Publishing A Novel Is Hard Especially If You Have Depression
(and no, I’m not talking about “post-publication blues”)
0. Backstory
Even though I like to claim I’m all about being honest with my mental health struggles (see for example Writing, Antidepressants, and Depression or Writing on Antidepressants, An Update) — the thing is those posts where I’m examining my decision to go on meds are 7 years old. I’ve continued to write about depression and suicide in my stories and essays, but there’s a big difference between approaching such topics in a creative setting (which allows me more distance) versus talking about this all in a more informal and therefore more direct (raw?) way. And wouldn’t it be nice if the line tracking my mood could be drawn as a smooth and seductive upswing? I think that’s generally how the narratives we hear about depression go: that person used to struggle and now, thanks to therapy / medication / hard work, they are okay! At least publically! Versus what my mood has felt like, particularly this past year:
All this to say — I thought hard about not publishing this. I mean, I’ve actively been not publishing this for a year now. But with another book on the way (Portalmania, May 2025!), it feels time to throw this out into the world, to maybe pave the way for a more emotionally honest publication experience next year.
1. October 2023
I’m writing this with two months to go until my debut novel’s publication date. To have a book of my own has always been a life goal since I was a kid, which means by this point it’s been a life goal for numerous decades, but here I am, on unstable footing, wondering if I need to ask my psychiatrist to up my Prozac. I’m exhausted from the emotional whiplash that seems inherent to the pre-publication timeline, and I can’t seem to claw my way out of this latest dip, caused by what should be good news: a request for an interview for a national magazine’s website.
The problem is that interviews are frightening for me.1 Not reading them but giving them. The idea of giving them, of being asked questions I don’t want to answer or don’t know how to answer. This is partly because I’m not the most effective communicator when speaking out loud. My memory is not as good as I wish it was for a 47-year-old, perhaps due to the surgical menopause I’ve existed in for years. Add to that the current atmosphere of rage if one says the wrong thing out loud. So speaking in public is frightening for me too. I’ve agreed to readings and residencies then canceled because I could feel my mental health crumbling, meaning I could feel the structures that I have in place to bulwark my mental health—consistency, repetition, social interaction mostly in small groups—crumbling. But now that I’m having a novel coming out, I feel like I need to start saying yes to things. And that is taking a toll. I struggle with depression, sometimes with suicidal ideation, and also some mild anxiety. When I say mild, what that means is an intense fear and a sense of panic that something very bad is going to happen.
I want my book to sell, of course I do. I also want to stay alive during this process. I also would like to feel relatively okay during this process. My reach goals: to feel moments of happiness. Joy? Pride? Satisfaction. My depression is generally under control due to medication, therapy, and a set of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) skills that I picked up in a year-long DBT group, but stressors, especially when those stressors are stacked, can bring back old habits, which include me visualizing, in minute detail, ways to kill myself. And being a writer, trust me, I have pretty good visualization skills. But even when the suicidal ideation isn’t there, I can manage to feel terrible, my brain on overdrive, this constant unkind narration—whose?—following me around every moment of the day and in the evenings too, and I cannot shut my mind up.
A few other recent events related to publishing my first novel that triggered my ongoing depression:
when I finished what I thought was the last draft of my book
when my initial agent left agenting
when my first editor changed publication houses and I was paired with a different editor (what is known as being “orphaned,” which is rarely talked about, probably because the process is terrible)
when my second editor asked me to rewrite my novel
when my second editor asked me to rewrite my novel again after that, and I saw this novel that I had worked on for so many years disintegrating in front of me (I ended up switching publishing houses)
when my first review was, as they say, “mixed”2
when a trade magazine published a nice enough review but I didn’t get one of those red stars
If you’re reading this and you’re thinking — what the fuck is her problem, doesn’t she realize how lucky she is to have a book coming out? Trust me, I think those exact thoughts too. Lucky, lucky, lucky. Me me me. I have all the negative self-talk covered. Trust me. I worked so hard to get here. I worked word by word, day by day, short story by short story, small literary magazine by small literary magazine, for years upon years upon years. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I know people who have worked as hard as me, some harder, and they don’t have agents, and they don’t have a physical book. But the whole lovely idea of DBT’s dialectical thinking is that two opposing facts can be true simultaneously. I am so lucky to have a novel coming out— and I spent last night imagining when I could hang myself and where, the garage or the bathroom.
