When Your Book is on a Topic Nobody Wants to Think About

When your book is on a topic nobody wants to think about

Kathleen Basi

Bear with me a minute, because I’m going to start with a cliché: a book is like a baby.

I know, I know. But it really is! You dream about it, you conceive it, you gestate it, you labor over it, you birth it, you raise it, and eventually, you send it out into the world, hoping everyone else will love it as much as you do.

But what do you do when your book baby centers on a topic no one wants to think about?

For years, I resisted sharing my aspirations as a novelist too widely. Mostly because of that accursed (and also blessed) question: What’s it about? It’s hard to boil a novel down to a single sentence. And let’s be honest—the moment of delivery is fraught with peril. You spend one quarter of your mental energy forcing the words out and the other three-quarters doing a deep psychoanalysis of the recipient’s body language and response. Do they like it? Do they hate it and are just being polite? What does this tell me about the ultimate marketability of my book?

(Writing is a crazy-making vocation.)

For months I stumbled around when people asked me about my book. Here’s what I finally settled on:

It’s about a woman who, a year after losing her entire family, embarks on a road trip to visit the place they died.

OK, let’s just lay it out there: A dead family is not a book topic that makes people leap up and say, “Me! Me! I can’t WAIT to read that story!” The first several times I answered the question “What’s your book about?” I was met by a slight freeze in the listener’s face, a hasty calculation between honesty and politeness.

So from the first day I began working on A SONG FOR THE ROAD, I knew I was taking a risk. A risk that I would put in countless hours and never find an audience at all.

Still, I believed in the story. Three years and around a zillion (slight exaggeration) revisions later, I was ready to query. I wanted to share with my family, who’d been hearing about my writing for years. So I emailed them the first three chapters and an elevator pitch, and the reply was…

Crickets.

For a week, no one even acknowledged the email. Later, my sister, who has young children, admitted, “I don’t think I can read a book on that subject.”

Imagine sending queries with that on the brain!

But I pulled up my big girl panties and did just that. I knew there was more to this book than a dead family. From the moment I started working on it, I knew I’d been entrusted with something very, very special. A SONG FOR THE ROAD is an uplifting story of rebirth and renewal, of hope and friendship and the meaning of love.

And hey, it’s a road trip novel. You get to experience the thrill of seeing new places through someone else’s eyes. What’s not to like about that?

Nor is this a solo trip. I knew Miriam, my main character, needed a companion–someone to play off of, someone to activate scenes and get her out of her head. But the hitchhiker who hopped into Miriam’s car just outside Green Bank, West Virginia caught me entirely by surprise. From the moment Dicey opened her mouth, she was fully fleshed out, with a back story of her own and a wonderfully sassy attitude—the perfect counterpoint to the weight of Miriam’s emotional arc. The chemistry between these two women makes the book sing.

There’s no room in an elevator pitch for those kinds of details, but you know what? In real life, you’re not in an elevator! There aren’t any rules. So I started adding those other details whenever I shared about my book, and guess what? Not once since then have I gotten the deer-in-headlights, Why the bleepety-bleep did I even ask? look that had me so paralyzed in the beginning.

I signed with my agents in the fall of 2019, and the manuscript went out on submission in January 2020.

Then came COVID.

In March of last year, I pretty much wrote off the whole book. In light of world events, the book’s prospects seemed dim at best. “Nobody’s going to buy a book about a woman whose entire family died,” I told my husband. “Not during a pandemic.”

But guess what? I was wrong. And here we are. A SONG FOR THE ROAD is flying the nest.

In retrospect, I’m kind of glad I got that deer-in-headlights reaction a few times early on. It helped form the book. Throughout the writing process, and during every query letter revision and manuscript rewrite of the past four years, I remembered those reactions, and for that reason I have always kept the word “uplifting” front and center in my mind. The result is a book that tackles an unimaginable topic in a way that leaves us filled with hope.

Maybe, in the end, believing in our work is an act of will—one that takes in all the hurdles and, instead of being destroyed by them, makes them part of us. Maybe, rather than something to wring our hands over, the obstacles are something to celebrate. These are our birth stories, after all.

—

Kathleen M. Basi is the quintessential jack-of-all trades writer: musical composer and songwriter, feature writer, essayist, nonfiction author, and of course–storyteller. Basi spent her childhood drawing inspiration for stories from the fields and trees on her family’s farm…when she wasn’t climbing on tractors and jumping off hay bales. Now, as mother to three rambunctious boys (read that: always breaking something!) and one chromosomally-gifted daughter (Down syndrome: more alike than different!), she doesn’t have to look any farther than her kitchen table. Visit her juggling act at www.kathleenbasi.com

A SONG FOR THE ROAD, Kathleen Basi

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild meets Katherine Center’s How to Walk Away in Kathleen Basi’s debut novel about an unconventional road trip and what it means to honor the ones we love.

It’s one year after the death of her husband and twin teenagers, and Miriam Tedesco has lost faith in humanity and herself. When a bouquet of flowers that her husband always sends on their anniversary shows up at her workplace, she completely unravels. With the help of her best friend, she realizes that it’s time to pick up the pieces and begin to move on. Step one is not even cleaning out her family’s possessions, but just taking inventory starting with her daughter’s room. But when she opens her daughter’s computer, she stumbles across a program her daughter has created detailing an automated cross-country road trip, for her and her husband to take as soon-to-be empty nesters.

Seeing and hearing the video clips of her kids embedded in the program, Miriam is determined to take this trip for her children. Armed with her husband’s guitar, her daughter’s cello, and her son’s unfinished piano sonata, she embarks on a musical pilgrimage to grieve the family she fears she never loved enough. Along the way she meets a young, pregnant hitchhiker named Dicey, whose boisterous and spunky attitude reminds Miriam of her own daughter.

Tornadoes, impromptu concerts, and an unlikely friendship…whether she’s prepared for it or not, Miriam’s world is coming back to life. But as she struggles to keep her focus on the reason she set out on this journey, she has to confront the possibility that the best way to honor her family may be to accept the truths she never wanted to face.

Hopeful, honest, and tender, A Song for the Road is about courage, vulnerability, and forgiveness, even of yourself, when it really matters.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing