The newsletter’s archives are available here. Please find below the text of the first issue, originally published 5/26/2021.

Someone wants to read your pandemic book.

Several Saturdays ago I ate inside a restaurant for the first time in more than a year. I had planned to eat outside—I’m fully vaccinated now, and so is my partner Tracy, but it would be safer for any as-yet unvaccinated waiters if they never had to serve anyone indoors. Unfortunately, the outdoor seating was full, in fact overcrowded, and in any case the waiters were definitely serving people inside and have been for quite some time. I reasoned that serving a fully vaccinated person without the virus inside was at least as safe as serving a person of indeterminate status outside, probably safer, but I’m still not absolutely certain this is true.

Our table was separated from the others (each nearer than six feet) by plastic barriers. When a waiter visited us, Tracy and I put on our masks, but we couldn’t quite see them coming, so there was always an awkward moment where we nervously answered their questions as we hooked the loops over our ears. I felt ashamed of everything I was doing and everything that I wasn’t. I didn’t believe—I still don’t—that we were doing the right thing, not precisely, but there’s been so little clear guidance as to what the right thing is over this past year, and so much of the guidance we get seems designed mostly to manage ignorant people.

At the same time, I can’t say what (if anything) we were actually doing wrong. The CDC has since declared that fully vaccinated people are fine to live and move indoors as normal, unmasked and elbow to elbow, which had been my tentative understanding of the science up to that point, but even still it’s hard to feel confident we aren’t hurting someone. If nothing else, weren’t we giving cover to the nonvaccinated people who were presumably eating beside us? The most basic components of a previously normal life still feel acutely morally hazardous.

We’d spent the previous several hours holed up in my day-job office, the fourth time I had been there in a year, working on our respective projects—me reading through what I’ve already written of the novel that I put on hold last year, Tracy building a videogame about preparing for a fight—and slowly eating a chocolate croissant purchased to-go at our favorite café, which I hadn’t visited in you can guess how long. We had wanted to eat that outside as well, and to work there, but it was too windy, and anyway practically no one seemed to be following common sense rules re: masks and personal space on the sidewalks, which again was likely not a real risk for us but nonetheless lent everything an atmosphere of malicious recklessness. It feels weird and bad to be around people who don’t care about the people they’re around. I felt like I wanted to write about this experience. I felt like somebody might want to read it.

The truth is that I want to tell you all about everything that’s happened to me since the beginning of the pandemic. Not only that I (like practically everyone) ate far too much sugar in 2020, but that I specifically ate family-sized bags of FaveREDs Starbursts and dozens of Little Debbie Nutty Bars—repeating each time I opened a package, out loud to myself or to Tracy if Tracy was there, “Fuck everything,” a statement that has never felt more true than it did last summer, when it seemed that our president was trying to neglect us to death and that the electorate might well reward him for his efforts with a second term. This is also what I said when I had another drink after thinking that maybe I wouldn’t have any more drinks. Sometimes it was fun to not care what happened to me. Sometimes I bought some stupid little thing, a videogame or a movie that I wasn’t even totally sure I would like, because it was comforting to know I could afford to do that, because it made me feel a little bit safe.

In May of last year, I sold a novel about the end of the world. I suppose I should mention it’s called Drowning Practice, and that it’s coming from Ecco early next year. Although the particulars of that book were quite different from our reality (I’d been at work on it since some time in 2015), several editors apologetically rejected it on the grounds that it felt too much like what we were living through in that moment. They needed a break.

I have never in my life blamed anyone for rejecting me—it seems in each instance the natural, obvious move—but I especially couldn’t blame them. There seemed to be at this same moment an emergent consensus: even when the pandemic was over, it would never be a good subject for fiction or memoir. The dreaded, inevitable attempts at COVID-19 literature were frequent objects of preemptive derision on Twitter; I can’t find any one megaviral tweet that exemplifies the genre, but it seems to have started in March. As the tech journalist and commentator Xeni Jardin tweeted on March 26, “Nobody wants to read your pandemic book.” Three minutes later, the writer Nylah Burton quote-tweeted this warning, adding, “There only needs to be a handful of pandemic fiction books and they should all be published a decade+ from its end. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them through cyberbullying[.]”

Somewhat paradoxically, pandemic books like Ling Ma’s Severance and Albert Camus’s The Plague were said at the time to be selling quite well. It seemed like half of the people I knew were streaming Outbreak. We didn’t read and watch these things expecting comfort or actionable information, I think, but because it presented itself so forcefully as something a person could do. The idea was too obvious to avoid, like a looming landmark one can’t help but drift toward on the highway. Perhaps our actual behavior—helplessly consuming stories that we knew would upset us—made us resent the future behaviors that it implied. We knew that we would ultimately choose to read and write about the pandemic, that we wouldn’t have the willpower to resist it. We are going to be talking about this forever, thinking about it forever, making art about it forever, and that makes us angry.

