I Wrote a Book with my Wife: It Was the Best

And sometimes the worst!

I know for a fact I’m living through one of the best times in my life.

We’re sitting in a cafe in Soho. She’s pissed at me because she was really excited about the final line she added to the chapter she edited yesterday. I deleted it.

Not because it wasn’t amazing. But because I changed a line two pages early and now it doesn’t make sense.

It is the best thing I have ever done. And I’m doing it right now. I’m determined not to wish it away. To wish it finished.

Because it’s also really hard.

Actual image of her annoyed at me at the cafe

Every day we annoy each other. Every day we contend with each other and struggle with each other. And I love it.

I’m meaner than usual. I’m more exacting. I talk to her in staccato sentences. Make commands.

At first, I didn’t know where it came from. Usually, she is the last person I would ever talk that way to.

At some point in the second draft I realised what it was. It’s how I talk to myself. I don’t know how I feel about that.

I’ve never been this close to her. I don’t know where she ends and I begin. If you printed out the document and showed me a random page, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was mine and what was hers.

I feel like this sometimes, outside the book.

There’s the fights over who said what nonsense phrase first or who invented what stupid joke that isn’t funny to anyone but us.

The morning coffee, where we both share the same shot from the espresso machine.

There was the time we had been silent for ten minutes, only to both say “fish” at exactly the same moment apropos of nothing.

But in the book, it is complete. A sublimation into some ethereal state where we are one being. A dissolution of self.

It’s like flow multiplied by flow.

And it’s not easy. It’s like having a limb that fights you. The two halves of your brain with a single mission and different opinions about how to achieve it. It’s hard that we are mean to each other sometimes. It’s hard that we can’t always have the same idea for how a scene should go. It’s hard when you come back to the text and find something you really love, changed.

It would no doubt be easier to do it myself, but it wouldn’t be as good. It wouldn’t mean as much.

Even if it’s hard. Even if it makes you annoyed at each other. I would whole heartedly recommend writing a book with your wife.

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Did you know Amie has several amazing books you can buy? Check out her fiction and non-fiction

If you want some more pieces on what it’s like to work with your spouse, I have this one about being the “support person” in our relationship. And this one about having a partner who’s more ambitious than you.