04/29/2023
Fantastic!!
This note is not part of the Letters from an American series. It is instead an announcement— which comes from a bit of a place of surprise, to be honest— and a thank you to everyone who reads here.
The announcement is that it appears my new book is a real thing.
It has a cover now (which is what has prompted this note) and will come out in mid-September. It is 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, and I think it is… not bad, which is about as far as any writer will— or should— go on a new book.
The book is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and it tries to explain how we got to this political moment… and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize— on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them— but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.
Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.
Then stuff happened (there was a wedding in there! :) ) so I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft.
When I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. That reworking meant I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript, and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at it.
The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.
And that’s where the thank you comes in. This really is your book as much as it ever was mine.
I hope you like it.