When I searched for other writers who have depression and/or anxiety, to see how they’ve managed to navigate the publication of their books, what comes up most frequently is post-publication depression, also known as post-publication blues which, from what I understand, is an uncomfortable feeling many writers experience, or are said to experience, that can be cured by long walks, self-talk, and coffee with a friend. In other words, some sad feelings you just need to push through. I don’t mean to belittle such emotions. At the same time that’s not what I’m writing about here. Maybe I’m not using the correct search terms. Or maybe the writing and publishing community hasn’t talked seriously enough about this. I can’t be the only one whose brain is inadequately wired for book publication as it exists now.
What I did find: this 2023 somber U.K. survey of 104 writers, half of whom said publishing their debut novel “negatively affected their mental health.” (And, surprise, I also found people on X, in response, being mean.) This survey suggests the experience of publishing a first novel created new mental health concerns for many individual writers. From one respondent: “I’ve been exhausted and anxious since about two months before publication until now, about a year on. I have developed quite severe anxiety, for which I am now taking medication." For writers with pre-existing mental health conditions, it’s not far-fetched to conclude that the publishing process is likely to make those existing conditions worse. At least that’s what happened to me.
So other than forbidding me and others like me from publishing books, what is there to do? I think it might help if we start having honest conversations in public about the mental health of writers—particularly of debut novelists but I’ll go out on a limb and say this might be a broader issue. I want us to talk about this in a serious way, with complex and serious language. Those of us with mental illnesses, even if we’re medicated or in remission, might need to be more careful during the publication process. Maybe we need more institutional support. Or maybe we can better support each other. What about formalized peer-to-peer support? Maybe those of us struggling could be more vocal about how distressing this is. Maybe there can be alternate interview and reading formats for anxiety-prone writers, or maybe writers who are new to this can be offered some kind of training or mentoring. Let’s talk publicly about how devastating and destructive it can be when your novel is orphaned (and let’s find a way to make that process better for authors). Let’s talk about the enormous pressures and responsibilities placed on new authors to promote their books, and why, if a book doesn’t sell, it’s seen as a failure of the author rather than a failure of the publisher or of the marketplace. Let’s also discuss how the onslaught of Goodreads reviews, Amazon reviews, and snarky Publisher’s Weekly or Washington Post reviews might be affecting author mental health. Maybe more places and people need to be like Booklist, which only reviews books they like and recommend. And let’s not have the knee-jerk response be that authors need thicker skins. Let’s stop using the term “post-publication depression” when what we’re really talking about is sadness. Maybe we can be more honest in our Instagram posts and start promoting our frustrations instead of only showcasing those times when we appear happy.
2. November 2023 (cont.)
I finished writing part 1 of this essay then I called my therapist. I scheduled several extra therapy appointments. In therapy, we tried parts work. We talked about how I only needed to be myself in interviews and if that entails awkwardness, then so be it. We talked about the responsibility of a reporter to structure a good interview, that it’s not all on me. Eventually my brain quieted down. To prepare for my interviews, I wrote out the answers to questions I thought I might be asked ahead of time. Then I exercised a lot, I talked to writer friends, and practiced visualizations my therapist taught me. Many weeks later, I feel okay again, and I’m tempted to delete everything I said earlier. At the same time, in typical dialectical fashion, everything I said earlier remains very true, and as a writer, I have difficulty deleting something that is inherently true.
