William Landay

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2012 Wrap-up

It’s been a while since I posted one of these updates, so here are a few year-end developments for Defending Jacob.

  • The novel was named to several “best of 2012” lists, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kirkus Reviews, Toronto Globe and Mail, Kansas City Star, and my hometown Boston Globe.
  • Stephen King included Defending Jacob on his list of “the best books I read in 2012,” in Entertainment Weekly, calling it “the best crime-and-courtroom drama in years.” Very cool.
  • If that isn’t surreal enough for you, Google’s Zeitgeist 2012 list placed the book at #5 and its author #2 among trending search terms for U.S. books and authors, that is, “search queries with the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2012 as compared to 2011.” Mom, is that you Googling me over and over?
  • The town of Sharon, Massachusetts, chose Defending Jacob for its annual “One Book, One Town” program, which means everyone in town will read the book or face criminal prosecution. Or something. (I will be visiting Sharon as part of the event on Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 7:00 pm at the Sharon Middle School.)
  • And just for fun, my favorite pull-quote from a review: “I am so in love with this book, I would marry it if it asked me.” Now that belongs on the cover of the paperback.

The mass-market paperback edition of Defending Jacob goes on sale February 26. The trade paperback edition (the larger paperback format) is coming in a few more months.

As ever, thanks to all of you for sticking with me. Happy 2013!

Writing is frustration

I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can’t do that anymore.

— Philip Roth

Write posthumously

In his 1988 book of essays, Prepared for the Worst, Christopher Hitchens recalled a bit of advice given to him by the South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. “A serious person should try to write posthumously,” Hitchens said, going on to explain: “By that I took her to mean that one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion—did not operate.

Jeffrey Eugenides (read the whole thing here)

The desire to matter

The desire to matter as much as we once did to our mother is at the broken heart of all narcissistic endeavour, whether it’s writing novels, tweeting or carrying the right kind of handbag. Writing fiction is the symptom of many psychological distortions — a terror of mortality among them — the most poignant of which is a longing for perfect recognition, perfect understanding. This is the illusion hovering at the end of every painstakingly edited line. There was a time when Franzen’s mother imitated his “wuh” sound, mimicked his O-shaped gape, as if it was a work of genius, as if it mattered to the culture. The secret motivation of even the most gifted writer may be to enjoy this again — this is our blueprint for the experience of mattering — and “writer’s block” is perhaps a fancy way of describing the moments in which this seems impossible.

— Talitha Stevenson