Afterword
It’s exciting that Slow Down is being reissued by its new publisher All Due Respect for its five-year anniversary. Seems like a lifetime ago, and I’m thankful that a new audience will get a chance to read my debut novel. The book is about horrible people doing horrible things to another, but there’s an underlying pulse of sweetness that exists at its core. It’s a takedown of a society that is moving at way too fast a pace, but also a love story between Noah and Nevie. They are cruel to each other throughout, but truly love another and know that the only way they can survive is to leave everything and run away together. The question is whether they make it. I like to leave that up to interpretation. I go back and forth myself deciding about their end. Both of them certainly want to escape their lives, but whether they have the guts to do so is for the reader to decide.
The first draft of this book was written when I was twenty-two in 2001. I’d just graduated college and worked an awful job similar to Noah where we were honestly abused. I had a chair thrown at me at an office Christmas party at P. Diddy’s restaurant by a drunk superior. I was fired pretty much in the same way as Noah and used that as fuel. Job prospects were grim due to a dot.com burst and 9/11 on the horizon, but I was lucky enough to still be living at home and would write in Gramercy Park every day. I remember how happy it made me to be able to create and feel like I had a chance at getting published. I was listening to Coldplay’s “Yellow” and I thought of the line, “We were all yellow.” I imagined a Manhattan where people had the same tattoo of a yellow circle on the small of their backs and the book developed from there.
While I tried the publishing route, it just didn’t happen. So I stuck the book in a desk for ten years and then pulled it out after getting an agent. We tried the big houses but they found the book “too mean.” Noah was unsympathetic, and editors didn’t see a wide audience. We sent it to Jon Bassoff, an amazing writer who ran New Pulp Press at the time, and he bought the book for precisely that reason. He loved that it was about horrible people doing horrible things to one another. And this kicked off my career.
Looking back, I’ll always be proud that Slow Down was my debut. And even though a lot of the characters are tough to like, they are human. There are times when Noah is vulnerable, and even sympathetic, you just have to look closely.
In terms of the mantra Slow Down, it couldn’t be more applicable today. Writing this, the world is in the midst of a pandemic, and my hometown New York City has been hit harder than most places. We have been moving for years at such a fast pace, not allowing ourselves to take a breath between twenty-four seven news cycles, and social media, etc. I hope we come out of this slowing down just a little, realizing what is important, not letting life just zoom by. So, be like Noah, I guess. Well, be like part of Noah. The Noah that finally wakes up. And thanks for reading!
—Lee Matthew Goldberg, April 21, 2020