s where I always put the most embarrassing bits.)

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Below— some book recs and below that, a little rant about people who are dead to me, and also “One Weird Trick” I have been using on an almost daily basis for the last year that has really improved my life.

I was in Boston for a few days last month and stopped by Grolier Poetry Bookshop on my pal Kit’s recommendation, and to say hello to his friend James who is, it seems, the only person who works there. James edits a new-ish literary magazine called Duck, which he gave me a copy of (thanks, James!) and I think y’all would like it a lot.

At Groiler, I ended up buying, for no particular reason, a copy of Greenhouse by Jack Paradise. Lo! The wild high of buying and immediately reading a book because your subconscious was like— yeah, gimmie dat.

Greenhouse is a novella about a gay couple and their kid living on an island in the somewhat near-ish future. Wonderful book, calm and elegant. There’s a sense of some kind of discord happening elsewhere, off the page, or maybe that’s just a feeling I can’t help but assign to any book set in the present, recent past, or near future. Discord in all directions.

Since Greenhouse was so well-made and pleasing to hold, I looked up the publishing house that made it, which was new to me— Publication Studio, an international network of 11 studios that collectively produce and distribute their titles. I don’t totally understand how it works, but whatever Publication Studio is doing, I am pretty sure I am in favor of it. They’re in Hudson, Glasgow, Vancouver, São Paulo, Paris, etc. Why not Mexico City, my pals? Let me know.

Much of what I’ve been reading lately is following a kind of color scheme, so here it is.

Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette was a gift from my friend and fellow writer Maryse Meijer. The language is totally refreshing and electric. It’s Bessette’s 1953 debut and it was translated from the French by the brilliant Kate Briggs. Definitely worth reading if you find yourself feeling hemmed in by the average rhythms and textures and sentences we most commonly find in novels. And maybe this isn’t the most flattering word for a book, but I think it’s had a medicinal effect on my writing. It got me out of a confusion or a slump.

The Loves of my Life is Edmund White’s last (as in final) book. It was published just a few months before White’s death in 2025, and I’d been meaning to get a copy. As the cover says, it’s a “sex memoir” and though I’m not yet done with it, I know it’s going to be delightfully frank to the very end. Sometimes a person might say “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, I’m just going to write whatever I want,” but really no one gives less of a shit what other people think than a gay man in his 80s. It’s raunchy, tender, a little bizarre in moments. ¡Viva Edmund!

And Dog Days by Emily LaBarge is out now in the US and it’s our Irregular Book Club pick for August. (August 9th most likely.) There’s tons to discuss here. LaBarge is doing something really interesting with the essay form (as the book feels more like an essay to me, but technically I guess it’s a memoir.) It’s out now with Transit Books, a small press I just totally adore. In the UK it came out last year with Peninsula Press.

Recently in an interview with a Spanish journalist (para El libro moebius, Alfaguara) I found myself talking about the people who are “Dead To Me.” By this I mean if I saw any of these people in the street, I would walk the other way and if they tried to speak to me I would pretend I didn’t hear them. In the interview I was thinking—oh shit, how did we get here? Shut up, Catherine. Stop talking. I’ve never had anything like media training and I run my mouth in the stupidest ways during these things.

It’s a short list, the dead-to-me list, but I’ve often wondered if it’s ridiculous to be a person who does such a thing. No, that’s not true— I know it’s ridiculous to be such a person, yet I’m the one in charge of this behavior, and it remains firmly in place.

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Years passed. I became a novelist. While writing a scene set in a real Italian trattoria, I gave all the Italians forks and spoons, so they could eat their spaghetti the correct way. The book was published, no one mentioned the pasta, and only when it reached my Italian translator did the truth come out— what do you mean? What spoon? We do not eat anything like this.

It seemed I’d been defeated, until finally, just last year, I watched Moonstruck, which stars Cher as an Italian-American diva who eats her spaghetti marinara with a spoon as her dutiful aid.

The above essay is 144 words, a part of a series explained here. Past entries include:

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-Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of the Hermit. One part existential detective novel, one part Thomas Bernhard homage, very funny, very dark, completely unpredictable. It was sort of like I Heart Huckabees about grief, if the lead had also been a recently transitioned man confronting his Midwestern family.

