Looking for your book in a bookstore

Or: how to hurt your own feelings

Some personal news to share: after several committed months, I finished my Scandal rewatch in March. Without Olivia and Fitz keeping me company (I miss them), I have been reading before bed again.

To be honest, I've had a complicated relationship with books lately, and it’s not just Scandal that’s to blame. About a year after my memoir was published, I found myself avoiding bookstores altogether. The aversion was jarring and disorienting, like developing a new allergy to a favorite food. Bookstores had always been sanctuaries for me; they were the places where I felt most at home in college and when I visited new cities. They contained endless worlds for me to lose myself in, stacks of words wrapped in dreamy covers that I really, really wanted to see my name on one day. Walking into a bookstore was an act of manifestation, like an aspiring actor sitting in the audience of a Broadway show, dreaming of being up on that stage one day. Writing a book was all I ever wanted, and bookstores represented a sense of possibility. 

I felt deeply proud when I saw my own book propped up on a bookstore table for the first time, the culmination of a lifelong dream. But alongside that joy lived a growing shame that I couldn't shake. Here I was – someone who had always celebrated other authors, read voraciously, and wanted to be the writer buying books and championing new voices – consumed with new anxieties about what my own book's performance meant for my future. Writing wasn't just something I enjoyed; it was the career I had dreamed about since childhood and now it was real. The stakes felt impossibly high, and each bookstore visit became a referendum on whether I would get to keep living my dream. 

I started to play an unfun game with myself and it went like this: I would walk into a bookstore and immediately search for my book. If the store didn't have any in stock, it meant I was a failure. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. If they had one or two copies, it meant not enough people wanted to buy it. You lose. If there were five or six copies, the store had clearly ordered too many and nobody wanted to buy them. Clearly, there was no winning this game. I was so mean: to myself, to my book, to an industry I loved.

Intellectually, I understood that not every bookstore carries all the same books, that there are different buyers and booksellers with different tastes, that book distribution is complex and often unpredictable. I knew that my book couldn’t be front and center in every bookstore in the world forever and ever and that there is plenty of room for all kinds of books. But emotionally, all roads lead back to the same fearful voice telling me that everyone else’s book was bigger and better and that I would never get another shot at doing what I loved so much. I did the literal thing you’re not supposed to do — judged books by their covers — and berated myself for not writing them all, regardless of their genre. I hated that I couldn't let myself enjoy my former happy place and that my own insecurities had transformed a lifelong source of joy into one of anxiety.