Late one Saturday night this fall, I hurtled through Cape Cod in a Sprinter van, dressed in a sparkly dress, on the way home from my friends Eric and Frank’s wedding. A fellow guest asked the driver to put on some music. “September” poured out of the speakers and we cheered. How did I wind up smiling tipsily and bobbing along with new friends to an Earth, Wind, and Fire song? Blurbing.

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Two years earlier, a young woman who’d written a charming debut had asked me for a blurb. I thought, as I often do, of Emma Straub’s Substack on the subject, in which she said:

I try to read as many debuts as I can, and write as many blurbs as I can. Some writers hate writing blurbs but I see it as a simple, easy way to offer my support, a kindness I have been given and need to return. I think writers who have been blurbed but then refuse to blurb are assholes.

The young author was grateful for the blurb and invited me to her book party, where I met Eric and Frank. Eric and I became so close that he asked me to give the lead-off toast at his and Frank’s (incredibly fun) wedding.

Simon & Schuster recently announced that it was dropping its blurb requirement. In the New York Times, novelist Rebecca Makkai said she was taking a break from blurbing for at least two years. “The whole blurbing thing is misery for everyone, isn’t it?” one author recently said to me. “It’s still such a maddening thing, and everyone hates it, and everyone feels bad about it.”

Like Emma, I want to give other writers, particularly new ones, the same sense of belonging that being blurbed has given me.

This is the prevailing opinion, but I don’t share it. I blurb as much as I can without wrecking my capacity to write and read for myself. And so I blurb an average of one book a month. Last month I did three. It’s probably too many.

Sometimes I think I’m devaluing my blurb currency and so I vow to take time off, but my resolve crumbles. Like Emma, I want to give other writers, particularly new ones, the same sense of belonging that being blurbed has given me.

Of course, when you get a reputation for being an enthusiastic blurber, as A.J. Jacobs pointed out, also in the New York Times, you get asked to do it lots more. Lately, I’ve been getting asked for blurbs once or twice a week, which means to stick to my dozen-a-year guideline, I have to say no several times a month.

Typically the decision to take on one book over another comes down to an algorithm of how much I’m in the mood to read that kind of book/how much free time I have/whether I think I could actually help.

I’ve found that blurbing often leads to unexpected joys. I met two now-close friends, Susannah Cahalan and Abbott Kahler, that way. I reviewed a book by Abbott (then writing as Karen Abbott) in the New York Times Book Review. A couple of years later, she wrote me a note about an essay I’d written.

I wrote her back and said that was so nice and the essay was becoming a book and would she blurb it? She wrote a fantastic blurb. I took her out for a drink to thank her.

For that same book, I wrote to Susannah Cahalan, who I’d known briefly at the New York Post and asked her to blurb. She wrote something amazing. I took her out for drinks to thank her too. And the three of us wound up becoming good friends.

We’ve all blurbed one another’s books since then. (“Who doesn’t love a log roll?” said one of our editors.) But our connection has yielded more than endorsements. In 2018, Susannah, Abbott, and I formed a reading series and support group for women writing nonfiction.

People in that group have garnered proposal help and fact-checking assists and magazine assignments and even book deals from connections they made through the club, and it’s yielded strong friendships and good times.

Given that blurbs are part of the favor economy, as readers we should probably take the more over-the-top ones with a grain of salt. When one friend of mine found a book blurbed as “unputdownable” quite putdownable, she said, “Blurbs should come with a sticker that says, ‘No sexual favors were given in exchange for this blurb.’ One of my editors responded: “No! The blurb industry would collapse!”

Most writers I know don’t lie in blurbs, though one told me she will sometimes write a “succulent vine” blurb. (“It means I use a lot of flowery language, weaving it around the book without actually saying the book is good.”) While some argue that the whole culture of the blurb is controversial, I think that’s a matter of a system being the worst one except for all the others.

To ask for a blurb is to ask for help explaining to the world what exactly you’re trying to do.

“I actually like being asked to blurb and I say, ‘yes’ a lot,” Olga Khazan wrote me when I asked her for her take on blurbs (as part of replying yes to her request that I blurb her next book—I did demand a quid pro quo: a photo of her ridiculously cute six-month-old baby).

Usually there’s at least something nice to say about a book (that’s not like a weird self-published tirade). I’m also very sympathetic to the book-promo hustle and I guess I blurb unto others as I would have them blurb unto me. That said, I hate asking for blurbs! Whenever someone says yes, I feel really grateful but also like I could never repay them. And if someone doesn’t respond, I worry that it’s because they hate me or think I’m dumb or something (when the most obvious explanation is that they’re busy). I know the publisher always offers to ask for you, but I feel like the hit rate is higher if you ask yourself, but that’s also more vulnerable and, potentially, humiliating.

My first novel comes out this spring, meaning last summer I was put in the position of having to ask for blurbs of my own. One writer said no because she only blurbed nonfiction. Another said no because she was on blurb sabbatical and couldn’t make exceptions or her friends she’d said no to would get mad.

One said no because her media outlet wouldn’t let her blurb. One said no because she only blurbed her students. One said maybe but then a couple months later said actually, no; she’d gotten busy.

But six said yes and wrote the most fantastic things. I invited them out for drinks and meals, and gave one a trophy. For the rest of our lives, I will happily host their panels or water their plants.

I will continue to blurb as much as I can as a way to honor the precarity and vulnerability of navigating the world as a professional writer. To ask for a blurb is to ask for help explaining to the world what exactly you’re trying to do.

One novelist replied to a recent blurb I sent over: “Thank you for seeing in it what you did. That is exactly what I was striving for. I really can’t tell you how it feels to get a reaction like that—thank you. I mean, you know.” I do.

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Crush by Ada Calhoun is available via Viking.