Life Unplugged

Point No Point, BC where I spent three days with no cell service. 

There are times when you want a vacation, and then there are times when you need one. When you’re likely to end up curled in the fetal position in the corner or bursting into tears at the post office for no reason if you don’t take one.

For me, the perfect vacation is a mix of a little adventure, a lot of reading, some great food, and zero connectivity. It used to be that going out of the country would automatically mean you were disconnected, but now with free WiFi in every café, it takes a little more discipline.

Reader, I’m not here to tell you that I took a vacation and discovered the evils of social media. I love social media! Twitter forever! But study after study shows us how addictive it is, and it’s healthy to break away once in a while and reassess your habits.

Itchy Trigger Finger  

The first day of my vacation, I was sitting in an armchair reading and noticed that the mint from our little window box had grown so wild that it had gotten caught in the doorway, making it look as though it was ready to take over the apartment. Ha, I thought, I should Instagram that! This wasn’t the last time I caught myself thinking in social media-ready bites. This isn’t a bad thing, I need this skill for work, but it made me realize how deeply my work life and my personal life are intertwined at this point. Like many of us, I use social media not for one particular thing but for a mix of connecting with friends and family, clients, and other people in the great jumble of work and leisure that the book world at large is to me.

Take a Look Around

I noticed my tendency to reach for my phone the moment that I was otherwise unoccupied, when I was waiting for a friend or eating my breakfast alone in my kitchen. Instead I stared out windows, people watched, and eavesdropped. Oh the things I learned about the love lives of the twenty-something girls sitting next to me while I was waiting for my boyfriend at our favorite pizza place! She broke up with Carl twice but at least the second time he didn’t send out a mass text to her whole family. It’s so embarrassing that her mom still invites him to dinner whenever he’s in town. God Mom. (NB: what twenty-something dude is running around with the name Carl?).

No Distractions

Without my phone, and all its many portals to the wide world, I was without distractions in a way that I’ve grown unused to. I had occasional moments of feeling disconnected in an unpleasant way, like everyone might be at a party I hadn’t been invited to. But mostly I just felt more relaxed: I wrote in my journal, I took pictures just to have them, to put them in a frame on the wall maybe. And whatever thoughts came, I let them come—joyful, anxious, dark—they washed over me.

Now that the detox is over and I am back online, I hope to learn to use these things better. I missed tweeting about books, and I can’t wait to logon on light up some of the authors I read over vacation. (#amreading! Er…#wasreading!) But there’s a lot of social media time I spend that is far less justified: perusing the wedding pictures of a high school classmate that I could not for the life of me produce a meaningful memory of, for instance. I want to keep the good, but ditch the junk.  

What do you notice when you log off?   

Compare Despair

Are we living in the age of envy?

It used to be that we could only compare ourselves to those we knew in real life, and even then only when we saw or spoke to them. Now unfathomable amounts of information about our co-workers, friends, exes, and acquaintances are a click away. Once upon a time celebrities were remote, glamorous beings with no pretentions of being “just like us”. Now I could probably hop on Instagram and tell you what Cara Delevingne had for breakfast. Photos of Reese Witherspoon come up on my feed right in between pictures of my friends’ dogs, the spectacular bloody mary from their brunch, and stunning vistas from their hikes. Regular users of social media develop a kind of sixth sense for curating snapshots of their lives: a funny conversation overheard at the office of their cool job, a hot new novel placed next to a between a cappuccino with elaborately designed foam, held by their perfect manicure.

Pouring over these updates can be fun…or it can induce stomach-churning envy.

Last week Jilly Gagnon, writing for Elle.com, talked about exploring her feelings of jealousy after a friend of hers landed a flashy book deal. She had her own book deal, but her friend (who was a year younger than her, to add insult to injury) was already garnering praise and attention from the press. To wit, she learned of the good news via a media newsletter.

It may sound petty to feel envious under such circumstances—after all there are surely many who gladly switch places with Gagnon—but I doubt there’s an author out there who couldn’t sympathize.

