As with any thing you’ve written there are always the competing feelings, the dialectic. This is the greatest piece of writing. Ever. This is the greatest piece of shit. Ever.
The difference with a novel, as opposed to, say, an offhand blog or essay, is the sheer size of the thing. Which means time spent, years rather than days or weeks. A fanatical level of commitment. And then, suddenly, it’s out there. When the outsiders, the police busting in, finally see the wall-sized corkboard in your basement with the polaroids and screeds held with thumbtacks and connected by stretches of dusty yarn; you want it to make sense, you want it to work, hoping they’ll see the light. Understand that your crazed midnight hours were not spent in vain. Your greatest fear the stupefied look on their faces: You spent years on this?
All of this is more traumatic if you think, maybe—just maybe, this one time—that the thing you produced was not a piece of shit. Maybe even something great. Your baby is beautiful. And who knows if your next child will be a beauty? That you’ll have the energy, some of that waning stamina of youth, for a multi-year gestation.
Hence, the postpartum depression.
