New Year, New Book

Oh, hi. Long time. I have news.

I wrote another book! And sold it to the wonderful people at DAW! See:

This is a concept I’ve had in my head for a long time, but the heart of the story—parents who lose a child—is a more recent addition.

If you have followed my work or my intermittent social media presence, you probably know I have a daughter. She’s seven—a great prime number—and is all things joyful, chaotic, brilliant, wonderful, messy, and perfect. She’s the best.

But before her, there was another—a positive-test, soon-to-be-baby-bump my partner and I knew about, began to plan for, dreamed of welcoming into our lives. We were overly happy and not nearly as guarded as we would be the next time around, so we told everyone—family and friends, colleagues and random people at the grocery store. I would’ve told the geese that frequent our nearby lake if they would’ve stopped honking for long enough to let me get a word in.

That child, that could’ve-been-child, who lived exclusively in our imaginations and the planned-for future of our lives, left one morning without any real fanfare or warning. We didn’t know anything about that person; it was too early to know the size or sex or shape. And so, as we had imagined our future child, we also imagined what we had lost. We named that baby Harrow, and we mourned the lost lives we might have had together.

When we found out about our daughter later, my partner and I guarded the information from the world and from our own hopes. We didn’t plan like we had for that lost baby. We didn’t burble the news to just anyone. We knew how quickly hope could flutter and die, and so we sheltered it.

And then our daughter was born! And she was healthy! And happy! And loud! So, so loud. You know how babies in movies pop out in the hospital and scream the high-pitched songs of their people? Well, my daughter emerged, was deposited on a scale, and let loose a deep, gravely cry more reminiscent of a drunk 50-year old man verbalizing his fruitless efforts to remember what he was trying to say. “uhhhhhhhh”

She arrived! And everything was great. On the bell curve of biometrics, she had numbers and percentages that her doctor nodded happily at, and so, too, did we. Having a new baby is terrifying, and we were appropriately terrified, but we also had every reason to be optimistic. Our daughter pooped and cried and looked and pooped some more and wiggled and pooped just like babies are supposed to. And that was great.

But I couldn’t get rid of the fear—the near certainty—that something bad was going to happen. I’d lost once, and a persistent, whispering voice in my head assured me it could happen again. Probably would. I spent nights not able to sleep, creeping into my daughter’s room to make sure she was still breathing. I’d stare at the baby monitor until she wiggled around or the pixels shifted just slightly to show an inhale or exhale. I’d haunt the space outside her room, telling myself and that voice that she was fine, she was ok, she was just sleeping. And then I’d go in again, just to check.

If this book, The Nothing and the Dread, has a starting place, it’s there, in the darkness outside of my daughter’s room, somewhere in the silence between “she’s fine” and “but what if?”

But if the start is there, it’s also on the glider chair where, in the middle of the night, when my daughter had been fed but wouldn’t sleep, I would sit and hold her, sometimes reading to her from the kindle I held, sometimes singing to her, and sometimes just looking at her. I’ll never, in my whole life, forget her weight in my arms or the way her round cheeks looked in the soft illumination of the hallway lights. Gliding back and forth on that chair with her as she blinked and looked and breathed and snuffled and shifted around—well, I haven’t experienced much better in my life.

So this book, which I hope to say more about in the coming months, starts there, a mixture of that deep, uncertain fear and that sublime, impossible joy. I wrote it for the child I lost and for the child I got, the one I never got to know and the one I feel so grateful to know. This book is everything I’m afraid of, and it’s everything I love, too.

I hope you like it.