Book 3 in progress

because writing is the best and also the worst

Hi, hello, I have an announcement. I am writing a third book. Because writing is the best and I love it and want to keep doing it for the rest of my life!

Writing is also the worst because every time I sit down to write anything, including this Substack, I feel like I’ve never written a word in my life. This is not a good feeling, so I put off writing and go to the grocery store, or start a load of laundry, or turn to my old friend The New York Times Spelling Bee, because combining letters into words is much easier than combining words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and figuring out which paragraph goes where. Also, the third book is about being diagnosed with ADHD in midlife, and I’m discovering that writing with ADHD is easier than writing about ADHD. Writing about ADHD feels like what I imagine what Leonid Rogozov felt when he performed his own appendectomy except that writing about ADHD with ADHD is more like doing your own brain surgery.

Also, not to brag, but Leonid Rogozov only removed his appendix once. He wasn’t promoting a newly released book and writing a Substack at the same time. He was just doing scienc-y things on an Antarctic expedition, so I win.

Just kidding. Leonid Rogozov is awesome and I could never.

Meanwhile, here’s a sneak peek at the intro to book 3:

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I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was fifty-four, after the strategies I had unconsciously devised to keep it together stopped working and I started losing it. By “it,” I mean my phone, my other shoe, my temper, and my sense of the world as a navigable place.

To be diagnosed with ADHD you have to fill out several questionnaires that ask you to rate how often you make careless mistakes, lose items, fidget, interrupt, or have difficulty getting organized to complete a complex task on a scale of “Never” to “Very often.” Then you meet with a psychiatrist who conducts a clinical assessment. The psychiatrist who conducted my clinical assessment seemed skeptical because my first book, a memoir about working as a college admissions counselor while raising three neurodivergent children, was in pre-publication at the time. He said that my ADHD couldn’t be that bad if I wrote a book, to which I said “Ask me how I wrote the book,” and that is how I ended up with a diagnosis and a prescription for methylphenidate, generic for Ritalin.

Being asked to quantify behavioral patterns over time is not dissimilar from writing a memoir. You look over moments in your past and go, Ah, that’s why I’m like this. Except that the questionnaires I filled out captured only a partial truth—that I struggled to be on time, to wait my turn, to sit still, to focus, to keep track of my belongings, to feel less sudden, blinding rage in seemingly innocuous situations. The questionnaires quantified the nature and frequency of the disorder—never, rarely, sometimes, often, very often—but not my efforts to manage it. And I’m sorry, but those efforts are also important, because aren’t we all struggling with, or against, something?

I personally struggle with the following: existential dread, figuring out what’s for dinner, my overflowing email inbox, aging, an inability to focus on a single task, and a disastrously cluttered Google drive filled with documents with names like “BOOK 3 LOLOLOL.”

Every day is a battle against entropy. Except I’m also the cause of the thing I’m fighting against, which makes determining the winner tricky, to say the least. It’s like the call is coming from inside the house but the house is a mess and the phone is nowhere to be found and it’s unclear whether the caller on the other end is a friend or a fiend or simply a wrong number.

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Updates

BAY AREA BOOK EVENTS:

•Wednesday, May 27 at 7 pm: I’ll be talking about my new book, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, at the Sunnyvale Public Library. More details here.

•Sunday, May 31 at 12:15 pm: “Taking the Long Road Trip Home” (in conversation with Kevin Wilson, author of Run for the Hills and Nothing to See Here at the Bay Area Book Festival). Details here.

If you’re not in the Bay Area, I do book clubs virtually, and both Troika and my first book, The Golden Ticket, make for lively discussions about parents and children, generational expectations, ambition, and success. Invite me! I’m very fun!

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