On Audiences

16 January 2024

Speaking of audience: 

I've been thinking a lot about audience lately--I just read this fantastic letter from B.D. McClay, I had a book come out this year, I've been bouncing around book festivals and bookstores and book-things with my own book in hand, saying "my book!" in front of people who are purportedly, An Audience, but are also fellow writers and creators and such. I just had a post-pub recap meeting with my agent where a huge part of that conversation was just about the scarcity of places to publish book reviews or thoughtful little essays that relate to your book or anything where a normal person who hasn't hotwired their brain to the internet might find you. Even the internet is less good now--I'm barely on Twitter, BlueSky feels sleepy, and Instagram really doesn't feel like the place for conversation.  I believe the letter from B.D. McClay is paywalled but it gets at some things I want to talk about, so a) you should subscribe, it's a wonderful (extremely regular!) newsletter and b) I think the whole essay is worth reading but c) I want to get on with this conversation so I'll throw in one quote that I think summarizes the argument quite well: "They [writers] feel like they’re tap dancing in an audition in a completely empty auditorium, watched only by the line of fellow tap dancers waiting for their turn. And this is a very depressing way to live."

This is not true: I've gotten at least an email a month from a complete stranger showing up in my inbox, thanking me for writing, which feels like a miracle, and resolves me to send more nice emails to writers whose books I have loved.

It is also true: part of the reason I wrote a book--the reason I suspect anyone writes a book--is to join this big, semi-permanent conversation. In my book, I wrote about my love for Kate Briggs, for Valeria Luiselli, for Karla Cornejo-Villavicencio, put out ideas that built on those writers that came before me, and one of the things I was looking forward to was having my book exist as another stepping stone on that ladder, another part of that conversation. It's happened in a few places, and the book hasn't even been out for a year, but it still feels....quiet out there, like the conversation moved past me, took no notice as it rushed past. This percieved silence comes partially out of this kind of now-mentality that comes with launching a book, partially just...true. I have a hard time imagining what I think a satisfactory amount of conversation might be, of reviews, of people arguing and building on my ideas, that limit might not exist. I do want to caveat this conversation with the very belated realization I had about publishing books: there's a sense in which writing/publishing a book is maybe like having a kid or running a marathon, in that it is an absolutely massive colossal enormous achievement to you, it's the biggest thing you've done to date/recently, but it very much is also something that a couple hundred/millions of people do all the time, and that's it. Writing a book or running a marathon or birthing a baby just means that you did that--not that you're a better person or more interesting (maybe more interesting in that you have at least ONE good fun fact for the rest of eternity), just that you checked that particular box. Not every book gets the attention it needs or deserves, much less in the moment it first comes out, and basically no book gets as much attention as the writer secretly, in their heart of hearts, dreams it will. Still, there's a sense of having tap danced and had no one watch except to raise an eyebrow from the wings. 

When you go on book tour, you have all these wonderful conversation partners. These are people, usually writers but sometimes podcasters or filmmakers or activists or journalists--who have given up hours of their life to read your work and come up with questions to ask about it. I've done it once and it was terrifying and challenging to fill up nearly 45 minutes of conversation, even about a book I really loved and had so much to say about Latinidad and history and heroes (Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Dreaming of You). I had big plans on my own book tour to read stuff by everyone who had made the time to talk to me, ideally before we were in conversation. That sometimes happened, particularly with folks who had really beautiful long-form essays or reporting out in the world (Carina del Valle Schorske talked to me in New York, I re-read her NYT Letter of Recommendation: Translation all the time, and her essay on dancing also for the NYT mag is perfection, Carlos Ballesteros spoke to me in Chicago and his critical reporting on U-Visa denials in Chicago still makes me so mad I can barely breathe whenever I think of it). For the rest of it, I'm still working through the books--Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's (San Francisco) beautiful Children of the Land, which I'm halfway through, Jessica Goudeau (Austin's) After the Last Border is on my list shortly. I've talked to so many other fellow writers and both shamefacedly told people and was told: "Your book! I'm afraid I haven't read it, but I've heard good things!" Like it was all a big class none of us had prepared for. All of this to say: I am, I have been part of the problem, time attention and space are all finite. 

