Winning Emotional Education Author of the Year for a series of books about not having it together is the kind of contradiction I am, on most days, here for.
The award is real. The 2025 Emotional Education Author of the Year, given for the Waddle Forward Series. I keep a copy of the announcement in the bottom drawer of the desk. It still does not feel like the announcement is about the same person who writes the books, but that is, on reflection, the point.
The award is not for being right. It is not for having figured it out. It is, as best I can tell from the citation, for writing self-help that does the opposite of the genre. For writing from the middle of the journey. For admitting, on the page, that the author is also in the kitchen at 11pm with the kettle on, trying to figure out what to do next.
Which is what the books are. So in that sense the citation is accurate.
What the books were supposed to be
The first book in the series was Hold My Ducks. It was supposed to be a single book, written over a long weekend, given to a friend who needed a boundaries book that did not sound like a workshop handout. It was a gift, originally. Not for the genre. For one person.
The friend read it on a flight to Brisbane. She emailed me from the airport before she had collected her bag. She wanted to know if she could send it to her sister, then her sister’s flatmate, then a colleague at her job who had been crying in the break room for a month. The book went around her workplace before I had finished editing the second draft.
That is when it stopped being a single book.
The second one, What The Duck Am I Doing With My Life?, came out of conversations with people who had read Hold My Ducks and said: okay, the boundaries thing has clicked. But I don’t know what I am doing with my life. Is there a book for that? There was not. I wrote one.
The third one, Duck Yeah, came from the readers of the second one. I read it. I have figured out I am in a transition. Now what? The same loop. I wrote the next one.
The Collection bundled the first three, because the readers who arrived at book three almost always wanted books one and two for the friends they were also worried about. The bundle was an inventory decision more than an authorial one.
The Strong One Is Tired, the fifth book, was different. It was written for the reader who I had been hearing from in the margins of every other book. The reader who was not in the audience of any of the first four, but kept buying them for other people. The eldest siblings. The eldest daughters. The dependable ones. The book was for them.
Five books. Three years. None of them planned in advance.
What the award contradicts
The award contradicts, gently, the assumption built into the genre that the author is supposed to have arrived. The judges, in giving the award to a series called Waddle Forward by an author whose entire pitch is “I have not figured it out,” were making a small institutional argument about what self-help is supposed to do.
Self-help is supposed to help. That is the contract. The genre has, over the last decade, drifted towards a different contract, which is “self-help is supposed to look like it is helping.” The drift produced a lot of books that read well on the cover and badly on chapter three. The award, in its small way, was a vote against the drift.
I do not want to overclaim. It is one award. One year. Probably one judge had a bad week and decided the books were funny enough to give the award to. The contradiction stands either way.
What is next
Book six is not written yet. There will be one. It will be for the readers who arrived at The Strong One Is Tired and asked the next question. I do not know what the next question is yet. I will know it when the emails start arriving.
In the meantime there is the Monday email, the affirmations, the duck on every page that matters, and the small administrative reality of running a sub-brand that did not exist five years ago. The award is a punctuation mark in a sentence that is still being written, which is the right way to take it.
I am not the responsible one. I am the one who wrote a book about being the responsible one. There is a difference. The difference is the whole sub-brand. The whole sub-brand is now, somehow, award-winning. Waddle forward.
Duck Yeah
Build a Life You Actually Like Living. A Witty Guide to Getting Unstuck, Rebuilding Your Life, and Actually Enjoying Your Life Again.
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