The Unmapping, my debut novel about life in a state of emergency, is now available wherever books are sold!
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I am a terrible self-promoter. The Unmapping has been officially out in the world for seven days, and yet, reading this Substack, you might not know it. In my defense, I’ve been busy. For the past 2.5 weeks, Seth and I were in Florida, then Colorado (Denver → Ouray → Boulder), then NYC, then DC, and only got back to Madison late Sunday night.
I started writing a reflection post at the airport on the way home. It was after a weekend of predicted storms that didn’t come to pass, yet they remained in the forecast, including a tornado watch the night of our journey. I couldn’t write much, though. All I could think about were the scattered pieces of dialogue surrounding me. “Twenty grapes, unfortunately.” “It’s like a baby salad.” “You gotta get ready for the boys.” Noises, so many noises. After spending hundreds of hours, probably thousands, with the words that have shaped themselves into a book, my first book, living silently in my head, rearranging themselves soundlessly into the rhythm of story… now my days have been filled with real noises, words and people and interactions and collisions of the sound waves, then the airport buzz that allows a few pointed phrases through. “So you want the ginger chews.” “The bad news is.” “You’ve been gone a long time.” When I filled my water bottle at the filler station, the water sang on the steel, rising in pitch until it was time to pull away. When we went through security, the TSA agent mumbled something that took me thirty seconds to understand: “Are you a Packers Fan?” I told him it was complicated.
I tried to listen to the noises in my head instead. “All you do is press one button.” “Do NOT pay attention to the board.” “Are you a fish?” Memory after memory from the past 2.5 weeks. Our first leg of the journey was from Madison to Orlando, and on the way down, there was some light turbulence. Everyone screamed with each bump. I rolled my eyes at first, but decided they were preparing mentally for roller coasters, and that was fine. It was the closest to a roller coaster Seth and I would get in Florida. We didn’t go to Disney World ourselves, but we did spend two evenings in “downtown Disney,” which is where all the Disneyites go after a day of Disneying to become zombies, overheated and exhausted, as they purchase their final gifts and snacks. Each night, Seth and I ate at the T-Rex-themed restaurant (which we dubbed “t-rextaurant”), then walked around and shocked each other with static electricity (it was in the air, probably from so many animatronic dinosaurs).
Thus began the weeks of noise—the roars of fake dinosaurs and fake volcano blasts and screaming children in our ears—which continued until our final days in DC. “He finishes your sentences.” “I’m a talker too, I have to stop myself.” “Worst case is the khaki uniform.” Talking to friends and loved ones about utility bills, rabbits, piezoelectricity. Talking about the book! So much talking. Talking on the phone, on the radio, over the dinner table, in front of a crowd, in front of another crowd. So I was ready to come home and turn off the sound, which would begin with a nap on the late-night plane, which I was grateful to board after the aforementioned tornado watch, which I decided was no bad omen.
Well.
You know turbulence is bad when the flight attendant yelps into the microphone. When they have to stop and start and restart three times. And that was just at take-off.
Sometimes I think the main goal of life is to try and understand what’s real and what’s not. Stories aren’t real, but writing a story put me on a very real flight. Disney isn’t real, but the faded mouse-ear headbands really do clog up the real trashcans and real gutters. A book tour doesn’t feel real, but somehow it got me to see dear friends from all walks of life who have had real weddings and real babies. The games we play aren’t real—Ping Pong, terrible basketball—but they bring us closer together. Most conversations aren’t real: they are not about conveying information, but they are about existing together. And turbulence isn’t real. Turbulence is not real. It tells you that you are in danger when you’re not.1
And yet. The panic was rising.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a panic attack, but I recognize the signs. It begins with your average heart palpitations and tingles; that’s fine. What’s more concerning is when I begin to lose those physical feelings. A true mind-body split, with my head somehow rising above my shoulders, at risk of floating away. Somehow I convinced my fingers to open the in-flight entertainment to watch a movie, but the technology didn’t work. I tried pretending I was watching a movie in my head instead, but that didn’t work either. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto Seth’s head! I held my breath and counted to ten. I massaged my arms and squeezed my legs. Nothing was working.
Also, I was hungry. I had been counting on the snack cart to come through. But it didn’t come: too much turbulence. I had some snacks in the carry-ons above our heads, but we weren’t allowed to retrieve them. We were not allowed to do anything at all except sit calmly in our seats. There were no screams. This was not Orlando. The anxiety made the hunger worse which made the anxiety worse, my body feeling weak and insignificant. I was trapped.
