Tayari's Blog: "Evangeline": A Book I Wrote a Long Time Ago

The action of the novel is that she has to come home for her sister's wedding. The whole novel is about two hundred pages with a pretty large font and generous margins. I remember how accomplished I felt when I finished it. I remember how the pages smelled-- warm and damp from my dot matrix printer! I remember my stonach cramps when my boss said, "Someone came in the office over the weekend and made two thousand copies!"

I discovered a copy of "Evangeline" in my basement and I looked it over. Lord, it's a mess. There are at least seven point-of-view characters and they all talk like they know that they are in a book. I am glad that I wrote it before the glory days of self-publishing. Ha ha. I probably would have sent it to iUniverse and been selling it out of my trunk. (I'm joking, but not really.)

An editor at Simon and Shuster wanted to see it. I gave it to her, and she politely told me that it wasn't ready for publication. But she did tell me that she thought that I would be a fine writer when I was older. And you know what, that was enough for me. I put "Evangeline" away without any sadness, and tried again.

I am not quite sure what the moral of this story is, but I think there's something in it worth sharing.