Amanda Goldblatt on Choosing Never to Be on the Bestseller List

Amanda Goldblatt is this week’s guest. Her debut book, Hard Mouth, is now available from Counterpoint Press.

From the episode:

Amanda Goldblatt: I think I was really careful about managing my expectations because, you know, I was 36 when my debut novel came out, which is not old at all, but I had been around a lot of friends who had published at younger ages. I’d spend a lot of time just watching their experiences. I just had a lot of information. But it also meant I always knew—not always but often knew—what wasn’t happening and what was happening to me. I felt grateful for the reception of the book, and I wasn’t expecting it. My grad school mentor sat me down at some point during a one-on-one meeting … and was like, well, Amanda, you’re never going to be on the bestseller list.

You know, when someone says something like that to you, you hold onto it. She’s saying it because my work’s a little weird, and my intention isn’t the bestseller list. Certainly, that’s not my career aim. I think I decided a long time ago that I would rather make the art that I wanted to make than make money off my art. If I had to choose, which it seems like often you do, most of the time you do, or you don’t get to choose it is just one or the other. I guess sometimes they coalesce.

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Amanda Goldblatt s a writer and teacher living in Chicago. She is a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and her fiction and essays have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Noon, Fence, Diagram, Hobart, and American Short Fiction. Hard Mouth is her debut novel.