What Nails It

On August 27 Yale University Press will publish my short book What Nails It. It’s not anything I ever expected to write.

Bluntly: in the summer of 2022, when I was in the hospital and not expecting to leave except in a box, John Donatich, the head of the press, where I’d published three books since 2014, called to ask if I’d give the Windham-Campbell lecture at Yale. I said, what’s that? The talk by an author on the theme of ‘Why I Write’ at the annual ceremony for the Windham-Campbell literary awards, he said, which were launched in 2016 with a talk by Patti Smith. Each speaker writes a book on why they write and then draws a lecture from it, he said. When? I said. September, he said. I can’t, I said. I’m still learning how to walk again. No, next year, he said. The idea that in a year, in the best circumstances, I’d be able to travel across the country and speak in public was so absurd—I’d been having speech therapy twice a day for months, having lost the ability to speak with any emotion, feeling, emphasis, flair, or really meaning—I said, sure, figuring why not, there’s no chance it will happen. At that point I didn’t know if I’d ever write again and did care if I did or not.

But though I have no inclination to write about myself, I didn’t know why I wrote. I’d thought about it a lot over the years. So half a year after leaving the hospital, I sat down at my desk and the book wrote itself.

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