If you’ve promoted a book, then you know what I’m discovering, which is that it’s deeply uncomfortable and weird. You finish the book and then, over a year later, you’re talking about it again. You’re asking people to read it, to write about it, to let you talk about it, to talk about it with you. If you’re lucky, you’re doing a lot of this.
(Fingers crossed; I’m still in the process of hoping anyone will want to talk about it!)
The last time I wrote a book it was different. I co-wrote it, for one. It was fairly easy to describe (“the apocalypse in pop culture,” even if that was only truthfully half the description). It was a fairly academic book, which meant its prospects were modest to begin with. And, honestly, it was an obviously Christian book, and I was working in Christian media at the time, which meant it wasn’t too hard to spin up the Christian media machine for it.
Salty is a different animal. It masquerades as a “food book,” I guess, but I think of it as a women’s history book, or maybe a book of criticism — “through the lens of food,” as I keep saying, though I’m not entirely sure most people know what that means. It’s also a little bit memoir. And none of those are really helpful descriptions; basically it’s just me geeking out about some cool ladies who did cool stuff and also food and France and New York and Agnes Varda’s potatoes and Octavia Butler’s aliens and what Hannah Arendt said about friendship.
Anyhow, I didn’t write Salty with the idea of publishing a bestseller, or really anything other than a good book I could be proud of. I just wanted an excuse to do the aforementioned geeking out. I finished it last May. Now I find myself in the uncomfortable position of asking people for things, for favors I guess, and as a mostly-magazine-type writer, asking for favors is not the sort of thing I usually do. Nor the sort of thing I like to do.
But perhaps the oddest thing that I’m doing, the thing that happens when you’re promoting a book you wrote, is that I have to learn or maybe re-learn how to talk about it. Like, I know what it is. But how do I describe it to you? What questions will people ask me about it? We got the same set of questions over and over when we were talking about the apocalypse. What will they be for this one? With nine subjects, will I find that they change depending on my audience or my interlocutor? Will I be any better at talking about it in two months, when it finally comes out, than I am now?
Of course that’s half the work — well, a tenth of the work — of writing a book, something I’m well aware of while also in the early stages of research for the next book (We Tell Ourselves Stories). What I guess I forgot was that the hardest part of writing a book isn’t writing. It’s talking.
And then I remember what I learned last time, something that I, a critic, ought to know instinctively. Most often, it’s your readers who will teach you how to talk about your book. They look at what you made and they see what it is — something that is basically impossible for the writer, or at least for me. They notice threads you didn’t see, themes you didn’t realize were even there.
So I guess it’s not a matter of talking, as much as listening.
(I guess I am obliged to say this: please do pre-order!)
Been writing
Wrote about Donbass, the darkly satirical 2018 film that’s finally getting a US release that might help you understand what’s going on in Ukraine — but, more importantly, why it’s so impossible to fix much of anything.
Been reading and watching
A heck of a lot, but perhaps most notably rewatching The Godfather Part II as part of the research for an upcoming piece. Stay tuned!
And I read The Year of Magical Thinking for the third or fourth time this week. It really might be Didion’s best book? It’s brutal, and it has meant so much to me over the years since I first read it.
Odds and Ends
Happy Easter, if you celebrate, and whether or not you do, I hope you’re having a beautiful, beautiful start to your spring. (Or, I guess, autumn if you’re on the other side of the globe.)
Enjoy the ride. You might enjoy this Brevity blog post/list essay answering an events coordinator's question: "What is the target audience for your book ... and why do you think your book will interest them?" https://brevity.wordpress.com/2019/05/09/people-who-will-be-interested-in-my-book/