Hello from the other side

three months out from pub date!

Jun 08, 2026

FYI: Writing Wednesdays are on pause for the summer! We will resume in August! Stay tuned for info about that, as well as Fall events and classes!

honestly this might be the best photo ever taken of me?! shout out to laguna beach at golden hour! Photo credit: jeff rovner. And since everyone always asks: the shoes are by Charlotte Stone. And YES, they’re different colors on purpose :)

Where the Girls Were came out on Tuesday, March 20

Let’s (said in Kai Ryssdal voice) do the numbers:

Over the past 96 days I’ve done 39 book events, readings, panels, and classroom visits, and book club visits in 12 cities and 4 states. I’ve been to 27 bookstores, 4 book festivals, and 1 conference, and have done 15 podcasts and interviews, and 1 TV appearance. I’ve signed hundreds of books.

I’ve been on 7 planes, 2 trains, multiple ferries, and in many Lyfts and rental cars. I’ve enjoyed 2 angel food cakes with orange peel frosting, a dessert mentioned several times in the book that was prepared to two different book clubs. All together, I’ve addressed thousands of people, including packed audiences of hundreds, and, in one particularly out-of-the-way bookstore in Colorado, an audience of exactly 1 (thank you for coming, Jan!). My agent says I’ve sold “a respectable number” of books, especially for a debut novel.

These numbers tell a particular story about the past few months: I worked hard and hustled! I did a good job! I had fun! I am tired! Hopefully they tell the people in the publishing biz that while the book isn’t a bestseller, that Kate Schatz sure puts in the work! There are a bunch of other internal metrics they’re using to quantify success but nobody shares that stuff with authors and also: those numbers and figures and data points don’t capture what has actually happened.

What I cannot count are the conversations I’ve had, and the number of stories I’ve been told. From readers, from audience members, from friends and friends-of-friends, from total strangers who’ve emailed and DMed, and from the one woman who mailed me a beautiful, heartfelt, 5-page letter telling me her stories about pregnancy, abortion, and adoption in the 1960s (and also inspiring me to finally pay for one of those services that deletes my home address from the internet). I don’t have photos of these stories to post online, and they don’t show up in the Penguin Random House author portal that lets authors obsess over how many books they’re selling (or not selling). It’s impact that I can’t quantify—but I really really feel it. And it all means so much.

Like the older woman in a library in Portland who locked eyes with me during a reading and then waited until the room had cleared to burst into tears and tell me the story of the daughter she gave birth to in 1966 and never got to hold.
The ones who’ve approached me in the signing line after readings and leaned in to whisper said “this book is my story” or “this book is my mother’s story.”
The woman at a book club who told me that found the sister her mother surrendered for adoption 50 years ago, and is taking that sister to see the mother, who is still living but has advanced Alzheimer’s and won’t know the daughter she’s never met. I’m still thinking of her and hoping so hard that the meeting went well.
The elderly man in Laguna Beach who raised his hand during the Q+A to tell us his memories of working in the sepsis ward at Los Angeles General Hospital in 1960 when he was a young doctor. How they had 40 beds that were always full, and every woman was there because of post-abortion infection. “You know why we don’t see that now?” he asked the audience. “Because of misoprostol and mifepristone! Medication abortion saves lives!” We applauded and I was so glad he spoke up.
The woman, age 80-something, who told me that reading the book has given her the courage to tell her grown children the story she’s never told anyone. A violent, haunting story that is not mine to share but I can tell you it stuns me to think I’m able to contribute, in some way, to the enormity of her being able to tell this truth to her loved ones.
The women who’ve told me about the conversations they’ve had with their own mothers during and after reading the book. how the book gave them a way in to new conversations that revealed old, long-held, never-mentioned stories. About abortions, assaults, pregnancies, all of it. Unmentioned for many decades, and, suddenly, spoken out loud.
The man who raised his hand and told the audience about his experience finding his birth mother, who was pregnant in 1968, in San Francisco, just like Baker in the book.
The woman at a book club who told the group, who’ve known each other for 30 years, the full story of how she adopted her now-grown daughter in the 80s. I learned later that in all these years she’d never told them what actually happened. And there we were, discussing a book over brunch, and it was time for her to tell that story.

I’ve heard stories about people’s mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. Cousins who were really sisters, sisters who were really cousins, bio-family found on Facebook, through 23&Me, through tearful confessions after decades of silence.

I’ve also heard stories of young women who did have choices: who chose adoption or abortion, who chose to keep their babies against odds and wishes and norms.

Listening to and witnessing and receiving all of these stories is incredible. It’s powerful, beautiful, heartbreaking, inspiring. It can feel overwhelming, yes, but ultimately I’m honored, and ultimately, this is what I’d hoped this book could do. This is what I know books can do. I am SO grateful to everyone who has read the book, and showed up to events, and selected it for book club, and passed copies along to friends and neighbors and moms (and husbands—shout out to the men who read novels about women!). I am moved to know that the hard work of writing a novel is worth it. I am honored to be part of the long and necessary lineage of women who tell stories that really fucking need to be told.

And hearing stories makes me want to write more stories! Which I really cannot do when I’m book-hustling. So! Summer is here, I have almost zero book events planned until Fall, and that is very much on purpose. It’s time to write new books! I’m completing the final edits on a book that will come out (finally!) in 2028. I’m letting my agent read pages from the new novel I’ve been working on, and am continuing my (very fun) research for that one (it includes interviewing elderly lesbians and crashing the 60-th anniversary party for Maud’s, the legendary San Francisco lesbian bar). And goddammit, I have another idea for another novel, and I’m extending a family vacation and tacking on a research road trip through the deep South (that’s also an anniversary trip with my wife!) We’re going to Nashville, Memphis, Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham, and maybe later this year I’ll be ready to talk about that book, too!

I was tempted to say that I’m taking a hiatus from Substack this summer, but what if I feel all inspired and want to send a dispatch?! Let’s just say I’ll likely be even more intermittent than I have been. Let’s just say my brain is buzzing, my creative energy is bubbling, and I’m now co-existing with new characters who are very much alive, and kind of won’t shut the fuck up, so I better give myself the time and space to write down what they’re telling me.

Happy summer, and here’s a picture of the time I did an event beneath a painting of a sad clown.