On Sinéad, and on making an anthology

Part I of an ongoing adventure

Sinéad is the energy I need right now. Sinéad: who told the truth and stood up to power and was shunned, she of the raucous bellow and the beautiful trill, the woman who fiercely felt and lived as she believed, who was shunned for political action about issues that are still silenced, who changed her mind and never stopped asking questions. May she rest in peace and power.

I’m still so stunned that this book, Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us, is happening Its tentative pub date is July 22, 2025, from One Signal of Simon & Schuster, and you can preorder it, which is wild. I wanted to write about the process of pulling this together, because it was a wild ride, and I think, will continue to be. And I think we need these essays, each about how a song or a moment can change your life, and each about persevering through dark times and challenges.

Getting to talk with these authors and work inside these essays with them was a stunningly wonderful opportunity. It was a huge conversation, and continues to be. And oh my gosh, the talent of these writers!

Our authors:

Sharbari Ahmed

,

Sarah Viren

,

rayne fisher-quann

, Stacey Lynn Brown,

Millicent Souris

, Lidia Yuknavitch, Stephanie Elizondo Griest,

Porochista Khakpour

Gina Frangello, Mieke Eerkens,

Myriam Gurba

, Lauretta Hannon,

Sinéad Gleeson

, Zoe Zolbrod, me,

Martha Bayne

,

Madhushree Ghosh

, Jill Christman, Nalini Jones, Megan Stielstra, Heidi Czerwiec, Brooke Champagne, May-Lee Chai,

Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha

, and Allyson McCabe, author of the book Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters which just won the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award.

And a forward by

Neko Case

!!

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When Sinéad passed away, I was pulled into a vivid grief. It felt different than losing another musician, although I’m sure so many people have a specific attachment to one singer or another. The weird thing was that I kind of didn’t even realize she was that person for me. No, that’s not quite right: I didn’t think of her as just a singer-songwriter-musician. She was a presence, as so many of us felt. She illuminated what was possible. Maybe it was that we were similar ages, and there’s also something odd, I think, about being called Sinéad, as I was, in college, by random people after I’d shaved my head. But no—it was about her fierceness, which I don’t even need to describe because you might know it. It was her convictions, her flexibility, the horror she’d been through and the beauty she spun from it.

Anyway, I played her songs nonstop as I cried, and I was doing this a few days later when my mom flew into visit, so I was driving down I-95 to get her at LaGuardia. And at around Stamford, I began to loop “Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” and felt it in my bones every time. I knew I needed to write about that song, but then I wondered what other people’s songs were. So when I got to LaGuardia, as I was standing by the baggage claim waiting for my mom, I pulled out my phone and posted on Facebook a few lines about how that was my song, and wouldn’t it be great to do an anthology, and what would your song be?

I got my mom, and we started talking about a million things, and I didn’t look at the post until I got home, but already dozens of people were posting, and actually there were already arguments happening about the rules and who got first dibs on a song. So I felt I had to do something because I didn’t want people to fight. From that original post, there were comments about co-editors, and Martha Bayne had commented, and so I replied to her asking if she’d co-edit this thing, because Martha had been my editor for an anthology I was in from Belt Publications, Rust Belt Chicago, and she was so great to work with.

We scheduled a zoom call and Nana-Ama Danquah was also on the call, because she was thinking about co-editing with us but ultimately couldn’t. I had written up a paragraph towards a summary for a proposal, and Martha and Nana-Ama argued that something else was needed, that it was an anthology, yes, but it needed some focus besides the one person, one song idea. They were right, and so we ended the call, and as usually happens, I got despondent because I didn’t have a magic idea, and then after a few hours, I wanted this book to be a book so badly that I forced one out of my head. (This, I think, is an upgraded version of the first paragraph I must have emailed to Martha and Nana-Ama, with their additions and edits):

One song, one writer. In this timely anthology, a diverse range of women and nonbinary U.S.-based writers each consider an in-depth and personal response to one song by Sinead O’Connor. Rather than a collection of musical criticism, this collection presents our experiences of being riveted at a particular time of crisis or challenge by one of O’Connor’s songs, which seemed to offer a road map for personal transformation in the face of social restrictions and political limitations and norms. As an icon of protest music and a writer of gentle lullabies, O’Connor’s voice and music ranged boldly, and her presence offered an alternative in terms of gender identity, spirituality, rebellion, vulnerability, and anger that opened possibilities for us, presenting a model for re-seeing our own lives. Each author will discuss both the personal connection to the song, the song’s context, and the mysterious thread that connected us to the singer that has felt very different from our devotion to other performers. We will explore the outsized and vital impact that Sinead O’Connor’s artistry, decisions, and voice have had on our lives. We believe that her death in 2023 has shattered us in a specific way because Sinead’s emergence and death offer two bookends through which to view our lives. Amid attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, restrictions on reproductive healthcare, and rising racism in a polarized nation, we wonder between 1990 and 2023, whether things do feel different and how they are different since the first time we were riveted by her voice. Taken together, these essays present not only a collection of personal experiences; together they build toward a theory of the singer’s impact and the meaning of her life through the lenses of our lives and our stories.

I was shocked that they liked it, that it was specific enough. So away we went! We then had a big challenge in terms of how many essays we could choose, and how to select them based on pitches, combined with the fact that we wanted a diverse range of essays, and the first people to see my Facebook posts are not a diverse or representative range of people. We made a list of possibilities from the post, and I posted a follow up saying that we’d take pitches, but that ended up not being true, so I had to apologize for that later.

We started soliciting friends and friends of friends, and though I got advice to not build the list around well-known people for the sake of being well-known, it was also going to be a selling point of the anthology to have recognized names. (And even now my brain is compiling a running list of people we should have asked!!) And meanwhile, we were putting things together into a proposal.

As an aside, I find book proposals very, very difficult to write. (Actually I have a lot to say about this, so maybe it should be a whole other post.) Also

Anne Trubek

has said smart things about this in her wonderful newsletter Notes from a Small Press, in the post “Wither Nonfiction”:

A friend of mine needed to send their agent a 25,000 word proposal before they would read it. Many proposals are in the 60K word range. It’s an enormously high bar, and it takes almost as much time (and leave from work) to do the kind of book proposal that both Big Five and most academic presses (given peer review) require. So many good books linger unpublished not because the publishing house didn’t offer a large enough advance, but because the proposal process is unnecessarily complex and time-consuming. Also, it caters to a certain kind of writer, and not all people who could write great researched non-fiction can write a great book proposal.

BUT I will say that this will probably be the only time in my life that the proposal was not hard to do. It went relatively quickly, mostly because 1. It was made up of pitches from our authors and 2. It was a group project. But back to Sinéad.

The proposal got done very quickly, my amazing agent Mariah Stovall at Trellis Literary was excited about it, and she started sending it out that November. (This is also unheard of for me, idea to finished proposal in a few months). But we actually had timeliness on our side. And part of what multiple smart people like

Jane Friedman

and

ken whyte

have written about the “nonfiction crisis” actually played in our favor. Yes, this was an anthology, which is always hard to sell, and it was a collection of essays, which is strike two. BUT it was about a famous person who is and was deeply beloved. We went through one round of subs and it wasn’t taken, but on the second round, One Signal was interested. Interested!!!

I was up at a one-week residency at Prospect Street Writers House in late January, and if you’ve followed my substack posts, you know that my life was falling apart in a few specific ways. So my first residency ever was a huge gift to myself, and then in that week Martha and I learned that we had a real-live meeting with a publisher on zoom. I hadn’t brought even an eyeliner, and just t-shirts and sweatpants, so I ran to Goodwill for a nice black shirt and CVS for an eyeliner.

Martha and I talked and brainstormed and zoomed beforehand with Mariah, and then we did well, and Nick Ciani at One Signal was actually super interested and excited about the project and then it …. SOLD? And then the title changed from So Different Now to Nothing Compares to You, and I was happy about the change. Because titles are so hard!

And then Martha and I worked our butts off with a solid 6 months of editing, soliciting more writers with Mariah’s help, and the help of other contributors, using a series of Dropbox folders to move essays through our production process, tracking everything on a spreadsheet, doing zoom calls, and navigating our lives and curveballs of life in the process. And also: because of where many of these authors are in their lives, many of them Gen X, they had such life challenges with illness, caretaking, death of parents and other significant people, and other calamities, and yet they wrote through it, doing the thing, responding to emails in grief, practicing their craft in the face of sadness and challenges and change. The most common email Martha and I exchanged during the editing process, as the essays came in one by one, was “OMG go to the folder, this essay is freaking amazing!!”

Because of who Sinéad was, and the roles that she played and plays in our lives, the essays themselves were each tied to BIG things in our lives. We watched writers dig as deep as they could, and I think it’s okay to say on behalf of both myself and Martha that we were often in awe. Because of who Sinéad was, these essays will rock you, will make you nod with recognition and remembered pain and love and beauty.

I don’t know how many more parts there will be to this ongoing post, but I can’t thank our contributors enough for their beautiful words. You’re going to love this book, I promise.

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Do you have an idea about a review of this book, or an event, or a festival, or a reading, or a bookstore that might host us? Would you like to be on the ARC list? Please let us know via this Google form!

Also, some other good things I’m excited about: An essay of mine that ended up in Love and Industry was published by River Teeth, and it’s a Notable in Best American Essays 2024! Yay and thank you, River Teeth!

And I was delighted to be invited to talk with Amy Hallberg for her podcast, The Courageous Wordsmith, which. you can find here!