Leaving is a Noun
And The Leaving Season is a now a paperback
LEAVING IS A NOUN
The paperback version of my book, The Leaving Season, came out this week! It is a strange experience to see an abstract idea turn into something that can be held in one hand. Ten years of work—thinking work, writing work, emotional work, publicity work, work-work to make this work possible—in a 5.5 x 8.25-inch package. All that action and sweat and forward movement alchemized into a solid, material object.
A verb turning into a noun.
Most paperbacks are produced about a year after the hardcover; mine is coming out just a few weeks past the book’s official first birthday. These days, a paperback version is not a sure thing, and I feel very fortunate that my publisher greenlit this one. The two anthologies I co-edited with Margot Kahn (Wanting: Women Writing About Desire and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home) both came out only in paperback. My first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From An Atomic Town, came out in hardcover and also moved into paperback; my team at PublicAffairs explained that the paperbacks would be built out of the unsold hardcovers. The guts of the books would literally be stripped from their spines, a somewhat violent image, and I imagined the discarded hardback covers piled in a heap like a clatter of useless bones. The naked insides were then tucked inside a softcover and shipped back out into the world. A bracing—if graphic—reminder that at their core, books are commodities, even if their writers prefer to imagine them alive and with heartbeats.
This time around, the paperback planning has been a much more celebratory process. This version of The Leaving Season feels completely new between the paperback format, bright and brand-new cover (thank you, Sarah Bibel!), fancy book club stamp (thank you, Zibby’s Book Club!), and Reading Group Guide (thank you, W.W. Norton team!).
An additional change: new subtitle! Goodbye Memoir in Essays, hello…just Memoir. This will likely only be noticed by the nerdiest of book nerds, but since this was the focus of so many of my favorite literary podcast conversations and radio interviews, this subtitle change felt like a loss initially. That said, as someone who runs a Publishing Studies program, I understand that subtitles are ultimately a decision based on marketing, not art, and I trust my team. And so, viva la memoir! The point of paperbacks, after all, is accessibility and the chance to reach new markets—especially book clubs (hit me up! I love visiting book clubs!). Books have such a short (ahem) shelf-life, and any opportunity to bump back up into the public’s eye is a step closer to the ultimate goal: being seen as a solid enough bet so that my publisher will want my next book.
This paperback also reflects what The Leaving Season has become, which is a beacon of hope. With the advent of Hot Divorce Summer and the plethora of divorce books hitting the market (and the bestseller list) the past few months, the energy of this topic feels like it has shifted from somber to joyful, even in the single calendar year of my book’s short life.
I’m glad for the breaking open of these conversations, the support and thirst for speaking aloud and unapologetically about leaving. This is the hope underpinning the Leaving Season Postcard Project. I’ve collected so many emails and dms and whispered stories from readers who have left, or are thinking about it. My main hope is that this book continues to be handed from reader to reader, not because I want more people leave their marriages, but because I want them to see that it is just one small part of the whole. Although The Leaving Season is a divorce story, it is so much more. It is also a love story, involving motherhood, creativity, desire, and hope. A woman is so much more than her marriage. This is the whole point.
Leaving is ultimately a speculative act—one must imagine and believe that there is something on the other side of the impossible leap. Sending a book out into the world is also a speculative act—terrifying, gratifying, and full of so much hope. Thank you for spending time with mine.
xo k