My book is so real, it's available for preorder
Writing news and a belated Happy New Year!
Every time something happens in regards to my book, I tell everyone I know, it’s starting to feel real! This is either a lie or it takes me a long time to get anything through my skull, because I’ve been saying it for about a year. And yet—IT’S REALLY STARTING TO FEEL REAL, GUYS!
That’s because it is real—so real that you can click this link and put in a preorder for August when it comes out!
It has a cover, it has typeset pages, and soon, in the form of advanced reader copies, it will even exist in physical space, not just a pdf on my laptop.
In honour of this impending reality, or maybe to make myself feel it more, I thought I’d write a quick newsletter about it.
It is, I regret to inform you, almost the end of January, which is quite a shock. Did you know that it has been 2025 for almost an entire month? I’ve found this new year difficult to celebrate. The sky is gray. The wind is cold and my space heater and electric blanket are on overdrive. Despite the tenuous ceasefire, news out of Gaza continues to be horrific. LA is burning to the ground, historic sites and family homes alike. Donald Trump thinks he should buy and/or rename most of the world. America has become the nation-state equivalent of one of those gender reveal parties on the news that accidentally blows up half a county. Etc, etc. Dark times.
It continues to feel hard to celebrate things. But also, a few small celebrations go a long way in building up the energy to keep going.
One of my main coping strategies in life is to find the things I think are funny (even if darkly funny) in difficult times, and that is what I was trying to do in writing a book about Christian pop culture of the 2000s. (I’m sure someone will tell me if I succeeded or not when it’s published.) Part of the book is about what I think is a hilarious incongruity within evangelical religion: packaged pop culture products built to slot neatly into the gears of capitalism and praise an all-mighty omniscient deity at the same time.
When I was first pitching the book, I found myself wondering if the topic was relevant. After all, I was writing about artefacts of a pretty niche subculture from 20 years ago. But now here I am almost two years after the fact, trying to update each round of proofs to add in the new and terrifying way that Christian nationalism is making headlines that week, in Canada and around the world.
I think what I learned in the process of writing the book was the importance of examination—or, as I prefer to think of it, of attention. It’s common to talk about the “attention economy” these days, and to bring an ethical quality to the question of where that attention goes (from concerns about who gets “platformed” in various publications down to ye olde Twitter’s “no one is talking about this”). I think the act of attention does implicate some power, and also that sustained, critical attention is crucial to the unravelling of any subject. Where your attention goes is where your time goes; but it also presupposes care. You are not attentive to what you are indifferent to. All of this is a long way of muttering around favourite Simone Weil quote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
For now, I may really be finished writing this book (unless JD Vance makes it illegal to be single or James Dobson is appointed secretary of education or something), which means I have a few months to let it sink in before it becomes really really real in August.
If you’d like to preorder the book you can do so through ECW Press and/or your local bookstore! (The website has a handy tool to find a local seller.)
🙏
On a very related note …
I just published this book review of Angel BH’s excellent All Hookers Go To Heaven, which definitely has some … overlapping themes. Check it out!
Some books I’ve read and loved this month
I’m halfway through City Boy by Edmund White, and his tales of literary lunches and late night cruising and stomping on roaches in 1970s New York are getting me through the month. Despite the massive changes to the publishing industry in the last five decades, it’s nice to know the perennial writerly fears (feeling too old to publish your debut, not publishing frequently enough, being scared to meet your heroes …) existed then as now.
I recently read a double-header of very funny and yet very moving novels: Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly and Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin.
My two great loves of streaming service docuseries are the scam documentary and the cult documentary, and I went on a real deep dive over the holiday break. I hopped from Anatomy of Lies (batshit) to Breath of Fire (troubling) to The Vow (extremely psychologically interesting). After watching The Vow I picked up Don’t Call it a Cult by Sarah Berman, which filled in all the NXIVM gaps I was left wondering about. It’s thoughtful and well-reported, and written so sharply. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about maybe don’t open this rabbit hole.)
Some random links
Speaking of the attention economy … I enjoyed this piece that questions the way we construct the idea of an attention span (and whether our technologies are really “changing our brains”).
I also loved this essay that answers a question I’d always wondered about (What’s up with all the Australian cafes in New York?) and one it never occurred to me to wonder about (Was the popularity of avocado toast in part a knock-on effect of the September 11 attacks?)
This new Sheila Heti is just everything I love in a short story.
I’m interested to see if there might be a brighter future for social media—if, say, people get fed up enough with billionaires having mid-life crises and vacate their platforms—and actually feel kind of interested in the idea of a social internet that’s more fragmented and less monopolistic. Apparently Mark Ruffalo (and some other people, I stopped reading after Mark Ruffalo) want to Free Our Feeds. Idk. I have a Bluesky account (joellekidd.bsky.social) if you want to connect with me there!💾
For me it's cult and scam podcasts... same topics, different medium. Love the homage to label makers on the book cover!
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