Stay In The Room

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eff McLean is a vocal coach and author living in West Hollywood, California, with his dreamy husband, Joe.

As a first-time author, I wasn't really prepared for what it takes to get a book onto the shelves of a bookstore.

I'd watched my dad, Michael McLean, do it over the years, and it always seemed to happen so fast. My experience was completely different. The word I keep reaching for is glacial—though with glaciers melting at record speeds, maybe that’s not quite the word anymore. Maybe I should just say slow. Or, if I’m feeling scholarly, chelonian. Or I could create a brand new word, like tortugal. Or if I need to be a little clearer, I could rely on that old standby, at a snail's pace.

Whatever. 

It was slow.

First of all, writing the book took forever and ever. Like sevenish years. Then it somehow seemed to take another seven years between handing in my final edits and official publication on April 7, 2026 (it was actually less than a year).

Side note: My book is called Stay in the Room: How a Gay Son and a Mormon Father Found Themselves and Each Other. I wrote it with my dad, Mormon songwriter and author Michael McLean, and our friend, the brilliant therapist Brad M. Reedy, PhD. It’s all about how I grew up gay and Mormon in rural 1980s Utah and then found my way from self-loathing to loving myself through a series of major disasters like a) being Mormon and gay, b) an ill-fated first marriage, and c) an addiction to crystal meth. The book also relates how my dad came to celebrate me for who I am while still holding on to his Mormon faith.

The book’s title comes from an experience my dad had when I was railing against him and the Mormon Church. A voice told him he had to stay in the room with me and listen even though all he wanted to do is leave. 

Given the power of that message, I hate to admit that I didn’t stay in the room when it came to getting through the publication process. With the book finally out of my hands, I quietly checked out as the publisher industriously fact-checked, laid the book out, designed the cover, and all the rest. 

And then one day, a bound proof appeared on my desk. It was my job to read it.

It sat there. And I sat there. We sat there. For over a month.

I was terrified to open it. What if it was bad? What if I’d failed? What if I was just a whiny person who had spent seven years of his life trying to figure out how to create a meaningful book—and it turned out to be awful?

I wish I could say I’d used the tools from the book to coax myself into reading the proofs. Instead I let my emotions, my fears, and my anxieties get the best of me. Eventually, I approved the proof without ever opening it. I told the development team I had no changes. 

I felt shame for approving the book sight unseen, and I was still petrified of reading the book. It got so bad that I relapsed spectacularly after years of sobriety. 

I was in a scary place, and I was mortified. The author of Stay in the Room was supposed to be flawless and beyond wise. He was supposed to stay sober.

I’m happy to report that I headed right back into the recovery rooms where I’d learned to heal. Soon afterward, I received the final book in the mail. I tossed it in my bag as I packed for a family trip to Mexico for spring break—a week away for my niece. On the balcony of the resort, I finally found the courage to open the book and start reading.

I couldn’t put it down. I laughed. I cried. I was grateful that my past self had written down the very tools I needed. 

I also discovered some mistakes. I had misspelled my cousins' names. I had missed some credits from my musical theater career. Ultimately, I had to own these mistakes because I had signed off on them. 

In the book, I repeat a phrase that you’ll hear if you hang around recovery spaces long enough: relapse is part of recovery. I believed that concept when I wrote the book, and I believe it even more now with one more relapse under my belt. It has led me to serious introspection and the right kind of humility—not humiliation. I can see where I am struggling and reach out for help. 

Recently, I saw very clearly that I needed a specific kind of help. I’m in the publicity phase of publication. It’s a lot of interviewing and talking about myself. With my past as a performer, I thought I’d be better at this than I have felt. So I decided to seek help from the brilliant Allison Hansen, a media coach I’ve known since I was a teenager.

She told me that I seemed to be comparing myself with my coauthors, who are both super media savvy. She suggested that I was trying to snap into performance mode, which made sense since I have been a performer for decades. But it wasn’t feeling authentic. It occurred to me that performance mode is perfectionist mode, and recovery and sobriety cannot breathe around perfectionism. 

Then Allison told me something revolutionary: “For forty years, you’ve thought that your gift was your singing voice. But I want to let you know that your gift is your heart.” With those words, Allison freed me. I don’t have to try to be cool. I want to stay in the room and share my heart with people. And Stay in the Room is my heart. It’s not a performance. It’s my vulnerability and my growth. 

I am not a perfect person who wrote a perfect book from some elevated station in life. I'm just someone working day by day to show up for myself and others, someone who happened to write a book that I apparently need to read over and over again.

I hope you read it and that it brings you some comfort. Or at the very least, I hope you can read it and think, “This guy hasn't figured it out either—and somehow that helps.” The tools in my book are things that help me heal. Whether I choose to use them, whether I stay in the room of healing and hope, is something I get to decide minute by minute, day by day.

J