This book, to be specific.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/This_is_Not_About_You_cover_reveal.png?v=1690914640" width="500" height="500">


After a lot of back and forth, the cover design for This is Not About You has been finalised, and we're moving ahead with copy edits, legal reads (hoping not to get sued, thank you very much) and, er, probably more copy edits, with a view to publishing in July 2023.

I've been writing This is Not About You for the guts of five years, although it feels like longer! And it's been hard to keep up my enthusiasm levels for the project as one year has rolled into the next. I guess, when you decide to spill your guts about every single romantic mistake you've made, it takes a while to draw the full truth out – all the while knowing that "full truth" will only ever be one side. MY side.

This is Not About You is, above and beyond anything else I've ever written, a labour of love. The writing of this book has seen me reopen old wounds and pick at old scabs and lay bare the ways in which I have given so much of myself over to the task of finding love, thinking that it would somehow fulfil me or, at the very least, make me happy. 

This book is honest and awkward and embarrassing and uncomfortable but it's also bold and daring and bright and optimistic, and I hope the cover conveys that. Or, at the very least, I hope it makes people think, that book would look great on my shelf.

Thank you all so much for your support – and for your patience! We're almost there…

It's time to judge a book by its cover

I submitted the manuscript for This is Not About You the day I flew home to Ireland, for the first time in over two years. Somehow I had got it into my head that I couldn't enjoy my time at home without getting rid of the book, exorcising the demons of romances past and landing in Dublin with a clean slate of sorts.

A few months previously, I had emailed my editor, tentatively, to tell her that I would be submitting a "first draft" in coming weeks. "Don't send anything you're not happy with," she told me. "Just send it to us when it's as closed to finished, the best version you can write." (These are not direct quotes, but you get the gist.)

I felt panicked. I needed someone to look over this for me, to give me feedback about what I'm leaving out, and what, indeed, I should leave out. It's difficult, I find, to truly edit your writing when it is autobiographical. How do I know what's worth sharing when, at least in my own opinion, all of my life experiences are equally thrilling and important?!

I went back to the book. I sent it to a friend. She told me she loved it (I hoped she wasn't lying). She also gave me some pointers, mostly about how not to get sued by the men I'm talking about. I took her advice on board (mostly). I sent a few chapters to another friend. She gave me some more suggestions. 

There are certain chapters that I read over and over. I bathed in the memory of those relationships, the first whiff of romance, the first frisson of passion. I squinted my eyes and I looked into the rearview mirror of my life and I tried to remember each and every detail. 

There are others that I couldn't bear to re-examine, once I had mined them for content, as I mine so much of my life. I dug out what I thought was relevant and I tried to be honest and kind, both to myself and to the other person, and then I turned the page - quite literally - and did not go back. It is difficult to be objective when the object of your writing is your own trauma which, when revisited, breaks open like an old scar, begins to bleed anew. 

I know that there will be further edits. I will need to trawl through these archives once, twice, three times more, and I am prepared to do it, but for now I am enjoying the quiet, the relief of having rid myself of this thing, the monkey on my back. I have written it all down and I am hoping that it will turn into something powerful and meaningful, at least to more than just me.

Of old scars and new blood

I have broken the back of the book. In the year of our lord 2022, that feels like a somewhat dodgy turn of phrase, but I have – a little over two years after I launched on Unbound, I am almost ready to submit the manuscript and stop thinking about all the boys I've loved before. 

I sent a (very early) draft of the book to a friend this week, hoping that she would say nice things but also hoping that she wouldn't lie. I just want it to be good, you know? She told me she loved it. "It's melancholic but funny and really relatable!" she said. She is my best friend now. All other friends must line up behind her. 

The "melancholic" bit got me. The accuracy jumped OUT, as the TikTok generation might say. Writing this book has been a very melancholic experience. 

In the fog of postpartum, sleeping three hours a night and not remembering a time when my back didn't hurt, opting in to this kind of melancholia has felt like a self-flagellation of sorts, and honestly, not one I've been in the mood for very often. It can feel punishing, to sit down and go over past regrets, to write them down on the page and think about letting other people read them. My friends; the boys in question; my parents. 

I read a part out to my sister yesterday, and said, "I'm not sure I can put this in the book. Mum and Dad will read it!" She scoffed. "They'll be fine! It's your story!" But by the time I'd uttered the words, "After I had come and he had told me – and I wish I could forget – that I tasted delicious, we had sex in the missionary position until he achieved orgasm", she was re-evaluating. It turns out, it's easier to write these things down than it is to read them out – and even that is easier than hearing them, with little preparation. 

Anyway: just like I did, on that fateful night, the book is coming. But just like I did, on that fateful night, it's gonna take a little more time. (But we're nearly there.)

I was busy thinking about boys

And oh, what a year!  
 

I apologise profusely for the lack of updates and hereby promise to let you know how things are going on a bi-monthly basis.  
 

For now you should know that the book is progressing far more slowly than I would have liked, but I am on track to have the manuscript submitted to the team at Unbound by the end of February. It turns out that mining your own experiences – some lovely, some hilarious and some traumatic – is more difficult than I'd first imagined and requires lots of breaks, copious cups of tea and a plethora of rewrites. Thank you for bearing with me!   
 

On a personal note, this past year has been a YEAR. I got married last March and gave birth to my son, Atlas, in October – and while married life hasn't really thrown up any unexpected developments, motherhood definitely has.  
 

I've been writing about all of these things and more in my <a href="http://Rosemarymaccabe.substack.com">newsletter</a>.  
 

Anyway, I will be back with more updates on a drastically more regular basis, and I am very much hoping that the book will be with you this year. &lt;3

It’s been a year

My earliest memories of Valentine's Day are all jumbled together. I can't remember the year, the age, the time – but I can remember that my mother sent me a Valentine's card each year, something she still denies, although lately, less strenuously than in previous years. 

I knew it was her because of the handwriting. My mother has many talents – she bakes a mean apple tart and can tell you, to the digit, the licence plate of every single car owned by her, her friends or any of her family members – but disguising her handwriting is not one of them. I was never quite sure why she didn't get my Dad, whose writing I rarely saw, with the exception of a signature that looks a little like a treble clef, to write it. Maybe that was part of the fun. 

Each card would contain a message – something about how they (the anonymous card-writer, not my mother) had admired me from afar and hoped that, one day, I would notice them. Even though I knew they were from my mother, I still liked to imagine who else could have written the cards.

I would almost always have one boy on the go – and by "on the go", I mean, a boy I liked to think obsessively about and gaze at longingly across the classroom, usually a boy who either had no idea of my fervent admiration or, more often, was well aware and entirely repulsed by it – and so I would sometimes allow myself to imagine it was him, that he was embarrassed to admit to his feelings in front of his friends, but that there was hope for a secret romance between the two of us, if only we could find a way to initiate it. (I may be 36 now, but "is embarrassed of me in front of his friends" has never quite made it into my list of dealbreakers. You can find your way around anything, if you try hard enough.) 

One of the truly convincing aspects of my mother's ruse was the fact that she used to affix a stamp to the front of each of these envelopes – a stamp that would then be franked by the post office, evidence that not only had someone paid to send me this letter, but they had actually placed it in a postbox at some distance from our home. These were not the actions of a woman whose eagle eye can detect an unfranked stamp a mile off, whose kitchen cupboard contains a tin full of those same unfranked stamps, carefully cut off the envelopes to which they were originally affixed,

When I first began to cotton on to mother's adventures in espionage, I was quite offended. I saw it as an act of pity, a sympathy card sent to her second born daughter, the hideous troll who would surely never receive a Valentine's card on her own merits. How dare she assume that! I thought, indignantly, entirely ignoring the fact that hers was the first Valentine's I ever received. To this day, hers have amounted to the most Valentine's cards received from any one person. Her love has been the most reliable of my life.

She doesn't send them any more. I'm not quite sure when she stopped – well into my twenties, anyway, past the age at which you should probably find getting Valentine's cards from your Mum a bit embarrassing. I'm engaged now, and living on another continent; her handwriting isn't what it used to be, after a fall that broke her wrist, and from which she has not fully recovered. The cards don't come any more, but the love – I know that's still there.


 For this Valentine's weekend only, take 14% off the price of a pledge with the code LOVEUNBOUND14 – or use NOTYOURVALENTINE to get 20% off the Totes Narcissistic pledge.

the most reliable Valentine of all

Before you ask, <a href="https://twitter.com/thejeremyhaynes/status/1245767684484202496?lang=en">I have seen the tweet</a> – the one that tells how how I should be using this time, the one that breaks down exactly what I should be achieving with all of this time that I now have. The way it's being talked about, you'd swear days in isolation are longer than any other days, that the hours we have now have been stretched out long, like fresh pizza dough being prepared for the oven.

It's true that not all time is created equally – but it is not true to say that one day is longer than another. A day is 24 hours. An hour is 60 minutes. A minute is long enough to type a paragraph, perhaps – 100 words, according to my Mavis Beacon typing score. That feels like a lot. 

But this, the time in which we now find ourselves, feels to me a bit like the Swamp of Sadness in which Atreyu is lost. (If this is a reference that is outside of your cultural vocabulary, <a href="https://amzn.to/2zoxL9z">you have some work to do</a>.) Time takes on the same form as it always did, but the feeling is different – and so, too, is my feeling of its potential, of what I can get done in this time. 

That is all to say: I am not getting a lot of writing done. 

I have never written a book before so I don't know if this is normal. Can creativity – inspiration – come in fits and starts? This book is different, too, because it is memoir – each time I sit down to write a chapter, to remember a connection once made and, then, unmade, I need to take a deep breath, gird my loins, align the chevrons and go through the Stargate.

It takes a lot out of me, this confessional writing. It is something I think I need to do – I hope you'll forgive me that indulgence – but, at the same time, something I'm not all that fond of. 

Last week, I wrote about one of my longest relationships, a boyfriend I had in college, a man I thought – for a long time – that I would make a life with. I remembered moments I had never remembered before. It left a bittersweet taste in my mouth, a coating on the tongue. Afterwards, I wrote him an email. I asked him how he is; I confessed to Facebook stalking him in the decade since we last spoke, to knowing about his wife, their children.

He wrote back within a day. He filled in the gaps, replaced the puzzle pieces that had been missing. He seems happy and I, truly, am happy for him. (No one has ever claimed to be happy for their ex and been truly believed, but this is my truth.) I am not sorry that we didn't make it – that would, if nothing else, have made for a very short book. 

I haven't finished our chapter. The email might make it in. "As I wrote this down, I found myself beginning to wonder..." Or not. Time will tell.

As it is, I am writing – <a href="http://patreon.com/rosemarymaccabe">four essays each week on Patreon</a>, <a href="https://mailchi.mp/c0deb8ea8e06/things-to-read-watch-and-do-pandemic-edition">sporadic email newsletters</a> when the mood takes me. It will, as my Dad likes to say, get done.

P.S. For the month of May, I'll be sending out a FREE daily newsletter, Monday to Friday, with recommendations on things to do during lockdown, articles I've read and enjoyed, YouTube videos that have entirely distracted me for 30 minutes... So <a href="https://mailchi.mp/c0deb8ea8e06/things-to-read-watch-and-do-pandemic-edition">sign up at the top of this link</a> if you'd like to receive those. (I won't be offended if you don't.)

at a time like no other

For once, these men are the objects; I am the subject. Me, me, me.

Rosemary Mac Cabe was always a serial monogamist – never happier than when she was in a relationship or, at the very least, on the way to being in one. But in her desperate search for ‘the one’ – from first love to first lust, through a series of disappointments and the searing sting of heartbreak – she learned that finding love might mean losing herself along the way.

