San Diego has fog; on the morning I have to fly from there to L.A. for a live TV show, the airport seems to be closed. I'm getting desperate. If I don't turn up on the set, they may need to interview a potted plant. Suddenly a buzz runs through the airport: something is going to L.A. I rush to the counter and miraculously get my ticket changed, my body booked on that plane.
On board, I see this is no miracle, it's only the eight most foolhardy people in San Diego climbing into a prop plane so tiny I'm not allowed to carry my purse on, but must stow it in the hold. I ask the uniformed man, "Will we get breakfast?"
He snorts. "Lady, this flight has a crew of one. You want me to fly the plane, or serve you breakfast?"
We ricochet up through the fog. My fellow travelers blanch, but I relax. Nobody's spilling coffee on me.
At the end of my day in L.A., one of my publisher's sales representatives offers to buy me a drink. I accept, though I am so tired I suspect I might be one drink away from delirium. But sales reps are founts of knowledge: they know who's who, how your book is selling, and everything about what's coming out next season. I ask him about an author I've been hearing about--will she be touring?
He avoids my question. "Things happen sometimes," he says. "Not everybody is cut out for the book tour."
"Like what kind of things?"
"Showing up drunk for signings. Punching out a reporter. Going AWOL from the tour, turning up on a shopping spree in Santa Fe. You don't want to know. It's not pretty out there."
I press him, asking again about the famous author in question--does he mean her?
"No," he says. "But we decided she's untourable."
Untourable?
Prior to this tour, I went to New York several times to meet editors and publicists over friendly lunches. Were they actually checking to see that my socks matched? These overtures of author-publisher friendship were actually screen tests? I take a deep breath. How ridiculous; I'm thinking like a paranoid schizophrenic.
"What exactly does untourable mean?" I ask.
The sales rep stares into his Jack Daniel's and replies, "Insane."
Promoting novels in a sound-bite culture is like selling elephants from a gumball machine. Cramped. Put in your nickel and stand back. Interviewers keep asking, "What is your book about?" They mean well. They are kindly giving me a chance to pitch my product. But you should sooner say to a hypochondriac "How are you?" than ask an author this question. Shall I grab you by the lapels and really tell you? Have you got all day? No. What they need is a seven-word answer, and the only accurate one I can think of is: "It's about three hundred pages long--read it!!" But that sounds surly, so I contrive witty, deficient summaries, which I repeat in senile fashion from city to city.
The words from my own mouth begin to fill me with despair. I'm making a parody of my own earnest trade. If I could say my piece in a glib sentence or two, why on earth would I have spent years of my life on it, and all those pages? If Leo Tolstoy did a book tour for War and Peace, how would he answer? "It's about how Napoleon invades Russia, and all these people discover war is, like, bad news." Duh! Middlemarch in a plot summary sounds like a soap opera, and Pilgrim's Progress, a Sunday-school lesson. My own book doesn't have a prayer in the interview format. I flounder to define not just my own intentions but the concept of novel itself. "It's not so much what happens," I try to explain, "but how the words fit together, and what carries over from it into your own life."
My interviewer looks at me, her eyes two perfect asterisks of mascara, and cuts to a commercial.
Through every city, every hour, every question asked and partially answered, I'm missing my daughter. I sleep in an oversized T-shirt she decorated awhile back, with help, in nursery school: it has her picture silk-screened on it, underscored with her name in childish handwriting. But I can't hear her voice on the phone, for I've yet to finish a day and get to a hotel before she's gone to bed. Finally, when I arrive on the East Coast, thanks to the gods of time zones, I can call while she's still awake. At the sound of her small Hello, my heart shudders along my ribcage like a stick dragged down the length of a picket fence.
In a voice much higher-pitched than I remembered it, she details for me her day, the pictures she made, some new kids she met in school. She brightly reports, "I told them I have an imaginary mom."
