how i wrote a book, part 3

Oil of Gladness

If I’d had my way — and let me be clear up front: I am desperately grateful I did not have anything close to my way — my second book would have been a jokey-bitter career-advice tome, not-so-subtly titled “Big Fuck-Off Energy: A Career Path Forward When You’re Out of Fucks.”

I started writing the proposal for this book in the summer of 2020. Like many accomplished women at this time, I spent those long pandemic days making beans and teaching 5th grade math. Most all of my freelance work had dried up. I had just one client left. I took on his only available project at a laughably reduced rate. I was in little position to say no. So, for 20 hours a week, I espoused the health benefits of cannabis for a Christian website — God’s Greenery — ostensibly providing service journalism to its hardcore readership but really, sneakily, pushing the company’s in-house CBD line, “Oil of Gladness.”

While I sold snake oil to Christians, Insta-potted your aunt’s favorite cannellini recipe and failed at long division, my husband was on deadline for two books. Each morning, he’d march out our front door and into the dank, windowless garage where he’d type in isolation at a card table until dark, after which he headed the few steps back home for bean dinner. Earlier that year, we’d tapped most of our savings to pay an unexpectedly high tax bill. His book money wouldn’t come in for months. Our income was a fraction of a fraction of what it had once been. I needed to sell a book — and fast. We were broke.

My agent Nicole and I spent weeks perfecting the Big Fuck-Off proposal. I pushed the text through multiple rounds of revisions, flipping jokes and casting off clichés, driving the point home — women are over it — making the writing sing. Truth was, every female I knew felt as fucked as I did. The book seemed just right for the moment. I felt certain someone would scoop it up.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, says some old proverb. I haven’t read the bible since my 6th-grade confirmation, but I can tell you this: at this moment in my life, he/she/they was near-certainly having a good chuckle over me.