There are many compelling reasons to be skeptical of the incoming pandemic literature. For one, the experience often feels obliteratingly universal, not only in its generalities but in its particulars. So many people got into baking bread last year. Surely they can’t all be allowed to write about that.

The similarity of our respective COVID experiences is however frequently exaggerated. I work a white-collar office job that is mostly quite easy to do from my home. My partner’s office job required in-person attendance; Tracy’s pandemic was not my pandemic, and we live together. The cashiers who ring me up at the grocery store did not have anything like our pandemic. The people in the meatpacking plants who butchered the chickens that I have been eating in droves did not have anything like our pandemic. The university students I serve in my day job were interacting with the same institutions, often at the same time and in the same virtual meeting rooms, but their pandemic was nothing like mine. If each of us wrote a book about the experience, and if each of us read all of these, we would learn things that we could never imagine.

In May of 2021, the novelist Chris Bohjalian published a piece in the Washington Post speculating about what post-pandemic fiction would look like. “In some ways,” writes Bohjalian, “9/11 is instructive. It was 2005 when the major 9/11 novels began to arrive in earnest.” There had of course been some allusions in earlier novels, but it took about four years as he reckons it for authors to successfully “shape the nightmare into a story.”

It’s worth pausing here to note that publishing is a slow process and writing novels takes time; it’s difficult to imagine decent 9/11 books, written with any kind of deliberateness, coming out any more quickly than the ones Bohjalian cites. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, one of the 2005 crop, was certainly criticized for coming out a little too early, a little half-baked. As the critic Laura Miller wrote in New York Magazine, “We’re still not entirely sure what [9/11] signifies, or even if, philosophically speaking (and this is the hardest possibility to contemplate), it might signify nothing at all.” Some reviews even implied that Foer was (again?) exploiting a tragedy for personal and artistic gain. The book, wrote Michael Faber in The Guardian, “contrives to make something beautiful out of other people's suffering, and hopes to be judged on its beauty alone.” Both criticisms were and are persuasive, but it’s worth pausing to think more about why, and about how our year-plus-change of quarantine differs from the September 11 attacks.

Why is it so important that people wait to write fiction about tragedies? Is the issue really that we don’t yet have the perspective to know their significance? I’m skeptical this is the case—it’s not as if now, in 2021, we’ve all agreed upon the meaning of what happened in 2001. It is true though that it’s easier now to write something about 9/11 that will probably not be judged stupid or offensive in several years’ time; we do have an imperfect consensus on the broadest possible themes, the central images, the most important characters. I think we mostly wait out of justified caution. We want to see where the boundaries are. We want to let other people—less patient people—find them for us. This may be wise, but it isn’t a moral imperative.

We may also wait because we want to see who will successfully claim COVID as their personal narrative property. One suspects Foer felt entitled to write what he did partly because he was a New Yorker, and there is a general sense that this means he owns a small piece of that day, but Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close notoriously ends with a sort of photographic flipbook animation depicting someone who jumped from one of the towers falling in reverse—in other words ascending. It doesn’t feel at all, in retrospect, like Foer owned that. But in this regard especially, COVID is unique in modern memory, the easiest possible judgment. It happened to everyone. It must belong to all of us. The dead should be remembered, but so should the living, who changed in many cases everything about our day-to-day so as to keep each other safe. That experience is ours. We can do what we want to with it.

So while I don’t know that I’m ready to write fiction about this past year just yet, I truly hope somebody is. There should be one thousand pandemic books of every genre in English alone. I won’t read all of them, but I will absolutely read a few, and I will be so glad to know the rest exist and that their authors felt able to write them. There are, for better and for worse, so few things like COVID—so few objects of unambiguously universal collective property. Every minute of this pain is also yours.

I should come clean with you about this: I originally wrote the above as an essay. I shared it with the novelist Miranda Popkey, who generously edited it down from something roughly twice as long, and after shopping the results around a little bit, I decided to make it the first edition of this newsletter, which is called Moon Salt for reasons I’ll explain some other time.

I want you to take this first letter as an invitation—please do actually send me an email about your experience of these waning days of the pandemic. I want to hear how it’s going for you. I also want to know what it was like for you six months, a year ago. I’m hoping to weave some of your pandemic writing, and some of your writing more generally, into future letters, so please let me know if I have permission to do that.

Miranda’s book is great, by the way. It’s called Topics of Conversation; give it a look, buy it now, thank me later.