Momfluenced was the long desired destination I had fantasized about for years along my circuitous path of becoming a writer.

I’ve written about it before, but I wasn’t one of those little kids who, like, always knew she wanted to write. I wrote, sure. Lots of beautifully purple stories about dreamy maidens and star-crossed love (with illustrations to match OBVIOUSLY). And I had multiple journals in which I wrote agonizing entries about friend jealousy, boy drama, my sister stealing my stuff, and my family not understanding me.

One such tortured example:

“I think I’m into David. I know, I’m pathetic. David will be over soon, I’m sure. He writes me many letters. Lately he has been telling me how he’s in love with Megan. He really, really likes her. Great. Why is it that whenever I like a guy, that guy always ends up being desperately in love with Megan. I just can’t stand it.”

YOU COULD NOT PAY ME ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY TO RELIVE ADOLESCENCE.

But I never thought of myself as a writer so much as a reader. Books were my escape from my mixed up and exhausting interiority. They were my keys to other worlds. They were my friends.

As a grad student in literature, I had to take a composition course, and I ended up taking one that was geared toward pedagogy. Throughout the semester, we wrote several creative pieces we might later use as assignments. I wrote a poem about acne. A stream-of-consciousness memory essay about the texture of my childhood home’s wall-to-wall carpet. I wrote about the smell of my grandfather’s car - a combination of pungent cologne, aftershave, whiskey, and Buick.

I really enjoyed this class, and frequently felt pride in my ability to string words together, but still, didn’t think of myself as a writer. Maybe I thought of myself as happily imbued with a detailed memory, or maybe I clocked the fact that writing about stuff that made me feel something ugly or strange or brave turned on some sort of light inside of me. But none of these sensations or exercises cumulated in me thinking of myself as a writer.

Reflecting upon my past dabbles with putting pen to paper, I’m a little surprised I never went through a “wanting to be a writer” phase since all the ingredients were clearly there. I was frequently more comfortable ensconced in the world of a book than performing myself IRL. I was insecure, desperate to express myself in order to be seen. I’m a Scorpio!

It wasn’t until I became a mother and was forced to confront my life’s choices (namely, to pursue motherhood as a panacea for feeling professionally lost) that the idea of writing as a THING took hold.

Things I Did To Become A Writer

• Applied for a job at an interior design blog despite having no experience whatsoever in blogging or interior design.

• Started a blog in order to gain experience in blogging where I wrote stuff like this.

• Begged lots of editors to let me write for them without having any clue how to professionally beg.

• Sent pitches like these with a photo from my wedding?????? Apparently thinking that professional writers sent headshots along with pitches????? REMEMBERING I USED TO DO THIS IN REAL TIME IS A JOURNEY.

• Got my first piece published after failing approximately 177 times - this piece was CLEARLY about puberty and obviously it required an embarrassing personal photo to accompany it.

• Applied to a writer’s conference with a 20 page writing sample about postpartum depression and got in. Writing this sample was the first time I dared to take my words seriously.

• Read a flash piece about childbirth aloud in front of the 100 or so people who attended this writing conferences.

• Applied for an editor position at the New York Times despite having no editorial experience or training.

• Learned how to write a proper pitch (shout-out to

  , who was one of my first teachers!)

• Made one of my very best friends at another writing conference who has read more of my shitty first drafts than anyone else in my life.

• Got a piece accepted by my first glossy women’s outlet and felt like I had arrived.

• Made the decision to stop attending certain writing conferences mostly because I started to feel like I no longer needed the fairly arbitrary validation many writing conferences provide.

• Took a 9-month class in order to develop a nonfiction manuscript.

• Was told to include more male characters in my nonfiction manuscript.

• Was told to include more “happy moments of motherhood” in my nonfiction manuscript.

• Conducted my first phone interviews - one of which was with for this piece and I had to really really coach myself not to make an ass of myself re: fangirling.

• Taught myself how to interview people.

• Pitched myself to agents at an event that was sorta like speed dating for agents and writers who needed agents.

• Understood that in person charisma and a catchy pitch “I want a freshly exfoliated face but I want to smash the patriarchy” might lead to piquing agents’ interest but the interest would die if the actual book was not sellable.

• Started a spreadsheet of agent rejections (50 or so give or take). It was color coded!

• Pitched an agent as she was trying to help herself to mushroom quiches in A BUFFET LINE (yes, still dying about this one).

• Misunderstood an aspect of journalistic etiquette and spent days in a shame spiral.

• Got referred by another writer friend to write something for Harper’s Bazaar - the first time I’d ever been commissioned.

• Wrote my first celeb profile and felt the thrill of TRAVELING FOR WORK.

• Learned how to ask for more money (I still need handholding with this one).

• Learned how to write a book proposal.

• Landed an agent and felt like all of my wildest dreams had come true.

• Sent a book out on submission only to watch it get roundly rejected.

• Girded my loins to write another book proposal which also got roundly rejected.

• With help from a brilliant developmental editor, identified a juicy hook in the last rejected proposal and yeah, wrote ANOTHER BOOK PROPOSAL. This is three book proposals in case you’re not keeping track. I CERTAINLY WAS.

• Got an offer!

• Didn’t get any other offers and didn’t think to worry about the money aspect of my only offer, so desperate was I to think of myself as a REAL WRITER.

• Wrote a fucking book.

• Tried and failed not to think about how much time went into writing the book versus how much I was paid to write the book.

• Begged everyone I knew who had anything at all to do with publishing, influencing, or celebrities, to accept a galley.

• Pitched myself to approximately 7,142 people in order to publicize the book.

• Begged thousands of strangers to preorder the book. Including readers of this newsletter!

• Agonized over book tour outfits and sent approximately 612 photos like this to my sister/cousin thread.

  

• Because the only way I’d make money on the book was through royalties (sales) given the small size of my advance, I began to strategize about how I might impact sales.

• Strategized about how to grow my social media following so more people would buy the book.

• Strategized about cute merch that would look splashy on social media so more people would buy the book.

• Strategized about how to get on big podcasts so more people would buy the book.

• Strategized about blurbs so more people would buy the book.

• Strategized about writing about my book on this newsletter so more people would buy the book.

• Experienced the high of pub day! It was a real high! It was great!

• Experienced the numbness of pub week. It was real numb! It was weird!

• Experienced the comedown and exhaustion of intense effort required by book promotion.

• Wondered if any of it had been worth it.

• Wondered if I’d ever write another book.

• Wondered if anyone cared.

• Stopped thinking my book was at all something I could control the reception of and slowly stopped thinking about my book altogether.

• Enjoyed the freedom that is LIFE AFTER BOOK.

This week, Momfluenced the paperback was released. Tuesday came and went but I forgot to post about it because I was transcribing a newsletter interview, drafting a 5 Pretty/Ugly Things post, walking my dog, attending my kid’s band concert, and letting my 4YO show me which flowers had bloomed overnight.

I’m proud of the years of work that went into Momfluenced, and I’m enormously grateful for the many, many people who helped me usher it into existence. It’s a book that combines difficult personal excavations alongside myriad maternal perspectives and hopefully illuminating cultural and historical contextual analysis. My deepest desire is that reading it helps you make sense of the age of Ideal Motherhood™ and allows you to transcend anyone else’s ideals. It’s been an absolute joy to talk to people for whom the book has cracked something open, and a privilege to add my voice to the canon of books seeking to better understand how class, race, politics, social media, and consumerism make navigating the role of Mother so sticky, so confounding, and sometimes, so liberating.

Happy one year to Momfluenced, and happy paperback week!

(Please Buy My Book)!

In Pursuit is now on PATREON

Momfluenced has been out in the world for exactly one month and “how I feel” about it all changes almost hourly, but here are some things I know to be true.

• I spent roughly a year querying agents (without whom you can almost never sell a book to a mainstream publisher), and nearly 50 said no before one said yes. I have vivid memories of desperately trying to project an air of “not desperate” over the phone as my postpartum doula tried to get my fussy 2-week-old to nap downstairs. During the agent call, I asked thoughtful questions, provided thoughtful answers as I leaked breastmilk and prayed the baby wouldn’t cry which would distract me from keeping my inner excited squeals at bay. I galloped down the stairs after the call and attempted to explain to my saint of a doula why “getting a literary agent” after years of fantasizing and one year of actively trying felt akin to winning the Pulitzer. I let out the squeals!

• The first book my agent and I tried to sell went out on 3 rounds of submissions which means roughly 36 editors said no thank you.

• The second book my agent and I tried to sell went out on one round of submissions before I pulled the plug to revise.

• I spent 6 months writing a new proposal based on the rejections from failed book #2. If you’re counting (I sure as hell was!), this is proposal #3!

• Writing a proposal is harder (FOR ME) than writing a book. Requirements include: selling yourself and your ability to sell book; crafting chapter summaries for chapters that don’t exist; researching and writing a compelling sample chapter that will give editors a good sense of the rest of the not-yet-existent book; and most impossible of all, (using captivating prose!), communicating the heart of a thing you have yet to write in something which is called “the overview” but which should be called “the impossible.”

• After a month or so of the Momfluenced proposal hitting editors’ inboxes, my agent left me a voicemail sharing the news that one publisher was interested in scheduling a call and I still have that voicemail saved on my phone.

• When it became clear an offer was imminent, and my agent told me to have realistic expectations about my advance, I didn’t care because I was so drunk on YES after so many years of NO. A book a book a book a book a book a book my book my MY BOOK MY BOOK MY BOOK what is money?!?!?!?!

• I will never do this because it’s against my religion to do math voluntarily, but if I ever did do the math to figure out my hourly rate for writing this book in one year (prior to several months of edits the following year), the math would make me deeply sad.

• Posting the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement of the deal on Twitter was one of the biggest career highs of my life. Freshly showered and donning a hoodie still warm from the dryer, I sat dazed in bed with my laptop and took this beautiful selfie of myself crying about it it all as my writing community showered me with Twitter congratulations love.

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• I love book research! I read so many books to prepare for writing Momfluenced, and as I underlined my way through each one, felt so privileged to be in conversation with thinkers and writers I so intensely admire. One of my favorite parts of writing is reading.

• Writing is hard! Every single first draft of each of Momfluenced’s chapters started as a document full of copy-and-pasted quotes, interview transcripts, and brain vomit. Every single one of those shitty first chapter drafts convinced me that I had no business whatsoever writing anything, much less a BOOK.

• Molding and polishing a too-long, disconnected, thesis-less first draft is one of the great pleasures of my life. Connecting dots and uncovering nuggets of insight previously buried in expository filler before switching gears unexpectedly to follow a new train of thought - it is the best kind of intellectual exercise. Transitioning from a “I’m not equipped to write a grocery list with any sort of clarity so why am I attempting a book that people will have to spend actual money on” mindset to a “I made something from literal nothingness!” mindset is a wild ride.

• As an author of a book, you created something from nothing, but it is not really something you own. You have some say (if you’re lucky) in what the finished product will look like, how it will be marketed, and who it will be marketed towards, but ultimately, you are not a book designer, a marketing executive, a publicist, or a publishing company, and your book is a product that isn’t owned or sold by you which is fundamentally weird!

• The book cover design process will MAKE YOU FEEL FEELINGS.

• I don’t know a single author alive that enjoys selling herself in order to sell books.

• As an author in 2023, unless you’re Donna Tartt (and even if you are Donna Tartt honestly, because even Donna Tart has a Public Persona), it impossible to sell books without selling yourself. I spent approximately 12,302 hours writing pithy Twitter posts, drafting earnest Instagram posts, creating fucking Canva graphics, and sharing Insta stories in order to trick myself into thinking I have any control in how or whether my book sells. I spent double that time creating a single Instagram reel.

• Your Book is the Holy Grail, The Peak of Mount Everest, The Moon Landing and for everyone else in the world, it’s Just A Book. **

• 8 months before pub day, I started spending the hours between 2AM and 4AM writing bad reviews of my own book in my head.

• Random acquaintances will smile kindly when you tell them you have a book coming out, in the same way that you smile kindly when your 4YO tells you that real dinosaurs live in the woods. You will want to launch into a rant about how it’s a fucking miracle ANYONE ever gets a book published (much less writes a book!) but you won’t because that would be like your 4YO having a tantrum when you dare to say something inane like, “It’s fun to imagine triceratops in the woods isn’t it?”

• In the months leading up to pub day, I sent approximately 8,613 emails out to friends, professional contacts, people I talked to once in a buffet line at a writing workshop 3 years ago, people who follow me on Twitter, and people who have never heard of me or my little book, offering them galleys and (in some cases!) directly begging them to cover my book in any professional capacity.

• In the months leading up to pub day, I spent approximately 1,805 hours answering the same 5 interview questions over and over again, and in doing so, became convinced that not only was I boring as hell, but surely my book was also boring as hell?!

• I am very lucky to have several author friends who have tried to prepare me for being a debut author. They all told me a version of the same message: that debut books rarely sell well and if you focus on the sales (or the Goodreads reviews!) you will feel terrible about yourself and your life choices, so instead, focus on the wins and stop looking up your Amazon rating.

• This all sounds like very good advice and I did my best to listen to this advice in the run-up to pub day, BUT ALSO I did approximately 2,319 interviews in the months leading up to pub day, and how could 2,319 interviews not translate to widespread interest in the book (and how could that not translate to sales)?!

• My bitch of a subconscious totally thought the good press would lead to good sales!

• I asked for sales numbers a couple weeks ago and I will not ask for them again anytime soon!

• At an event close to home, I looked out into the sea of people who showed up to support me (most of whom I knew and loved), and felt the cozy rush of true community.

• My big kids came to the local event and didn’t even groan when I made them take a picture with me.

• At home that night, one of them told me she was proud of me and the other told me I had done a “good job.”

• At a writing conference 5ish years ago, I remember a distinguished author (of multiple books) telling a table full of aspiring authors (of which I was one) that he used to think he’d feel like he’d “made it” after he published his first book, but that he simply started chasing different points of affirmation and validation, and I remember composing my face to look as though I understood his point, but privately thinking to myself, “Lol if I ever get to publish a book I’ll KNOW I’ve made it!”

