I’m Writing a Book But I Don’t Want to Leave the House

Inspired by author Gabrielle Burton

There’s a book that lived on my mother’s bookshelf for years. I never read it. I just memorized the title: I’m Running Away from Home But I’m Not Allowed to Cross the Street.

It made me laugh every time. The drama. The conviction. The hard stop at the curb.

The book wasn’t a children’s story. Gabrielle Burton wrote it in 1972 as a chronicle of her own journey — from solitary frustration and quiet unhappiness inside a marriage and a life that looked right from the outside — toward something that actually was. She was tired of feeling bored, miserable, and trapped. So she joined a Women’s Liberation group, and it cracked her open. Her book is about how the women’s movement gave her hope and voice, and the changes that followed in her family and in herself.

The title is the whole argument in one line. She wanted out. She had every reason to leave. The rules she’d been handed didn’t fit the life she was actually living. But the infrastructure around her — the expectations, the roles, the definitions of what a woman was supposed to want — those were the street she wasn’t allowed to cross. Not because she lacked the courage. Because the system had built the boundary so early, so quietly, that it felt like her own instinct.

That’s not a 1972 problem. That’s the oldest problem there is.

Every norm that holds people in place works exactly the same way. It doesn’t announce itself as a cage. It announces itself as common sense. As the way things are done. As professionalism. As being a team player. As executive presence. As what serious authors do when their book comes out.

You don’t question it. You just stop at the curb.

Burton questioned it. That’s why the book exists. That’s why it sat on my mother’s shelf. And that’s why I remember the title fifty years later — because some ideas are so precise they don’t need an explanation. They just need to be named.

I’m naming mine now. I’m writing a book. And I don’t want to leave the house to promote it.

Here’s the thing about the way I write. Every chapter I’ve written for this book breaks a rule someone told me was non-negotiable. Don’t challenge your own industry. Don’t name the dysfunction out loud. Don’t make executives uncomfortable. Write for the broadest possible audience. Sand the edges. Soften the landing. Make sure everyone feels okay at the end.

I don’t do that.

I write about the systems we built for a world that no longer exists and keep running because nobody wants to be the one to say it out loud.

That’s not a comfortable book. It’s not supposed to be.

And now someone wants me to perform the very thing I’m writing against. Finance my own visibility. Get on the plane. Do the circuit. Post content from airports. Smile at the podium in service of a credential the market has already started to discount.

Plenty of people do it beautifully, generously, and with real results. I’m just not one of them.

It’s not the tour I’m objecting to. It’s the assumption that it’s the only way. That if you’re serious about your work, you get on the plane. That visibility requires a podium. That the credential needs to be performed in person to count.

The publishing world built those rules for conditions that no longer exist. And like every broken system, it keeps running them because nobody has updated the manual.

A published author used to mean something specific. Gatekeepers looked at your work and decided it was worth printing and distributing at scale. That scarcity created credibility. The barrier was real, so the credential held weight.

That barrier is gone — and that changes the math for everyone, whether you tour or not.

Today you can self-publish on Amazon in forty-eight hours. You can hire a ghostwriter, hand them a voice memo and a credit card, and have a manuscript in twelve weeks. You can reach a number one bestseller ranking in a thin niche category with the right launch timing and a ninety-nine cent price point. The algorithm doesn’t know the difference between a decade of craft and a well-timed discount.

That’s not an indictment of anyone making smart moves inside a broken system. That’s just the system.

The book I’m writing is about what happens when we follow playbooks designed for conditions that no longer exist. The book tour is a playbook designed for conditions that no longer exist. So I’m not doing it.

Burton questioned the norm that said her life had to look a certain way. She didn’t burn the house down. She just stopped pretending the rules made sense when they clearly didn’t. She named the boundary. She wrote the book. She changed things — for herself first, and then for everyone who picked it up off a shelf and felt something shift.

That’s the move. That’s always been the move.

The bravest thing isn’t always crossing the street. Sometimes it’s standing on a different side of it, asking why everyone else is still running in the same direction.

That’s the whole book. In one sentence.

The year Burton's book was published, my mother decided to divorce my father and go back to school. She earned a master's degree in psychology and built a different life — one she chose for herself. I am who I am because of the choices she made for herself, and I'm grateful for that every single day.