-Listening to the audiobook of something you loved when you first read it 20 years ago, and think of as one of your favorite books, but haven’t revisited in a while. I started doing this a while back, first with The House of Mirth.

-Kevin Sampsell’s Baby in the Night. A baby starts going out in his neighborhood alone at night because he thinks the moon is his absent father. An impulse acquisition after hearding Kevin read at the Frontera Festival in Dallas because the reading was so great. (Isn’t that the best way to find a new book?)

-Join us for the next meeting of The Irregular Bookclub on May 17th! We’re talking about Donald Antrim’s story collection, The Emerald Light in the Air.

Now this week’s rant—

I’ve been thinking about it for years— the insufficiency and impotence of using the accusations “self-indulgent” or “overly personal” in a work of literary criticism —but any time I tried to put it in writing, I felt pre-tired of the argument I’d been making in my head, leveed at no one in particular, and I’d give up before getting too far.

But last month the Irregular Book Club met to discuss Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, so I read the few reviews I could find online about it in preparation for our discussion. Two of the three were hugely disappointing.

I first read Sedgwick’s memoir in 2020, and I found it unusual and valuable in that it goes into great detail about her relationship with her therapist and the contents of her therapy sessions in the immediate aftermath of surviving breast cancer. (She died of cancer a decade later.) The book takes Japanese form of haibun— a kind of travelogue interspersed with haiku— so, at times the prose breaks into verse, then back to prose. I see it as an attempt to articulate the journey into the mercurial, private, transformative space of therapy for all those years.

While there are many books about therapy and psychoanalysis from the professional’s point of view, there are very few books (or even archives) out there that detail the experience from the patient’s point of view. (I’ve been looking for more— if you know of any, let me know.)

And I don’t know why I was surprised, but two of the published reviews I came across were critical of the book for, it seems, making the critic uncomfortable with its disclosures. (Though there is this one incredible essay about the use of failure and error in the book.) The Publisher’s Weekly review just came right out and said it: “Sedgwick's reflections can come across as tediously self-indulgent.” Another, longer review in the Fall 1999 issue of Rain Taxi seemed extremely confused and confounded by the book, and both wanted Sedgwick to tell less and tell more—

The result of so many disclosures is not exactly a tone of intimacy, nor is it altogether off-putting: if anything, the reader feels perplexed by the author's motivation—or is it compulsion?—to put affairs of so confidential a nature on such public display. The disclosures might be better understood if they served to elucidate Sedgwick's academic writing on sexuality, yet they have no discernible bearing on the politics of queer identity or the oppression of homosexuals. This absence of any meaningful connection between Sedgwick's work on gay studies and her own sexuality is never really examined in the book, and it only makes her erotic revelations all the more puzzling.

First of all— a writer’s motivation is totally beside the point when it comes to a critic’s work. You’re not reviewing the writer; you’re just reviewing the text.1 Second— a memoir, a book formed of the author’s memories and personal revelations, is indeed a confession. It is full of disclosure. It is full of personal details. Now, if someone cornered you at a party and started telling you personal details such as these, I’d call that perplexing, over-sharing, trauma dumping, etc. The context is not appropriate for confession. But the space of a memoir is always appropriate; I don’t think its possible for an author to tell too much in that space— or rather, the only person who decides what is too much is the author. As readers, our job is to make our own sense of it or else give up.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing to critique in a memoir in general, or in this memoir in particular. The language sometimes gets soupy and unclear. It’s a bit repetitive at times. Occasionally, I felt a little claustrophobic while reading. It’s possible that these bits of discomfort could have been avoided if Sedgwick had found an alternate path to take through the story.

But the accusation that a memoir (or even a novel) is self-indulgent— what is that really about? The self is always the subject (at least in part) of a memoir. The subtext to these kinds of accusations is kind of Who Cares? Who cares that she has these memories or feelings or desires? Well, I do. I care. I care how other people understand their lives and make sense of them and narrativize them. That’s why I like reading essays and memoir. Not because I think this memoirist’s life is uniquely more important than someone else’s, but because no one’s life is more important than anyone else’s.

There’s a moral judgment at play here, too. The writer who has indulged herself in public has made an ethical failing. She has told us something she wasn’t supposed to tell us. She had misjudged her own significance in this world.