• A week after the book came out, I felt curiously empty and remembered this conversation against my will.

• I spent pub day surrounded by friends and family in one of my favorite bookstores and felt simultaneously high, terrified, and loved.

• Two weeks after the book came out, when it was clear that Momfluenced was just a debut like any other debut (that is: a blip on the publishing industry’s radar), I reflected on the years of lofty dreams and unpaid labor, and shit started becoming upsettingly existential!

• I have received the warmest, kindest, most generous messages from readers explaining how this book has made them more culturally critical or how this book has made them feel seen, and I hate myself for (in my low moments) caring more about whether or not I got a Fresh Air interview than the the fact that I created something that is impacting people’s lives. Why do I write? What am I doing this for? What does this work mean? What am I prioritizing? Shit continues to feel existential and I’d really rather it didn’t.

• I did a group book event and had the smallest signing line which is FINE but I didn’t have my phone on me and it was very difficult to know what to do with my face!

• I went to breakfast with some of my author heroes (who I can’t believe are also my peers), and am still full to bursting with the wisdom, vulnerability, and joy shared during that breakfast. Themes covered: surrender, money, fighting, and fun. When is surrender a gift? How does one surrender? What is labor worth? What is the role of money in a writing career? When is fighting worth it? When is fighting a state of being?

• Shortly after this incendiary breakfast, I decided to give myself a week off from hustling. Instead of emailing someone at my publisher to “check in on” Amazon covering Momfluenced in some sort of mom-book round-up, I went outside. I transplanted milkweed. I hacked down briars. I planted glowing marigolds in a cobalt blue pot. I walked my dog. I weeded the raised beds and prepped them for tomato plants. My neighbors showed me a secret path behind our homes. I looked at beaver dams. I startled a deer. I listened to a wren trill. I shoveled black mulch. I smoothed the mulch around newly planted cosmo seedlings and savored in the full feeling as I watered them for the first time in their new home. I taught my 4YO how to identify lilacs and lilies of the valley and we smelled them together.

• I am acutely aware that if the me from 5 years ago read this, I’d feel mostly annoyed that an ungrateful bitch who’d managed to do the impossible and get multiple people to give her permission to put an entire book full of her words into the world has achieved the impossible and has the audacity to not feel anything other than pure gratitude and joy about it all.

• The pressure to feel joy is a real thing for women, isn’t it?

• A smarter person than me once said that you wouldn’t really know how you felt about your book until you were 3 years post pub date and that sounds about right to me.

• Seeing my book on sale at a bookstore is frankly unbelievable. Like, “Look, there’s my book next to real books which I think means my book must also be a real book?!”

• I think the labor of self-promotion that goes into publishing a book makes it easy for authors to forget to feel proud about writing a book.

• I’ve been reading upon waking (instead of immediately throwing myself into my email or social media) and I regret to report that it’s made my life and overall outlook immeasurably better.

• I will be reading nothing but fun and frothy and funny and joyful books for the foreseeable future. See this post for a bevy of delightful recs, and also see Samantha Irby’s chapter on how she’d rewrite Sex and the City in her new (utterly perfect) book, Quietly Hostile. Books are literally magic!

• Like many things in life, becoming an author is frustratingly a both/and situation when I really wanted it to be simply a “Now I’m A Successful Grown Up Person” type of situation.

• I spent the day volunteering at my kids’ school yesterday and wow, who the fuck cares how authors feel about their books being published when we should be writing daily front page profiles about how it feels to be a teacher for one single day?! Also, what shoes are teachers wearing? I wore sensible sneakers and my feet were throbbing?! AFTER ONE DAY.

• ** It turns out that Your Book actually being Just A Book is freeing. It turns out that living in a world where marigolds matter more than Amazon stars is kinda wonderful.

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I’m in Brooklyn with my family and we did allll the things today (Natural History Museum, Central Park, FAO Schwartz, multiple subway rides, keeping the completely un-city-trained 4YO from running into traffic) which I think was kinda good because it kept me distracted from my very real nerves about TOMORROW.

As a genuine and earnest and heartfelt-as-fuck thank you to you, the In Pursuit community, for not only being here, but also for being ok (at least I hope you’re all ok!) with the onslaught of book promo, I’m so excited to share an exclusive listen to the first chapter of the Momfluenced audiobook, which (yes, here come the links), you can listen to the rest of here or here or here!

First Chapter of MOMFLUENCED

I’ll be taking the rest of the week off for press and events (please come if you can!) and general holy-shit-my-book-is-finally-out feelings, but can’t wait to report back next week.

