Bear with me. There is a point to this story.
Months ago, before our six-month-long New England winter, we got a contractor in to yank out a bunch of tree stumps from the small grove where a few trees had, until recently, been growing—and dying—dangerously close to our house. The guy, incidentally, was a real character. He wheeled around our land on his skid-steer mini-excavator—a machine that captured my three-year-old son’s heart completely—cigar clamped between his teeth, talking loudly, whenever I drove by, about how great it was going to look when he was done. He was arrogant but he was friendly and I was willing to take him at his word.
Though he completed the stump-yanking assignment, he did it sloppily. When the season’s snow finally began to melt, it revealed, where the stumps had been, a four hundred fifty square-foot mud pit, pooling with stagnant rainwater and punctuated everywhere by long and creeping or thick and broken roots, which stuck out of the earth like alien tendrils and hacked-off zombie limbs. In the muddy, sunny, first real days of spring, our yard resembled the set of a low-budget horror movie. The children were more than into it. They spent hours with their trucks and shovels in the mud. I however was filled with dread at the prospect of the generations of mosquitoes which would surely breed in all that standing water. I asked a gardener friend to come and advise. Polite but appalled, she tugged a femur-sized root from the ground and tossed it into the woods. “So much of my work,” she said, “is cleaning up messes that men leave behind.”
I spent the next few days doing something very out-of-character: yard work. First, like a dummy, I went through the area pulling out with bare hands what roots I could, and taking ratcheting loppers to those that were too stubborn to budge. My palms, after that first round, were red and abraded. The skin burned for hours. The next day, I went out fully outfitted in work gloves (and sunscreen and a hat), with a hatchet, too, to hack up what roots were thick to be lopped. I hacked away at all the big roots I could find, and pulled up hundreds, maybe thousands of thinner ones. I loosened huge rocks from the ground and picked up smaller ones and made a low rock wall from them at the edge of the French drain.
In this way, three or four days went by. Eventually, I had to acknowledge that the job would never be done. There was just no way to get every single orphaned root. We live in the woods; the earth around our house is a dense network of root systems, some brittle, old, and dead, others strong and live and tough as muscle. I won’t embarrass myself by coming up with some belabored metaphor here for the work of writing. I will only say that this tough, physical work I did, with this tough old land, left me achy and thoughtful and satisfied, and ready for something new.
When I’d gotten to a reasonable stopping point, and raked as evenly as possible the soil that remained, I went to the gardening store and bought a bag of grass seed. Day five (or so—I lost track), I seeded all that grass. That morning was warm but cloudy, quiet and dark, a departure from the previous days’ brilliance. I sprinkled the little rice-like seeds, and raked and raked, and watched the airborne dramas of the birds, and listened to an audiobook, Lorrie Moore’s weird and witty recent novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home. (One favorite line: “Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic.”) Three hours went by. The toothed metal end of my borrowed rake snapped in half on a tough root; I raked with what was left of it. Now the job is done. Fortunately, the weather has been cooperating, misting and raining on my seeds. All that’s left to do now is to wait and hope.
A couple of nights ago, I joined a book group that was discussing Fruit of the Dead. One of the members asked me how I deal with negative reviews. She said, “I went on Goodreads, and . . . .” I winced; I didn’t want to hear the rest. For peace of mind, I have blocked Goodreads on my browsers and my phone.
To be fair, I have been pretty lucky with most readers’ responses to my work. When Self-Portrait with Boy came out in 2018, people were generous across the board. It is only recently that I have felt the sting of a few, outspoken haters. But Self-Portrait was, from my perspective, a more careful book. I wrote it more tentatively, obsessed with the idea of literary merit, fearful of how vulnerable I might feel if and when it was received. Writing Fruit, I tried to be more brave—tried, even, to embrace a kind of creative recklessness. I took risks, and—though I’ve gotten lots of positive responses, too—I have paid for those risks with greater censure. Despite what I thought of as bravery during the writing process, turns out after publication I am just as vulnerable as, six years ago, I was afraid I’d be.
How do I deal with it? To be honest, at first I allowed myself to feel a little hurt. And then, eventually, I felt strong enough to evaluate my second novel, myself. I listened to the audiobook and decided that I believe in it, after all. I think it is a good book, better than my first. Satisfied, to the extent that I ever can be, I turned the bulk of my attention to a new project: a novel that, because it is still mostly unwritten, still has the potential to make everyone who reads it fall in love. Finally, I lost myself, for half a week, in a mania of yard work, and felt renewed.
In Other News
Speaking of book clubs, I’m very happy to share that Fruit of the Dead has been chosen as the NEPM Book Club pick for this July! You don’t have to live in New England to take part. Register here for the virtual discussion on 7/18.
Mashable predicted that Fruit will “go TikTok famous this year” (??), and British GQ called it a best book of 2024 (so far). Only 7 months to go!
Meanwhile, the book got a nice write-up in NB Magazine; my poet friend Rena Mosteirin, who owns the beautiful bookstore Left Bank Books in Hanover, NH, shared this very thoughtful review of it with booksellers; and BookReporter wrote that Fruit “is far more than a clever retelling; it's also a thoroughly contemporary novel . . . [which] pulls readers out of time and immerses them in a story that feels both ages old and entirely new.”
The literary journal Bloodroot was kind enough to publish a short story of mine, “Ali, Alley, Allison,” about two young alcoholics and a young therapist who share (almost) the same name. View the complete issue as a web PDF here.
I will be in NYC on 5/21 for a very exciting panel at the Center for Fiction on feminist reimaginings of myth, with legendary and highly intimidating fellow authors Madeline Miller (Circe) and Maria Davahna Headley (The Mere Wife). More info here, including event registration. I’d love to see you there.
Thank you, and more soon,
xo Rachel