Mark Lukach is a writer and teacher who lives in Martinez, CA with his wife, son, and bulldog. He has been published in The New York Times, Pacific Standard, and The Atlantic Monthly, among others, and is publishing a memoir with Harper Wave in spring of 2017. Mark is an avid trail runner and body surfer.
Loren Kleinman (LK): In your article on the Pacific Standard called "My Lovely Wife In The Psych Ward," you talk about loving someone with depression. Can you talk about how this article has inspired you to work on your longer book, which is due out in 2017 by Harper Wave?
Mark Lukach (ML): In truth, the article did not inspire the book, because it was the other way around: the book inspired the article. The story of the book is about five years old, almost as old as my wife's diagnosis. When we were 27 and she was first hospitalized with acute psychosis, I had no idea what the hell was going on. Her first bout with psychosis, and the subsequent suicidal depression, lasted almost a year, during which I searched for stories of people who were in my shoes. I didn't find any. While there are writers who have written from Giulia's side of the equation--those who have been hospitalized, and who are forced to take unpleasant medications, and grapple with suicidal impulses--I was surprised that there weren't many speaking out about it from my side of the equation, the family members whose lives were just as upended by the mental illness, even though they weren't the ones diagnosed. So I set out to write a book of my own.
I think I pitched about 50 different agents with a loose book proposal, and none of them were interested. Then, I pitched an excerpt to the "Modern Love" column of the New York Times, and it was accepted. The essay was published in November 2011 under the title "Out of the Darkness," and it changed everything. Now I had agents and publishers approaching me, and I worked with an agent to secure a book deal. Much to our frustration, a deal never materialized, and we parted ways.
Then, in 2013, Liz Weil, a contributing NY Times Magazine writer who had read my Modern Love piece, emailed me out of nowhere. She had just started editing for Pacific Standard, and she wanted to see if I wanted to work on a piece with her. She was curious about the progress of the memoir, and suspected that there were more stories to tell than what was in the Modern Love piece. I had taken a few years off from working on the book, so I figured that a magazine article was a great way to jumpstart the book project, which felt like it was dying a slow death. I figured I'd give it a shot, and if nothing materialized from the magazine article, well then maybe the book just wasn't meant to be.
We worked on the article for a long time, almost a year. We finally finished the piece and it went out to publish in January of 2015.... and for lack of a better phrase, it went viral. It had over a million reads in the first day, and close to 4 million in the first week. The reception was explosive, and totally unexpected. After working on the article for so long, I was just relieved that it was finally out there, and I could move on. Instead, it had me once again fielding emails from agents and publishers. This time, I hit the jackpot. I partnered with an amazing agent, Bonnie Solow, and she helped orchestrate a deal with Harper Wave by the end of February, less than two months after the article published.
LK: Can you discuss how you turned an article into a book? What was the process like?
ML: I'm actually still in the midst of the conversion. When the article published, I had a 90,000 word memoir that was 4 years old, which chronicled (in excessive, painstaking detail.... I now understand why that manuscript didn't sell) my wife's first hospitalization. She has since had two additional hospitalizations, so it was a matter of trimming a lot of the crap out of those 90,000 words, and adding on two more hospitalizations, plus the birth of our son. I guessed that between the old manuscript and the Pacific Standard article, I had about half the book to mine from there, and the other half was going to be new material.
In the summer of 2016, I'll put the finishing touches on it, and then I turn it into Harper on September 1, 2016.
LK: How has writing been a support system?
ML: I like the question of writing as a support system, because that has unquestionably been true for me. When Giulia first got sick, I would spend hours at night writing lengthy emails to my parents, as an attempt to explain to them, and to myself, what was going on. I must have written hundreds of pages of emails over the course of the year, and in truth, they are a big part of what inspired me to write a book. There's no question about it that writing has been therapeutic for me. It's very emotionally draining, and I have to tap back into some pretty raw emotions to write about some of the memories from Giulia's three hospitalizations, but I feel like I'm surrounding those memories with beauty and creativity by writing about them, and that has helped me immensely.
What's next?
Publish! Gotta get the book finished, and then published, and then who knows. I'm still a bit shocked that I'm here in the first place, with a book deal from a major publisher, working with a top-notch writer as my editor, a powerhouse agent as my advocate...it's all pretty surreal. I often have the Talking Heads lyrics ringing through my head--"how did I get here?" especially considering that this whole journey started by taking my wife to the psych ward.