The Bloggess

This is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how I’m about to go on book tour for my new book in a few days. Instead I am writing about the fact that I was just informed that my first book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was banned from the high school library of a nearby town I love and visit often.

Honestly, I’m not that upset about my book being banned. I’ve had so many letters from young people who felt they’d been helped by my books but it does have some profanity and so I can understand the reasoning even if I disagree with it. What I am upset about is the stories about how New Braunfels ISD has pulled more that 1,500 books from their school library shelves after the Texas’ Republican-backed book banning law (senate bill 13) passed. The bill ordered all public school libraries to review books for “profane” and “indecent” content and I guess Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was deemed too dangerous for high schoolers.

Weirdly, my book was not on the original list of the 1,500 books triggered for review on March 13 but a week ago it was added to the New Braunfels ISD website as being removed for being “non-compliant”. (I’ve been called worse.) I guess 1,500 books weren’t enough. But then, it’s never enough for book banners.

This is going to happen more and more. It used to be a rare thing…almost a badge of courage to have a book banned. Now? It’s everywhere…this war against books and ideas and people. Reading is how you fall in love with people different from you, and how you develop compassion for them…because if you love them, you want to protect them. But there are some people who don’t want you to love others. They need you to fear them.

Books save lives. They have saved mine. Books are safety nets for so many of us, and right now those nets are being cut.

The list of banned books is incredible in length and includes so many that I adore. Equally upsetting is the fact that so many classics that shaped me have been pulled from the shelves and placed into “restricted sections” where they can only be accessed by students enrolled in Advanced Placement Literature, because God forbid a normal high school student would want to read the works of dangerous writers like *checks the list* Jane Austen and Emily Brontë (whose name they misspelled).

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in A Brave New World (restricted) and that the book burning of Fahrenheit 451 (also restricted) is closer than ever, with no Sense and Sensibility (also restricted) about what this will cost. It feels like we’re going through The Crucible (also restricted) and are caught in a Catch-22 (also restricted) where we can’t convince people how terrible it is to ban books because they either don’t know the power of books or they absolutely know it and fear it. It’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (banned) how book banners go out on some kind of A Discovery of Witches (also banned) and fight against Acceptance (banned) and of diversity, while we are losing All The Beauty in the World (banned). America is a Beautiful Country (banned) in so many ways, but we will lose so much of that beauty if we don’t make Changes (banned) to cherish and embrace and grow what makes us Educated (banned) and compassionate. The diversity of voices is necessary…it is a reflection of who we are and who we want to be. A plethora of ideas and voices and experiences…This Is What America Looks Like (banned). We can’t just pretend that Everything’s Fine (banned) and that this is just an overreaction of Anxious People (banned). Do you think this is what the founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton (banned) envisioned? I’m going to stop here because I’m sure you can see that this dumb paragraph is WAY TOO EASY TO WRITE because there are so many books they have issues with and you probably get the picture already but y’all….Jane Eyre? The Color Purple? The Odyssey? Crime and Punishment?? THIS IS WHAT WE’RE SAVING TEENAGERS FROM?

So what can you do? You can buy books that are being targeted, especially those written by the LGBTQ+ authors or authors of color because they are being targeted the most. Supporting those authors tells publishing to keep producing those books because they are needed. Publishers will lose money if libraries become afraid to purchase books and so we need to make sure that they know the audience is there and greedy for diverse voices. Get a library card and start checking out those books and more, to prove to the government that libraries need funding and that people care about reading. Read to your children. Read in front of your children. Talk online about the books that you love so that your passion ignites others. If you’re a parent you can get involved with your school to make sure this doesn’t happen in your school and you can protest it if it happens. You can vote out the people who seem to be obsessed with freedom, but mainly when it’s their freedom to take away yours and your children’s. You can run against school board members who are book banners and show up at the meetings. You can keep updated by following organizations like PEN AMERICA, or the Texas Freedom to Read Project or Authors Against Book Bans.

*deep breath*

This is probably filled with typos and is not really the sort of thing that I should be writing the day before I leave to start my book tour but it’s important. When books and thoughts and people are suppressed, we all lose. Keep fighting the good fight, friends. It’s worth it.

This was supposed to be a post all about new book releases you should check out this month but then I got sidetracked because I’M GOING TO BE ON THE TODAY SHOW.

At first I thought this was a practical joke because I’m never asked to be on things like this but turns out it is real and I will be on next Saturday morning (the 28th) to talk about my new book. This is especially puzzling since there is a story in the book about how I was the first person to ever say the phrase “lady garden” live on CNN but I have promised to be on my best behavior. I am currently baffled though about what to wear and have winnowed it down to a pair of fancy overalls made of couch upholstery embroidered with kittens, a silky dress that I loved until I realized that everyone will see my knees on tv, a kaftan that I thought would be very sophisticated because it’s just black but now that I look closer looks a lot like a witches costume with floor-length cape, a vest made of actual ice cubes that I wear when I’m panicking because anxiety makes me sweaty. Pretty sure none of these work. I do have one dress that might work but when I showed it Hailey they were like, “It’s a little….vaginal?” and then I looked at all of the giant pink paisleys again and now all I can see is vagina. I wore it to the bookstore yesterday and was like, “Can you see the vaginas in this dress?” and they were like, “Oh. Well not before, but yeah, now that I’m looking for it I can see vaginas” and so now the best dress I have is one where I worry that I will show everyone my vaginas. This is where I would share a picture of it but if I do then I have either doomed myself to have you all see my vaginas on live tv or everyone will be like, “HOW DO YOU SEE VAGINAS IN THAT, YOU WEIRDOS?” and it feels like there’s not a win there either way.

