Ew... I Need a Platform

On the book, the button, and the Year of the Fire Horse

On the first of January I woke up and remembered that this was to be the Year of the Fire Horse. The Gregorian and Chinese calendars do not line up — by lunar reckoning the fire horse would not arrive until the middle of February — but I have spent much of my career moving between the two, and I have learned not to wait for them to agree. I decided it was time to write down everything I had spent twenty years learning — about parenting, about ambition, about what happens in a household when a child becomes old enough to make decisions no one else can make for them. The Fire Horse comes around once every sixty years. It felt like a deadline.

Over those years I have been called a parent whisperer and, once memorably, Xanax for parents — the ones who cannot yet see how this is all going to work out and respond, as loving people do, by overdoing.

I have never been sure the sedative comparison is right. What I offer is closer to a map of whose hands a decision is in. But I understand the compliment. It is easier to put something down once you can see where it belongs.

I didn’t know I had this book to write until I started writing it. As it unfolded, it became bigger and more personal than I expected. I had always known I was good with parents and teenagers. I didn’t know why until I watched the answer assemble itself on the page: temperament, experience, and a habit of seeing several layers of a situation at once.

As the manuscript took shape, I realized something else.

For years, parents, counselors, colleagues, and friends — some of you among them — have been telling me I should write this book. I’d smile, thank them, and go back to work. I thought they were responding to the counseling, or the workshops, or the frameworks.

It wasn’t until I began writing that I understood what they had been seeing before I did.

This book isn’t an idea I decided to have. It’s the shape that twenty years of conversations were already pointing toward.

The manuscript is now with editors.

One of the things publishers evaluate alongside a book is its author. They ask who is already listening, and they want the answer expressed as a number. The industry calls it platform.

A platform is the thing I spent those twenty years avoiding. The work I loved happened one family at a time, in rooms built for two or three people, and I was glad to keep it there — that is the scale at which the layers of a situation become visible. It is also a scale no instrument records. Twenty years of conversation, by the industry’s way of counting, leaves almost no trace.

My training is in American studies. I spent years learning how institutions translate complicated human relationships into metrics they can compare. I recognized the move immediately when it was turned on me.

So I’ve turned on paid subscriptions.

Nothing is moving behind a paywall. Every essay, every field note, every letter will remain free.

The paid button does something much stranger than buy access. It counts to the people paying attention.

It tells the people evaluating this book that this writing has readers who care enough to support it. That’s what the publishing industry means by platform: not simply that people are reading, but that someone can point to a number.

If you’d like to be one of those numbers, I’d be deeply grateful.

If you’d rather keep reading for free, please do. The writing has always been the point, and it always will be.

I’ll tell you more about the book when I’m able.

xo, Mindy