"There are going to be (many) times where you're like, 'I want to shoot the manuscript/myself into space.'"

Author Meredith Turits on her winding road to publication, learning to love feedback, and her stirring debut novel, JUST WANT YOU HERE

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Meredith’s novel, out now.

---

Me: Hello, hello!

Meredith: hi!!!!

It's so nice to connect a decade+ after we worked together! Huge congrats on JUST WANT YOU HERE!

omg, before anything HUGE congrats on how successful you've been, it's truly so inspiring and i am thrilled for you (and your sister!!!!).

Aw thank you so much, Meredith!

yes! so cool to cross paths again.

How are you feeling a few weeks post-launch?

actually, strangely zen? i'm the least zen person on the planet, but i've been so surprised how the launch has gone down with a spoon of sugar for me. i'm just very grateful i've had this opportunity - it's surreal to see it out in the world and watch people i don't know and will never know respond to it.

Oh, that's beautiful. It really is awe-inspiring knowing strangers are reading your words, isn't it?

you just get so used to your book sitting in a private word document for years that there's still a big learning curve to understand it's no longer yours alone.

and i think it's interesting because you have to change your relationship with your work and really get used to the fact that you no longer have control - both of the audience and how they respond. i actually thought i'd struggle more with that, and i've been proud of myself that i've done a decent job adapting.

Yes, five books in I still get this eerie feeling of, "...wait, how do YOU know about these characters?"

Any insights into what made you feel okay with that?

one thing my agent, danya kukafka, said was that i sort of paid the emotional distress up front. so, i had a book that i worked on for 10 years before this that didn't sell after getting THIS CLOSE, and i was a wreck when it happened. and then this book took a bit of a twisty road to selling, which was also very emotional for me. so, in a way, i think the actual release has been such a breath of fresh air for me - just this immense feeling of I GOT THERE - that i can actually settle into the victory since i've already been through so much of the emotional struggle.

that's beautiful! I want to hear more about this twisty road, but first, can you share a little about JUST WANT YOU HERE?

yes! i like to think of it as a second-chance coming-of-age story. the book follows ari, who is 28 and lives in new york with her childhood sweetheart, whom she's engaged to. in the first sentence, he leaves her after 10 years together. she thought she had her life mapped out, and all of a sudden she's totally adrift and left without a compass.

she makes an impulsive move to boston to start over, and quickly falls into an affair with her older boss, and gets in really deep with his wife, too. she makes a bunch of terrible choices - i like to think of the book as "bad decisions, good sex" - in an attempt to figure out who she is and what to do with her life now that it's off its axis, and she's nearly thirty.

What was the inspiration for this story?