Out of My Hands
My book launched this month.
For most of my adult life, I existed professionally inside organizations. Product management, consulting, meetings, roadmaps, team lunches, employee evaluations. Even when writing privately, that wasn’t how other people understood me.
Once a novel becomes public, some people interpret you through it. Observations that were exploratory begin sounding autobiographical. Themes become perceived positions. Fiction gets read partly as confession, even when it isn’t.
Contemporary workplace fiction gets read as autobiographical because the genre offers no built-in signal of invention. Unlike science fiction or fantasy, which announce their fictionality through impossibility, realistic fiction set in recognizable workplaces and relationships looks indistinguishable from memoir, with the names changed.
This shift requires a different kind of acceptance: that once something enters public life, you lose the ability to fully control what it means.
Which is probably healthy. Most worthwhile books survive because readers complete them with their own experiences anyway.
Now it is out of my hands.
Available in paperback wherever books are sold, and as an ebook on Kindle, including: