There’s Always Next Year: What the Buffalo Bills Taught Me About Writing and Hope

There is nothing writers love more than talking about how hard it is to write. Stephen King described the writing process as “like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.” Sportswriter Red Smith, in a quote often erroneously attributed to Ernest Hemingway, compared it to sitting down at a typewriter and bleeding. Gwendolyn Brooks: “Delicious agony.” George Orwell: “Like a long bout of some painful illness.”

That is also what it feels like to watch the Buffalo Bills.

Like most Bills fans, I was born into this serfdom with no possibility of escape. There is a picture of my dad, wearing a Bills sweatshirt and hat, holding two-day-old me in the hospital; just out of frame is the Bills-branded cooler of Miller Lite he brought with him to watch the Bills play the Dolphins on the hospital’s television. It was Western New York in the very late eighties. The Bills had Jim Kelly, Thurman Thomas, and Bruce Smith and were about to embark on a run that would culminate in four consecutive Super Bowl appearances; it was a bringing-beer-to-the-hospital era.

But here is where being a Bills fan works to my advantage: who cares about humiliation!

But the hospital beers couldn’t last. Those four consecutive Super Bowl appearances became four consecutive Super Bowl losses, a feat that had never happened before in the history of the NFL and has never been equaled since. The Bills are among history’s most prolific losers, the Wagners of the devastating loss; they are losing virtuosos, and they’re loud about it. Their seventeen-season-long playoff drought was one of the NFL’s longest ever, and it encompassed my middle school, high school, and college years and most of my early adulthood. My first Technicolor football memory is watching the Bills crash out of the playoffs with the Music City Miracle, when the Tennessee Titans returned a kickoff for a touchdown in the final moments of the Wild Card game with a questionable lateral, when I was in the fifth grade. The Bills wouldn’t return to the playoffs until 2017, and wouldn’t win another playoff game until the 2020 season, when I was over thirty and staying with my parents during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Bills may have won more football games in the past six years than any other team in the NFL, but the stink of failure coats them with the persistence of dive bar grime. They have been blamed for inflicting both the Oklahoma City bombing and Donald Trump’s presidency on the United States. Bills safety Damar Hamlin medically died on the field during a game in 2022. Just three weeks ago, the Atlantic published an article dubbing the Buffalo Bills “The Most Cursed Team in American Sports.”

With a fandom like that, no wonder I became a writer. Before I even knew how to write, I understood the complexities of a particular kind of suffering, of investing your passion and identity into something outside of your control and giving it the power to destroy you. A critic, a necrotic publishing market, an opposing defense with a negative DVOA—it doesn’t matter. If you want to participate, you have to be prepared to hurt. That’s the bargain.

Writing requires a certain tolerance for humiliation and disappointment. Bills fans know all about humiliation and disappointment, which might explain why we, poet-like, named both ourselves (Bills Mafia) and many of the Bills’ losses, from the minor heartbreaks—Hail Murray and Twelve Men—to the bone-dislocating failures—Wide Right, the Music City Miracle, and the loss that affected me the most, Thirteen Seconds. Watching Josh Allen, my most beloved oaf, sit on the sidelines, his helmet still on, absorbing that his team had squandered the lead he gave them with thirteen seconds left in the 2022 Divisional playoff game, felt like getting kicked in the head by a horse for eternity.

Well, that is also what it feels like to publish a book.

Writing a book is a joy. Even the bad parts, the writer’s block and the cringe sentences that require line editing bordering on decontamination, are so much better than the best parts of most desk jobs. If you have ever, even for a couple hours, wrestled with a spreadsheet while the clarion call of Microsoft Teams blares in the background, the blessed quiet of an empty page is bliss. You are reading this essay on lit hub dot com; I don’t need to convince you of the quiet delight of writing a sentence and immediately smiling upon rereading it, of saying what you want to say and liking how you said it. You already know.

But publishing a book is another story. There are thousands of the normal indignities, the endless rejections, the endless silences that turn into rejections by default, the endless comparisons of your advance and sales numbers to someone else’s, the endless attempts to shrink a novel into an easily digestible peapod for social media, preferably in a talking head video. You might go into publication day with zero blurbs. You might get a one-star review from someone who thought the “trial” in your title was ACOTAR-style deadly trials.

But here is where being a Bills fan works to my advantage: who cares about humiliation! I know all about being embarrassed and feeling small. I went to college in Massachusetts during the zenith of the Tom Brady Patriots and the nadir of the Bills drought era. I was getting clowned by strangers while drinking Rubinoff vodka out of an unmarked water bottle in a freshman triple for wearing a Bills shirt—it doesn’t get any lower than that. I understand the bargain I made.

I know all about being embarrassed and feeling small.

I have already learned the art of the lost cause; I am the Wagner of the lost cause. I was forced to be an optimist, and believe that a better world was possible—that one day, the playoff drought would end, and then the AFC Championship drought, and then the Super Bowl drought. I don’t have another choice. And I know I have to be loud about it.

I thought a lot about optimism while writing this book. The main character, Magdalena Overmorrow, is a scholar and a healer who moonlights as her city’s only abortion provider. She begins the book as a political prisoner, and by the end of it is on trial for her life. For much of the book, she is not having a very good time. But no matter what situation I put her in, no matter how much I tried to batter her spirit, I couldn’t stop writing her as an optimist.

