When my Grandma passed away I missed her in a way I didn’t really have language for. I’d walk into stores and buy something just to have a reason to tell the salesperson a story about her. Someone wise told me grief is love with nowhere to go. That stuck with me more than anything else anyone said that year (like “at least she lived a long life” or “she’s still with you”. True. Thanks. But I miss her).

So I started writing whenever I was said, usually in the mornings when I used to Skype with her (yes, the old-age home had Skype not Facetime).

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about writing through grief. It’s genuinely therapeutic, but at some point you have to pull it back. I wrote every last breath my Grandma took. All of it and every detail of those ten days in the dementia ward. It helped me to write it but a lot of that didn’t make it into the book in the end. There’s a real difference between what helps you process something and what a reader actually wants or needs.

My advice if you’re trying to write something hard, write like nobody is ever going to see it. That’s how you get the raw stuff. My favourite sentences in the book are the ones that started as pages I never expected anyone to read e.g. “the wind blew so hard that pieces of the sky began to fall.” This is how I felt when I realized she was dying. That the sky was going to actually fall on me.

The other thing I didn’t expect was that writing a character based on someone you loved and lost can actually help you let them go. I needed to process those ten days with my Grandma, and then separately I needed to process that she was gone. There were moments where I’d reach a junction in the story and know my Grandma would have done A, but the character needed to do B for the story to work. Choosing B, every time, was its own small step towards letting her go.

Part two. How do you write your own family’s story.

Every single family has a story. Not all of them are as wild as the one that got told at our Shabbat table about the great-aunt from Golders Green in London who married the Chief Justice of Zanzibar.

But every family, especially Jewish families, carries raw material. Events like the Holocaust and others of that scale, belong to some families and not everyone. The smaller markings of a good story e.g. love, immigration, loss, scandal, faith actually make a book worth reading and those belong to everyone.

I am always clear that this is a work of fiction. The bones of the story are true but the connective tissue has creative license, because it has to go into someone’s heart and mind, and that is a key difference between historical fiction and memoir.

Someone once likened historical fiction to a pearl necklace. Each pearl on its own is true but stringing them together creates something uniquely new. This is how I hold my true north when I write my second novel. Lots of true pearls and gems, strung together to tell a new story.

So that’s the honest answer to one line on WhatsApp.

This is the first of many. If you’ve read The Spoon and the Sea and you’ve got a question of your own, send it. I’d love to answer your question too.

1. Big effort that sounds effortless. She does all the research to invite readers into the all-consuming world she has created without rambling on with every interesting fact she found out. This is the hardest part of historical fiction, to make it seem effortless when, in fact, you have been down hours of rabbit holes into times and places and geeking out on all new interesting facts about what they ate, what they wore and how they spoke. Reading her books feels like learning history without trying, which is the hardest thing to pull off.

2. Goldilocks language. She lets the story do the work without flowery language. Her language is beautiful but it isn’t over the top. It’s just enough to make you care about the characters and appreciate the writing without too much that your eyes roll because it sounds like someone prompted ChatGPT to write a metaphor for something. It’s not too much, not too little. Just right.

3. She writes brave women we can actually be. She writes women whose courage comes in different flavours, shapes and sizes. Even in The Nightingale, where bravery was literally in the face of the Nazis and arguably the most 'dramatic’, Vianne is quiet while Isabelle is loud. They make small decisions that show how brave they are and, more importantly, how brave we can be. Living in Israel and raising 4 daughters through this war since October 7, these reminders go a long way.

4. She plays the long game. She’s patient with her own career the way she’s patient with letting her characters ooze rather than dishing it all out in long prose on page 1. I remember Kristin Hannah saying in an interview that The Nightingale didn’t take off right away. It did fine, not extraordinary, until readers found it after another one of her books became popular. I think about that a lot as I run the marathon with The Spoon and the Sea.

So dear Kristin Hannah… thank you.

My faves: The Nightingale, The Four Winds and The Great Alone

I don’t think Theo of Golden is the exception.

I think it’s the playbook. Of the new publishing world.

Everyone thinks marketing = money (publicist, blog tour, ads etc)

The opposite can be true especially when you are running PLG which, luckily, books are!

What is PLG? 🤓 Product-led growth. In tech this is what we call it when the product itself drives adoption (not sales representatives or ads). Books are PLG because no budget can fix a bad/boring book or make people finish reading and shove it into a friend’s hand and say “you have to read this”.

A quick caveat, this goes for both self-publishing and traditional publishing. It’s for the author who got signed by one of the big 5 (maybe with an advance and sales in launch month, and not much more beyond that - I’ll write one day about why I don’t believe most of the conventional wisdom around pub day). It also goes for authors with indie publishers, even ones like Zibby Publishing with innovative, author-friendly models like profit-sharing and doing real marketing legwork for their authors. It’s also for the author who popped it on Amazon themselves.

How is it one size fits all? Because the role of the author has changed no matter which path you’re on. Distribution has changed. Your reach to readers has changed. Author, you are running a sales and marketing engine now, whether you signed up for that or not. THIS is the publishing world today and it’s what WSJ didn’t catch onto.

The good news: a shoestring budget can go far if you embrace this and learn the ropes.

I am 7 weeks postpartum so forgive the baby analogies, but just like we say eat-play-sleep, we also say crawl-walk-run.

That’s your new book marketing mantra.

Take another look at the WSJ article. Theo of Golden has sold 2.5 million+ copies because his niece did the unglamorous work tracking platforms, reaching book clubs, treating every single reader like a potential advocate. Those first crawling efforts compounded to 3,000 copies sold, the book was walking. They kept going and enough people shoved it into the hands of others that it ran and reached 125,000 copies in one month (before any agent, before Oprah aka the drivers that make PLG go viral).

That’s not breaking every rule in publishing. It’s exactly the publishing rulebook, just from a different version of the sport, and it’s the one we are all now playing.

How do you stop yourself from going insane while you have to tinker and chip away and become a marketer rather than seeing your book fly off the shelves from day one so you can get back to writing?

I always remember Kristin Hannah saying in a podcast interview (forgive me, I can’t remember which one having listened to so many) that The Nightingale didn’t take off immediately. It did reasonably well but it didn’t go nuts. One of her other books did relatively well and then readers of that book discovered The Nightingale and it became a phenomenon.

I think about this every time I feel itchy to run before the book is ready.

Your book doesn’t need a big marketing budget.

It needs patience, conviction and creativity.

And if you wrote a book, you have all three in spades.

Congrats to Allen Levi 👏🏼 (and his niece 🦸🏻‍♀️) on the success and the beautiful book.