Since I signed my own book deal back in October, I’ve been spending a lot of time deliberately comparing my work to that of my contemporaries. This is a necessary part of figuring out how to market my book. Determining which authors appeal to the audience you hope to reach is a solid first step to connecting with that audience. But spending so much time thinking about how your work stacks up to those you admire—sometimes even reaching out to them to ask for their support in terms of a blurb—is humbling. You look at what they have—the prime spot on the bestseller list, the movie deal with Reese Witherspoon’s production company, the prestigious awards—and wonder how you could ever live up to it. You wonder: am I really in this league?

But, as I must keep reminding myself, envy is a spectacular waste of energy better used elsewhere. And in truth, no matter how good someone appears to have it, you never know what someone else’s life is really like. Jo Piazza—a writer many are doubtlessly envying furiously right about now—wrote last week about how perfect her life probably looks on social media, and how far from reality that image really is.

It is also true that, without exception, every writer I know who has had any measure of success (and many who haven't yet) has worked hard, has persevered through rejection, and done the noble work of continuing create in the face of the world’s indifference.    

When I catch myself feeling covetous of someone else’s success, I try to focus on how far I’ve come. My current success might not stack up so well to that of Cheryl Strayed or Donna Tartt, But compared to the career of Andrea Dunlop a year ago? I’m kicking ass.  

The Artist Isn’t Present

I love chatting with my fellow writers on Twitter. The ability to do so is what turned me from a Twitter dabbler to an enthusiast. Being able to reach out and let an author—and the world at large—know how I loved a book or piece of writing in one click is a singular joy. Sometimes it has other benefits—the person follows me or reads my work, sometimes we even become friends—but just being able to send them this low-key, non-intrusive love note feels good in and of itself. The connection I feel with a book I love can been stunningly deep, this gesture of reaching out to the author is small, light, but still meaningful.

These days, when I go to write something to an author on Twitter—say Maria Semple—and they’re nowhere to be found, I feel in some tiny sense unmoored and disappointed, like I’ve discovered they’re no longer living.

I’m thirty-three, a peculiar age in that I’m technically in—but in many ways not of—the millennial generation. It means that most of my life happened entirely without the presence of social media and smart phones. I didn’t own a cell phone of any kind until I was out of college. I talked to other teenagers (or “teenagers” *shudder*) in AOL chatrooms (scree-errr-chhhh), I bought wagon axles in the general store on Oregon Trail.

For most of my life I read books without updating anyone other than the next friend who asked me for a reading recommendation. It was a given that the act of reading was a solitary, one-way experience. You’re only option was to write an author you loved a fan letter—which it never occurred to me to do. Once I worked in New York publishing, I met lots of authors in person. Some of them were deeply charming, some were downright off-putting, but there was always something surreal about being faced with a person you’ve become so intimately acquainted with on the page.

Once, when Ian McEwan was visiting the Doubleday offices from England, I drilled my friend Chastity—his publicist’s assistant—for his whereabouts in the building. I contrived to be carrying something to the copy machine the moment I knew he’d be arriving on our floor. When I saw him—kind eyes behind signature spectacles—I stood stunned for a brief moment, before booking it off down the hallway towards the copier. His work was too dear to me to risk having a moment of awkwardness. What if he was dismissive? What if he was, like several distinguished male authors I’d met, an unabashed ogler? (I have no reason to believe that Mr. McEwan is either of these things, by the way, he has a sterling reputation). I could easily have asked his publicist Nicole to introduce me, but Ian McEwan the artist was too important to me to risk it on a moment in the presence of Ian McEwan the man.

The desire to connect can cut both ways. One of the most buzzed about authors of the last few years is Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, who is not only not on Twitter, but completely anonymous: with people speculating that she is everything from a male to a group of authors writing together. The mystery seems to be working for her—though it’s earned her some scorn from the press—and she represents a particular fantasy: that of being able to produce one’s work entirely in peace. The hustle of trying to promote yourself a writer, of putting yourself out there, can be wearing.

The way we read—the way we interact with art and artists as a whole—has fundamentally changed. Social media provides a cozier connection to those we admire than was ever available to us previously. No artist should be feel beholden to this—you don’t owe anyone access to your personal life—but insofar as reading and writing is about making a human connection, I can’t help but think that the ability to share the love with the click of a button has improved the experience. What do you think?