Did You Always Want to Be a Writer?
A question from a journalist made me realize I had been circling the answer my whole life
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here. Join our WhatsApp community to keep the conversation going.
A few weeks ago, a journalist asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer.
“Did you always want to be a writer?”
It seemed like a simple yes or no. But it wasn’t.
Technically, my writing career began in 1997, when I was “Author of the Week” at age six for a story about a camping trip. In third grade, I placed second in a state multicultural book competition for a story I wrote in Hebrew about a cow named Rina. In middle school, I got a letter published in the newspaper, only for the paper to retract it once they found out I was a minor. I had been, on paper, writing things down for most of my childhood.
But to declare that I wanted to be a writer? That was daunting. Perhaps because so few people “make it” as writers, and it felt like a lofty statement from which I would most likely fall, or fail.
So the dream fell into a black hole.
I moved to Israel in my early twenties and stopped writing almost entirely. Not because Israel doesn’t value it. It does, deeply. I stopped because I had my blinkers on, solely focused on building myself from scratch in a new country, a new language, and a new professional identity.
It took five years before I joined a community of other young immigrants working in Israeli tech. Those new friendships with people who’d made the same jump helped me realize that some parts of myself were still in Australia.
By then, my grandma had already passed away, and I had started writing to help me process the grief. I never referred to it as a book. It was “that Google Doc on my computer.”
That Google Doc became The Spoon and the Sea. The manuscript was a finalist in the Vogel Literary Award, and I signed with a global literary agency.
And still, even then, I didn’t have a clear answer to “Did you always want to be a writer?” I defined myself as someone with lots of titles who wrote a book on the side.
I only entered this chapter, the one where I know the answer to the journalist’s question, when the publishing industry tried to tell me I couldn’t. I had an agent and a fancy literary award. But what started at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the days right after October 7 made clear that this door was closed to me because of where I live and who I am.
It took someone telling me I couldn’t be a writer to stop dancing around the question. Fueled by that rejection, I treated my book like a product and turned it into a bestseller.
Here’s the funny part. The moment I actually let myself say it aloud, as scary as it was, storytelling became the thing every company wants and needs from its marketing leaders. AI is changing everything, and the market will be led by companies that can rise above the noise and tell their story in a way that stands out and moves people. Turns out, writing a bestselling historical fiction novel is a great true-or-false icebreaker in this line of work.
So now I am firmly in this chapter and halfway through my second novel. Writing is part of who I am, the way I am Jewish, Israeli, a mother, an immigrant, a tech exec, a historical fiction geek, and a houseplant killer.
So when the journalist asked me, “Did you always want to be a writer?” I told her,“Everyone in Israel who has known me for years said, when I put out a book, ‘Wow, you can write. You wrote a book! And everyone I grew up with in Australia said, ‘Finally, you wrote a book!’”
In other words, yes.
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