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My entire family (spouse and three kids) are traveling to New York to help me celebrate the book launch on April 25th at Books are Magic, and I have a bunch of fun events planned in other states (and virtually) that you can check out here. PLEASE COME if you can! It’ll be so nice to have some pals in the room/Zoom windows.

This is my first book, and I’m leaning heavily on author friends to guide me through this Very Special Time. One of those friends texted me this which pretty much sums it up.

Unfortunately (because I’m me and not someone else), when loved ones ask if I’m “excited,” I say “yesssss” with a shrug behind every sound wave, because while sure I guess I’m excited, I’m mostly terrified of failure or embarrassment or not controlling enough of what I can control. Unfortunately, I’m told these feelings are TO BE EXPECTED.

has this to say about being a debut author.

The trip from struggling writer to published author is a vision quest that takes place in a protected area bordered on all sides by strip malls. It is like sitting at a dinner table in haute couture with a dirty diaper on. For a lot of writers, it will prove to be the most emotionally unsteady period of their lives. It is a privilege and a gift and an honor to be a debut author, but it is, above all things, an existential test.

Anna Sproul-Latimer of says this about the lead-up to a book’s pub date.

It’s a moment where there’s really not much to do; anything you could be doing is either stuff you should have been doing months ago or stuff you can’t do until just before publication. How fun for you!

Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica and JELL-O Girls, says this.

A process as emotional as putting your first book out into the world is bound to pull forward your own latent fears and insecurities about yourself and your needs. I think these feelings of wanting too much, pushing too hard, bothering people with emails, and so on, are inherently tied to gender, the anxiety of being an “ambitious” woman and the impulse to apologize for or minimalize that ambition by being as easy to work with as possible.

In summation, writing a book and then working your ass off to get as many eyes on that book as possible is A LOT.

On the one hand, no one has any way of predicting why some books do well and others don’t. On the other hand, maybe an excerpt in this publication or an interview on that podcast will launch a book into the literary stratosphere! (This is highly unlikely, but my brain likes to fuck around with magical thinking).

I threw myself into professional writing solely on the basis of wanting/needing to express an existential crisis of identity following the onset of motherhood, and despite having written academic papers on selfhood in Portrait of a Lady and the use of the word “happy” in Northanger Abbey and the depiction of “spinsterhood” in Lolly Willowes, I had no journalistic background and knew approximately zero professional writers before I started blithely and cluelessly pitching editors like the sweet springtime child I was.

My first published piece was about my period.

Through sheer stubbornness, I somehow cobbled together a career (after many, many, many rejections and professional stumbles), but it wasn’t until a few years in that I began to dream of A Book. Once I let the dream in, of course, there was no going back. The image of The Book took hold despite having no clear idea of what The Book should be about.

I signed with my agent when I was two weeks postpartum with my third kid, and we tried (and failed) to sell a collection of essays about motherhood inciting my feminist rage, and later, a nonfiction book about how the angel of the house is alive and well in depictions and expectations of contemporary American motherhood. Seeds of both “failed” books ended up in Momfluenced!

And now The Book is A Real Book. With a title and a cover and everything! And I find myself trying as hard as I can to do the impossible and experience the fulfillment of a dream.

And this is where I tell you that living my dream of writing a book feels sorta like living my dream of becoming a mother because both dreams were based on nebulous imagery and foolish beliefs in the ability of the external to fundamentally change or improve the internal. Motherhood did not imbue me with radiant strength or peace. Mothering meant that my days and skillset drastically changed but I was shocked to realize that my many human frailties and vulnerabilities remained, despite the fact that I’d attained Madonna status. I fear that being a published author who has written A Book might be the same. Maybe, despite having become this person I’ve dreamed of becoming, I’m still me. Middle-of-the-night anxiety sweats and all.

I don’t love the “birthing a book” metaphor simply because it feels reductive, over simplistic, smarmy, and somehow minimizes the intense reproductive labor of creating a human and the intense intellectual labor of writing a book. But I think there’s something to be learned from my flawed thinking that motherhood might be a shortcut to complete fulfillment and transcendance. Like, yes, I’m trying to enjoy seeing something on which I worked very hard and very long become a real thing. But I’m trying NOT to assume it will change the core of me or my days.

So in the spirit of honest celebration rather than misguided attempts to Live A Dream, I’d love to share some blurbs written by writers I’ve long admired that somehow make it easier for me to feel pride/joy/fulfillment. Being read and seen through the eyes of others has a funny way of making shit real, doesn’t it?

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Reading this book feels like having the best, most nourishing conversation about media, race, capitalism, and the collective public scream that is parenting right now with a friend who has done all the reading. Petersen’s deep research, smart analysis, and warmth makes this essential reading for parents who want to know what pulls us toward the endless scrolling that is an inescapable part of our twenty-first-century lives.

- Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child

Momfluenced makes rich text of our often mindless scrolling, unpacking the ways performances of social media motherhood help and hinder parenting in its personal and political spheres. This book provides all the delicious pleasures of envy-snarking on the neutrals of your newsfeed, plus the necessary catharsis of your favorite group text, with the bonus of nutrient-rich research into how race, class, and politics influence our cultural conception of the ideal mother and why mindful consumption might be the first step to change. I’m so glad we have Sara Petersen’s voice to unravel these complexities with humor and pathos.

- Julia Fine, author of The Upstairs House and Maddalena and the Dark

A thoughtful and freeing look into mommy influencer culture and how it shapes how we see each other and ourselves. I started underlining until I realized I was underlining the whole page. An important read for anyone who has ever gotten trapped in the endless doomscroll toward being a better, more beautiful mother.

- Kate Baer, author of What Kind of Woman

Reading Momfluenced is like having a frank conversation about motherhood, gender, and capitalism with someone much smarter, wittier, and well-read than I am. Sara’s vulnerable, incisive, and funny-as-hell take on momfluencer culture will stay with me for a long time. Fans of Under the Influence will gobble it up.

- Jo Piazza, creator of the Under the Influence podcast and the new podcast (which I recently interviewed her about for the newsletter!) She Wants More

Incisive, illuminating, and prescient, Momfluenced thoroughly excavates of one of the internet’s most fascinating and insidious subcultures. If I could heart this book twice, I would.

- Amanda Montell, author of Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

For women disappeared by the Cult of Domesticity, Momfluenced opens up the possibility of self-reclamation with a passionately conceived deep dive into modern motherhood as performance, commodity, and fantasy. An eye-opening must-read.

- Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

Momfluenced takes us on a journey to understand our own history of domesticity and how it affects so much of our culture today. Petersen unpacks influence through a lens of who has power in this country and teaches us how we can change the narrative for the women coming up behind us. A must-read!

- Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)

This is the book for anyone who has ever sought to untangle their own desires and experiences of motherhood from those fed to us by the happily married duo of capitalism and white supremacy, and by that duo's children: perfectly curated social media feeds, family portraits sprinkled with ads, images of tiny bodies and reproductive lives packaged for maximum profit. It is for parents and kids and anyone interested in the ways we sell ourselves to one another, and the ways we have been taught to perform. Sharp, glittery, warm and incisive, Momfluenced does what momfluencers cannot: it tells the truth. 

- Hannah Matthews, author of You or Someone You Love: Reflections of an Abortion Doula, which you should preorder here!

Thea Lim wrote this about the feeling of being read by others, and I think it’s pretty apt.

I try to focus on what the whole enterprise is really for: the fact that, at this very moment, someone might be reading something I wrote, and feeling touched by it. ISN’T THAT MAGICAL?

It is magical.

Please come say hi at any of my book tour events (I’ll keep updating the page as more details are finalized) and please reach out if you’re interested in having me come talk (about the book or Instagram ads or my hatred of Mother’s Day) to your school, workplace, or other organization/event venue.

GoodReads is hosting a Momfluenced giveaway, which I think ends today! And if you’re a GoodReader, while you’re there, please mark the book as “want to read” (or if you’ve read an early version, leave a rating and review!). You better believe I’ll be begging you to review it on Amazon after April 25th too because sadly, algorithm is king.

As a sincere THANK YOU for indulging my endless book promotion when you’d probably rather be reading about golden dildos, I am offering this 💥GIVEAWAY💥 to you, my beloved newsletter readers.

SWAG. If you’ve preordered Momfluenced, and want to receive 2 sticker sheets, 2 #momfluenced pencils, the best grocery list notepad on the planet, and a personalized note from yours truly, simply email me at saralouisey at gmail dot com with the subject line NEWSLETTER GIVEAWAY and a photo of your preorder receipt. I’ll then choose 5 winners at random who will get all the goodies plus a look at how bad my handwriting really is.

THANK YOU!

PS: If you dig my swag, it was designed by a dear friend’s incredible shop, which you can check out online here. They have the best card selection and the cutest shit you will suddenly be convinced you can’t live without. I mean. And yes please.

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If you would like the book personalized with a name or special message (I will totally write “Fuck Mother’s Day” or “American Motherhood - WTF” or “Ideal Motherhood™ is a scam” or maybe just “aksd;flkjasd;lkfja;sldkfj”), please let Water Street know in the order comment field. Books will be signed before the release date (April 25th, 2023) and will be shipped to arrive roughly on release date. Water Street ships media mail (free) or Priority mail (not free) within the US, and internationally as well. Exclusive Momfluenced sticker sheets (pictured below) will be included with each preorder while supplies last.

Preorder your signed copy here!

