I must admit that when the contract arrived in my inbox, I was in a very undignified place, involving multi-tasking in the bathroom and simultaneously powering up my Blackberry. (No, not that! Get your mind out of the gutter!) Let me tell you, yesterday I found out that it is not easy to utter a Shehechiyanu blessing with a toothbrush in your mouth.It didn't go down the way I expected. I always thought the news would come by phone, that it would happen at work, that it would involve screaming and shrieking and being embraced by my colleagues and that I'd be on the phone all day telling the people who mean the most to me. But instead it was just a quiet spring morning, alone in my apartment, getting ready to leave for Passover services, way too early to call anyone.
Thus, I am pleased to announce that my novel, The Bookseller's Sonnets, the book that was sown in tears and now will hopefully be redeemed in joy, will be published by O-Books (a small house in Britain specializing in religion and spirituality titles) in June of 2010.
I had a provisional contract on Tuesday, but didn't want to say anything to anyone until I was sure. This is, you should know, all due to the help and guidance of my dear friend Sally, whose beautiful memoir, The New Jew, is now available on Amazon.com. Seriously, it's gorgeous. Buy her book. Buy it now. Do not wait.
But she is not alone in making this moment possible. Throughout the past two days, my mind and heart have been full of gratitude for the friends, family, teachers, colleagues, and writers who helped me along the way. Publication of an actual novel has been a dream of mine since I was 17 years old. It's so hard to believe that this day has arrived.
Is it an accident that this happened on the first day of Passover, the festival of liberation? Not that I'm expecting to be liberated from anything anytime soon - most authors I know have to keep their day jobs. But perhaps it is instead a liberation from the past, from the heartbreak that engineered the writing in the first place. Maybe it's a liberation from that dark time, when I thought nothing would ever be right again, that I'd be grieving forever.
My dear friend Abby told me just a few short weeks ago that those we lose in the springtime contribute in some way to our own spring awakening. And yesterday I listened to a beautiful reading about Passover, which contained the idea that a seed must break to give forth life, and just as it is hard for a seed, contained in its shell, to imagine itself as a blossom, so it is with hearts full of grief, in their brokenness, to imagine that someday they will be whole.
So my hope is that this will be the beginning of the beginning - that having given my whole broken heart to this book, that perhaps with it going out into the world, somehow my broken heart will be made whole again.
In the meantime, let the celebration begin!
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