I started writing Vanitas because I’d just completed the umpteenth draft of my book, and I wanted to work on shorter pieces with a quicker path to existing in the world, and also because my agent would surely put the book on submission and sell it to a publisher soon, meaning I’d need some mechanism by which to promote that news and eventually the book itself, and also because I was frightened by all the free time I was about to have.
Hilarious, now! Unfathomable! Obviously, this was December 2019.
I was used to pushing aside big chunks of my life for the book as needed and my life was used to slugging back into place once I was done. (Imagine, if you wish, Kuato from Total Recall.) But this time I didn’t want it to go back into place. I wanted a writing project that was not entirely all-consuming, just a little bit all-consuming. I needed a creative shim, a wedge, a chock. I had a newsletter already, a TinyLetter I started in 2014 when everyone was starting a TinyLetter, and at various points I’d been happy with its regularity (when it was monthly) and happy enough with its quality (once I dropped the promise of a schedule), but never both at once. Now I wasn’t sure why! One essay, once a month, proper and polished — surely I just needed to say I would do it and then I would do it.
It seemed imminently doable, and it was! For the first month. January 2020, I wrote about perfume. It was fun. I had fun! So much fun that I decided for February I should write about the three miscarriages I’d had over the past year, which until then I hadn’t typed a single public word about. Somehow that was also fun, almost, in its own way, in that I felt mostly out of my mind while writing it, but out-of-my-mind in a different way than I’d felt while living it. The piece turned out less orderly than what I’d hoped, but it felt right enough, and I told myself I’d get back to proper and polished in March.
It’s annoying that anyone alive now who was alive in March 2020 will be talking about March 2020 for the rest of their lives but if there’s one thing someone who lived through March 2020 probably doesn’t want to think or hear about, it’s March 2020! Anyway, you know all about it. That month Vanitas, like everything else in the world, became something else — nothing unrecognizable, just a few degrees askew of what it had once meant to be. A few months I got back to that fun and easy feeling of the first issue, and a few more months I got back to the lost-marbles elation of the second one. Some months it just felt good and was easy. But many months, since then, for one reason or another (pandemic, fourth miscarriage, an actual pregnancy, an actual baby), writing this newsletter has felt like digging a hole with my bare hands, or burying myself alive with my bare hands, or digging myself out of the hole I’ve burned myself in, or scraping all that dirt out from under my fingernails with another fingernail, or trimming my nails and arranging them kinda nice, also in the dirt.
(Meanwhile, the book wasn’t done after all; the umpteenth draft was not the last; there was one more, and then it went on submission in the spring of 2021, and there it remains. I love the book, my agent loves the book, but apparently it’s just a hard time to sell a coming-of-age memoir by a middle-class white lady about growing up mortal in the American South at the turn of the 21st century. It’s sad! It’s funny! It’s beautiful! If you’re a publisher whose fancy was just tickled, please be in touch?)
Anyway, writing Vanitas was almost always what I needed, even the absolute struggle months. But now I need something else. I need more time, more space, or at least a rearrangement of what little time and space I do have. Even if everything that happened over the last four years hadn’t happened, a different four years’ worth of other stuff would’ve happened, and I suspect I would have found myself here sooner or later.
And so this is the last issue of Vanitas. Not the last newsletter I’ll send, not by far — I like the format too much to give it up completely (plus I do think it’s the one truly valuable channel for a writer to cultivate online, blah blah blah) — but the last spinning out from that moment of creative panic in December 2019, and the last with this name, which I’ve honestly always felt so pretentious saying out loud.
This is also the last newsletter I’ll send via Substack. I keep writing and deleting explanations for why, but really it’s just… the Nazis are bumming me out, y’all. A whopping 363 people subscribe to this newsletter, it makes me zero dollars, it literally just exists to keep me sane; there is no reason for me to share a platform with Nazis unless I want to. And I don’t, so I won’t.
Thanks for reading Vanitas, a newsletter about life, death, and other dumb stuff. The last four years have been a doozy for everyone, and I’m grateful for any amount of time you spent with my words. I will reappear in your inbox when the time is right; you don’t have to do a thing. In the meantime, I’m on Instagram at @by_rachaelmaddux. Thank you, and happy solstice, and ceasefire now.
The painting is “Seated Female Model,” by Vilhelm Lundstrøm.
You are a great writer. I hope you keep writing even if you don't share it.
The Nazis are also bumming me out 🙁 Good decision and good luck, until your reappearance!