Hello dear readers! It has been quite the year for fantastic debut releases! And I’m so happy to welcome author Molly Greeley, author of the newest Austenesque debut release I’ve had the pleasure of reading – The Clergyman’s Wife – to Austenesque Reviews today! Molly has such a lovely and inspiring post to share about her journey to publishing her first release, The Clergyman’s Wife. We hope you enjoy!

~ Through the Gauntlet ~

I sat in my car, waiting to pick my daughter up from preschool. From where I was parked, I could see the playground, where her entire class was engaged in the serious business of play. Some kids queued at the slide, bumbling in their snowsuits and mittens. Two frantically rode the giant bumblebee, which dipped alarmingly back and forth on its metal spring. Several spun in circles, or played games of chase, or ate clandestine mittenfuls of snow.

My daughter stood beside the playground’s lone bench, watching them all.

While I watched her watching them, another little girl broke away from the group with whom she was playing and approached my daughter, who visibly shrank back. I was too far away to see her face, but I could picture the wariness there. My own body tightened with remembered emotions—churning fear, desperate hope—both hope that I (who also hung back outside the games, hovering beside benches or trees or my school’s solid brick walls) would be asked to play, and that I would not.

“Join them,” I whispered fiercely, hands clenched together. “Please, just join them. Have fun.”

The little girl said something, gesturing behind her toward the playground. My daughter gave one quick, tense shake of her head, and I could cry for how hard it was for her to just be. The other kids were almost entirely oblivious to each other, lost in their own worlds of make-believe or just enjoying motion and snow and friends and slushy bootprints.

Later, in the car, my daughter would cry and say she wanted to play but just couldn’t, and I would come close to crying, because I knew exactly how she felt, and I knew that in time she would have to find her own way to work with these feelings, pushing past them when she could, holding back when she truly needed to. But that balance can be so hard to figure out.

~~~

My anxiety is as familiar to me as my unruly hair, or my knobby knuckles, or the three matched pairs of freckles on my right arm. Like these things, it has been with me for as long as I can remember; it is, as the saying goes, part of my blood. My mother is an anxious woman, who, despite her natural empathy and charm, spends the days before big trips or parties in a state of mild panic. She tells me that her mother, too, was prone to anxiety. This buzzing, fearful feeling has slipped from generation to generation, warning of the dangers of climbing too high on the jungle gym, or the steep hill, or in life in general; of upsetting someone by not quite following the rules exactly, either accidentally or on purpose; of making mistakes; being rejected; looking foolish. My daughter and I are just two more in a line of our family’s anxious Jewish women (and it does seem to be our family’s women who inherit this—my two sons don’t have this people-pleasing, fear-of-everything trait, which both my daughter and I displayed from infancy).

When she was a toddler, I took my daughter to one of those music classes where the parents all sing and bang instruments and generally make happy fools of themselves while the kids smile and drool along. She was old enough to sing the songs, and at home she loved making music and dancing and generally making a giant ruckus. But at the classes she say perfectly still and silent in my lap, her small face serious, and watched everyone else. Every single class was like this, an entire year of Saturday mornings wherein I’m pretty sure it looked like I was dragging an unhappy and stubborn two year-old to something she really did not want to do.

But when we got home, she belted out the songs from class, sometimes making up her own goofy lyrics, displaying a wit and silliness she rarely allowed the world outside our little family to see. She danced with abandon. She was free in a way she could not yet allow herself to be in the wider world, and oh goodness, how I could relate. And how deeply I wanted better for her; for her to just know her own worth and put it out for everyone to enjoy (or not), without worrying so deeply about how she would be perceived.

All my life I’ve allowed my own fear—so insidious and pervasive; so amorphous that it sometimes encompasses everything, the whole world one giant danger sign and me, powerless to keep myself or my family safe—to keep me from doing things I desperately wanted to do. Like my daughter standing at the edge of the playground, I’ve felt that impossible, magnetic pull both toward and away from the things I wanted to do, the desire to connect and have fun and learn and be part of it all warring with all the fear about what might go wrong.

~~~

I was twenty-three years-old when I opened an email from the executive editor at Cicada Magazine, which had published one of my short stories a few months earlier. She had received a message from a literary agent who wanted my contact information; was it all right to pass on my email address?
Yes! I responded. Of course!

Good luck, she wrote back. Let me know what happens!

