Promoting My Book with Postpartum Depression

I previously had no concept of what it was like to be a victim of your troubled mind.

I almost died on the way to an event promoting my debut novel. Halfway between my home in Iowa City and a Midwest Independent Booksellers Association event in Decorah, I fell asleep at the wheel, or kind of started to drift off at the wheel, until I hit a bump in the road that jolted me awake. I got off with a flat tire, which an absurdly kind man changed for me at a gas station, allowing me to continue my drive up the barren March landscape of Iowa to the town that was hosting a conference where authors like myself would give big speeches to a room full of booksellers to charm them into promoting our books in their stores.

The unusual part of my falling-asleep-at-the-wheel experience was that it was ten in the morning. I had a nine-month-old at home, and for the last six months I had been broken by unrelenting postpartum insomnia and depression, which meant I spent the majority of my nights fully awake with my heart pounding, sweating through multiple nightgowns, meditating and reciting poetry and every Bachelor cast member to myself, recounting every minor sin I had ever committed to deserve such a fate, and wondering if I was going insane.

Sleepless and desperate for my latest meds to kick in, I had created a warped value system that dictated only people who could sleep on their own were allowed to enjoy life, to smell stupid scented candles and drink overpriced lattes and decorate Christmas trees and binge-watch Game of Thrones, or even do things like promote the debut novel that had been their lifelong goal to publish. Because I suddenly could not complete the very basic task of falling asleep, I deserved to be punished and was completely unworthy of my family or friends, just a selfish, spoiled, worthless human being who probably would have been better off crashing into a truck.

Needless to say, this mindset did not help me relax at night. I was so anxious about not sleeping before the conference that I had spent the entire night watching the light slowly sneak through my bedroom window until my alarm went off. I only began to relax when I got on the road, lulled by the asphalt rolling below me.

Well, I didn’t die, I reasoned. It was time to plow forward. I didn’t have time to worry, because now I was running late. I had planned to arrive an hour early and practice my speech in the parking lot, but I already knew not to trust any plans I had made, like the one about having a baby and a book in the same year and it being the greatest year of my life. I rehearsed my speech as I drove, going too fast on my spare tire, past the scraggly trees and gray fields that gave no indication that spring was just around the corner.

“I’m so happy to be here to share my novel with you all,” I told the pale, cloudless sky. “I still can’t believe any of this is real.”

*

I ran breathless into a room in a regal old hotel in a charming, brick-covered town I might have appreciated under different circumstances, where the other authors were chitchatting about themselves and their books. I stared at the turkey wrap and chips waiting for me and was amazed at how quickly I was able to turn on my public self, to perform old Maria like a ventriloquist, making self-deprecating jokes about my flat tire, about how wild it was to have a nine-month-old at home, all while shoveling down the food. As everyone nodded politely and shared their stories, I wondered what would happen if I said, Ha, ha, my book came out this week but if I didn’t have my daughter to care for, I would jump off a bridge! In fact, I almost died two hours ago—isn’t that hilarious?

I knew this was not the way to win friends and influence others, so I continued my routine of slight self-deprecation and interest in others’ lives, which I had learned somewhere between growing up as an immigrant from Ukraine who had to move around a lot and quickly adapt to her surroundings and being a star recruiter during my sorority’s rush.“Mandy, have you met Melissa? Did you know that you both do competitive tap dancing and have twin brothers?”

I was able to turn on my public self, to perform old Maria like a ventriloquist.

My friends know me as an open book, someone who speaks her mind to a fault, and though I have had my share of private longings and grievances like everybody else, I had previously struggled to stop obsessively talking about my suffering with everyone I knew. Until then.

I finished my wrap and my pre-mom robot chatter—“Madison has the best farmers market, doesn’t it?”—and shuffled down the stairs to prepare to give my speech. As I watched the other writers take their places at the podium to make jokes and share inspirational stories, they all looked so normal and put together, like being a person came so effortlessly to them. But enough of that; it was my turn to speak. I approached the stage and scolded myself, as I did whenever anything good had happened that year, like my daughter laughing for the first time or my book getting praise. Oh look, you little bitch, here’s another moment that was supposed to be good, but you have ruined it all.

I stood over the crowd and delivered the speech I had practiced on the road. People were charmed and laughed at the right times, which was no surprise. I had fooled everybody, for the first of many times throughout my book tour.

*

One of the chapters in my novel was inspired by Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” My favorite passage in that deceptively complex story is about how the married philanderer, Gurov, returns to Moscow after meeting his mistress, Anna, on the seaside of Yalta, where he falls madly in love for the first time in his life. He can think of nothing but Anna and feels like the world’s everyday realities are an assault on his private longings.

One evening, he finds he can no longer keep his feelings to himself and confides in a friend at a restaurant that he had met a lovely woman in Yalta. Initially unresponsive, the friend replies at last: “You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit too strong!” After this exchange, Chekhov writes: “These words, so ordinary for some reason, moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days!”

I was always moved and amused by this passage—the sturgeon was his turkey wrap, I suppose—but I did not understand the depth of his suffering, or how the difference between one’s private and public self could be as vast as an ocean. Some writer I was! Wasn’t fiction supposed to be all about those sad, lonely people and their secret lives, the dark insights into the depths of their consciousnesses that they hid from the public? I always thought this was one of the more boring aspects of fiction and cared more about exploring the public self, the impulsive decisions that rule our lives: the parties, the arguments, the bad behavior, and so on. And yet, here I was, finally getting it when I felt like my inner and outer self had nothing in common, when any word I uttered was a lie. This was the greatest shock of my life, more shocking than the bump that jolted me awake on the road.

They all looked so normal and put together, like being a person came so effortlessly to them.

The three months after my near-death day bore testament to this fact. I wasn’t exactly old Gurov, but I too struggled to keep up a public face while I was dying inside. My book was autobiographical, an immigrant coming-of-age story inspired by my many moves, and I returned to many of those places to read from it, which made the experience even more surreal. At my book launch in Brooklyn, I faced dozens of friends from all stages of my life and felt guilty that they came, convinced they were only there out of pity. Afterward, in the dark of a bar, I told a friend about my insomnia and immediately regretted it; he had been trying for a decade to publish a novel, and I saw how ungrateful I sounded on my big night. I went back to chugging wine and joking around and said I was just being dramatic; I was a little tired but fine.

I read from my book at the beloved bookstore Prairie Lights in Iowa City, where I lived, fulfilling my dream to read there after attending dozens of readings as a graduate student, awaiting my turn. I looked over the crowd and said, “I can’t believe you’re all here!” Everyone laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. I didn’t deserve anyone’s love because I couldn’t sleep.

I went to my pre-Iowa home of Oakland and got choked up when I practiced reading a chapter where my heroine complains about working for a how-to company, because the girl who wrote that chapter whose biggest problem was writing how-to articles and not publishing her novel had no idea how good she had it. After the actual reading, at a bar where my husband and I had once played countless rounds of darts, I took on the part of the conquering hero, laughing with my friends instead of telling them about my nightly panic attacks.

One of my last trips was to Florida, my family’s first home in America, where I spent three days by myself on the beach during the day and my evenings connecting with readers. It could have been an amazing and well-deserved vacation if I didn’t spend every minute hating myself.

My last evening there, the local librarian, bookseller, and I ate one of the best meals of my life: fresh gleaming oysters, the softest crab cakes, and foamy local beers. Still, I was bombarded with the usual self-hating thought: Wow, this would be such an awesome moment if you weren’t a psycho! Mercifully, the tour ended after that.

*

I started feeling like myself again by the end of that summer, courtesy of a new job, working meds, and leaving the cold for good to start fresh in a new place with my new job. Once the dust settled—sleeping again can help with that—I saw my fellow humans differently. When I stood before my new students or walked by random people on the street, I thought: Are their smiles sincere, or are they dying and screaming inside? How about my new friends and colleagues or the neighbors walking their dogs by my house? How about those writers on the stage that day in Iowa or all those booksellers, so cheerful in spite of the cold? Who was I to say they weren’t suffering too?

When Covid-19 hit and I listened to every episode of the My Favorite Murder podcast while pushing my daughter all over town in her stroller, I was fascinated by the backstories of the killers, usually a hodgepodge of a terrible upbringing and debilitating mental illness. While I could never excuse their behavior, I could begin to understand it, how they could walk right up to a cliff and jump. I thought of friends who struggled with anorexia and anxiety and depression and how, while I tried to be understanding, part of me thought some of it was within their control. I previously had had no concept of what it was like to be a victim of your troubled mind. I thought more of Gurov, The Bell Jar, of an acclaimed contemporary novel I once told a friend I found “a little dull” because I found extensive explorations of mental illness to be uninspiring.

Two years after my almost-death day, I stress the inside-outside theme every time I teach. I see it in Daniel Orozco’s story “Orientation,” narrated by an office employee who lets a new hire in on the secrets of his coworkers, who include a woman who regularly weeps in the bathroom, a man haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, and a woman who is routinely sexually abused by her own husband. “But we’re not supposed to know any of this,” our narrator tells us matter-of-factly.

I see it in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven,” which is narrated by a woman reflecting on a time in her childhood when her mother had fallen in love with a friend. Her mother had acted stern and proper at the time but later confessed that one afternoon, she had nearly set herself on fire out of lovesickness. The daughter says that by the time she and her father got home, her mother “was in the kitchen boiling rice for our dinner, as if it were any other day.” So rice instead of sturgeon, then.

I stress the inside-outside theme every time I teach.

Most recently, I noticed it in Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” where a defective radio exposes an anxious homemaker to the secrets of the residents in her apartment building, people who are short on money and love, getting abused, and afraid that they will never feel like themselves again. In the end, we learn that she, too, is full of secrets. Her husband recounts a string of her misdeeds and asks, “What makes you so Christly all of a sudden?” I asked my students what they thought the point of the story was. One scratched his head and squinted at his camera before taking a stab at it: “The world is messed up, and so are we?”

My student was right, though I think he was only two-thirds of the way there. The world is messed up, and people are messed up, but it’s a comfort to know it, in a way—to have it all out in the open, in its chaos and glory. The world is still a big mess now, of course, though things are looking increasingly hopeful. In fact, I just wrapped the virtual book tour for my second novel in May. Though I didn’t get to feel the warmth of actual readers in the room, I enjoyed it much more than the first one because I didn’t have to do it with a broken brain.

When people attended my events, I didn’t think it was out of pity for me. When people reached out to say they read and loved the book, I took the compliment instead of convincing myself they had only purchased the book out of obligation and didn’t really mean their kind words. Okay, I thought during the six-stop tour that allowed me to “see” my grad school classmates and my current colleagues from work, connect with other Russian-speaking immigrants, and field embarrassing chat comments from my family members, so this is how it’s supposed to feel—like a celebration, not a con act.

Something else I learned during my virtual tour: Many people have been reading more than ever while they’ve been cooped up indoors. Likely, they encountered countless protagonists who pretended they were doing just fine as they went out in the world while the reader understood that, internally, they were racked with pain and despair. Maybe more of them have been stopping to think about the pain behind the smiling faces of their loved ones and strangers as a result. May those dear readers have the great fortune of learning the hard lessons from literature instead of real life.