I’ve written about it before, but preorders are enormously impactful to a book’s success. Preorders indicate advance interest in books, which inform how many copies bookstores buy and also which titles they feature more prominently in shop windows or customer outreach. Preorders affect whether or not Momfluenced pops up on Amazon and other online retailers’ home pages (which, of course, increases visibility). Every single preorder also counts to a book’s first week of sales, and that first week of sales typically dictates whether a not a book will make bestseller lists. Lastly, preorders create industry buzz, which leads to more marketing and publicity investment from my publisher, which leads to more media coverage on podcasts, TV shows, print media, and public radio.

I’m already noodling on book #2 ideas, and the success of Momfluenced will ultimately impact my chances of getting book #2 out into the world. Preorders matter so very much and I SO APPRECIATE any and all of ‘em.

One more ask (I am very greedy) - we’re starting to think about Momfluenced book tour plans, so if you’re interested in attending a Momfluenced reading or event (virtual or in-person), let me know via this form. I’d love to see you!

The button!

I’ve dreamt about The Cover.

Maybe it would be floral and irreverent, à la Kate Baer.

Maybe it would be shockingly sparkly like Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot.

Maybe it would be typography-forward like Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror.

Maybe the there would be bright colors and “book blob” graphics like Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.

In my fantasies about The Cover, I didn’t know what The Book would be about. I just knew it would look beautiful. It had to be, I reasoned, because only a beautiful object would make sense as the endpoint of hours, weeks, months, and years of ass-in-the-chair work. Only a beautiful cover could encapsulate my dreams, my fantasies of one day being an Author with a capital A.

(Reader, if you spend years of your life fantasizing about something, and then have an opportunity for that fantasy to come to life, I strongly recommend spending some time exploring the notion of fantasy versus reality. You will save yourself several unnecessarily emotionally fraught hours.)

Once I signed the book deal for Momfluenced, I remember being hit with the sudden, shocking realization that there would be a real cover, not simply a fantasy cover. I Pinterested and tagged and copied and pasted like my life depended on it. Every time I thought about the cover, it was Christmas Eve and I was seven.

(I did not spend any time exploring the notion of fantasy versus reality).

During an early meeting with my wonderful book editor Maya, she walked me through a rough timeline the year before the book would publish. She estimated that April 2022 would be when I’d see the first cover. “Cover Month!!!!!” I typed into April 1st on my Google Calendar. It was happening. My Fantasy Cover was going to happen.

When the first design option came in via email, I was in the bathroom with my phone, and this is what popped up on the screen.

Read more

Preorder here!

The cover design process was absolutely fascinating, and I’m writing all about it for paid subscribers next week. So if you want to support my work (while also helping to keep the bulk of content free for everyone) AND get some juicy deets about how a book cover is designed from start to finish, upgrade below!

If you want to preorder my book (still can’t believe I wrote a book that people will be able to buy?!?!?!?!), I’d be so grateful.

Some bullet points about why preordering Momfluenced is a great idea!

• The book ships in late April, so it’d be a nice little irony gift for Mother’s Day since one of the central aims of the book is to highlight the grotesque hypocrisy of a country which celebrates mothers one day a year by way of brunch while undercutting and disenfranchising mothers every other day of the year. Think of it as the ideal “Fuck Mother’s Day” gift for someone you love!

• Preorders are hugely important for a book’s success because preorders alert retailers to a book’s sales potential (and lead them to increase their orders). The number of books being preordered also indicates market buzz, which is more likely to lead to big press coverage (help me realize my dream of being interviewed by Terry Gross!) Preorders also show the book’s publisher that the book in question is important to readers, and this might lead them to investing more time, resources, and money in the book’s publicity.

• Book Riot explains how preorders can help a book land on bestseller lists (critical for a book’s success and an author’s likelihood of getting another book deal in the future!)

That author you love who you’ve been reading forever? They rely on your preorders. That friend of yours who finally got a book picked up by a small press? They desperately need your preorders. Debut authors especially need a solid showing in book preorders to prove to the publisher that they have a place in the market. And an author’s best first shot at landing on one of the big bestseller lists is in that first week of sales, a number that’s bolstered by preorders.

• Another way you can support me and Momfluenced is by suggesting your local library or book club place a preorder. Libraries are so important in terms of access, so suggesting your library preorder a copy is a great way to ensure that access for as many readers as possible. Most libraries make it pretty easy and have little online forms you can fill out. As someone allergic to phone calls and even emails sometimes, I love a quick form!

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• You can let your local bookstore know about your interest in Momfluenced, and multiple requests for a particular title could lead the bookstore to preorder more copies for their shelves. This is not only a great way to be a good literary citizen by supporting local bookstores, but it’s also a great way to support authors.

