Book! Birthday! Party!
Buy my first book for her twentieth birthday! Read some of the new one!
It’s my first novel’s twentieth birthday today, let’s party! To celebrate I have decided to do two fun things:
A wee sale of some of my last remaining copies of the book (it’s out of print). Scroll down for more about the book and how to buy! Or click here!
I’m publishing a world-wide exclusive excerpt from my current book about publishing my first book because I live to be meta and self-referential and maybe just a titch narcissistic in all that I do? What I can I say, I am what I am!
If you’ve been following along for a while now, maybe you’re like, wtf, I thought this new novel was a fantasy book about sea creatures! Indeed it is. But it also kicks off with a very healthy dose of autofiction. I simply can’t not self-mythologize, darling.
Excerpt from my new book!
At age twenty-four I’d published my first book — a very short romp about getting dumped — straight out of grad school and to some mild critical acclaim. My book launch at a bar in Toronto was rammed with my friends, family, my high school creative writing teacher, the ex-boyfriend I’d written the book about — even Ray had been there it turned out. He had tagged along to the event with a friend, he hadn’t been single at the time, but what a goddamn thrill when we started hanging out the following year to know that he had witnessed me in, frankly, my highest glory, and that I had, in fact, stayed on his mind.
I had bought for the occasion a very tight dress that had ensconced my reasonably slamming twenty-four year-old body. I’d gotten up there after the other readers, comedians, and bands I had managed to rustle up, all of whom I was surprised had said yes, and read from my book percussively, with some kind of trance-like verve. I rather brought the house down if I do say so myself. “Holy shit, Katy! I’ve never seen you like that!” Molly had said after. “You were so fucking cool!” I sold forty books! The feeling! Fame! Sure, the writing itself had been something of a rush, I got what people were saying when they went on about process over product. But this? I wanted more. What’s more humiliating is that I figured more wouldn’t be hard to come by. That initial success had seemed to me like just the start.
Fun fact: as per the flyer above, among the bands that performed at my launch were Death From Above, a member of which was a friend from high school. I went on to fully eviscerate their politics for the CBC in 2017 after the other member of the band was found to be Proud Boy adjacent. About four years after I published that, Gavin McInnes emailed me personally (subject line: Dead Womb) to ask: “Why did you choose writing over being mother (sic)? You suck at it.” Life, man. She comes at you fast!
Here’s one more excerpt from the new book about the old book, just for fun:
For my first book, I’d been given carte blanche by my kind indie publisher to do what I liked with his government-issued tour money. Having nary an ounce of what I then dubbed “careerism” and what I now dubbed “a clue,” I did two tiny events and then just hung out with my friend Jordana in Vancouver for a bit, took a transcendent bus ride through the mountains to Banff, wandered around the postcard town, found my way to the hot springs and improbably rented for two dollars one of the collection of be-legged 1930’s bathing suits the hot springs staff kept in a cupboard somewhere for when weirdos like me showed up.
This was shortly after I’d met Ray and I’d found myself thinking a lot about him even though we’d only had that one night of ecstasy-fuelled chatter. A lot of the time as I languidly lounged in that hot spring alone, I was picturing the two of us being wed. I had thought that though I might not be rich, being a writer would at least consistently afford me glamourous experiences. Maybe we would have a glorious life.
If anyone knows if you can still rent a bathing suit at the Banff hot springs, PLEASE let me know!
**HUGE UPDATE: You can! Thank you to my friend Barb for sending me this!**
Another Book About Another Broken Heart
Let me get this out of the way: in some ways I am so embarrassed, humiliated, ashamed, etc. that it’s been twenty years since I put out my first book and I’ve yet to put out another. That’s not what I expected would happen if I’m being honest with you. One day maybe I’ll write a whole essay about all of that, or maybe it’s already happening in this novel I’m working on, I’m not sure.
But what I want to say today, since we’re partying, is that in spite of not publishing a hefty pile of books by the age of forty-five, I do find my life pretty glorious. Alongside many non-writing-related blessings, writing this current novel is some of the most fun I’ve had ever. When I can flip that switch in my brain that evaluates my life in terms of how much I derive meaning from my day-to-day doings vs. surveying my stack of achievements for evidence of “success,” I feel, on the whole, fucking great. That switch is increasingly easy to flip (god bless and keep therapy).
Today I just want to shower my first little baby book, Another Book About Another Broken Heart, and my clueless baby writer self with so much love! So many writers say they can’t read their early work; they find it impossibly cringe or amateur or underbaked or what have you. I’m kind of the opposite. Every time I revisit my first book, I’m like, “Who the fuck wrote this?! The audacity! The confidence! Who was she?” I know for a fact that she was simply a moderately depressed, absolutely broken-hearted twenty-two year old in grad school who had no idea how to write a novel but did so anyway because her thesis was due to her advisor. I’ve always done well with deadlines.
What is this book?
Another Book About Another Broken Heart can certainly be described as meta, self-referential, and a titch narcissistic, but I’ve also heard that it’s funny! Here’s a nice review of it from the Montreal Review of Books. The Toronto Star said it was “consistently delightful,” but I can’t find that review any more, this was twenty years ago after all. More recently, reigning queen of break-up fiction, Monica Heisey, told me she liked it!
The late W. P. Kinsella did not like it and absolutely trashed it in Books In Canada; a review which helpfully remains excerpted in the book’s Product Description on Amazon. I quote:
This girl [the protagonist] is so frightfully naive…that she would benefit from being put in suspended animation until she turns, perhaps, forty.
Haha! Joke’s on Kinsella: now I’m forty-four, and I’m basically THE SAME. It was honestly such a shockingly mean review that it remains among my faves.
Disclaimer: there is one paragraph near the beginning of the novel about a waiter at an Indian restaurant that freaks me out a bit. I have no idea what I was trying to get at when I wrote it. If it reads racist, I’m really, really sorry; if it just reads clanky and weird, I’m sorry, too; if you read it and think, ‘whatever, it’s fine!’ that’s great! I just wanted to let you know my forty-four year-old self would’ve cut that part.
Otherwise, I think it’s a fast, decent read about getting dumped! A perfect gift for the broken-hearted in your life! The sentences are long, the print — as Kinsella grumpily pointed out — is teeny, and I forever thank my dear publisher, Andy Brown of the still-stellar Conundrum Press for taking a chance on me twenty years ago!
Buy the Book!
I decided the easiest way to sell books on here would be to run a subscription sale. Here’s how it works:
Click this button which will take you to a Special Offer on subscriptions page.
If you live in Canada or the USA, choose Annual Subscriber for $15 CAD.
If you live anywhere else, choose Founding Subscriber for $31 CAD.
I wanted to make the Founding one a bit cheaper than that, but Substack wouldn’t let me, I’m sorry.
Both prices include a signed book plus shipping to wherever you’d like. To give me your address, just respond to this email or write to me at julia.s.tausch@gmail.com. Let me know there, too, if you don’t want it signed, or if you want any kind of special message inside.
This isn’t just an attempt to get more subscribers! You can opt out of emails and unsubscribe right away if you want, I won’t be mad. I just wanted to sell the book without researching “make online store” and all that.
That’s it! I’ll sell them while supplies last!
If you buy one, thank you so much in advance, you’re the very best that there is!
Hopefully back to our regularly scheduled programming of Writing, Reading, and Eating very soon!
Really enjoyed that, has it really been that long?
happy book birthday!