Marketing hurts my feelings

On writing a "book about desire"

The other day I read an email about my book that called it, yet again, a book about desire, and I felt this sinking sensation inside, one that has become familiar to me throughout my life. The one that says, what you just said made them understand you less, and they’re getting further away by the second.

The thing is, it is about desire. It’s about what happens when desire goes away, and how lonely that can be, and how to get it back. But the thing the marketing machine doesn’t understand is that, for me, desire is not about sex. It’s about something even more primal. It’s about want itself. Hunger, drive, need, longing, fantasy. Yes, all those things have to do with sex. But sex is not the point.

I called it What You Wish For, because my idea was that we hold in our deepest longings and fantasies the answer to the whole puzzle of becoming the person we want to be. I was only ever trying to write about love. Somehow, in the maze of queries and proposals and Instagram and Substack notes, it’s become a “book about desire.”

And part of me says, why can’t I just let it be that? It is that! Who says desire is only sexual and isn’t that deeper thing I mean? But the other part of me, well…

My feelings are hurt.

Frustrating is too small a word for this platform-building game I’m playing. Condense it, make it smaller, make it the pop chips version of what you’re saying. A snack, edible in seconds, gone in less. I don’t want it to be gone, I want it to live forever, because what I am trying to say is immortal.

My dreams are grandiose indeed. Because they should be. I don’t want to write a manual that gathers dust on the nightstand while someone cries themselves to sleep alone. I don’t want to write a manifesto, either. I want to get at some tiny portion of the truth of the thing, because the thing is grandiose. It is infinite, and that's why every instruction I get to tidy it up hurts my soul.

There’s one person in this whole apparatus whose dreams for the book are as grandiose as mine, and I grabbed onto him like a life raft after the turbulent sea of queries telling me “your book is great, but no one can sell an Instagram-unknown author” and “why would anyone read this when they can just listen to a podcast, too academic.”

Too academic stung, because academia was my first love and it’s where everything began. I was in love with learning, and in love with learning about love, because it is the richest and most nuanced subject I’ve ever sunk my teeth into, and I did it all to bring the full force of all that education and training to this moment, to here, to tell you about it.

I met my husband while I was at college, so it’s an origin story in that way. But equally, I met myself there. I met a world of infinite knowledge and silent, rich exploration that let my mind go and go and go, and it’s still going. My drive for exploration found its eternal fuel source on that campus, and it drove this car here.

Yes, this was my actual campus library.

My frustration with short form is that it wants a clever little saying, a nugget, a fragment that makes everyone go “yes me too” and you know, all the clever little sayings about love are redundant to the point of absurdity. They’re either flattened into some self-help bullshit that tastes and feels like an Rx bar, or they’re so obvious that everyone has already heard them a thousand times.

I’m so terrified, you see, that you won’t know what I mean. I don’t mean some pithy little sound bite. What I mean also sounds banal but it isn’t:

Love is our way out of the darkness. It is the most perfect healing agent evolution has ever produced. It is drugs. It is serenity. It is absolute pleasure and absolute terror. It’s the very best of us. If there’s a more important thing to spend your life figuring out, I don’t know what it is. And if anything I say can help you do that, then I consider it the most worthy work of my life.

And you know, it is a book about desire. And about all the things that surround it: Curiosity. Play. Wonder. Imagination, passion, drive, courage. Desire is a great thing, it’s the gas pedal of the car we’re all driving around this messy planet.

The car, though, it’s going somewhere important. It goes to that front porch so many of us dream of, when we’re holding the hand of a person who knows every messy thing inside us. It goes to my office, where someone who has never asked for help because it was never an option climbs into her wife’s lap and cries for 30 minutes, and her wife holds on so tight that she knows, forever after, she has someone to go to. It goes to the emergent space between us, where something new comes into being because we loved each other in precisely this way.

I was only ever trying to write about love.

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Let’s use our marketing hate to do some marketing. I will be Live at 4pm with The Therapist Who Came Undone! Probably talking about this very thing.

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The Emotional Logic is an independent, personal project and does not belong to or reflect my employer or professional organizations. Nobody’s proofreading this but me, for better or worse.