I never did tell her what happened, because the embarrassing truth is, nothing did. The agent emailed me asking whether I ever considered turning that short story—a quiet tale about a single evening in the life of a divorced father and his young daughter—into a novel. If I ever do—or if I ever write anything else, she says—she’d love to take a look at it. I emailed her, thanking her, telling her I would certainly be in touch if I did expand the story.

But I didn’t expand the story. I spent countless hours staring at my computer screen, my fingers frozen on the keyboard, my chest buzzing with the old familiar panic. I knew, I knew what a big opportunity this was, and I just—couldn’t—push past the paralyzing fear. Of what, I wasn’t entirely certain—failure, certainly, but good grief, what was I doing now? Squandering this opportunity certainly couldn’t be called success.

Eventually, as the weeks passed and I hadn’t succeeded in writing more than a few straggling sentences, I actually managed to shove the agent’s offer, and my inability to rise to the opportunity, into the little box in my head reserved for memories of things I didn’t do, chances I didn’t take, friends I let slip away because I was too afraid to do the vulnerable thing. The box’s lid slightly convex, bulging at the center.

I’m trying very hard not to add anything new to it these days.

~~~

My debut novel, The Clergyman’s Wife, comes out soon (actually, it comes out in exactly twenty days as of this writing, but who’s counting?). It’s been a decade since that agent’s offer, and it is only now, in my thirties, that I’ve managed to achieve some semblance of the balance I desperately want my daughter to find more quickly than I did. When I finished writing my book, I almost didn’t query—the thought was terrifying; and of course, it was hard to decide which prospect was more daunting: universal rejection, or actually finding an agent, landing a publisher, and having my work out in the world, thus facing more criticism.

When I push past my anxiety it’s like ducking down, arms over my head for protection from blows, and rushing down the long, intimidating line of a gauntlet. I’ve forced myself to run that gauntlet several times in the last year and a half and so far, I haven’t regretted a single rush. I signed with an agent, and then a publisher. I attended a writer’s conference, where I actually took part in all the mingling, leading to some incredible connections with other writers, and had the chance to spend time with my editor at William Morrow, the lovely Rachel Kahan, who was a panelist. I’m going to be a guest on a podcast next week. Everything is exciting and terrifying and sometimes sick-to-my-stomach-making all at once; but so far I haven’t added anything to the box.

~~~

Now in second grade, my daughter still struggles with her own anxiety, though she has come far from where she was in preschool. I go to her school and eat lunch with her sometimes, something parents are encouraged to do, and I marvel at the change in her, watching her save seats for friends and giggle so helplessly at another girl’s joke that the lunchroom monitor has to come shush them. Other times, sometimes unexpectedly, fears still reach out and grip her tightly, and she goes tense and still, unable to do more than give short, staccato shakes of her head. I can’t. I can’t. Finding that delicate balance, of pushing past her fears while still being kind and gentle to herself, will likely be the work of a lifetime, but it’s work that, at seven years-old, she’s already begun.

My first book signing is scheduled for soon after my book debuts. I tell my daughter that I’m nervous, but that I’m going to do it anyway. She looks at me seriously and says, “Okay, Mama, here’s what you do: you say yes, you are confident, and you just believe you can do anything.” A comforting pat on my hand, and then she adds, “I’ll come with you and stay with you the whole time so you won’t be scared. And I can practice talking and signing books with you after school every day; that will be my schedule.”

Somehow, I think it’s all going to be okay.

I hope all goes well with your first book signing, Molly and your release of The Clergyman’s Wife! I am so inspired by your bravery and I am very glad you pushed through your own fears! I wish you all the success in the world!

~ About Molly ~

Molly Greeley earned her bachelor’s degree in English, with a creative writing emphasis, from Michigan State University, where she was the recipient of the Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts for Creative Writing. Her short stories and essays have been published in Cicada, Carve, and Literary Mama.

She works as a social media consultant for a local business, is married and the mother of three children but her Sunday afternoons are devoted to weaving stories into books.

~ Connect with Molly ~

Website    ❧    Facebook    ❧    Twitter

GIVEAWAY TIME!

The lovely people at William Morrow have kindly offered to do a giveaway with Molly Greeley’s post today! One paperback copy of The Clergyman’s Wife is going to be given away to ONE lucky reader!

To enter this giveaway, leave a comment or some love for Molly Greeley!

• This giveaway is open to readers in the US. Thank you, William Marrow!
• This giveaway will end December 17th.