Field Notes - No. 1
A year and a half ago, Ethan came to me with an idea for a book about love. As I write this note, Ethan’s project is nearing completion. I’m proofreading the last three chapters; the work is almost done.
Ethan’s life is built around friendships; he knows a ton of people, so writing a book on friendship was something he was made to do. The day we met, after I told him what I do for a living, he shared the outline for a book he had sketched notes for on his phone: four subject headings, and a sentence or half-sentence under each one describing his idea.
He wanted to discuss and awaken people’s natural inclination to love others as friends. The message’s premise is to show love for the people we pass in transient moments and expect never to see again—to love others without expecting anything in return, not love, friendship, or even kindness.
At its core, it’s an argument-driven self-help book proposing that our society would be better if we thought of each other more than ourselves and took decisive action to put each other first. Ethan chose to discuss evaluating ourselves to see what we could do for each other, without taking any special time out of our day, disrupting our schedule, or being any different from who we already were.
I learned of his book idea when I met him for lunch while on a trip to the West Coast. As we were getting acquainted, he mentioned being from New York City, and since we kept in touch, he let me know the next time he was coming to town.
When I heard from him again, he invited me to his mother’s funeral reception.
The day of the reception, I went to the cathedral near 57th and Fifth Avenue to attend. He and his wife had rented a block-long dining hall on the third floor, and the space was packed. East Coast friends, West Coast friends, people he knew in high school, college, and his professional life were in attendance. I met his sister, wife, one of his children, and sat with his closest friends from college. I talked with three dozen people that day, and that was only a fraction of those in attendance.
Three months after the reception, Ethan hired me to write his book.
Ethan unpacked his love-book idea through examples from his own life. He unpacked the ideas he’d loved for years, and I structured them in an outline. The plan was to tell the idea, not the man, but while I drafted the first two dozen pages, I saw it was clear this story would benefit from the author being in it.
Everything Ethan told me about his idea came packaged in anecdotes from his life; in his stories, he described love through abstract language, but he grounded it in his friendships. It was clear the voice telling this book would come through his stories. But we weren’t writing a memoir. We were writing an idea book. So, to make the book read true to his idea and his expression of it, we led the chapters with moments from his life. Parts of his childhood, his marriage, his professional life, his colleagues, and his best friends became part of the anecdote.
This shows where he stood in his relationships. Instead of having all the answers, he learned what mattered most to him after losing his material wealth. Instead of his career, he built up his relationships, and what he needed to support his family came with it. His story is one of steadfast love for family and friendships and relearning the most important thing in his life, in a way for the reader to evaluate their own priorities, done in casual Ethan-written prose.
It took a conversation to work through why writing himself into the text was the perfect way to express his idea; his life exemplified the idea he wanted to share with readers. He greenlit the improvisation, and he had his book.
It’s true that writers write about what they know, and it’s true that the sum of everyone an author knows goes into their books, but for a first-time author coming from Wall Street finance, he thought he was being subtle, skirting his ego by not talking about himself when, in reality, the heart of the book is him, the people he knows and loves, and their experiences together.