Keep Working That Book. (Not "Working on" It. "Working" It.)

When I decided to write a new, tamer version of a book I first wrote in 2004, a part of me worried what people would think. Can’t she just let that f-ing book go? I imagined someone saying to another someone who wouldn’t care or know who “she” was or what “f-ing book” She 1 was talking about.

But I only gave that a few seconds of thought because the truth is: no. No she can’t let it go. Not because she’s clinging to the past but because even though it was her first book, she thinks it may be her life’s work. And she also thinks may be the most pretentious person alive for using the phrase “life’s work” while talking about herself in the third person.

I could, of course, count on my former email list—a list that I’ve explained included some bizarrely combative assholes1—to assure me that I wasn’t being entirely paranoid about being judged. Several responded to the newsletter where I told them about the PG version of Party Girl that the book didn’t sound like it was their kind of thing, PG or not.

One subscriber took it a step further, asking me why I couldn’t just come up with a new idea. She even had suggestions: a cookbook, for instance! I wrote her back thanking her for her creative suggestion.

This woman seemed to believe that the only reason one would go back to an earlier book would be because one lacked new ideas. That is certainly not the case for me. I have 16 ideas by breakfast, 14 of them usually bad and 12 of them often forgotten by lunch. I don’t lack ideas and I don’t lack motivation.

Here’s the marvelous thing about publishing a book you love: you never have to let it go if you don’t want to. If our work means something to us (and we own the rights)2, we can all do our own version of Taylor’s Version any time we want.

I’ve made Party Girl into a journal, a clothing line, a podcast3 and a screenplay.4 I even talked a guy who owns a sober bar into making it into a mocktail. (I don’t think he did it in the end, though I stand behind the belief that it would be a hit.)

The idea to do a PG version of the book came to me a few months after my son was born. Because becoming a mom made me insantly5 more conservative/boring than I’d been my entire life, I suddenly couldn’t believe there was a novel sitting in our house that opened with a threesome. The fact that I’d written said novel—and had been all over TV telling people it was loosely based on my own experiences—left me almost speechless6.

I’m an act first, think-later type of person, which has served me as many times as it hasn’t. In my 20s and 30s, I did all kinds of things—posed for Playboy, answered sex questions on TV, dated men that could generously be described as losers—without thinking. I smoked two packs of a cigarettes a day until I was 31, let a French photographer take nudes of me, told bosses to f*ck off…you get it. Not thinking.

That doesn’t mean I regret writing Party Girl. Not at all. In fact, it was the purest book I’ll ever write.

I wrote it before I knew anything about the book business, let alone agents and publishers. I didn’t know there was such a thing as the “Big Five” or that even when your book is acquired by one of them, it’s more a nightmare than a dream. I didn’t know what it was like to spend every bit of your book writing energy obsessing over the book “hitting” or making you your publisher’s favorite or getting Oprah’s attention or inspiring a Times review. I was a naif who wrote from my heart, and while, yes the writing included threesomes and all sorts of other salacious things, the book was completely untainted. Writing Party Girl was like emptying my veins onto the page and having it be bizarrely pleasant.

The four books I wrote after Party Girl were tainted. I wanted to please GoodReads readers who could never be pleased, make my publisher and agent into my mom and dad and finally get the attention I felt I deserved or just MAKE MY DREAMS COME TRUE, DAMNIT, even though by then I’d forgotten what the dreams were. By my fifth published book, I concluded that I hated writing. It took me years to see that I didn’t hate writing at all; I hated what I’d allowed the publishing business to do to me.

Even though I escaped traditional publishing, the books I’ve written since—Make Your Mess Your Memoir and On Good Authority—had motives behind them. I wanted them to attract clients—and they have. I love them, and worked hard on them, and am proud of them, but they are not as pure as Party Girl. (Being pure and attracting clients are NOT mutually exclusive; the majority of the books we publish at Legacy Launch Pad are both.)

My point is that your book can live for as long as you want it to. I meet people all the time who talk about how they just want to have a #1 bestseller or their book doesn’t need to be good because they’re just using it as a lead magnet or “who cares what’s in it because no one even read anymore, right?”

My God, no. Quality matters. Having your heart in it matters. Our books will outlive us so do it right. And if, like me, you don’t want to let go of a book you first published a decade-and-a-half ago, you don’t have to. Hold onto it as long as you want to.

Or you could just take the advice of my newsletter subscriber and write a cookbook.