• Lastly, preorders really, really, really, really matter for first time authors because they show both the book’s publisher AND the literary marketplaces that this is a writer (and a book) worth paying attention to. So many debuts get lost in the shuffle, and preorders can help prevent that. The shuffle, for the record, is big. In America, approximately 600,000 to 1,000,000 new books are published every year. It’s a lot! Preorders are a wonderful way to help a debut book stand out in a sea of other debuts.

• Preorders are gifts to your future self. I can’t tell you how much I love being surprised by a book I ordered 5 months ago once it arrives in my mailbox. It’s a beautiful thing.

• Preordering a book about how the cult of ideal motherhood (on social media and off) is harming marginalized mothers, perpetuating alt-right ideology, and strengthening white supremacy is one small way to voice dissent.

I think that’s it (for now!) Thank you for being here, and thank you for indulging what will surely be one of many “please buy my book please please please!” entreaties to come. 💃

Another preorder button!

But neither of these pieces are ready yet. In part because I’m still collecting source material, in part because I’ve spent most of this week as a summer camp chauffeur (can someone PLEASE invent a summer camp Uber that is also free?!), and in part because my (pretty much final) book edits are due to my publisher in less than two weeks. For those of you who are reading this and have somehow escaped me bleating on about my book, I wrote a book! It’s called Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture, and it’s coming out next spring. I’m proud and terrified and still pinching myself, but yeah, I wrote a book.

Writers are a quirky bunch, so it’s no surprise we all have our firmly rooted preferences when it comes to actually getting the words out of our bodies and into a google doc or onto a piece of paper. I know lots of writers who feel uniquely grounded and connected to their inner worlds when they hand-write drafts in notebooks, but I’ve never been that type of writer. My handwriting can’t keep up with my thoughts (not that these thoughts are brilliant by any means, but they do tend to move quickly), and maybe it’s because I had a very fastidious typing teacher in 8th grade, but typing feels like a fluid extension of my brain in a way that writing stuff out by hand just doesn’t. Plus my hand cramps.

I also know a ton of writers who swear by hard-copy edits. They print out copies of first and second and third drafts to best catch typos, awkward turns of phrase, over-dependence on writerly crutches, facile conclusions, whatever. These writers argue that editing hard copies is superior (or at least different in an important way) than scanning and rescanning a document on one’s computer (over and over and over again). But for whatever reason (laziness? obstinacy? a lack of curiosity?) I’ve never done a ton of hard copy edits.

I have written many drafts of Momfluenced.

I wrote several shitty first drafts seen only by myself. These drafts consisted of quoted passages from books and articles piled on top of each other, blocks of free form musings, notes to myself which would read: “get better source” or “make a clearer connection” or “follow up on this” or “double check this” “is this boring?” and lots and lots of TK TK TK TK.

I wrote not-as-shitty second drafts that I sent to dear writer friends who did what dear writer friends do: gushed about stuff they loved and gave smart feedback about how to make other stuff better.

Then I wrote the “This is as good as I can make it and also I can’t look at this thing anymore or my head will explode” first “official” draft for my wonderful editor Maya at Beacon. Maya responded to that draft with brilliant comments which made my second official draft infinitely stronger. I sent her the second draft. Then Maya sent shorter, more technical notes, and I responded to those edits with a third draft. Finally, this draft went to the copy editors at Beacon, who sent me a fourth draft to review by August 23rd.

This is, in most meaningful ways, the last time I will really dig my hands into the book. While I know I will never think to myself, ahhhh unadulterated literary perfection! when it comes to the book (or anything else I write), I do (rather desperately and earnestly) want Momfluenced to be as good as it possibly can be.

So I printed the thing.

And guess what? All my writer friends who swear by hard copy editing? They were right! Reading my book (I still can’t believe this massive pile of paper is “my book”) the way I read “real books”—that is, by holding a physical object in my hands and making sense of the words typed onto that physical object unencumbered by tabs, text notifications, social media alerts, or the lure of Wordle—it’s allowing me to view syntax, word choice, and even paragraph spacing in a whole new light. Suddenly it’s crystal clear that a certain sentence needs to stand by itself, be granted room to breath away from the busyness of the prior paragraph. Suddenly it’s clear that a certain sentence amounts to little more than a word salad and should be cut. Suddenly it’s clear that one of my writer crutches is to repeat words and sentence syntax to create some sort of intended narrative effect!

This is all to say that I’m trying to not apologize for not completing a “real” newsletter this week while simultaneously trying to catch hold of this brief moment in my life as a writer. I wrote a book. And soon that book will be out in the world and I’ll have no control over how it’s received, how it impacts readers, or who will read it. But for right now, for a little bit longer, I am trying to soak up the joy of authorial polishing, I’m trying to be alive to the weight of an accomplishment I’ve worked years to achieve.

I wrote a book.

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