The Wonder Chronicles: 30
On Finishing a Book
Cover art: Sheyam Ghieth. Design: Mark Ecob for Unbound
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On NYC
I’ve published two books and the first anthology I’ve edited has just gone to the printers, It’s done!
Every time I’ve signed a book deal it takes about a week or so for the “What the fuck have I got myself into?” to kick in.
I’ve been writing professionally for 34 years. I started working as a reporter for a local newspaper when I was 23. I published my first book when I was 48.
I spent the intervening quarter of a century writing trouble, causing trouble, and being threatened with trouble by an array of regimes. None of the writing was longer than 3,000 words so I was fine.
Seventy-five thousand words for a book? Ha! Who do you take me for? An author? I’m a journalist, thank you and six years spent as a Reuters News Agency correspondent in Cairo and Jerusalem had me mainlining speed, as in get-it-out-as-fast-and-in-as-few-words-as-possible.
Books need you to slow down and I was always running–away from, as in I don’t know what I want but I know what I don’t want and stop asking me so many questions, the police are running after us!
I had to fall out of love with journalism–the run, run, don’t slow down school–before I could write my first book. I hid behind all those big news stories I was reporting on. It was much easier to excoriate the military-backed dictator of my birth country than to examine why it took me so long to disobey the lessons of my upbringing.
Writing my first book was wrenching. It was too close to home–I wrote the most difficult chapter (about how I finally faced off with sexual shame–no biggie) as I sat at my parent’s dinner table and then warned them that it would upset them but that I didn’t write it to upset them. It was my revolution, I told them.
I had to step away many times as I wrote that book. Disrupting your own patriarchy is hard that way. The second book took that disruption worldwide against global patriarchy and by then, I could say “Fuck the patriarchy” backwards in five languages.
I inhaled fury and rage to write that second book. I beat up a man who sexually assaulted me in the middle of writing it and that glorious moment was a before-and-after reckoning with misogynistic fuckery that I poured into it.
I laugh now as I remember that soon after I signed that book deal, I accidentally (on purpose?) forgot my laptop at Manchester airport security as I was making my way home back from speaking at a literary festival in the U.K.
And now, with a March, 2025 anthology publication date, menopause and I are forever attached at the hip (uterus, maybe?). Third book! Who me?
Meanwhile, I’m about to start writing my fourth book. What, me?!
Remember to take your laptop! Slow down! Write that book!
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Across the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
I appreciate your support. If you like this piece and you want to further support my writing, you can like/comment below, forward this article to others, or send a gift subscription to someone else today.