If My Book Were a Garden...

Monkey Bicycle has been publishing If My Book essays for years. They’re often hilarious and touching, and I always read them with great interest. We authors find it hard to talk about our books. We feel unfit to write a synopsis of the work that took us years to create. Especially when that synopsis is meant to be printed on the back of the book and have strong commercial appeal.

But James Tate Hill, the editor of Monkey Bicycle, and a brilliant writer in his own right, found a way to trick us authors into revealing something about our books that we may have kept hidden even from ourselves. By using metaphors, we get to explore what our book means to us and what we hope readers will find within its pages.

I’m proud to have an If My Book essay on the Monkey Bicycle website today about Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion.

“If Woman of the Hour were a garden, it would be full of uninvited weeds thriving against the odds.

Some people claim I was in charge of the garden’s cultivation, but that is a lie.

Everything started growing when I began listening to seeds. I first heard the angriest seeds because they were the loudest, and I watered their stories into Venus flytraps.

Some people say that Venus flytraps aren’t weeds, but I think of weeds as plants that we didn’t intend to grow and that sprouted from the earth as though by magic.”

—> Read the rest of my essay “If My Book Were a Garden” on Monkey Bicycle’s website.