3. December 2023
I finished writing part 2 of this essay, grateful that my earlier disjointed state of mind felt so far away. All that emotional messiness was behind me, I assumed wrongly. Because now, two weeks before publication, another phase of promotion has caused another nosedive of my mood. This time the “best of the year” round-ups are the trigger: each list I’m not on feels like a literal electric shock to my brain. Plus this pressure to approach everyone I know for help in novel promotion. My Instagram had morphed into writers promoting their year-end accolades. I make a post pleading for writers to promote their disappointments and failures then I delete the app from my phone. Wednesday night I spend crying in bed envisioning where and when to hang myself again.3
I would like to leave you with a happy ending. That’s the way the summaries of post-publication blues usually go. You feel bad for a while but then you are okay! Because you have a book in the world! You have a dream come true! If I ever try to tell you that was all that happened, please don’t believe me. Writers lie for a living, but I don’t want to lie about this.
4. October 2024
I’ve sat on this little essay for a long time, for 12 months to be exact. Part of me is embarrassed when I think about sending this into the world. Was I being overdramatic back then? Was I just experiencing a few average bouts of instability, so specific to me that it wouldn’t have a place in a larger discussion? In other words: is this all about my personal mental health and nothing about the publication process?
Perhaps. But recently my husband emailed me a Baffler article about Helen DeWitt’s tumultuous relationship with publishing. This article references how she seriously considered suicide after challenging interactions between the publishing world and her novels. “To DeWitt, the Last Samurai copyediting fiasco was a link in a chain of events that led to an irretrievable loss of time and morale, a feature of a system that not only threatens books being published but also future half-written and unwritten books, and even the life of the author herself.” Maybe DeWitt and I are the only two writers who ever felt and will ever feel this way when our creative work collides head-on with the marketplace. But I’m going to guess we’re not.
After a year of what might be called “exposure therapy,” I find interviews are a lot easier at this point, as are readings — though I still tend to do a lot of prep for them. Traveling to my first book festival last month did almost push me to have a breakdown though.
I would additionally describe this review as “overly catty” and “written by someone who really likes straightforward genre books which isn’t the kind of books I write.”
This did not last long. I would have stayed off Instagram forever or at least a long while but it was suggested to me that I get back on — or have someone else get back on as my proxy —before my book launched. And, truth to be told, Instagram is generally a nice place to interact with other writers, though — also true — I’ve had to mute people whose constant self-promotion mixed with success after success began to affect me negatively. I still think it would be awesome if we all start posting about our rejections, or if we’re only allowed to post about other people.
Thank you for writing this! As a long-time depression sufferer (who has successfully treated and managed it with meds for years) and writer, I am in total agreement that we must talk openly about this stuff.
When my last book came out, I definitely experienced some downs that crossed the line from sad / frustrated / disappointed /etc. to something more than that. One such time was on the occasion of a particularly snarky review in a major publication, which came at a time when I was on shaky emotional grounds for other reasons. As a long-time depression traveler, I'm pretty good at recognizing when my brain chemistry is making things feel worse or bigger than they really are, and reminding myself that it's (most likely) temporary. But it can still be rough -- especially when you know that everyone thinks you should be on Cloud 9 and stay there.
In any case, I'm glad you're writing through it, getting help, etc. It sounds very trite to say it, but you're not alone.
I’m all agog to read this — I also contend with the black dog of depression — but I must save it until I’m done reading After World. I found it in a display of dystopian / post-apo literature at the local public library. Found it initially intimidating, but now I’ve got a reading buddy who’s also interested in the Singularity to take the dive with me. My Singularity novel, Quibble, is also resistant to some readers early on — it may just be the price of admission for such an otherworldly topic. If you’re curious, see the first chapter in the link I’m pasting below (the whole novel is being serialized on Substack, and I’m nearly done). I’ll revisit and read this post once I’m done with After World, which I’m keen on — I’m as excited about reading it as I was when I found Charles Stross’s Accelerando.
https://singulardream.substack.com/p/quibble-chapters-1-and-2