I was, frankly, intimidated by that question. Because I knew, whoever I wrote, people would assume she was me.
So how would I differentiate her?
To start, I asked myself why she was narrating. If she were happy narrating, as I was, if she loved her life, as I did, where would the conflict come from? Many （probably most） narrators are actors, so maybe she was just biding her time, waiting for the next on-camera or theater gig? But that felt unsatisfactory. I wanted to give the professional, working-class, yeoman narrator their due. It’s a job—a skill, a craft—in its own right, and it doesn’t get enough attention as it is.
And then, MeToo happened.
I didn’t want to write a MeToo book; this isn’t a MeToo book, don’t worry, you didn’t miss something. But at the end of 2017, the entertainment industry that I had grown up in was rocked by scandal. Everything we’d always whispered was finally being shouted and it seemed—shockingly—that people might actually be held accountable. An outcome that, truthfully, had never occurred to me as a possibility. It was a time of reflection for me, and the realization that had me walking around for most of the winter of 2017-18 as one big ball of rage was how little control the business of acting affords and how that opens the door to predation. As an actor, you can’t control when you work or with whom or in which role. You can’t control when the opportunity arises or how it’s handled in the execution. There’s a pretty famous saying: sometimes the only power an actor has is saying no.
But who ever says no? To the potential money? Fame? Relevance? To the joy and satisfaction of getting to do what you love?
Well. I did. I decided around that time that I didn’t want to act on the business’s terms anymore. That any fun and fulfillment it might possibly bring wasn’t worth the frustrations and dehumanization it reliably brought. I suppose it’s like getting to that breaking point, finally, with that one boyfriend who just won’t go away. Every time he leaves, and you think you’re over him, he comes back with new excuses, new promises, and you say, okay, well at least he’s talking to his mother again or he has a job this time or maybe he finally sees my worth. How many times do you let him come back? In the wake of 2017, I’d reached my limit. My life was so much better without Hollywood in it.
But it was my choice to walk away.
What if it hadn’t been?
What if “no” had been said for me?
What if the main character I’d been seeking had been kicked unceremoniously out of the pursuit of her dream, against her will, and that was why she was narrating?
I’d already written a book about choosing to walk away from an old dream and toward a new one.
This time, I wanted to write a book about accepting the absence of that choice. Nothing to overcome, nothing to be corrected . . . just something to accept.
It occurred to me, then, that I had explored this territory once before, albeit nascently.
Before My Oxford Year, I had been working on a YA novel about a seventeen-year-old girl growing up in Los Angeles, the daughter of a celebrity publicist. A pretty girl, a not-terribly-ambitious girl, a girl for whom doors opened simply because she was pretty and fame-adjacent. And one day, this girl skipped school and went skydiving with her friend and almost died. But she didn’t. She survived, with half her face.
Her journey was accepting that while she may at first feel like an ugly duckling, she was actually a Swan.
So, I finally had my main character and, to borrow a line from her, I had her “why.”
Finally, I was ready to write.
But first . . .
I had to promote My Oxford Year.
And attend to my day job of recording other people’s books.
And then I got a job offer at an audio-based tech start-up I couldn’t refuse.
And then, after building the company to a place where I was able to step back, I finally, finally, sat down to write three chapters and a synopsis.
And then I flew to New York and met with my agent to discuss the pages.
And that meeting was on March 2, 2020.
The fact that this book about accepting all the things we can’t change was written during the turmoil and upheaval of 2020/2021 seems fitting.
It was ten years in the making.
It was my pandemic baby.
It was my refuge from the madness.
Just when I would begin to think there was no empathy or laughter or romance left in the world, I’d open my computer and there were Swan and Nick, waiting for me to get cracking. Empathizing. Laughing. Romancing.
And it became autobiographical in a sense far deeper than occupation or history or family. It became the embodiment of all the hope for the future I wanted to have, but often found I couldn’t muster. Just like my main characters. Into them, I wrote my fears as well as the antidote to those fears: the urging to take the risk. To trust in the outcome, an outcome that, whatever it may be, would at least be the result of action instead of inaction. That seemed worth writing about in these times. It seemed, as Sewanee observes at the end about Nick’s voice, something to believe in.