It feels related to this idea I posted over a year ago that for some reason I still occasionally get notifications about—

Ultimately, I think when a critic accuses a memoir of being self-indulgent or over-sharing or too personal, I think what we’re seeing is the critic’s shame or discomfort over the level of disclosure on display.

It’s been almost a year since I put out The Möbius Book, which is at least half a somewhat straightforward memoir. (You can pre-order the paperback if you were waiting on it.) Since it was my first nonfiction book after 10 years of novels and stories, I thought a lot about what it would mean to share specifically personal details from my life and therefore from the lives of other people I’ve known.

My father was the only person I spoke to who was upset about what I wrote, not because it wasn’t true, but because it was true, and also because there was one story I told briefly, but not in full.

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I’ve been trying to write this post about how and when and why to ask for feedback on a writing project, but a few things have gotten in the way, mostly the manuscript I’m still chipping away at, and the fact that my habits around getting feedback on my writing have changed a lot over the years. I’ve been trying to remember what I used to do when I was a younger writer, and why I do things differently now.

(For some reason, sharing writing projects with friends reminds me of the Victorian practice of using leeches for various ailments, hence the above image.)

Feedback from Friends

With the first novel I published, Nobody Is Ever Missing, I had to do an email autopsy to discover that, yes, I did give a draft of that novel to at least three writer friends who all wrote both poetry and prose. I’ve never written poetry with any seriousness, but I feel like poets and visual artists tend to give the most useful and yet totally unexpected advice. They have a way of finding undertones in a text that the rest of us mere mortals can’t quite name or see.

I must have talked to my friends about the draft in person, though, because I don’t have any of their notes in my emails. I remember them all being super supportive, as friends usually are. The main thing I think I was asking them was, Is this a thing? And the general response they gave me was probably, Yeah, could be! Maybe it wasn’t super helpful on a textual level, but I was still trying to echolocate in the project.

When I first began writing what became that novel, however, I thought I was writing short fiction, so I published at least a few pieces of it online back when there were all those lo-fi, tiny, & wonderfully alive lit magazines all over the internet. (RIP Elimae!) So that was a form of feedback— or rather, it opened me up for feedback from people I didn’t know. We used to just email strangers on the internet because we’d read their tiny story on a tiny blog and loved it— do people still do that? I don’t know where the young-young writers are publishing fiction online anymore, but I can’t underscore enough how the 2007-2011ish blog, small press, and online lit mag world pushed my writing in the most lasting and important ways.

Workshop Feedback

I wrote that first novel in the years after I’d finished an MFA in creative nonfiction. Doing an MFA, at least for me, was a funhouse mirror of feedback, so much feedback, and so much conflicting advice, that I felt in some ways that I had less of an idea of what kind of writer I wanted to be when I left. I think what had actually happened is that my previous certainty about what I wanted to write and why I wanted to write it had fallen away under scrutiny— there was something more honest I had to discover once the degree was done.

But I had chosen to study nonfiction partially out of my early 20s belief that there were lots of very specific things I needed to learn about writing nonfiction while the writing of fiction (which I was doing mostly in secret since I was a kid) seemed to be something I would either get better at doing over time, or eventually stop doing. There was something about the fiction writing process that seemed uniquely private and un-learnable. (I have more complex feelings about writing education now.)

I don’t know if any of that was true, even back then, but it felt true at the time. I don’t know if I learned anything specific about writing a good essay—all my work was very bad at the time—but I’d like to think the lessons landed deeper and maybe I’m still learning them now.1 The whole time I was there I felt like a total idiot who had gotten a scholarship for this program for no good reason at all, but a few months ago I came across the essays I used to apply to the program, and while they’re not at all excellent, they were much more promising and alive than anything I wrote while I was actually in the MFA. Maybe sometimes we have to get worse at writing before we can get better.

Mentor Feedback

The essays I wrote in college got me into graduate school, I think, for two reasons. One was that they displayed a kind of urgency and useful ignorance; I wrote them all in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, when I was twenty, twenty-one, and I didn’t realize I wasn’t an investigative journalist. The other reason was that I had a great editor and teacher, Martin Pousson, who would mark up every single line of every single essay I wrote for a year and a half. He could unpack a 5 page draft for like 2 hours, raising a million new questions and giving me plenty of things to go read and learn from.

