THE DEFAULT WORLD is out today

Breaking my normal posting schedule because today my debut novel for adults is finally out! The Default World is six years in the making. I wrote the first draft (about a cis woman who deeply wanted to be friends with a beautiful and glamorous coworker) in the summer of 2018. I sent it to my agent at the time, and he loved it and wanted to send it out immediately. I said let me do just one more revision. I sent it to a friend who used to read my drafts: she said the book was offensive and that it was appropriative for a man to write about female friendship. I said fuck it, I’ll just make her a trans woman (I’d known for some time by then that I was trans). I sent the next draft, all trannied up, to my agent. In Jan of 2020 he said he hated it and couldn’t sell it. I spent all of 2020 trying to find a new agent—the book accrued something like 150 rejections from agents. I rewrote it three times. Finally I found my current agent in early 2021. He sent it on submission in early 2022. It went out to forty editors and sold on the third round of submissions in summer of 2022.

That year of looking for agents scarred me deeply. I’d been published before and I was now out as a trans woman, so I got a lot of initial interest from agents—fifty or sixty manuscript requests. But ultimately they all passed. I won’t go into the reasons, because it’s utterly tedious, and anyway I’ve rewritten the book so much that the book which is coming out today is very different from the one they passed on. Suffice it to say, the experience sucked.

Although I started my career writing for young adults, it’s always been my dream to publish a book for adults, and I’ve always seen myself as a serious writer, a literary writer. I know that the literary world doesn’t necessarily believe in me—I’ve experienced enough snubs and condescension in the last four years to fill eight blog posts. But fuck them. Most of what they like is pretty mediocre. I don’t write in the tradition of Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange, I write in the tradition of Edith Wharton, Henry James, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, etc.

I hesitate to start this blog post by talking about all this rejection, because that’s such inside baseball, and it’s not really germane to the reader (who after all is just looking for a pleasant way to pass their time). But for me the struggle to publish the book has become synonymous with the book itself. I cannot say why so many people were so repelled by this book! I think my values and theirs are just very different, to be honest.

As for the contents of the novel itself? Well, my voice is the voice of the book; my worldview is the worldview of the book. If you like this Substack, you’ll like the book. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not a discourse novel. It’s not a novel of ideas. It’s a real novel, with scenes and a plot. It’s about a trans woman trying to scheme her way into the good life. But let’s be real: when you read a book, you don’t retain every jot and tittle of the story. What you retain is the overall worldview, the gestalt. And the gestalt of my novels is just this sense of…I dunno…sanity? This hard core of common sense—the feeling that it is possible to get to the bottom of things, and that underneath it all there does exist the truth.

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When I think of what fiction can do, I always think of one particular night during the fall semester of my senior year of college.

I had bronchitis. I was staying up late, coughing my lungs out, feeling miserable. I was also taking a lot of LSD and drinking two or three bottles of wine every night. At the time I lived in Synergy, a co-op house on Stanford's campus. It's a huge mansion occupied by fifty kids who cook and clean communally. It had major sixties vibes. I'd moved in the previous year and loved it, and now I was back for a second year hoping to replicate the experience of those late night on the front porch drinking, talking about who was fucking whom and who was secretly gay and how much we hated everyone else on campus. But a lot of my friends from last year were gone, and this year it as a bunch of NEW people who I didn't know as well and who, quite frankly, didn't take as many drugs or drink as many alcohols as I did.

Anyway, so I was wandering around this dorm at 2 AM, high on LSD, seeing patterns in the stains on the linoleum floor, and feeling so utterly bereft and alone. I knew that I was destined for great things, but I also felt like a fraud. All around me folks were living orderly lives--exercising, eating well, working hard, preparing for careers. Meanwhile I was waking up and drinking every day, taking LSD, not going to class, and now my body itself was collapsing into these terrible coughing fits that seared my lungs and throat.

All I wanted in that moment was to feel better. To feel less alone. And although I'd always been a reader, my reading had gone down of late. I was mostly watching Scrubs and House and playing video games and drinking and doing drugs. I hadn't yet started my Great Books quest: I was twenty-one years old, I was pretty unformed. I'd been writing. I was a writer. I knew I wanted to write. I'd been writing and submitting short stories for a few years now, but still hadn't had any real publication. Nothing to be proud of.

Anyway, with my heart hammering, I sat down in a hallway at 2 AM, with a collection of books. Some of them were mine and some were other peoples', some were just lying around the house. And I started reading blindly through these books, looking for something, anything, that would make me feel...anything at all? The world was shimmering, moving, and I was just...alone. Everyone was asleep. The future didn't exist, and neither did the past.

I finally opened up a mass market paperback edition of The Fountainhead. The one with the green art deco cover. You've probably seen it. I'd read the book before, many times. But I'd been in college long enough to know that you're not supposed to like Ayn Rand. But in this moment, all I wanted was something that would give me the strength to survive for another day: I just wanted to know that the world needed me in it.

So for the first time since high school I started reading this book. And I read about Roark and getting kicked out of architecture school and al that other shit that happens in The Fountainhead. And I thought, wow, okay, so somebody gets it. I am not alone. Ayn Rand is dead and Howard Roark never existed, but there is somewhere in this universe something that is not myself, but which I can feel connected to.

And ever since then I've known that my aim in writing isn't to tell a good story or to embody some abstract sense of beauty—my aim is to write the book that some other Naomi can pick up at 2 AM in order to feel less alone. To me, that is the most important part of writing—this desire to convey to other people that individual life, as we live it here and now, on this earth, has some meaning.

It’s a feeling I’ve only gotten rarely from books—even the best books—and it’s come most often from authors who combined rigorous honesty with a deep belief in humanity’s potential to be transcend its worst impulses: Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Richard Yates, and a few others.

I know this story is a bit confusing, because the portrait I've painted of someone smoking cigarettes, drunk, high on LSD, wandering her dorm room at 2 AM reading Ayn Rand, is not the most appetizing picture. This is not the portrait of a superwoman or somebody who has demonstrated tremendous mental acuity or artistic talents. And I think you can see now why my work is a hard sell. The rhetoric is good: everyone wants to feel less alone and to feel that life matters. But when I get down into the specifics—a trans woman manipulating her friends—suddenly the picture feels murkier. But to me the world’s relentless turning-away from the ugliness of life is precisely what makes people feel so alone. Jhanvi, my protagonist, has a very real darkness inside of her, but she never allows that darkness to win. And that’s what makes her a hero.

Anyway, that's the kind of book that's coming out today. The Default World is just a deeply sane, sensible book. It's a book with integrity. It's about someone who's trying to make her way in a world that doesn't quite make sense. Someone who's trying to make the pieces fit, even though she suspects that she doesn't quite have the whole set. Reading this book isn't gonna fix your life, but I do think it'll make you feel less alone.

Buy my novel: The Default World. I also have events forthcoming in SF (May 30th) and NYC (June 6th). Click on the links to RSVP.