In our sixth annual look at the debut authors of some of the year’s most inquisitive, innovative, and impactful essay collections, memoirs, and other books of literary nonfiction, Eirinie Carson writes about her memoir of life after the sudden loss of a close friend, Leah Myers details her exploration of four generations of women in the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe of the Pacific Northwest, Andrew Leland describes the personal narrative and historical and cultural investigations that went into his book on his gradual transition from full vision to blindness, Jen Soriano poses the questions she needed to answer in order to complete her essay collection about the impacts of transgenerational trauma, and Jami Nakamura Lin explains the writing process that led to her genre-bending memoir of how we learn to live with the things that haunt us. “The New Nonfiction 2023” takes us on five unique journeys through the writing and publication of a first book of nonfiction, five stories of writing that required different approaches, perspectives—and timelines. But as Soriano says, “There is no early or late for book debuts—there is only right on time.”

The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, April) by Eirinie Carson
Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (Norton, May) by Leah Myers
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (Penguin Press, July) by Andrew Leland
Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing (Amistad, August) by Jen Soriano
The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir (Mariner Books, October) by Jami Nakamura Lin

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The Dead Are Gods (Melville House, April), a debut memoir about life after the sudden loss of a close friend that plumbs the depths of grief, pulls memories filled with love and joy from the grasp of pain, and explores how those people we are closest to help forge our identity and sense of self. Agent: Tim Wojcik of Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. Editor: Athena Bryan. First Lines: “My best friend, Larissa, died three years ago. A sudden death, improbable and unexpected. She died a week after my thirty-first birthday, two weeks after her thirty-second. A vibrant human, also improbable and unexpected: a cool rock-and-roll type with a love of poetry. An enigma, hard to gain a grip on, a mythical woman, indulgent, reverent. Loved by us all.” (Credit: Kirby Stenger)

The Dead Are Gods began as a eulogy for my best friend, Larissa, whose sudden death in 2018 left me reeling. I was a caricature of grief in the wake of her death, clutching my heart, gasping, my face perpetually damp and salty. I began with the eulogy for her funeral, fragments of which appear in the book itself, and then I found I couldn’t stop writing. It poured out of me. At first it was merely to gather all those shared memories that seemed to be slipping through my fingers, things that at first felt dumb to hold on to because who would care? Who would take the gift of our stories and treasure them? But then this nostalgia turned to reflection, as it often does, and my writing became the main source of my grief processing. My friend and occasional writing partner read my essays, my musings, and suggested that I had a book on my hands. After some hesitancy—because I am not a trained writer and hold no MFA, and impostor syndrome is a bitch—I tried to focus on making my work into a story, with an arc, with lessons, with meaning beyond just Larissa and me.

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I didn’t want to leave the reader with the feeling that I was a preacher in a pulpit, reducing Larissa to some long-dead god, frozen perfect and pristine. After she died I would pore over old voice notes she left me on our WhatsApp chats, replaying her laugh over and over. I wanted to get some of that magic, some of the real Larissa on the page, but audio is hard to write, so I added e-mails and texts from our decades-long friendship to break up the chapters. In them you can read our silly pet names for each other, our trepidation about our modeling careers, the names of the bands and the celebrities we revered as teens and young adults, our willingness to use the last of our rent money to go get a glass of wine together somewhere fancy. I did my best to conjure up Larissa, and of course there are parts of her that are intangible, but I think readers are able to meet her, my best friend, eternal and flawed, in the pages of this book.

My first reach for an agent went to Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan, who put me in touch with my now agent, Tim Wojcik. He was enthusiastic and touched by my work, which was almost complete. We spent a year together polishing it up, mid-pandemic, before sending it out on submission. The submission part was hard; the impostor syndrome caused me to assume every rejection was because I was a lifelong model and not a college graduate. Finally, we met Athena Bryan, who was then a Melville House editor, and thank God we did because at Melville House I found a team willing to not only field all my very green questions, but to push me and my book into realms I had never thought possible. The Dead Are Gods received a starred review from Kirkus and has been featured by Oprah Daily, Good Morning America, Nylon, People, and the Washington Post, to name a few, and still when I see it in bookstores I let out a little squeal because Look, Larry! Look what we did! In writing this book I fell more in love with my best friend. I discovered things about her and myself and society’s relationship to grieving that may never have come to light in other circumstances, and in doing so I reached a hand out into the ether and it was grasped by a community of grieving people. And of course of course of course of course I would give all of that back to have one more moment with my girl, to stand and have her nestle in my neck as we hug, to take my hand in her long, thin fingers, to have her say, one last time, “Do you want to go get a glass of wine?”

Of course.