A lot of people go to MFAs out of this belief that we need feedback about our writing in order to get better. There is some truth in this—as you don’t want to get trapped in your own self-feedback loop—but there’s also some risk when it comes to showing your work to other people. Martin took giving feedback to a fine art; I don’t know anyone who can read a text the way he can. Lord knows that over 2 years in an MFA, you’ll probably phone it in sometimes, but getting or giving half-assed feedback feels pretty terrible.

And yet! Well-timed feedback from a trusted source can be absolutely invaluable in your writing process.

But when is it a good idea to get feedback on a novel manuscript? What about a story, an essay? When is it maybe a bad idea to ask for advice on your work? And how do you know what kind of advice to seek out?

Who is a good source of feedback on a manuscript? How might early readers change or challenge your process? Is it possible that certain kinds of feedback could totally ruin a manuscript for the writer? Or is the ruinability of a manuscript a sign that the project was doomed anyway?

All of the above will be addressed below, but first,

An admonitory tale—

I used to know this writer who once sent me a manuscript he’d just written. I mistakenly assumed he wanted to know what I thought of it as a work-in-progress. After all, he’d just written it. The ink was barely dry.

Naturally, I had notes! There were parts of the plot that simply did not add up, and areas that felt emotionally vacant. It was a cool concept, a solid first draft, but I thought he would probably want to revise a little.

Turns out he did not want my opinion, unless my opinion was that it was the best thing I had ever read in my life. I soon learned he never wanted anyone’s opinion about anything he’d ever written because in his estimation no one knew how to write his work better than he did.

At the time—almost done writing my second novel—I was still encumbered by the idea that I needed other people to confirm that something I had written was working or not working, accomplishing its goals or falling flat. I did not feel like I could judge my work totally on my own, because there were things I’d written that I thought might be mediocre, but then turned out to have real meaning to readers, and there were things I’d written that I thought were pretty great that turned out to fall apart under the slightest outside scrutiny.

But this dude2 wasn’t asking for my advice about the work— he just wanted me to appreciate the fact that it was already, in his estimation, fantastic, and definitely done. He never, as a rule, asked anyone for advice on his writing.

And the thing is— this is not an entirely incorrect position to take! No one can fix your work for you. No one can tell you what to do with your manuscript. No one knows your end goal better than you do.

But that is not what getting feedback is about.

You don’t seek out a reader’s response on your work because they are an authority, but because you are ALSO not an authority on your work, as much as it may sometimes feel like you are.

OK, but then who is the authority?

By the end of writing a draft of something, you should be pretty clear about some of your intentions for the text. You should have an idea of what its underlying, subtextual topics are. It’s important that you don’t go seeking someone’s feedback on your work before you’re clear about those goals.

The work itself is the authority on itself; not the writer, nor the reader.

But you also have to remember that you are the most contaminated reader of your own work, even though you are the only one who can write it. You know both too much and too little. You might be very proud of something you’ve written that will ultimately be useless to other people, or you might be a bit confused about something you’ve written that will have real utility to other people. There are the intentions you have for the text as its writer, but fiction has a way of creating it’s own agenda, outside your control or awareness, and usually you need another pair of eyes to see those other forces at play.

Feedback is not a quick fix

Feedback is not a perfecting process, but rather an exploratory process of figuring out what your options really are and to erode your own certainty about how things MUST be in this piece of writing. Probably the most meaningful guidance you will ever get in your writing life will take years to actually show up in the process.

When I was a younger writer, it was hard for me to understand or even see my writing at all until someone else had seen it; over time, I have a better eye for seeing my own work for what it is, for getting a manuscript closer to becoming itself before I bring it to other people, but I know I still need my first readers and editors to accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish.

Here’s what I feel like I know about who/when/how/why to seek feedback after about 20 years of getting and giving various kinds of feedback, and producing a not small amount of work that’s been greatly helped (and sometimes totally stymied!) by that feedback—

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April 21 - Harvard University 6pm/ Writers Speak / A conversation with Laura van den Berg
April 23 - New York University 7pm / A reading and disc…

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My friend Kendee had been recommending the Neapolitan Quartet to me for at least a year because she wanted to talk to me about it. I had tried to start My Brilliant Friend, the first book in the series, a few times but it had never felt quite right so I took the recommendation with a grain of salt. But then, the last time I was staying at her house, Kendee sat me down and was like, “Listen, I love you, but if you don’t read the Neapolitan Quartet very soon there will be PROBLEMS.”

