Building Muscle Memory: The Book I Was Afraid to Talk About

Muscle Memory was never supposed to be read by anyone other than me.

My father passed in 2021, exposing my helplessness when it came to asking for help. I’d spent my life developing the thickest skin, projecting a hyper-independence that I thought could never be pierced. Losing my dad ripped that skin away, leaving a raw pulp of fear that I’d been pushing down. 

I didn’t speak the language of asking for help. I had to learn. 

I looked into grief counseling groups, but the thought of talking about my grief in front of strangers made me feel faint. On the other hand, talking to people I knew and trusted made me feel pathetic. I didn’t want to be the downer: the person in need of help and support I didn’t have a clue how to ask for. 

I started with the one thing I’ve always been able to trust: books. Because that was another thing: my grief was so confounding, it had struck me with the worst case of writer’s block I’d ever experienced. My work was suffering, and my identity along with it. I needed to unblock what I’d trapped inside, and I figured spending some time with the words of other writers might help.

I started with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, a breathtaking work of remembrance that struck close to home for me, as we’d both lost our fathers during the pandemic. I was inspired by her rawness: how instead of trying to skirt around the experience and carry on with her usual work, she decided to use her craft to face it head on. 

I decided to do the same, and that’s how Muscle Memory was accidentally born. 

How my grief became fiction

I opened a blank Google Doc, giving myself permission to vomit.

Vomit I did: all over the screen with some of my most pleading, angry, desperate, disbelieving, and depressed thoughts. It wasn’t meant to see the light of day. I just wanted to create one small space for myself to begin talking—or writing—about what had happened. I still felt so lost.

After a few days of attacking the same doc with my emotions, it turned fictional. While I admired Chimamanda’s ability to express from a place of total truth, I needed to feel a little more distance and dissociation—I am a Pisces, after all. So, instead of writing about 20-something year old Taylor losing her father Bill, I wrote about 17-year-old Jane losing her father Gil. 

The name Muscle Memory came from my own experience with my grief, which has been an incredibly physical journey. I was drawn to kickboxing during the anger stage of the process; I wanted to punch and kick my feelings out of my body. That’s where I met my husband, who inspired the character Liam. 

What is Muscle Memory about?

After the death of Jane’s father, she moves from California to New York to live with her grandmother, leaving behind the only life she has ever known. There, she meets Liam, a Brooklyn teenager carrying his own griefs, loyalties, and contradictions. 

As the two fall deeply in love, Jane becomes entangled in a complicated chosen family whose wounds begin to echo her own. And in her own struggles with her mother and grandmother, she realizes that we inherit much more than names or physical features. We inherit fears, silences, ways of loving, methods of survival, and patterns we may not even recognize as patterns.

At its heart, Muscle Memory is about grief, identity, queer love, and the ways trauma settles into our bodies and relationships. But it is also about hope: the possibility that recognizing what we have inherited can give us the power to choose something different.

How much of who we become is chosen, and how much is simply remembered?

Why was I afraid to talk about my novel?

I’ve always wanted to be a fiction writer. I’ve also long felt conflicted about it. 

Nonfiction—a.k.a., my decade-long career in journalism—asks me to tell you what happened, sans opinion. Fiction asks me to reveal how I believe people work: what frightens them, what they hide, how they hurt one another, and whether I believe they can change. The events may be invented, but the emotional logic behind them isn’t. In that way, fiction has always felt very revealing to me, and vulnerability is scary. 

Jane is not me. Gil is not my father. Liam is not my husband. These characters have become people in their own right, with lives and choices separate from ours. But the grief moving through Jane’s body began in mine. The questions inside this book are questions I have asked myself. Sharing it means allowing people to see not only what I can imagine, but how I understand the world.

I have spent more than a year querying Muscle Memory while continuing to revise it, yet I’ve rarely spoken publicly about what the book means to me. I want people to read it, but I also want to protect it. I’ve been waiting to talk about the novel until I could present it as a finished, inevitable thing, but books are not inevitable while you’re making them. So, this series is my attempt to stop hiding behind “not finished yet.” If I’m asking readers to meet me inside this book, I have to be willing to meet them halfway.

