Shadowsong: A retrospective
Perhaps my best book ever?
from the author’s note
All books are mirrors of the author in some way or another, and Liesl’s journey to the Underground and back perhaps reveals more about me than I first realized. If Wintersong was my bright mirror, reflecting all my wish-fulfillment dreams about having my voice recognized and valued, then Shadowsong is my dark one, showing me how all the monstrous parts of the Underground were really another facet of me.
I would like to offer up a content note: Shadowsong contains characters who deal with self-harm, addiction, reckless behaviors, and suicidal ideation. If these subjects are triggering or otherwise upsetting to you, please proceed with caution. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please know that there are resources and people who can assist you (in the United States) at the National Suicide Prevent Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255. Please call. You are not alone.
In many ways, Shadowsong is a far more personal work than its predecessor. I have been open and candid about writing Liesl as a person with bipolar disorder—much like her creator—but in Wintersong, I kept her diagnosis at arm’s length. Part of it is due to the fact that bipolar disorder as a diagnosis wasn’t really understood during the time in which she lived, and part of it is due to the fact that I did not want to face her—and therefore my—particular sort of madness.
Madness is a strange word. It encompasses any sort of behavior or thought pattern that deviates from the norm, not just mental illness. I, like Liesl, am a functioning member of society, but our mental illnesses make us mad. They make us arrogant, moody, selfish, and reckless. They make us destructive, both to ourselves and to those we love. We are not easy to love, Liesl and I, and I did not want to face that ugly truth.
And the truth is ugly. Liesl and Josef reflect both the manic and melancholic parts of myself, and they are dark, grotesque, messy, and painful. And while there are books that offer up prettier pictures, windows into a world in which things are healthy and whole, Shadowsong is not one of them. I kept the monster at bay in my first book; I would claim it as my own for my second.
Again, I leave you with the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-8255. There is no need to suffer alone. I see you monstrosity. I am not afraid. I have faced my own demons, but not alone. I had help.
1-800-273-8255.
Shadowsong is the only book of mine I can stand to reread after its publication.
Unlike with my debut, Wintersong, I don’t have any doubts about whether this book succeeds as a work of art. It’s funny; of all the novels I have written, Shadowsong is the most personal, yet the easiest for me to revisit without cringe. Part of that is a function of how it was written; I sold the sequel to Wintersong shortly before publication, meaning I had less time to write the book (and less time to grow tired of it during the editorial process) than its predecessor. It was written mostly in a fugue state, and I have very little recollection of the actual writing process of this book, although I have very sharp memories of the feelings surrounding it.
2017 was a strange year for me. It was the year Wintersong debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, but it was also the year I struggled the hardest with my bipolar disorder (barring 2020, when I had to check into a crisis center). I was unmedicated at the time, not for any particular reason aside from a personal belief that I could function without it. As with many people struggling with mental health, I thought that because I was functional (barely), because I wasn’t delusional, and because I wasn’t too much, I could manage my symptoms on my own.
The restlessness, the anxiety within me. The feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction, my frustration with my ability to execute my ideas on the page, either in words or in song. I could not catch my own mind, my thoughts racing past in a blur, like fingers rushing through sixteenth notes without regard to tempo.
—Shadowsong, pg. 61
I was also, at the time, struggling a bit financially. Wintersong’s advance was $10K, not enough to live on, not to mention I had spent most of that advance paying my bills and finally paying off the balance of my student loans. During the writing of Wintersong, I was working at a call center for a large soda conglomerate for scarcely above minimum wage, and while the money wasn’t great, the time to write was. By the time I had sold Wintersong, I had moved laterally within the company to customer financial services, which paid me marginally more, but taxed my brain so hard I couldn’t write when I got home.
Which was a problem when you are trying to write your a book to a deadline.
I had a lot of false starts as well. I knew what the ending was going to be—Josef becoming the next Goblin King—but I didn’t quite know how to get there. I was hampered too, in large part, by the idea that Shadowsong had to be as romantic as Wintersong, with more of the Liesl’s “austere young man,” only I didn’t know how to fit that part of the story into the book. It wasn’t until I had a phone call with my editor, who told me, “You don’t have to write Wintersong all over again,” that I felt freed to follow where I needed to go.
But even that permission to write what I needed to write wasn’t enough to help with what was, in hindsight, a major depressive episode. I had a nervous breakdown at my day job, overwhelmed by the amount of labor I had to perform for little pay in addition to the manuscript I was supposed to deliver (also for little pay). At the time I was expecting a rather cushy royalty statement, based on the first quarter sales of Wintersong, but I wouldn’t be receiving that until the summer. I didn’t know if I could manage everything I was expected to manage. I didn’t know if I could survive that long.
My parents saved me.
I had been more or less financially independent of my parents for over a decade at that time, but I had the extraordinary privilege of their emotional and monetary support. My mother encouraged me to quit my day job and my father sent me money for living expenses so I could write without having to struggle so hard. I put in my notice and quit that very day, not even bothering to give the two weeks notice that was considered a courtesy.
It wasn’t just my relationship with Josef that had grown tenuous and fragile. Käthe was by turns tender and frustrated with me, for I was a beast to be around. I trailed regrets and reproach in my wake, my moods as mercurial as quicksilver. I strained even François’s infinite patience—pleasant and productive one moment, sullen and snarling the next. I knew I was insufferable, yet my irritability was a force both beyond and beside me. Even I found my own whining exhausting at times. I vacillated between rage and despondency, furious I couldn’t force happiness on myself.
—Shadowsong, pg. 124
I think a lot about my relationship with my parents, and with my partner, during this time. It’s funny, how better able you are able to look your mental illnesses straight in the eye from the distance of fiction. How much clearer you can see the weariness in your loved ones’ gaze as they behold you with both affection and annoyance. One of the biggest criticisms I frequently hear about Liesl is that she is “whiny.” To be completely honest, this criticism always takes me by surprise; I never think of Liesl as anything but emotionally raw, and that rawness can include whiny-ness. Or perhaps that’s just me and I’m not aware of the way other people think or feel. But I do credit Wintersong for being able to stand apart from myself and see myself in a slightly more objective light, and to see the effect my moods were having on those around me.
Because here I was, living my dream. I was a full-time writer now, and yet somehow, writing had become even harder than ever.
But now it felt like a rebuke. Or perhaps a bruise. Having emotions at all felt tender, sore, and Josef was comfortably numb. He saw François’s sadness but did not share it. He was living under glass, and it was safe.
—Shadowsong, pg. 74
Reading Shadowsong is almost like reading a diary. If the events recounted in the book are fantastical and wholly from my imagination, the emotions are visceral and real to what I was feeling at the time. A better record of what I was going through than the myriad journals I kept (and still do). I never write in my journals about my emotions or moods in such a raw or vulnerable way; in a funny way, fiction allows me to be more vulnerable with the world than I can be with myself.
It’s hard to write a proper retrospective on a book that is so intensely personal, yet also the book I feel the most emotional distance from now. Not that the feelings contained within the text are foreign or unfamiliar anymore, only that I am at peace in a way that I was not then.
Tell me what you think, and then tell me what the world thinks, for I think it is my best yet, my most honest and my most true.
—Wintersong, p.g 436
Yours always,