I didn’t want to write her as an optimist. I wasn’t in an optimistic place when I started writing this book; the world in late 2016 was not fertile soil for hope, and the reproductive justice space has only gotten grimmer in the past ten years. Abortion providers have long been targets of violence in the United States. When I was a kid, Barnett Slepian was gunned down in his kitchen thirty miles from where I lived. In the post-Roe present, at least two abortion providers in the United States are currently facing extradition to states where abortion is illegal for prescribing abortion medication, and a recent report estimated that since Roe v. Wade was overturned, over 900 women have been charged with crimes relating to pregnancy loss. Multiple women have died after being refused life-saving abortions by hospitals fearful of being sued or prosecuted.

The day Roe was officially overturned, I went down to a protest in Union Square. The rally was part of a larger protest that began in Washington Square Park; the march would come north and absorb the Union Square group, and continue to Midtown. The crowd was angry but quiet. A sort of damp exhaustion hung over the park. Some of the older women held signs indicating that they had marched for abortion rights before Roe, and they would do so again. I couldn’t muster up any optimism that day. The closest I could come to hope, in the midst of the black sludge of despair and weariness, was a kind of grim spite.

I was thrown back viscerally to my time as an abortion clinic escort, a grueling volunteer stint that I lasted at for barely a year. I have survived almost every bad experience in my life by telling myself that no matter what, I can use it in my writing, but the time I spent walking patients into an abortion clinic in Queens, past rows of anti-choice protesters, is the exception. The most important task for any writer in any genre is to leave readers with the understanding that every character in your book, just like every person on the bus with them in the morning or at the grocery store or tailgating with them in the parking lot before a game, is a whole human being with an entire universe inside of them. Even New England Patriots fans. But faced with the reality of the demonstrations, when protestors screamed at the clinic’s patients and followed them down the street to the parking lot, trying to film them, harassing them to tears, even begrudging curiosity about the inner lives of anti-choicers felt impossible. Any empathy I could have had for them burned to the ground inside of me.

All of those emotions came back at the protest—the impotent rage, the desperation, the bottomless contempt for the people who had gotten us into this mess. But when I looked at the women standing next to me, their faces bleak but composed, I realized that sometimes, a kind of grim spite is enough. Sometimes, that is hope.

In the book, Magda’s hope manifests in an open curiosity about her place of exile and the people who live there. She could have chosen to shut herself off from any human interaction and brood on the wrongs that were been done to her, but instead she chooses to live as if her life has dignity, and by doing so grants herself dignity outside of the reach of her persecutors. She makes friends. She falls in love. When people ask her for help, she gives it, even when it could potentially jeopardize her good behavior standing, because she believes the way she lives her life can and will bring about the better world she hopes for. The despair does find her eventually, the night before she is set to be executed, but the hope bought her so much extra time, and extra spirit during that time.

I think of it as a series of delusional inoculations against hopelessness, each one increasing in strength and intensity.

But it can also feel bad to be an optimist. Nobody likes feeling like a dope. No one likes having it rubbed into their face that they were wrong, that they were a rube who believed in the fundamental decency of the world, or in a fundamental fairness that doesn’t exist, whether that fairness comes from God or karma or the universe or the NFL’s sky judge (yes, it is really called that). But people who believe that better things are possible, no matter the evidence to the contrary, and doggedly act on that belief, are maybe the only people that matter.

It is impossible to get out of bed in the morning without some level of stupid trust in the unlikely. Writing a book is fundamentally a delusional act—it is difficult to create something out of nothing, and it is even more difficult to create something out of nothing and then convince someone they want to give you legal currency for it. It is difficult to believe a team is going to win a championship they’ve never won, and haven’t even reached the final for in over thirty years. It is difficult to believe that a loose amalgamation of activists and medical professionals and policymakers can restore the state of reproductive rights in the United States in the age of Trumpism and the billionaire-funded manosphere.

But I would argue that it is difficult to start with the big impossibilities (the government is capable of believing in the fundamental humanity of half the population) without practice believing in the small possibilities (the Bills are capable of going to the Super Bowl; I am capable of writing and selling a book) first. I think of it as a series of delusional inoculations against hopelessness, each one increasing in strength and intensity.

My best friend and I have a tradition: every year one of us buys two Bills-themed candles, one for each of us, and we ceremonially light them before games with the solemnity of high priests. As the tradition has gone on, the candles have become more and more desperate. The first year, they were jaunty red and blue buffaloes who proudly proclaimed that their scent was “a Bills victory.” Then there were matching Josh Allen prayer candles. This year’s label, in blue and red and white, states This Has Got to Be the Season, So Help Me God. So far, so good, this season: the Bills have started 7-1. So far, so good on the writing front too: my debut novel comes out this week. And if the unmitigated ass-kicking the Democrats laid on Republicans during the midterm elections last week doesn’t make at least a little hope stir inside you, nothing will.

And if this year isn’t the year? I’ll still be here. It’s the only choice.

There’s always next year.

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The Trial of Magdalena Overmorrow by Caitríona Moran is available from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.