Slightly related, copies of HOW TO BE OKAY WHEN NOTHING IS OKAY have arrived at the Nowhere Bookshop warehouse and I’ve begun signing them! You can also get signed copies from Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and lots of indie bookshops everywhere. And I’ll be signing books (and whatever else you want) on book tour in PA, NH, CA, OR and TX. Please come.

And now…some other lovely March books you should be checking out:

This month I picked Honeysuckle by Bar Fridman-Tell for the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club. It’s a dark, gothic Welsh mythology reimagined to explore love, power and consent.

And if you’re a member of Nightmares from Nowhere Book club you’re getting Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran. The untimely death of a student at a girls’ boarding school turns out to be the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events. A thrilling debut novel about teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age.

They are both hauntingly good and I highly recommend them.

And if you need more books to get you through the month, here are a few more new releases I loved:

The Lost Daughter of Sparta by Felicia Day and Rowan MacColl– A fabulous sapphic graphic novel retelling the lost fourth daughter cursed by Aphrodite.

The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann– We all know what happened to Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. But what if she woke up the day after her execution and took it upon herself to seek justice?

Statues by Junji Ito– I’m a sucker for any of Ito’s horror graphic novels. So very weird.

Hell’s Heart by Alexis Hall – Moby Dick. In space. With lesbians. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

Happy reading!

I’m not sure where time went, but the book I’ve been working on for years actually comes out in a few weeks. (Holy crap.) Preorders can make such a difference in whether or not a book is successful and so as a special thank you for everyone orders it before pub date, I have a little surprise for you that my incredible Random House Penguin team put together. If you click here to tell us that you preordered then you will get to see all of the drawings I made in the book and then you can print them or color them or post them on a wall or use them to set tiny bonfires.

And you’ll also get to read a few little missives from the book, including one called MURDER POTATOES and another about the time I tried to liberate a human head who was an in-real-life friend of mine. Sort of.

It will ask you for an email address but I promise you won’t get any emails unless you click the box that says that you want to get emails. And also there’s a place where you’re supposed to give the receipt number from your book order but I was like, “Anyone who needs this book is probably unlikely to have saved that number because honestly…I don’t even know where my own receipt is from when I ordered my copy. Can we just have people say ‘I totally promise I ordered a book – or maybe several because my memory is bad – but I’m not organized enough to prove it’ and my publisher was like, “For your people? Totally.”

Also, I was recently telling my sister that I had a meeting with the publisher and she was like, “You’re having a meeting with a random house penguin? That is awesome.” And to be fair, it’s actually Penguin Life which is part of Penguin Random House but I’m going to keep saying “random house penguin” because that does sound awesome.

Now please preorder and go read the sneak peek and tell me what you think? I hope you like it.

Okay, several things…

First off, this was my drawing I posted on my art substack this week where I wrote about how we all need to start using the word “unfuckwithable” more so it can end up in the dictionary, but I’m sharing it here too in case you haven’t yet signed up to get these weird-ass emails from me:

Secondly, this weekend I was hit with very bad mental health stuff and so I posted on threads that I needed someone to tell me to get out of bed and then I curled back up to bed-rot but when I opened it up again it was filled with so many people sending encouraging words or cat pictures, or lovely things like this unexpected bit of fried gold from my friend, Matthew:

And so I did. I drove over to the park near my house, but I had to stop in the middle of the road and get out in traffic because there was an oblivious duck standing in the street and so I waddled behind him trying to shoo him to the park even though someone honked at me (rude). But then when I got to the (normally very quiet) park I could not hear myself think because there were fucking hundreds of those feathered idiots quacking their little asses off.

This is where I would put a video but I can’t figure out how to embed one here so instead just click to the second slide in this instagram.

If it works, you can hear me (barely) trying (and failing) to remember what you call a massive passel of ducks but I looked it up and apparently it’s “a waddling” which totally figures. And then I walked closer and THEY FLEW OFF and I was like, “THESE FUCKERS CAN FLY? WHY WAS I WALKING THEM ACROSS THE STREET?” and probably that’s what that guy in the street was saying when he was honking. I’d like to think I was escorting the one duck with a bum wing, although I suspect the waddling was all probably taking turns pretending to be unable to cross the road alone as a fun little prank to as many people run over as possible.

But the point is that it was really good that I got up because I’ve never seen so many ducks in one place and will probably always remember it. I wanted to write about this last night but I was still deep in the depression exhaustion and so forgive the pause, please. And I’m writing this down now to remind myself to get out of bed, because you never know when some ducks will try to murder you.

Third…shit…I don’t remember what the third thing was. Clearly my mind is getting better today but not that much better.

I apologize. More when it comes to me. Probably seconds after I hit publish here.