Point taken! I started reading it a couple weeks later. There’s nothing like a well-timed and friendly threat to really get me into a 1240 page four book series.

And listen— Kendee was totally right. When I finished reading the first one, I immediately went out and bought the second. When I finished the second at the beach, I started reading the excerpt of the third immediately on my laptop. I’m now done with the third—I had to take a break to catch up on the Proust reading club I’m in—but I will read the fourth the minute I get it in a few weeks.

Just yesterday I realized I’d fallen out of touch with a couple of older friends that I admire and think of as extended family. I’d gotten their Christmas card, delayed by a month because that’s how mail works in Mexico, and kept it on the kitchen counter for a while to remind me to write to them, but I kept forgetting. Then just yesterday I remembered and sent them an email, writing out a summary of the several difficult things that have happened in my family since November (not to mention the wars, both domestic and international, that my home country has been waging) and I was like, wow, no wonder I’ve been reading so much and forgetting to get in touch with anyone.

Dissociating into books has been my number one coping mechanism since the 1990. That kind of reading every spare minute you have reading because you can’t really think of anything other than the characters in the book. Of course, a work like the Neapolitan Quartet is widely known to be a page turner of the highest quality. (I was suspicious of how good it could be, given how out of control popular it has been, but it really nails the magic ratio of internality/weirdness and a gorgeously paced plot.)

But then I was looking at my bookshelf and thinking of stranger books that I personally found intoxicating in that particular way.

So I put together a list of 15 of them for Bookshop.org and they’re offering 15% off (until April 1) this list if you use code BSO15.

Below I attempt to explain what makes these books unputdownable—

Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski

This one is 100% mood. It's life happening in the smoking car of a train barreling through the United States, mostly the south, as seen by one of the most unsung heroes of the personal/impersonal essay that the 20th century produced.

The Door by Magda Szabo (translated by Len Rix)

One of the most thrilling books about one strange woman’s indescribable power over another. A Hungarian classic first published in 1987, and the main character’s name is Magda, same as the writer, and they share a resemblance, so don’t anyone tell me it’s trendy or contemporary for an author to make that move in 2026.

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund)

I’m going to write something about all of Vigdis Hjorth’s books very soon, but this is probably the most intense of a very intense bunch. But if you’re upset by very bleak Norwegian family dynamics, just skip all of Hjorth. If that’s your thing, read everything she’s ever written and maybe start here.

Embers by Sándor Márai (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)

Another classic of Hungarian literature, this one much more saturated with revenge and early 20th century vibes. This is on backorder at Bookshop.org but just go ask your local bookshop or library for a copy.

Theater for Beginners by Richard Maxwell

This is one of those mercurial books about creativity that I keep returning to. Ostensibly it’s about making theater, but really it’s about making anything. I think I discovered it because Miranda July recommended it somewhere years ago.

One Sun Only by Camille Bordas

After reading the first novel Camille wrote in English (she’s French, published a few books in French very young, but now lives in the States and writes in English) I’ve been reading her short stories as they’ve appeared, about one per year, in The New Yorker. They are so peculiar and take so many strange moves. This is my most anticipated collection in years.

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré (translated by Holly James)

My friend Zoe just read this book and was texting me that she found it heartless and kind of emotionally terrifying and thus found the book insufferable. I loved it for all the same reasons! She called the author “hipster gay Camus” and she’s not wrong!

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (translated by Natasha Lehrer)

I started a whole book club because I needed to talk about this book, and also I wanted as many people as possible to read it.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Contemporary young folks literature that has a huge debt to this book and not enough of them talk about it, I think. Do the youngsters find it cringe that it was written by a white male Millenial? I do not care. I love this book forever.

My Death by Lisa Tuttle

A precise, short, obsessive book narrated by a women trying to get to the bottom of a mystery about an artist she admires, but also feels haunted by.

