I got lucky today. Billy took the kids so I could go write at a cafe for several hours–one of my cherished writing Sundays. Before I could get out of the house for the afternoon, I had to get dinner going in the slow cooker so there would be food to eat when I got home. Billy is a wonderful man with many talents, but getting things done while watching the kids isn’t one of them. In all fairness, accomplishing anything practical while hanging out with two very young kids is a hard-won talent and I’ve had way more practice. So I had to brown a pork roast and chop some stuff and measure some other stuff and throw it all into the slow cooker. No big deal. Except that the kitchen was trashed and I had to clean it enough that I wouldn’t be completely disgusted by cooking in it. And we had no clean spoons (which is to say we had nearly no clean dishes at all), so the dishwasher had to be loaded and run. And then the kids needed lunch and then I had to get the girlchild down for her nap.

And then I left. I walked the 30 minutes to my writing cafe. It was a beautiful walk, sunny and warm. (I highly recommend choosing a working cafe a decent walk away from home. I use the walk there to transition from Mom to Cari, and to start to think my way back into the book. I use the walk home to bask in the glow of Having Written, and to try to settle my brain back down into Mom mode so I can be present for them when I walk through the front door.) When I got to the cafe, I snagged my favorite table–the only one next to an outlet. I sat down to work for four hours. It was glorious.

With everything that had filled my day before the walk to the cafe, is it a huge shock that the new novel could be accused of being a bit…domestic?

Remember how I wrote the first draft of this novel differently than I’d written the first two? How I moved quickly, no looking back? How when I’d finished I wasn’t sure at all of what the hell I’d done, or if it was any good or even salvageable? Well, when I finally sat down to read through it after the one-month cooling-off period, I found that I’d written a good first draft. Very good in some spots, absolute crap in others…a normal first draft. Overall, I was very happy with it. Except for this one thing, and it felt like a big thing. As I read, I kept muttering, “Shit! This is so domestic. This is a fucking domestic novel. Shit. Can I do that? Can I write a domestic novel?” Etc etc etc until I was sick of myself. Then I noticed that one of my main characters, a mother, was struggling against her idea of herself as she’d been before kids in contrast with the postage stamp-sized life she’s now found herself in. She was struggling against her own domesticity as I was struggling against the perceived “smallness” of what I’d written.

But it isn’t small. It’s about adultery, and mothers and sons, and farming. You know what other book is about adultery, and mothers and sons, and farming? Anna Karenina. No, I’m not comparing myself to Tolstoy (but damnit, I am also not saying that I do not have the potential to one day write at that level). This isn’t a light book I’ve written, this isn’t fluff. And the tone is literary, the themes explored in a literary way because that’s how my brain moves and that’s how my voice naturally falls when I write fiction. And still, this fear. “I’ve written a domestic novel! I’m going to lose all my literary fiction cred!” Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Where does this come from?

Well…have you read this Meg Wolitzer piece yet? Or Roxane Gay’s brilliant response to it? If I’m lucky enough that this manuscript finds its way to publication, I do run the risk of being taken less seriously with this novel than with The Revolution of Every Day, which is also about relationships but with the “more literary” backdrop of class warfare and housing rights. It’s not paranoia. Were I to publish this book under a male pseudonym, the book would likely be received differently. But no. It’s my book. This is my name. And it’s the book I want to write. It seeks to answer the questions I wanted to ask.

I’ve so internalized this bullshit that as I read through my first draft, part of my brain wanted to hide the book away and pretend I’d never written it. I need to get over that. I need to move past it. I’m embracing this book exactly as it is. I’m going to revise it to the best of my abilities not to move it away from “women’s fiction” but to make it as true to itself as possible. Even if that puts it at grave risk for a pink cover. And if my courage flags, I’ll come back to this, from Roxane Gay’s essay:

“I don’t care if my fiction is labeled as women’s fiction. I know what my writing is and what it isn’t. Someone else’s arbitrary designation can’t change that.”