Why this story wouldn’t leave me alone

It took me a long time to realize Muscle Memory was a book.

It began as a short story that got longer and longer. I kept writing because the characters kept growing, changing, and revealing new parts of themselves to me. By the time I completed the first full draft, I had written an entire novel without an outline, or even chapters. The manuscript was divided by bullet points, which felt like enough organization at the time. I was still in the fog of grief, and amazed that I could even type a full sentence without passing out. 

The first version I wrote followed the younger characters from their teenage years into their early thirties. I stayed with them through more than a decade of their lives, watching the patterns established by their families shape the adults they eventually became.

The edit I’m finishing now, which is the final (finally!!) has cut that manuscript in half and replaced it with some new material. The characters remain teenagers throughout this version. I may eventually go back and write a sequel about their later years, but I don’t regret following them that far the first time. I think I needed to see who they became before I could return to their adolescence and truly understand them.

I used to hear writers say their characters had “come to life” and think, Okay, d-bag. But now, I completely get what they were talking about. 

You meet your fiction characters the same way you meet anyone else in the world. At first, you know only what they show you. But spend a little more time with them, and you begin to recognize their contradictions, defenses, desires, and inherited wounds. I had to follow Jane, Lacey, Liam, Constance, Zhang and Petra forward to understand what they were carrying, and where they still had the chance to choose differently.

That possibility kept pulling me back: the hope that we can inherit pain without being sentenced to repeat it. That love can support us without rescuing us. That hope is not something we stumble upon, but something we practice.

What revising Muscle Memory has taught me

The first version of Muscle Memory I wrote was distant and dreamlike. Since I had no plan, just vibes, the scenes drifted into one another, time moved quickly, and some moments existed more as vignettes than fully inhabited experiences. It made sense to me at the time: grief fractures time and makes reality feel blurred. That’s exactly how I was writing, but I eventually realized that the distance protecting me as I wrote was also keeping the reader at a distance, which was my issue both on the page and in real life.

During this last revision, I’ve slowed everything down. Instead of explaining that Jane feels disoriented, I stay with her long enough for us to experience that disorientation inside her body. What does she notice? What can’t she look at? Which sounds, smells, or movements pull her into a memory she has been trying to avoid?

The emotional arc existed, but emotion alone wasn’t enough. I had to make the reader feel physically present inside the characters’ lives.

I also made one of the biggest structural changes to the novel: alternating between the different characters’ points of view with each chapter. Letting them each narrate allowed me to go deeper into their individual fears and desires. It also made their relationships more complicated, because love is never one perfectly shared experience. 

Where the manuscript stands now

I’m currently finishing the final chapters of this revision, which I’ve been dragging my feet on. For example: look at me, writing this blog at this very moment instead of editing. 

But the book is closer than it has ever been to the version I’ve carried inside me. I’m still finding places to slow down, move deeper, and let the characters surprise me. I can finally see the whole shape of it, even if I’m still adjusting some of its bones.

Current diagnosis: The emotional heart of the novel is alive. My job is to make every scene feel as embodied as the emotions beneath it.

This month’s misstep: Waiting until I felt certain before allowing anyone to see the process.

What I’m trying next: Talking about Muscle Memory before talking about it feels easy. A.k.a., NOW.

Welcome to Building Muscle Memory

Building Muscle Memory is a monthly diary about writing, revising, and eventually releasing this novel.

Every month, I’ll share where the book stands: the character discoveries, revision problems, deleted scenes, tiny details, and decisions that are changing the story. I’ll tell you what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m trying next as Muscle Memory makes its way from my Google Doc into the hands of readers.

If you’d like to follow the journey from manuscript to publication, bookmark this blog, or subscribe to my newsletter for a new installment of Building Muscle Memory and other writing updates on the first of every month.