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Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (Norton, May), a debut work of personal history exploring four generations of women in the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe of the Pacific Northwest, blending tribal folktales, Native mythology, and the history of Native genocide to tell a story of family, heritage, and identity. Agent: Paul Lucas of Janklow and Nesbit Associates. Editor: Matt Weiland. First Lines: “No one taught me to be Native American. My mother taught me that I was, but she did not have the context for what that heritage meant. My grandmother mentioned it very little, even though it was visible in her features. Yet from my earliest memories, being Native has always been an integral part of my identity. Even though I was raised far from my tribe, far from any tribe, I heard the drumbeat of our traditions in my heart. My name is Leah Kallen Myers. I am the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in my family line.” (Credit: Blane Burroughs)

When I started the essays that would eventually become Thinning Blood, I was writing them for myself. I wanted to have a written history of my family and my journey. I hoped that by making these memories tangible, they would be harder to forget.

Many of the essays of the book took their first steps in my MFA workshop classes at the University of New Orleans. I was able to see how people reacted to the stories and the reality of being part of a culture that was fading away. Somewhere along the way I realized that few of my peers were aware of the reality that Indigenous people faced. Things that I thought were common knowledge were brand-new ideas to them. Seeing that sparked a desire to share more. I wanted to share Native history with as many people as I could. I wanted to share stories of my family and my tribe, planting them in the minds of others so they would live on longer.

When I had the cleaned-up manuscript ready, I began sending it to agents. I knew that as ready as I was to share my work with the world, I would need help doing so. I faced many rejections, ranging from kind “this is wonderful but not for me” responses to form letters. Luckily, as a writer who submitted to many literary magazines, rejection was standard.

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I decided to send a query to a dream agent, Paul Lucas with Janklow and Nesbit. Everything I’d read about the types of stories he was interested in spoke to me, and he represents some authors whose books I have on my own shelves. The agency had a six-month max turnaround time for responding, and I decided to use that time to take a break from trying to market myself. I set a reminder on my phone for six months from the day of submission, thinking I would pick up on querying at that point.

We had begun negotiations on a book deal with W. W. Norton before that date came to pass.

It was a whirlwind of a time; every new step felt overwhelming and surreal. I was taking part in e-mail conversations and phone calls that were literally making my lifelong dreams come true, and it was happening with the kindest team I could have hoped to assemble. They helped me shape the book into one that I needed when I was younger. Since its release I have seen it grow and reach people that need it now, for the same reasons. I have had the honor of reading accounts of people reading my book and feeling less alone.

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The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (Penguin Press, July), a debut book of nonfiction that combines personal narrative and historical and cultural investigation to explore the experience of the gradual transition from full vision to blindness in a moving portrait of not only the physical experience of blindness, but also its language, politics, and customs. Agent: Claudia Ballard of William Morris Endeavor. Editor: Emily Cunningham. First Lines: “I’m going blind as I write this. It feels less dramatic than it sounds. The words aren’t disappearing as I type. I’m sitting comfortably in the sunroom. The sun is rising like it’s supposed to. I can plainly see Lily sitting next to me, reading in her striped pajamas. The visible world is disappearing, but it’s not in a hurry. It feels at once catastrophic and commonplace—like reading an article about civilization’s imminent collapse from the climate crisis, then setting the article down and going for a pleasant bike ride through a mild spring morning.” (Credit: Gregory Halpern)

I have known I’ve been going blind for a long time. But for decades, blindness felt distant and abstract. The degenerative retinal disease I have, retinitis pigmentosa, causes one to lose vision gradually, from the outside in. It’s only in the past five years or so that blindness has become an immediate condition that touches the most intimate parts of my life. At the same moment that my need to learn blindness skills became more urgent, so did my desire to write about it. I knew I didn’t want the book to be pure memoir. There were a few reasons for this: There are already so many excellent blindness memoirs in the world, and I felt far from the place most of their authors begin from, having already gone blind and reflecting on the experience. I was—and am—still in the slow thick of it.

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I also felt a strong urge to write about the world of blindness beyond my own experience. To my surprise, in addition to the traditional negative emotions—fear, grief, anger—vision loss generated a powerful and persistent curiosity about the world of blindness and disability. I wanted to understand how my experience diverged from—or was beginning to resemble—other blind people’s lives throughout history. I wanted to explore larger and increasingly existential questions I found myself obsessing over: how understanding the world through four senses changed one’s relationship with art and literature, images and information, strangers and intimates, political action, and one’s own identity. That was the book I hadn’t quite encountered before: one that used the experience of vision loss to get at material that strayed energetically from the memoiristic into journalistic, critical, and philosophical territories.

