One November day in Ohio, I sat in a café with a friend, drinking tea while snow fell outside. She couldn’t read my books because she doesn’t read Hebrew, only English, and my books haven’t been translated yet. But I told her about the ones I had written. One is about a woman who escapes an abusive relationship and starts over in New York; the other is about a woman pulled back by a phone call to the past she tried to forget.
My friend was impressed. And there, in that small café in Ohio, she told me that she, too, wanted to write a book, but she didn’t know where to start.
“Just start,” I told her. “Sit down and write.”
I explained, with the confidence of someone who knew what she was talking about, that if she had something to say, she should express it and not let any barriers stand in her way. What she didn’t know was that for weeks, I’d been carrying around the urge to write but was afraid to approach it. Most of all, I feared that if I began, it would eventually end.
Silly, isn’t it? To fear starting because it must one day be over.
That conversation made me feel like the biggest fraud. How could I tell her “Sit down and write” when I wasn’t doing it myself? When for weeks I had been telling my therapist that something was blocking me from starting, and nothing was moving?
Two days later, on 11/11, I felt I couldn’t hold back any longer. I opened a Word document and began writing a story about women’s friendships and what happens when something in them breaks. My logic was that if I didn’t want it to end, I should take it slowly. Step by step. A little at a time.
Well, for six weeks I wrote thousands of words every day, until the table left red marks on my arms. I told my therapist I’d finished the draft – and the worst had come true: it was over. I knew it would end, and it did, and it was heartbreaking, because that period of writing is the happiest in the world for me. I enjoy rewriting, editing, and the whole production process.
But the writing itself… oh, the writing.
It came and went, making space for other things – equally important, but never quite the same.
The book came out in Israel in June, right into another war and missiles from Iran. No publisher would have released it then. But I decided to move ahead anyway. I knew the people I love in Israel needed escapism. People needed cool, faraway places to go to in their imagination, needed something else to focus on besides existential anxiety in a bomb shelter. It was a gamble – it could have gone terribly wrong – but my gut told me strongly: this story had to come out right then.
Luckily, it stayed at the top of the bestseller lists for months.
It received wonderful reviews and offered something different during difficult times. Like the writing itself, everything happened so fast. Now and then, I tried to stop and really feel it – elusive, but I tried.
The novel I Did Something Bad bubbled up in the fall, erupted like a volcano during the winter, and came out in the month with the most sunlight. The seasons passed, so much happened, and when I saw my friend again, I told her the book had really succeeded and that I was proud. She smiled, looked at me with the expression of someone who knew what she was talking about, and said –
“I never doubted it.”
One day, I hope she’ll read it – maybe her Hebrew will be good enough, or the books will be translated into English. But she’ll never know how much that snowy morning in the café helped me bring this story into the world. I wanted to give her the courage to write – but it was her question that gave me mine.
