I wrote a book. It’s called Softboy Diaries. You can’t buy it, and that’s fine — better than fine, actually. Let me explain, because the explanation is the whole point.
I wrote it in a bad year. The kind you don’t narrate while you’re inside it, because you can’t see the edges yet. Hamburg, then Berlin. A flat share, a room I tore the wallpaper off for no reason I could name. A stretch where I lost the plot more or less completely, and for a while afterwards couldn’t tell which parts had been real. I’m not going to dress it up here. It was the lowest I’ve been.
I started writing because I didn’t know what else to do with it. Not to publish. Just to get it out of my head and onto something that would hold still. And somewhere in there it turned into the thing I’d been putting off for years — the therapy I kept saying I didn’t need. Cheaper than the real thing, and available at four in the morning. Every scene I could get onto the page was one I no longer had to carry around whole.
So I finished it. A whole book, start to end, which is apparently the hard part, and then I did the sensible thing and sent it to twenty agencies. None of them wanted it. For a while that felt like a verdict on the writing, and then on me, which is how these things escalate when you let them.
It isn’t a verdict. I know that now, and not in a bitter way. Debut autofiction from a name nobody’s heard is just hard to place — that’s a market fact, not a judgement of the sentences. But more than that: the book already did its job. It was never really written to be sold. It was written to get me out of a room. It did that. Everything after would have been a bonus, and you don’t get to be resentful about a missing bonus when the actual thing worked.
Which is where the shirt comes in.
I don’t want the book to just sit on a drive, finished and invisible, waiting for permission that might never come. So I’m making a shirt out of it. SOFTBOY DIARIES on the front. The chapters down the back, all three parts — Hamburg, Berlin, the return — like a tracklist for a record only I ever heard.
It isn’t out yet. I’m still working on it — the fit, the print, getting the back to sit right. It’ll come later, in a small run, the way everything here does. When it’s ready it’ll show up in the current delivery, and I’ll say so.
When it does, it’ll be the most honest Fragment I’ve made. A piece of clothing that is actually a piece of writing. You wear it, it fades, the letters go soft at the edges — patina by design, applied to a bad year I came out the other side of. The book doesn’t need a publisher to exist. It exists. Soon you’ll be able to wear it.
That’s enough. That’s more than enough.