This Is Not About You is a life story in a series of love stories. About Henry, with the big nose and the lovely mum, with whom sex was like having a verruca frozen off in the doctor’s surgery: ‘uncomfortable, but I had entered into this willingly’. About Dan, with the goatee. About Luke, who gave her a split condom. About Frank, who was married…

But mostly, it’s about Rosemary, figuring out just how much she was willing to sacrifice for her happy ending.

At the age of 26, I had a six-month affair with a married man.


 As an aside: I’ve always wondered if the “other woman” is having the
 affair, per se, or if it is just the man. If I am single, can it be an
 affair? Is one person having the affair and the other person having a
 relationship? Perhaps that answers my question; it definitely wasn’t a
 relationship.


 We met at work and became close friends. It’s hard to look back and see the
 truth of why that was, what we had in common. It would be easier to say we
 became friends because we were falling for one another, and friendship was
 the door that led me to the best — and worst — six months of my life. But
 that wasn’t it.


 Before the first night we kissed and went home together and had terrible
 drunk sex — sex that was not worth the strife or the guilt or the
 embarrassment — I can say, hand on heart, I had never thought about being
 with him. He was married, more or less happily, as far as I knew, and I was
 not the type of girl to sleep with a married man.


 In a way, the affair marked a split in my sense of self — or, at the very
 least, in how I viewed the world. Before, I thought there were two types of
 women: those who had affairs — desperate, lonely, pathetic women — and
 those who didn’t. I placed myself firmly in the second category.


 For the six months we were seeing each other, I believed in pretty much the
 same basic structure, but with one significant difference: I had moved from
 the second category to the first and was, therefore, desperate, lonely, and
 pathetic. But I now know that women who have affairs can be pathetic and
 desperate, self-respecting, careless with their bodies and feelings, or all
 (or none) of the above. There is no common denominator.


 No relationship in my life has made me feel more alone than this one. It
 took over my life. It eclipsed all others.


 I became, for the first time, a liar. It wasn’t so much compulsive as
 necessary. I lied to everyone about everything — about who I’d had lunch
 with, about where I was going that evening, about whether I was single (was
 I?), about what I’d be doing this weekend or the next.


 He would come over and I would put my phone on flight mode and tell my
 friends I was out with other friends or at the movies or a concert (and
 hope they’d never ask for details). We’d eat takeout and have sex, and
 later — but never too late — he’d get up and get dressed and go home. I
 would tidy up, removing the takeout containers and the condoms and folding
 the blanket we’d been lying under while on the couch. I’d reactivate my
 network and wait for a flurry of texts. The silence would always be
 ever-so-slightly disappointing. I’d told them I was busy, but it still
 rankled. I felt like Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, escaping
 my everyday life and stepping into a kind of fairy tale, but I had no one
 to confide in.


 The lying, aside from being an isolating experience, added to my sense of
 being split. I had never been someone who lied. I had never been someone
 who could lie. I told the truth, for better or worse. I was — I am — an
 excessive oversharer.


 I was someone who would call friends and give them a blow-by-blow account
 of my day or night. I would tell them the details of my other friendships
 and my work relationships and talk about what book I was reading and what
 film I had seen. I spared no details in my confessional chats.


 During the affair, there was no point in calling anyone. I couldn’t tell
 them about my life. What would I have to talk about? Discussing made-up
 events is incredibly boring for everyone involved. If I couldn’t talk about
 him, I had nothing to talk about. He was all I wanted to talk about, so he
 became the only person I spoke to.


 It didn’t occur to me at the time, because it felt like we were both in
 this relationship we’d made in my house, but I was the only one who was
 truly alone. He had his family and his friends and a life with his wife. I
 had pulled away from friends and family so that I could protect my secret,
 while he had to stay close to his for the exact same reason. In my
 isolation, I needed him. I think he liked it that way.


 I tried to end it a couple of times, halfheartedly, like I tried to quit
 smoking. I knew it was bad for me. I knew it wouldn’t end well. I knew I’d
 be better off without him and that he needed space to deal with was going
 on in his life. He wasn’t sleeping; he had chronic back pain; he’d had a
 headache for weeks. His body was, I thought, manifesting the symptoms of
 his guilt.