The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits

This book invented a whole new kind of memoir. Also it’s really really funny about midlife, family life, writing, everything. It’s also one of those books that, when I was reading it, I would only put down to take 100 notes because it loosened up my thoughts in that way.

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima (translated by Geraldine Harcourt)

Another precise, urgent, short book, this one about a woman and her child moving to an apartment, or rather looking for a new way to live. It’s a very calming, meditative read and yet also really fervent. If you’re confused about what to do with yourself, or you’re in a transitional state, I think you’ll feel the urgency here, though it’s subtle.

Loop by Brenda Lozano (translated by Annie McDermott)

Of all of Lozano’s books, this one remains my favorite, though it’s close. It’s a beautiful, coiling book about young love and young creativity and living with your influences. Marcel Proust is sort of a character. It’s really funny and fun.

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews

Read this one last year, two times in a row, to try to get to understand it. In some way it is an attempt for Toews, author of several incredible novels, to describe why she writes, but in order to answer that question she has to tell the story of her sister. It’s absolutely full of sentences you have to sit with, copy into your notebook, come back to. Totally essential, vulnerable, and as always with Toews, really funny.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

I read this on a weekend trip during which I was supposed to be spending time with people I did, at the time, like being around, but in retrospect I realize I liked reading this book a lot more. A great place to start with Kitamura if you somehow haven’t already become a rabid fan.

As promised, the ridiculous story— again starring my personal hero, The Very Scrupulous Copy Editor— about working on edits for a story forthcoming in The New Yorker.

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The partner is the sort of man who never, emotionally, ceased to belong to his high…

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I love copy editors so much.

I’ve never been one of those writers who think the copy editors are all drunk on power and are always trying to mess with their prose. (Literally I’ve heard novelists say this.) I don’t always agree or accept every edit, but I love every suggestion; I love seeing a document through someone else’s eyes that closely. I leave a lot of colon-parenthesis smiley faces in the comments.

When we stopped doing paper copyedits, I first felt really sad reading all the track-changes comments, but now it sometimes feels like I’m passing notes with my friend, or chatting very slowly on AOL Instant Messenger in 1998, and even though the copy editor rarely even has a name within the document, you do start to get a sense of their personality over the course of the hundreds or thousands of edits and comments.

In fact, when I first got on Substack I thought— this is never going to work. I will have to hire a copy editor, and I’ll never be able to afford to both pay myself to write and pay a copy editor to find my mistakes.

Instead—my Substacks just have a lot of typos, and I just live with my shame.

Eventually it’s become clear— for me, Substack posts are not in the same category as my books or essays or stories. Mainly this is because every single book or story or essay I’ve ever written has been edited by someone else, then copy-edited and copy-edited again, then once or twice more just for good measure. Substacks (or mine, at least) are more like emails, rough around the edges.

When I got the copy edits on my first novel in 2013 they were on paper. The manuscript was mailed to my apartment and I responded to the red-inked copy edits with a blue-inked pen. This was the standard practice at FSG at the time, though I think by then a lot of other publishing houses had switched to a track-changes Word doc.1

My friend Rebecca (who was then an academic books editor and not yet the author of Murder Bimbo) lent me her copy of Copy Editing For Dummies so that I could decode the hieroglyphics.

What I learned while responding to those first ever edits is that my ability to spell, punctuate, or correctly use grammar was much weaker than I knew. Sure, the prose had its own logic, its unusual yet intentional syntactical tics, but then there were just lots of things that did not make sense. There were so many basic, humiliating errors in that manuscript that when I eventually met one of the copy editors in person I nearly fell to my knees and kissed her hand. Rachel!! I am horrible with names, but I am pretty sure her name was Rachel. Thank you, Rachel.

In the many years since then, I’ve learned that not only do I still make tons and tons of really stupid grammatical errors, but also that I’m not that great and re-learning the things I apparently learned incorrectly in elementary school or never learned at all.

Maybe I have a touch of the dyslexia, I’ve sometimes thought, and maybe that’s true, but I also feel like giving myself a diagnosis is just an excuse trying to cover up the truth— that I’m impatient and flighty and that even though I love writing and reading, I read over my pages too quickly to catch the mistakes. I must have gotten it from my father, as my mom used to regularly text me when I published something literally anywhere on the internet that had a typo in it. She couldn’t help herself. Sometimes I still get such messages, and honestly, I have always appreciated them. My pro-bono, guerilla copy editor.

