The Stranglehold of Gratitude | Happy Thanksgiving to All the Writers Out There

When you’ve touched the stars, gratitude feels like an appropriate response. You look down at Earth from your rarified perch, glimpse the hopefuls with their heads bent skyward, and marvel at the light years you’ve traveled. How were you so lucky to arrive when so many are stuck in the striving? You thank the universe because you are grateful, and because such incantations feel like a safeguard against falling.

(How to Be Creative While Living With Imposter Syndrome.)

It was June in New York. The sun was setting on the ThrillerFest writers’ conference, and I had just sacrificed my only drink ticket for a glass of warm cabernet. New York Times bestselling author Clare Mackintosh stood by my side as a group of writers expressed their thanks—for the week we’d just had, for their successful careers, for the shocked good fortune of being able to do what they love. 

Clare turned to me, mischievous grin, rebel glint in her eye, and said “I’m just so sick of all this gratitude” in a perfectly deadpan voice. The comment was hilarious and irreverent and exhilarating in the way that contrarian views often are. We took tipsy photographs, hugged goodbye, and went our separate ways.

But in the coming months, Clare’s comment lingered, exerting itself with the nagging persistence of an overlooked clue. The key to some locked door in my career I hadn’t even realized was closed. So, I wrote to her. Do you remember saying this? I asked. Yes, she confirmed. Did you mean it? She did. We set up a call.

For context: Clare is 10 years into a star-studded career—with not one, but two, gorgeous titles out this year alone. A fast-paced thriller, A Game of Lies, and a deeply personal work of nonfiction about the loss of her son at five weeks old, I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This: 18 Assurances on Grief. I, on the other hand, am standing at the starting line with a debut novel, The Department, due out in February 2025. I wanted to know what insights Clare had from her vantage point in the firmament that might help me chart a wiser course.

As it turns out, gratitude can be a killer. But a killer dressed in yoga pants and positive affirmations. Your eye is trained on the door while gratitude slinks in the window. The particularly grievous kind that Clare is guarded against is relevant to writers, though I imagine that all creative fields have some version of this wolf in sheep’s clothing. Benign expressions of thanks that belie a much more complex power dynamic, casting the writer as supplicant and the industry as benefactor. A relationship whose imbalance has all kinds of repercussions.

According to Clare, it “stems from the way that most of us became published.” For the vast majority, the path to publication is fraught. Rejection is a rite of passage. There are gatekeepers at every turn. We subsist on a diet of longing, fretting, nail-biting, staring at the phone, refreshing our inboxes. “It becomes very personal for the writer,” Clare says. When the door finally opens, it feels like confirmation of your worth, not just the salability of your work.

Therein lies the problem. To the industry, a writer’s work is a commodity. Something to be exchanged in a marketplace. But to the writer, it feels like being welcomed into the fold. The most important thing is to never be cast out again. Belonging is survival. “That balance of power never tips back,” Clare says. And because “perception is reality,” this becomes the world within which we, as writers, live and operate. “We are held hostage to gratitude.” Better not fuck up.

To be clear, Clare draws an important distinction between gratitude as a dangerous mindset and gratitude as a specific expression of thanks toward individuals who spend their time and energy to mentor, support, and champion our careers. Agents, editors, publicists, fellow authors, readers, and reviewers. To them, gratitude can and should be lavish and profound.

The other form, the malevolent form, is harder to pin down. It’s amorphous. “It’s an attitude,” Clare says. The feeling that one is here because they were lucky enough to have been chosen. It’s not wholly separate from the notion of indebtedness. There’s fascinating research to support this. Despite the benefits of genuine gratitude (reducing depression and anxiety, improving self-esteem, enhancing sleep), it can also produce a toxic positivity and reinforce damaging hierarchies. It can prevent people from leaving bad situations and serve as a silencing mechanism. Why are you complaining when you should be grateful?

Of her own career, Clare says, “I have always felt very strongly that I have agency. I have railed against that kind of gratitude from the start.” Her resolute sense of empowerment may stem from 12 years as a female police officer in a male-dominated field. Whatever its psychic origin, her perspective is sobering. “I have always looked at writing as a business.”

Today, we’re seeing this from female authors who take bold ownership of their motivations and talents. There’s Jessica Knoll’s refreshingly unapologetic New York Times op-ed, “I Want to Be Rich and I’m Not Sorry.” And Gillian Flynn’s righteous custody of her own genius, describing her work-in-progress as “the greatest first page that’s ever been written.”

But for those of us with our feet still firmly planted on Earth, what counsel can we take from this renunciation of gratitude? A luxury, it seems, to disavow it when we’re still so hungry for something to be grateful for. Perhaps the best we can do is to not look skyward, but put our heads down, do the work, remember that writing is an art, but also a business. We do well to resist the soporific lull of gratitude that beckons us in but renders us docile. And all the while, we bestow genuine thanks on those who keep our company on this wild and orbital ride. 

Learn more about Jacqueline Faber's The Department here:

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