On another note: I sometimes also have this feeling, particularly writing about immigration and social justice issues that reading my book is a stand-in for taking action, for actually understanding the issues. I tried to give my book as many off-ramps as possible, as many little breadcrumb trails for readers to pick up and follow back into their own communities as I could, but a book is very constrained by the form it's in. I get prickly and weird when white people tell me my book is "important," when they tell me that they "learned a lot." That's kind of the point but not all of it. I asked Valeria Luiselli about this once during an interview--it felt like Lost Children Archive, especially, had all these little off-ramps as well, and I asked if it had been on purpose, if she had wanted to mobilize or activate her audience, and she basically said "I don’t have anything planned out for the readers, to be honest[...]I have had to negotiate a lot with myself in terms of what political expectations I can or cannot have when writing fiction." She's absolutely correct, and at the same time, I feel all kinds of bristly when I feel like people are reading my book "wrong" which is to say, people who feel like they are now experts on immigration but haven't let the book move them into action. 

AND THEN: on the other hand, last week I gave a talk at an all-girls middle and high school and I got to have that feeling: "oh. This is what people mean by audience."

I was introduced by three students who had not only read my book, they had looked deeply at my website, had thought a lot about what I might have to say to the audience I was speaking to, and that felt like a very beautiful, very specific kind of honor in itself. I spoke as part of a weeklong program where these girls talked about language and identity and justice--something I think my book/my work/my self is located right in the middle of. I gave a lecture on these things, adjusting and adapting bits and pieces of my book for this new audience, finding ways to talk about my work that would speak to girls still trying to figure out their places in the world, the ways that all the things that made them up would be expressed eventually in the world. I talked about how, when I was 13, 14, 15, 16, I thought I had to wait, that I wasn't yet the person I would be as an adult, that I didn't have all the tools I needed to be a person in the world, but it turns out that the things I fall back on the most, the things that I feel are most constituitive of who I am are things that I've carried with me all along. It's not to say that the 15 years in the interim haven't been useful or sharpening or changing, just that, very often, you are the person you are, and you always have been. There isn't a day where you get braver or stronger or better at knowing what to do, you get to make those choices now, and keep making them. You get to take the strengths and abilities and privileges you have now and turn them into a way to reach a hand out to someone else. You get to start being the person you want whenever you want, and you get to keep doing that for as long as you're able.

This is a talk I would have loved to have gotten at that age--I've written before about feeling lost or confused or on pause for my whole childhood and only really coming un-stuck from that in my mid-20s, I remember the way that things electrified me or made me feel possible and also the ways that I was trapped in my town, in my family. And I think when I say "Oh, this is an audience," that's part of it: it's very easy to talk about writing the book you wish you had when you were younger, but it's something else entirely to actually be in conversation with 15 year olds who come up after the lecture and ask you "Yeah, but how do you know if you're doing something because it's good or if you're doing something because it makes you feel good? What's the difference?" Hon, I wrote an entire book about this question and I still don't feel like I've answered it, but it's absolutely the right question. I felt like I was talking to an audience who was maybe hearing about some of these ideas for the first time from me, a feeling I also occasionally got while teaching my class last fall, who were being presented with a new kind of vocabularly or toolkit to look at the world. I remember sitting in div school at 24, 26 and realizing there were people who just thought about these things, that you could be a part of that--what if I had figured that out at half the age? 

I don't want to say either that my ideal audience are people who are ripe for convincing, who have fewer preconceived notions than anyone else, but just maybe that my ideal audience is people who are not reading or listening cynically, who are willing to sit and listen to what an older person in a cool outfit had to say (yes I did get compliments from high schoolers on my wine-colored velvet suit, yes, I did let it go to my head). To wit: a few weeks ago I also got an email from a co-board member on the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund who had read the book over break, and found in it language to describe the experiences she had as an immigration attorney, shepherding clients through a system that might grant them safety but would humiliate them along the way, force them to beg. When I read that email, again, I thought "oh, this is my audience." Again, when Latine kids in their early 20s who were doing the same kind of interpretation work I had done came up to me at readings, my book clutched to their chests, saying "I needed this book, no one is talking about this the way I needed it to." 

And these are not the audiences you necessarily find with book reviews or op eds or tweeting and instagram posting or any of the things that you usually do in those first frantic months of book release. Audience building, like careers and conversation and care, are things that are built slowly, over time. I'm not patient, but every time I find someone else who understands and is excited by the thing I'm doing, it feels worth the wait.