🙅🏻‍♀️ The book I avoided buying for 12 years, part one

I didn’t want it on my shelves, for fear of inciting the outcome I was avoiding

“One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, without faltering—I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy so great that the tremendous strain of it is at times eased by a storm of tears, when your steps now involuntarily rush ahead, now lag behind; a feeling of being completely beside yourself, with the most distinct consciousness of innumerable delicate thrills tingling through you to your very toes; a depth of happiness, in which pain and gloom do not act as its antitheses, but as its condition, as a challenge, as necessary shades of colour in such an excess of light.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche in Ecce Homo (Nietzsche’s Autobiography, 1911)

I first spotted The Book at the McNally Jackson on Prince Street in NoLita, just half a block from my first New York City apartment. In September 2011, six months after my first book launched, I was lucky to land in a two-bedroom with my friend

Julie Clow

, as part of our joint scheming to move cross-country from California. I could rent her second bedroom, so long as I vacated once or twice a year when her daughter visited. No problem! I’d sleep on the floor if it would help me finally wedge my foot in the door of my lifelong dream to be here.

That Mott Street was a tiny, quiet, tree-lined oasis in a city otherwise teeming with chaos was an added boon; thank goodness Jules had great taste, the stability of a full-time job to hire a broker and land the lease, and the means to fund the hefty deposit before I arrived. In the early days, friends and family asked if it was hard adjusting to the big city. Au contraire—from the moment I set foot here, fresh off the plane, I felt a deep, knowing comfort in my bones: I am finally home.

The Book I stumbled upon launched in October 2013, two years into living here and two years into self-employment. I had given myself six months of runway, savings-wise, to “make it” (cue Frank); two years in, I was now in miracle territory to have stretched that wild, intimidating goal out fourfold.

But 2013 was a tough year, starting with a gut-wrenching break-up on New Year’s Day. It never let up. I cried almost every day that year, the same as when I was thirteen, and my thirteenth year of business would fare no better. Speaking gigs from my first book were starting to dry up as the sales momentum waned, and I knew it was time to move on to my next topic. I just didn’t know what it would be yet. I wasn’t sure what to do next, or how to pay my rent in two weeks (surprise, surprise—history repeats). That moment eventually planted the seeds for my second book, Pivot.

So when I stumbled on The Other Book, a compilation of essays with a cartoon sketch of the city on the cover, at first, I was excited. I carried it around the bookstore with me. I love books about writing and books about New York City—this had both. I was intrigued by the stories within, but ultimately, I spun into a 180 and put it back before reaching the register.

I decided that I didn’t want This Book on my shelves, for fear that I’d subconsciously invite the title into my life, inciting the very outcome I didn’t want. Although I was curious about what the essayists had to say about operating lives and careers just like mine, I didn’t want their power of suggestion to influence my hopes for staying in the city. I didn’t care if I was hanging on by my pinky fingernail, like Tom Cruise off a helicopter, I was staying put.

Deep down, I knew, as most creatives (short of a trust fund or high-earning partner) here do, that at any given moment, I was thisclose to not making it. I remember walking home one evening around that same time, looking through every passing restaurant’s big glass windows, watching twenty-somethings laughing over dinners in the warm glow of friendship and delicious food, while I was stuck on the outside, feeling sorry for myself, now living alone in a studio apartment in the same NoLita building, off to eat granola bars for dinner because money was so tight. I would give up on dinners out, but I wouldn’t give up my books.

Except for this one.

For the next ten years after that first encounter in McNally, whenever I spotted it in other bookstores throughout the city, I would enact the same ritual: pick the book up, look at it, turn it over, carry it a few feet around the store, then set it back down before approaching the register with my other selections.

Still, no.

Not yet.