Reading: Bipolar Disorder? Check! 49 Rejections? Check!

In 2021, I finished my MFA program in creative nonfiction at the Mississippi University for Women. I was 50 years old with bipolar disorder and unemployed due to putting my effort into finishing my degree. I spent the past few years fighting for stability of my mental condition since early 2005, which had been treated as postpartum depression. Moving to a new home, dealing with the mildly traumatic birth of my youngest daughter, and an alarming car accident all contributed to a severe depression. The final straw for my frazzled mind was Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Mississippi in late 2005. 

At the time, I was a freelance reporter working out of my home. I had lived in a sustained hypomanic state the previous five years, writing regularly for 10 different publications throughout the region. But after the hurricane hit, I fell into an even deeper depression, unable to manage my job duties, my housekeeping, and childrearing. I gave up on my career in mid-2006 and was awarded disability payments in 2007.

I spent many years trying to find out what my life was going to look like now. After I had a four-year span without flare-ups from my disorder, I signed up to teach English composition at a community college, two classes a semester in fall 2012. After two-and-a-half years, I was asked to take on a third class — and immediately found myself swamped. I simply could not keep up with the work; my mental state began to deteriorate once again.

How I Persevered
Before I left that job, however, I discovered the low-residence MFA being offered for the first time at a state college in fall 2015. After talking to my husband and the director of the program about what accommodations I might need as a disabled student, I enrolled and took the slow route to graduation — six years. I had a depressive episode once in 2018 that left me hospitalized, as well as another one during the pandemic years, and the civil unrest of 2020 made me impossibly paranoid and afraid.

But I pushed through as I always had. 

In 2021, equipped with my degree, and feeling hopeful for my future for the first time in many years, I was faced with the question — what now?

I tried writing full-time for a while, wanting to revise the memoir I had written for my thesis on my bipolar journey and found out that wasn’t good for my mental state. When the words flowed, I was happy, but when they didn’t, my mood would crash and sometimes take days to recover.

The ebbs and flows of my writing took a toll on me as they do many writers — on days the words just wouldn’t come, I questioned my whole reason for existing: Who was I if I wasn’t a writer? Who was I when I couldn’t write?

So instead, I began looking for a job. I landed one quickly with the marketing department of a small scholarly publishing house. It was part-time, but it kept my mind busy. I would be preparing and sending marketing materials and pretty much learning the ropes for how to sell books in this post-Covid economy. 

In January 2022, I made a New Year’s resolution to write more — I initially wanted to do more flash fiction pieces based on a book of writing prompts. I wanted to draft a new flash fiction story every day. But the habit of writing every day eluded me, and I was completely frozen whenever I did come to the blank page.

But in mid-January, I had an idea: Back in 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I wrote a novel called Hurricane Baby. I had conceived of it early in the aftermath of the hurricane, which directly affected my family even though we were 150 miles inland from where it made landfall. Writing this novel began as a way to channel all the angst I felt about what Katrina had done to the country and how it had affected me personally. 

Back in 2005, after I finished the first raw manuscript, I heard about a fellow journalist from my freelancing days who had signed a book contract with a good publisher. I called my buddy and got the name of his agent, who was in Mississippi, and gave him a call. We met, and I gave him the manuscript. He immediately fell in love with it and offered me representation. But selling it to New York was another story. He submitted it to around 20 New York publishers, none of which seemed interested. So I shelved it.

Now, 16 years later, I felt Hurricane Baby was still a marketable story, and a project I felt passionate about. 

When I found out the press I was working for wanted to hire me, I was faced with a choice: stick with the book or go with the job?

Since the job was less than 20 hours a week, I felt I could fit in the writing around my job by writing at night — just like I used to when my children were little. I worked six hours, three days a week, and kept Mondays and Fridays as days off. That left plenty of time to manage the household, my youngest child, and other obligations. And write. So my mind was settled — part-time job, part-time writer.

Seeing the Payoff from Having Persevered
I set a simple goal — write 12 stories out of the original manuscript. Some of the energy I found to work on the book and the marketing job at the same time was fueled by a mania I did not want to admit was happening to me. Bit by bit, I rearranged scenes and reassigned speeches from one character to another. I dreamed up new characters, all of whom needed their own story arc and conclusions. I signed up for a summer-long writing workshop where I submitted scenes of the book to be critiqued and met other writers working on manuscripts as well.

By the end of summer, I had sent the manuscript out to several voracious readers I knew who gave me suggestions on the manuscript’s pacing, believability, and tone. One reader told me that he needed closure on what happened to a particular character. I had been expecting someone to say that, so I did the work needed to give that character closure. Another one said one storyline in the book reminded her of the movie Fireproof — and not in a good way. So that one was reworked. 

By fall of 2022, I had compiled a very preliminary list of small presses, independent publishers, and academic presses that looked like they would be a good fit for what the book offered: a Southern Gothic historical linked short-story collection. I was just going to avoid the literary agent route altogether and send my work to publishers directly. I got my materials together — my query letter, my synopsis — and I started sending it out over email.

I got some very encouraging notes on the book: one editor mentioned she had enjoyed the stories, but they didn’t have room for it on their editorial calendar; another commended me for taking on such a formidable topic and said that my work was good but also said he didn’t think he was the right publisher for it.

Around December, I had it read again by two readers I had met in my workshop. We traded manuscripts — they read mine and I read theirs. This read really put the final touches on the work and made me go deeper into the characters and what they had been through. I did another rewrite and kept sending to more and more publishers.

By the following fall, it had been out on submission for a year. I had sent it to 69 different publishers and had received 49 rejections.

Early on, I let the rejections slide off my back. I was feeling blessed that no one wrote me a scathing letter on how I should never put pen to paper ever again. But amidst the steady drumbeat of rejections, my mood started to go south, and I’ll admit that I gave up emotionally on the book in late August 2023. I had two more publishers on my list that opened for submissions in October, and then I was going to be done. 

I’d wait to see what kind of replies I received from those last couple of publishers. And if they were rejections, I was going to give up on writing, publishing, the whole works. I would just keep working my marketing job making other writers’ dreams come true and give up on my dream of ever publishing a book myself.

Then Sunday, September 10, 2023, I got an email from Madville Publishing, which is a very small outfit out of Texas. They liked the book and asked if they could have the honor of publishing it. 

I was astounded. I kept refreshing the screen on my phone to make sure I had really read what I thought it said. My husband walked in the room, and I looked up at him and told him, “I sold Hurricane Baby.”

Against all odds — battling bipolar disorder, self-doubt, and decades of rejection — I persevered to finish what I started. 

I took a job when I realized I was not cut out for sitting behind a desk waiting for the words to come. The job kept my mind busy on other tasks, which freed up space to visualize (without pressure) what my author journey could look like. 

I set small achievable goals: two hours every night to write. 

I prepared myself for failure. I had a job. I had my family. It was OK if I failed to publish my book.

But I also set myself up for success — with people around me to aid in my journey. I had my readers, my author friend who looked at my contract for me, my professors who were willing to blurb my manuscript, and all of my writing and writing-adjacent friends who would commiserate, celebrate, and support me as I continued on. 

It took nearly 20 years — ones flooded with self-doubt, rejection, and disability — to become a published author. But in the end, it was a journey I needed to take to be ready for the new challenges ahead.

Julie Liddell Whitehead is an award-winning freelance writer who covers topics on mental health education and advocacy. Hurricane Baby comes out in August 2024. You can connect with her on Instagram @jdlwhitehead