Sophomoric

Welcome to the first installment of Sophomoric, a new series I’m going to be posting to my website every two weeks about the process of writing a second memoir. If you’re anything like me, you’ve hungrily gobbled up the scads of prescriptive writing and publishing industry advice out there–from podcasts and Substacks to newsletters and writing workshops and festivals. I’m profoundly grateful for all of it, though I have also experienced the paralysis of inhaling it too quickly and in too great a quantity. So, if you find yourself there, please know you’re not alone.

Despite having a first book, I feel neither qualified nor inclined to replicate any of that. To borrow a phrase from my Scandinavian-American-Midwestern father-in-law, my expertise, such as it is, is “pretty medium” at best. So hacks and advice will not be forthcoming, and where they appear, it will be unintentional and accidental. Because we’re all different. Each writing day is different. Sometimes the strategies that succeed on one day are absolute failures the next day. Sometimes successful strategies don’t even work from hour to hour. The only constant is change, so they say, and in my experience, writing very much proves that adage true.  

Some days, I might say, “Today taking a walk helped me have an insight I might not have arrived at.” The next day, I might say, “Today taking a walk lead to me feeling unable to turn off the improv podcast I was listening to while I walked because weirdly it felt destabilizing to turn it off and those actors feel like my friends even though I’ve never met them and they don’t know who I am but I felt irrationally terrified to be alone without them, so instead of feeling motivated to write after my walk, I listened to four straight hours of that podcast and washed dishes and did laundry. And then my daughter came home from school, and that was the end of my writing day.” 

Lilacs are going to be a big thing in my next book…

This Sophomoric series will therefore capture DESCRIPTIVELY what it’s like to have a first book out in the world and to be cultivating the hubris it takes to be attempting another. It’s also important to me that this will be about the process of writing a second memoir. All you fiction folks and poets and general nonfictionistas have a significant advantage over us in the world of prescriptive advice for second projects. 

Those of us burgeoning second memoirists do not have as much of that information, so to some extent, this will hopefully spur on some online conversations I’d like to see more of in that arena, though, of course, others are more than welcome to pop by here. 

So, who am I and what is it I’m writing about?

I’m the author of Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage (Eerdmans). It came out last October and some people have said nice things about it. And some people have said not nice things about it, including someone named Ed on Goodreads who complained about having to read about “every meal the author has ever eaten ever.” Solid burn, Ed. My friend Nellie once (accurately) referred to my writing as “sex writing by way of food writing” so, Ed’s not entirely wrong.

I do not track my book sales and only occasionally wander over to Goodreads. Ed’s burn aside, I generally do not read comments on any of the platforms where such things are available. I have been a writing teacher since 1999, and I have never once subjected myself to my “Rate My Professor” site, and I have no plans to alter that behavior when it comes to the book. I’ll get my second royalty statement in July and there will be some (incomplete) information on book sales at that point. 

My choice not to track book sales is partly driven by the fact that the only numbers directly available to me (BookScan) have been woefully inaccurate. When I looked at it in December and then consulted my publisher who has access to more reliable metrics, the “books sold” number on Bookscan had only captured 43% of books that had actually been sold. And it captured none of the ebook or audiobook sales or downloads. And those numbers often aren’t fully available until about a year out from the book’s release date.

I share all of that because I want to be clear about what I won’t be writing about. I will not be writing about how to sell more books. I don’t know how to do that. I had a fabulous editor and copy editor. My publisher paid for me to have an ebook and an audiobook. They printed and mailed a ton of ARC’s. They got those ARC’s to trade publications and distributed the book to stores nationwide. They got in on Libby and Kindle and iBook and other platforms. They gave me a beautiful hardback book. My friend Marke designed a gorgeous cover for it. I hired a great publicity firm who helped pitch my work to podcasts and periodicals and bookstores. Friends who have much bigger platforms than mine have been kind to me. My husband helps me run my website. Any sales I’ve made can be chalked up to that and to the book happening to land with people who like it. Beard is neither a total wash nor a bestseller by any metric, but it’s been profoundly gratifying to have it out in the world. And lest what I’ve just said come across as false modesty, let me just say clearly that I’m proud of the book, and perhaps more than any other accomplishment of the last six months, the fact that I wrote a book I actually like and feel proud of might be the biggest one. I would not have believed that possible as recently as four years ago.  

Kelly accepting the 2026 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. Photo credit: Friends of the St. Paul Library.

Having said all that, thinking too much about how other people perceive my book (in terms of sales or critical reception, even when positive) sometimes makes me feel deeply unmotivated to write any more. It’s not that I don’t want to sell books or that I think it’s crass or unimportant to talk frankly about those things. Of course it’s not. It’s just that there’s already plenty of people who do a fantastic job of discussing strategies to sell books and strategies to write good ones, and you can find that all elsewhere.

Cliche as it this phrase has perhaps become, I wanted to write instead from the “messy middle” of the process as a memoirist who happened to have an experience that was easily contained within a 6.5 year time period (which is the first book) that ended 23 years ago who is now, without a literary agent or manager, attempting to outline a second, less naturally time-constricted memoir about what happened from 2005-07 (so what happens after the first book ends, essentially). I am also drafting a screenplay adaptation of Beard (more to come about that later) and taking screenwriting classes for the first time in my life (as a kid who grew up obsessed with movies, this has been the most fun I’ve ever had in my writing life).

My career goal is that by December, the screenplay will be moving forward and options will be negotiated and I will have been able to get a literary agent as well as a book to media agent to help me negotiate this next phase of my career, including being able to sell that second book on proposal to a publisher. If you’re at all familiar with my book or with me, you’ll know that Beard took twenty years to write. And among the many scary thoughts that my scary inner critic likes to plague me with at 3AM is the fear that it’ll take another twenty to get anything else done unless I can immediately get a second book well on its way and sell the first one as a script. Sometimes that fear manifests in a frantic-ness that feeds off publishing and film industry advice and turns all that advice into counter-productive hypervigilance. 

So, I’m attempting something else, which is to tell you about all this honestly. Why is writing a book so wonderful? Why is writing a book so impossible? I want to answer (or at least contemplate) those questions, and to be as detailed as possible about where I am and what I encounter along the way. Books have mattered to me in my life because they let me know I was not alone. And while I’m also far from alone in naming that sentiment, my hope for Sophomoric is that for the perhaps niche group of readers who need some company as they attempt second writing projects (or first or tenth), this might serve them in that way. 

In my next installment, I’ll tell you more about the second book project. For now, happy almost Pride to you and yours, and I hope that there are flowers blooming somewhere close to you.        

This will be our fifth summer in the little red house but it’s the first time these flowers (irises? lilies?) have flowered. I’m so excited to see what they will look like, and it feels like a good omen somehow.