 I wasn’t feeling guilty. I’ve always thought the married party should feel
 the guilt, and any shame is theirs alone. I do feel ashamed, now — less
 because he was married and more because, with the benefit of hindsight, my
 motivations are so transparent. I was incredibly flattered that someone
 like him — someone older, smarter, someone more popular and better known
 and more sociable and ultimately better than me — would risk disrupting his
 life. For me. At the time, it felt like a compliment. I drank it up.


 When things finally did end, I had spent six months avoiding my friends. I
 had spent six months lying to my parents and my sister about what I was
 doing. I had spent six months hiding away with this man who told me
 something had to change; he didn’t want the life he had built for himself
 and he wanted something else. Something more. I thought that included me.


 He ended our affair in the snow. We had gone to a bar for a few drinks one
 weekday evening. We could do that because before all this happened, we had
 been friends. His wife, he told me, wanted me to come over for dinner. I
 imagined the conversation. “It sounds like you’re really friendly with
 Rosemary — why don’t you invite her over? Is she seeing anyone? Maybe she
 could bring him.”


 After we’d finished our last drink, we walked the three blocks to my house.
 The snow had been falling for days; as it melted and refroze, my kitchen
 ceiling had started to leak, a slow drip of ice-cold water coming through
 the flat roof.


 People had tried to tidy up the streets, but they didn’t know quite how. We
 don’t have snowplows in Ireland, and in their absence there was some
 disorganised shovelling that left enormous mounds of dirty snow piled at
 regular intervals on the sidewalk. They looked like giant snowmen who’d
 started to thaw and then frozen once more, having lost all shape and
 appearance of life.


 He stopped on the corner and told me it had to end. It was bad for him. It
 wouldn’t end well. He needed to sort out his life and his marriage and go
 home. I think I laughed. We’d had this conversation before, but the other
 way around, and he’d always talked me out of it. “I know it has to end,”
 he’d say. “But we’re having too much fun — it can’t end now.” I was easily
 convinced.


 I thought we were just switching roles. I was to take the reins, to deny
 him his moment of righteousness. It was important he felt like he was
 trying to do the right thing. But it couldn’t end; we were having too much
 fun.


 I probably told him not to be ridiculous. “Come on, just come home with me
 and we’ll talk.” But whatever had happened, whoever’s advice he’d finally
 decided to heed (his own?), his mind was made up. He left me on the corner
 and I walked through the snow to the house where I lived alone — largely
 because I hadn’t wanted to take my married man home to my housemates — to
 my two cats, who would soon disappear forever (but not before consuming an
 entire parakeet on the living room floor), and to my phone, which showed no
 messages or missed calls.


 I’m not sure how long it took him to sort out his life — a few weeks,
 perhaps a few months, definitely less than a year. He left his wife, just
 like he said he would. He moved out, just like he said he would. He moved
 in with his new girlfriend (just like I hoped he would — although, of course,
 he moved in with the wrong girlfriend). They adopted a little terrier with
 a bad hind leg, and a year later they welcomed a daughter named Emily.


 I know all these things from social media, and friends of friends, and
 nights out with people who know me and know him but don’t know us, and thus
 feel he is the common thread to stitch our conversations together.


 As for the two of us, we were never really friends after that night in the
 snow. In the immediate aftermath, I struggled massively with my mental
 health. I don’t want to assign blame because I’ve endured such events —
 long months of sadness and low mood and lack of motivation — since then. I
 had endured them before him, too. But it turned out he didn’t really want
 to be my friend if we weren’t having fun, and I didn’t really know how to
 have fun with him if we weren’t together.


 We stopped dropping by each other’s desks. We stopped having lunch. We
 stopped texting and responding to each other’s tweets, and about 18 months
 ago, he passed me on the street and we didn’t even say hello.


 It’s as if none of it ever happened. I put on the fur coat and went through
 the wardrobe and was back in a flash, a little wiser and a little lonelier
 and, for the first time in my life, hating the snow.

<div>
 
</div>

This Is Not About You

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