I rifled through the small bags at our feet, hoping for a miraculous surprise snack. Like a bag of peanuts or an old dinner mint.
Miracle upon miracles: I found a box of chocolates.
Maybe it wasn’t a miracle. I’d picked it up earlier that day as a gift for a family friend, who goes crazy for Neuhaus chocolates. Like, way beyond any normal level of desire. Neuhaus chocolates are good but not that good. I attribute it to the years she spent living in Belgium, so the chocolates bring her back there. When she is eating a chocolate, she is not eating a chocolate. She is reliving the stories of her life when she first ate these chocolates. There are no Neuhaus stores anywhere closer than 1000 miles away from Wisconsin, but there is one in DC, so when I was living there, I would often pick some up on my way to Madison. So it’s become not just a tradition for her, but for me, too: a sign that it was time to go home.
I was so hungry.
I wondered what would happen if I ate just one. Would it fix everything? Would it bring me back into my body and settle the wind in the clouds? Or, would it bring about disaster, like in every single movie, when the very moment a main character decides to compromise their morals, they swiftly bring about their own ruin? An explosion (Conclave) or a terminal cancer diagnosis (A Serious Man) before they’ve finished lifting the pen from the paper. What if I take a bite and that’s when the plane goes down?
On the other hand, was it really compromising my morals if I gave my friend a slightly less luxurious gift than I’d initially intended? Especially if it was to save myself and also everyone else on the plane from this terror?
It was a large box of chocolates.
I checked the flight time on my phone. Only thirty minutes left. I wondered if imagining eating the chocolate would be enough. I pictured it sending its chocolate-magic-chemicals to every corner of my body. I pictured living in Brussels on a gray concrete day, pushing a baby in a stroller. Young and newly married and exploring the world and eating chocolates. For a moment, this worked. Then I looked back at my phone. The flight time had jumped up, presumably to take a longer path to avoid worse turbulence. Now it was at forty-five minutes. Five minutes had passed, yet we were fifteen minutes further away. I took that as a sign. I ate a single chocolate.
And it worked.
The turbulence died down a little, but mostly it transformed into a dance. I listened to music and swayed in my seat and every time the plane jolted it was just part of the choreography. We began our descent. City lights popped in and out of view. We made it to the airport. Then we made it home. There was never a chance of it happening any other way.
Anxiety is not about real danger. It is a battle with the stories in your own head. I can say one thing, but my body believes another. So how fitting that my book/friend tour, which felt surreal in so many ways, ended with something simultaneously less real and more. That’s what The Unmapping is, anyway. A surreal way of getting at something true. What does climate change feel like? It feels like getting lost where you live. It feels like chaos that you’ll never understand but have to keep trying. As Sam Matey wrote of it, “It deserves to be the Novel of the Summer for 2025, because it just works for the times we live in, meeting the moment on so many levels. Unfathomable wonders and horrors are arising in the real world, seemingly stranger by the day.”
Now there is a book in the world with my name on it, but aside from that, my life hasn’t changed. Which is exactly what I wanted. I want my red-painted office, which I think looks cozy but my mother thinks looks like dried blood. I want my scraggly plant that to me says “life” and to my cats says “food.” I want the dual monitor setup so I can look at words and more words. I want to look out the window at the wind blowing through the freshly leaved trees and I want to sweep the seeds off the deck. I want to yell at rabbits with my fists in the air and know they can’t yell back. And I want to write. Two and a half weeks of travel with no writing whatsoever. My brain is stuffed to being clogged with words, and now I get to sit with these words quietly and let them breathe. I am happy to have a book published, and so very grateful to see so many people coming out to support it, but it has always been and always will be about the writing itself. Right now that’s the only story that matters.
-Denise
Some exciting things:
The Unmapping is listed 2nd on People Magazine’s “Most-Anticipated Summer Books”
It is also Madison Magazine’s book of the month for June (thank you,
, for the writeup!)I was interviewed by WORT, the local radio station
Also by the incredible writer
for this literary journal (Read her book Admit This To No One! It’s wonderful)The Unmapping received an incredibly thoughtful review from one of my favorite Substack writers,
(note: the review has spoilers, so wait until you finish the book before you read it!)
I don’t have any cat photos since I’ve been away, but can I interest you in this woolly mammoth?
No? Okay, here’s a photo from the DC event. Buncha animals!
Technically people have died from turbulence but that’s so extremely rare it’s basically a non-possibility