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Credit: Katie Schneider Gumiran and Rosa Gaia for Conway Elementary An instructional leader in a Bay Area school district told
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About a year after my essay collection, Some of My Best Friends , was published, I got an email from my editor. Subject line: “Thinking caps, please: a new subtitle.” I’d known that this was coming. When we started kicking around ideas for the paperback, my team saw an opportunity to jazz things up. A new cover, a new subtitle. The hardback versions were beloved—by more than just me, I was reassured!—but it turns out that the original subtitle, Essays on Lip Service , had begun to strike people as a little too subtle. “We want something that isn’t so vague,” my editor wrote, “and that very clearly tells you what you’re going to get in this collection: smart, incisive opinions; a perspective that may shift your own; some humor!” I love challenges like this; when you have to find the perfect way to sell a story to make it land with an audience. I also believe any exercise that asks you to compress your book into some sort of elevator pitch is never a wasted one. So, I was game, I was keen, I was dauntless. Even if a tiny part of me was miffed to discover I hadn’t gotten it right the first time. Subtitles have become a mini sales pitch that obscures a book’s genre the way you might sneak a dog’s pills into a spoon of peanut butter. The book is about the easy, lazy proliferation of social-justice language—how it’s funny when institutions slap it on like lipstick, how I’ve encountered that tendency in various industries I’ve worked in, and what that pattern tells us about what it means to be alive right now. With subject matter like that, I knew there was a high risk of being misread, or read uncharitably. If there was even the smallest chance the previous subtitle heightened that risk, then of course we should replace it. I fired off some suggestions, knowing none were quite right but hoping, as a juicy brainstorm can, they would spark something even better from someone else and we’d keep one-upping until we struck […]
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Credit: Katie Schneider Gumiran and Rosa Gaia for Conway Elementary An instructional leader in a Bay Area school district told
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