The biggest challenge in writing and revising the book was weaving together these two strands. My first draft suffered from what my editor, Emily Cunningham, described in her first memo to me as an imbalance between “personal narrative and what I’ll inelegantly call ‘everything else’—more detached reported material and history.” The text resembled a collage: long, personal, colorful scenes of emotional reckoning, slammed up against short Wikipedian historical narratives. How to integrate these two modes? In my second draft I swung too far in the other direction—Emily now informed me in her unfailingly polite but persistent way that large swaths of the new draft felt eye-glazingly dutiful and narrow. Which indeed they were—I was trying to satisfy her request for all that cultural and political history of blindness I’d promised in my book proposal. She disarmed me with a compliment: When you’re interested in a subject, she told me, you can make anything feel engaging. But if you’re not into it, it makes for tough reading.

This compliment was the soundtrack playing in the background of my last major revision: I cheerfully slashed all those dutiful passages of my warmed-over glosses on European Enlightenment philosophers’ speculations on blindness and instead wrote what felt urgent, fun, fascinating, relevant. Emily’s note also freed me to write cultural and political history that seemed connected to my personal narrative, since I was writing from my own experience, my own interest, rather than trying to cover the waterfront in the imaginary college-level disability-studies curriculum I thought I’d needed to follow. This third draft put the pieces in place, mostly, and left Emily and me to home in on the remaining, more isolated sections that had retained the stench of the dutiful, which felt at once terrifying and exhilarating to cut and rewrite up until the final deadline.

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Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing (Amistad, August), an essay collection about the impacts of transgenerational trauma, blending neuroscience, sociology, history, and family stories to explore the secrets of the human body—centering neurodiverse, disabled, and genderqueer bodies of color—in a journey to understanding and transformation. Agent: Samantha Shea of Georges Borchardt, Inc. Editors: Jennifer Baker and Francesca Walker. First Lines: “We are nervous beings, in nervous nations, at an increasingly nervous time. I wrote this book for those of us who have felt crazy and alone. For those of us who have been told to forget about the past, to stop being weak, and to swallow our pain. For all of us with a knowing body. For babaylan who remember a time before silence. For pearls in their shells seeking conditions to shine. My story is just one ripple in an emerging ecosystem of interdependence, where we don’t have to bear generational pain alone.” (Credit: Naomi Ishisaka)

I was a moody teenager and young adult who never liked small talk and viewed happy hour as a special form of torture. For a long time I preferred writing in my journal to engaging verbally with other human beings. I now know, through both somatic therapy and through the process of writing Nervous, that this is in part because I had a lot of things to work through that aren’t exactly popular topics over chips and salsa and a beer. So writing, for me, has been less of a choice and a career than a necessary form of being. Writing nonfiction has allowed me to process experiences of intractable chronic pain, mystical connections to ancestors, musings about historical trauma, and personal theories of well-being and social medicine. I wrote Nervous because these threads are difficult to weave together in anything less than a book-length work.

It took me eight years to create Nervous. I came up with the idea after birthing my first and only child and after receiving a diagnosis of central sensitivity syndrome (CSS), an umbrella category of conditions in which the central nervous system amplifies pain signals across bodily systems. This was an irony too great not to explore: I was the child of a neurosurgeon, a nervous system expert, but it turned out that the mysterious chronic pain I had lived with for most of my life stemmed from a nervous system disorder.

In 2015 I bought a spiral-bound notebook from the drugstore, scrawled the word nervous on the cover, and wrote on the first lines of the first page: “Why do we, nervous system experts included, have such a small understanding of the central system that governs all of our bodies?” On the next lines I wrote, “Diagnosis is not the same as root cause. What is the root cause of my nervous system dis-ease?”

To begin to answer these questions, I enrolled in an online class on the neuroscience of everyday life. I also enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop while parenting and working full-time.

Over the next three years, under the mentorship of Rick Barot, Julie Marie Wade, Kent Meyers, and Barrie Jean Borich, I learned vital elements of craft that went into Nervous. Barrie expertly guided my MFA thesis, which became the first of dozens of manuscript drafts. When Rick read my thesis he said, “This is going to be a book in five years.” What I heard was: “This is so bad it needs five years of revision.” Now I know he meant: “This is good enough to be a book, and book editing and production take a long time.” And he was right.

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The five years between thesis and book, from 2018 to 2023, involved a number of organizations and individuals who helped me to develop the questions I explored and ultimately to get Nervous published. The Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat introduced me to my agent, who was instrumental in helping me revise the book proposal that sold. Minal Hajratwala of the Unicorn Authors Club coached me through turning the proposal into essays. My editors at Amistad went into the trenches of clarifying essay themes at the structure and sentence levels. The HarperCollins union went on strike and won better wages, then returned to work with a renewed commitment to produce beautiful, top-quality books. I believe they wholeheartedly delivered on this commitment with the production of Nervous.

My book came out shortly after my forty-seventh birthday, which in the industry makes me a late bloomer. But personal nonfiction gestates at the pace of lived experience. I wouldn’t have been able to write Nervous as a younger person. I think Nervous is an example of how there is no early or late for book debuts—there is only right on time.