But the copyediting stage of a book is also full of fun moments— or it least it can be fun, if you have a really thorough editor on your side, like this note from when I was reviewing The Möbius Book:

This Myth Has Been Confirmed!!!!!

I let out a little squeal of delight when I came to this moment. Oh man oh god oh lord there’s nothing this copy editor can’t do— they’re out there Confirming Myths!!!

All this actually meant was that the copy editor had taken the time to go look up a Greek myth about cicadas that I had referenced. I’ve had copy editors point out all kinds of time inconsistencies, also— this was especially the case with Biography of X— though I’m not sure if that’s really their job or not. Maybe they just can’t help themselves.

More recently, I’ve been reviewing the copy edits on my forthcoming story collection, My Stalkers (January 2027). This copy edit has been a little less involved because all of the stories (except one) have been through multiple edits and published in magazines. Instead, the comments have been veering more philosophical, or pointing out differences in FSG’s house style and the styles of other magazines. (Goodbye New Yorker umlaut.)

Like this— should it have been “Wite-Out” (as the brand name is formatted) or just “white out,” two words from the English language that can be used with clarity in place of the brand name?

Copy editors are always saving me from my own stupidity and for that I am so endlessly thankful. There was one time last year when a really really really stupid spelling mistake here on Substack led to acute yet almost debilitating embarrassment, and then, somehow, the most amazing outcome.

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Hi Catherine

I’m wondering if there are tools/tricks/practices/attitudes that can help a writer who has written version X* of the novel, it’s in decent shape but not good enough. I received feedback that was mixed, both promising and also lacking, from an agent at a writing conference. Then I met with my writing group (very important to me, they have been supportive). They shared feedback, mostly positive and also containing numerous notes about things to consider doing to improve the work. My idea is to just take things one by one -- not everything but the points that resonate with me -- and work and work to improve the story. To do so with the knowledge that it won’t be perfect but maybe just maybe there will be others who will enjoy reading it later.

So I’m wondering if as a someone I admire who has written several books and is committed to a creative life, you have any words to share; maybe there are others in the community you’re building who face a similar challenge.

thanks

Michael

* X= 10 but really I’ve lost count and it doesn’t matter. I want to create something that makes sense, that makes people feel something, sad, funny, other stuff too.

Dear Michael & anyone else who is trying to revise something as monstrous as a novel,

First of all— yes, revision is often the most discouraging (as well as confusing, dislocating, and depressing) part of the writing process. You have to forget about almost everything that excited you about the story and see the novel as a machine that is either functioning or not functioning. Self-doubt abounds.

However, you might also discover some sincere joy and satisfaction in revising; when you find a solution that you’ve been seeking for months or years, it’s arguably even more exciting than any of those early days, all that first draft high you might have had.

I happen to love the long term commitment of writing novels. I love that it’s a slow and inefficient process, that it takes years of regular, sometimes repetitive labor. I love that the book that I end up writing differs from what I set out to write, and that the novel accrues layers I wouldn’t have been able to foresee at the start.

That said, a serious revision of a novel is a grappling with the shadow side of the work. Everything you might have had to ignore or fail to notice to get the first draft out will be on the table as you revise and honestly this is sometimes quietly humiliating. Most people stop here.

Whatever belief you might have in your ability to control and manage the process has to be thrown out. Slowness can sometimes feel like stasis, or even madness, so your patience will be critical, and even in your strongest patience yet you may still wonder: Are you revising your novel, or are you going quietly nuts? Is your novel an act of generosity you might give to others, or is it simply not functioning?

I’ve already written about starting a novel, working on a novel, about the various tools you might use when you feel stuck in a novel, and several other aspects of getting through a big process, but it’s interesting to me that you ask about revision this particular month.

I’ve just started a big structural revision of a novel, and as usual I’m often feeling daunted by the task. Though this will be my fifth novel, and my eighth book, I still needed to remind myself how I’ve ever been able to do this. The few writers I’ve known who find this life straightforward and easy are just pretty boring as artists; they tend to be stuck on a single setting and resist change.1

Anyway— here’s a list of strategies that have helped me in the past and I hope will keep helping me now—

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