Selling your book vs selling your soul
why are female authors expected to excavate their personal lives to sell a book? and is it possible not to? unless you're Sally Rooney?
I came of age as a young journalist during the ‘personal essay boom’. This was when writers (mostly women) were asked to reveal the deepest parts of themselves, for not very much money. These stories had a high click rate. Retweet fodder. Made the websites lots of money in ad revenue. This way of working was normalised. I was twenty-four at the time and I thought it was the only way to further my career as a writer —> write some personal stuff.
I remember reading one piece during that time, along the lines of ‘I was adopted and then eloped with my biological brother’. The piece ‘performed’ well. I often wondered if that particular writer, based somewhere in America, had friends and support during a time of high traffic online and avalanche of new followers/eyeballs, who let’s be honest, weren’t exactly sending kind comments.
I worked at an online magazine at the time and I was privy to the conversations my bosses were having about click-through rates and SEO and ad revenue. A hotbed for what we’d now call ‘trauma porn.’ A description of this being:
“other people's trauma shared in the mass media, leading to commercialisation, and even commodifying the trauma for profit or entertainment.”
It was the era of ‘doing it for the byline’. It became normalised to share every little morsel of your life for what could be a hit article.
Maybe people expected their story to be like Cat Person in The New Yorker and go viral and get turned into a film. (It rarely does.)
In my twenties, I thought selling your life story was what all glamorous writers did.
Turns out, writing and having a lovely life in private is where the fun is actually had.
This popular very-personal type of article was the done thing — and many people got book deals off the back of it.
Then, I started noticing many female authors were expected to write personal pieces to promote their books, even if their books had nothing to do with their private lives. It was literally bedded into the marketing plans. (‘How much are you willing to share?’ has been a question I’ve been asked in the past before a media outlet invites me for an interview). I.e. “can you give us a headline?”
As I write this article, it’s Sally Rooney week. Getting a proof of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, proved as difficult as getting Oasis tickets. I’m currently reading it now, and enjoying it. Now, the novel is out and booksellers had ‘midnight release’ parties. I admire the distance Rooney creates between her work and her personal life.
In a 2021 interview with The Guardian on Zoom, Rooney purposefully sat in front of a plain white wall.
i.e. you don’t get to see into my life.
In an era of over-sharing Instagram posts, house tours, and ‘what I ate today’ content, Rooney just wants to do her work. (Yes, she’s in a privileged position now whereby she doesn’t need to do much promotion at all, but still: she’s choosing to have some semblance of privacy and I respect that. In London, she purposefully chose to speak at a smaller venue as part of her book tour, even though she could have sold out a much, much bigger one five times over.)
Interviewers try to break the fourth wall with Rooney and they can’t. In a recent New York Times interview, the journalist wants to know if Rooney reads biographies of writers she loves. She replies with: ‘I’ve actually never read a biography of a writer.’ People find it hard to believe this. Is she not interested in the personal lives of writers? Does she not understand why we might be interested in hers? But she’s a Millennial! She’s still sort of ‘young’! Surely she wants to give us some personal flavour to her life! But no, she’s a novelist with a job, and the work is the work. Perhaps we’ve always been interested in the private lives of certain ‘star’ writers (such as the Joan Didion/Eve Babitz of the world) but on the whole, in the pre-Internet era, writers were able to write in relative peace.
Right now, to see a 30-something woman in the public eye with boundaries around their private lives is empowering. A similar feeling to a recent Instagram post by Chappell Roan asking her super-fans to please stop harassing her in public. She just wants to go to the cinema with her mates.
For many female novelists today, we are immediately assumed to have written about our personal lives; there’s a collective inability to believe that things are made up—that we haven’t just written down ‘our feelings’. I do believe this is thought of as less literary, something Rooney has brought up in the past.
In an interview (that seems to now be deleted), Rooney was asked if her short story, Mr Salary was somewhat autobiographical. She responded with a question back, readjusting the power dynamic:
‘How does that information make the scene any different for readers? Does it imbue the reading experience with some kind of increased authenticity because of its proximity to my real life? Or does it imply that rather than being the invention of a creative mind, this incident was just something that happened to me as a passive observer? In which case, is the story somehow “less literary”?’
In other words? You’re being nosy and I won’t answer your question.
For women, somehow, there’s an increasingly blurred line between ‘person’ and ‘book’. It’s become a trend almost, to personally promote yourself in tandem with the book (click bait headline, photoshoot, snapping the book in situ at home or with pets.) I’ve done it. I’ve been part of it. Consciously or unconsciously? I’m reflecting on this.
JoJo Moyes is also reflecting on it — wondering why, when promoting her novels, she is asked by media outlets to write about cankles(?) and, inappropriately, her divorce. Then, if you’re lucky, you get a ‘plug’ at the end. Out now, Penguin, £5.99, paperback.
“Have you ever seen Lee Child or Ian McEwan write an essay about some highly personal emotional trauma? Have you ever seen Robert Harris discuss his relationship with his ankles? No. They are asked about their craft, about the writing, their research, about professional developments in their lives. But we have come to expect our pound of flesh from women writers, and – trained to be accommodating from childhood – we so often, despite our best instincts, give it.” (From
Substack piece “are the men doing this?”)
When my first novel OLIVE came out, about a child-free-by-choice protagonist, I gave her long dark brown hair. (Look, it’s not me!) It was lightly inspired by my own life and friendships but the character and storyline was completely fictionalised. The reason I wrote it as a novel in the first place was because I wasn’t quite ready to share with the world my child-free status. I wanted to hide in plain sight.
I was twenty-eight when I wrote the book, thirty when it came out, and that seemed a bit young to be going on national radio to say I didn't ever want to have kids. Also, why should I?
My publishing team were brilliant, always checking in on my boundaries, and it’s ultimately it’s up to me how much I wanted to share. I personally felt some kind of duty to be honest about my own life. I didn’t want to lie and say the book had nothing to do with me. Some novels are totally made-up, like Rooney’s Intermezzo, but mine aren’t. They are deeply personal.
The stories of other child-free-by-choice women had helped me, and made me feel less alone, so I wanted to contribute.
However, the headlines about ‘a child-free author’ became more prominent than the novel itself. Can we just talk about the book? I wanted people to read the book, and now I was on the radio being interviewed about my life with no mention of it. The PR shenanigans are the least fun part of the publishing process, and yet, increasingly one of the most crucial parts of getting it out there.
Novels are often emotionally truthful, but that doesn’t mean any of it actually happened. In my experience, there are so many truths inside a novel, in a sort of Frankenstein-Picasso way, it’s all upside down and back to front, but only the novelist knows where the clues are. That’s what makes a novel so magical to write. It all happened, but it didn’t happen at all.
Anyway, my second novel comes out in April next year (details to come, soon!!) and I am thinking very differently about the process this time round. I won’t be putting too much of my personal life on a platter to ‘sell’ the book. I will put the book forward, as its own piece of art. I will discuss the themes, my writing, the idea, the inspiration, but I won’t feel the need to reveal parts of myself to feel worthy for it to exist. Maybe I could even try sitting in front of a plain white wall. But who knows. After all, I do want the novel to sell.
(A version of this piece was originally a guest post on .)
as usual, you write what I'm thinking. So tired of what "authenticity" culture has done to women. Our lives are so precious and the internet is so irreverent. It'll be a sad day when everyone is required to be an influencer
I’ve been very protective of what I share about my life on social media and with traditional media but it’s never easy! So a “hell yes” to more focus about the work and less talk about private life.