In Denver, for the noontime news roundup, the commentator clips a mike to my jacket and advises me I'll have fifty-eight seconds to discuss my book. In a flash of insight, I understand everything. In fifty-eight seconds, all I can possibly get across is my name, the color of my jacket, and whether or not I have anything stuck on my teeth. It's not my book that's on sale here. It's me.
Can modern literary success really come down to this, an author's TV persona? In a word, yes. Early on, when a publicist first apprised me of my promotional duties, I whined, "I thought an artist had the privilege of being a recluse!" She firmly replied, "A starving artist has that privilege."
An author can say no to a book tour--just as any employee can step backward down the career ladder for the sake of family or peace of mind--but a stigma comes with that choice. From what I've overheard, a writer who won't travel is viewed as an ingrate, a coot, a hermetic unknown who deserves anonymity, or just plain stuck-up. As Garry Trudeau has pointed out, America is the only place where refusal to promote yourself is perceived as arrogance.
Why isn't the author's written word enough? Why must she follow her book out into the world like an anxious mother, to hold its hand and vouch for its character? Why, for that matter, is a book more desirable when it has the author's signature on the flyleaf? I'm so grateful to my readers, heaven knows, I would do anything for them--probably scrub their kitchen floors if they asked. Certainly I would go along peacefully with the book-tour concept, if it were only a matter of my own temporarily disturbed life. But in principle it's an industry trend that worries me. Celebritization of authors rivets the nation's attention on a handful of books each year, shutting out diversity, leaving poets and first novelists to huddle in the cold with the masses of nonfiction scholars whose subject matter is more vital than it is sexy. Readers do need help, of course, in selecting among all the many deserving titles--but what criteria that could possibly fit in a fifty-eight-second TV spot will guide them to an informed choice? The quality of a book's prose means nothing in this race. What will win it a mass audience is the author's ability to travel, dazzle, stake out name recognition, hold up under pressure, look good, and be witty--qualities unrelated, in fact, to good writing, and a lifestyle that is writing's pure nemesis.
What of the brilliant wordsmiths who happen to be elderly, disabled, or indisposed to travel because of young children, or not so great looking, or terribly shy? What are we doing here to the future of literature? Where would we be now if our whole literary tradition were built upon approximately the same precepts as the Miss America competition? Who would win: Eudora Welty or Vanna White?
In Boston I do a syndicated talk show, which I've been told is very important. I'll have eight minutes to explain what my book is about, why everyone should read it, and why I have on these cowboy boots my host keeps staring at. While the makeup person flobs me with a horrid powder puff, I imagine seizing control and turning the tables, interrogating the audience: Why do you suppose novelists go on TV? Do you believe in literature? In Tinkerbelle? Clap your hands!
When I'm introduced, my mind rises to the ceiling like an after-death experience and waits up there to see what I'll say this time. I blurt out: "My book is about cowboys and Indians!" This is news to me. I have no idea what it means. For the rest of the interview, one of us, anyway, is on the edge of her seat.
In Atlanta, a talk-show host leans forward just before the cameras roll and confides to me that he's exhausted. "I've had to do two of these shows today, back to back."
"Two shows!" I shout, startling even myself. I left my tact in San Francisco. "Try six shows back to back, plus a couple of readings and book signings and an airplane flig
ht, every single day for three weeks!"
"Oh, but I have the hard part," he tells me sincerely. "I have to sound intelligent."
Apologies to those back home who think I'm lucky, but I've stopped trying to pretend I'm having an adventure. Adventure is stepping through brand-new doors with your mouth shut and your eyes wide open. This is adventure's opposite: traipsing through a hall of mirrors, listening to myself talk. And in truth it's also painfully lonely. I'm surrounded continually by people, good and kind ones, whose appreciation never ceases to astonish me. But I have no control over where, what, and with whom I would like to be. I deeply miss my friends, relaxed conversation, being in a house, making myself a sandwich, sitting still with my own thoughts, tucking my child into bed--the things that add up to what matters in my life. I am moving from city to city in a strange glass bubble, the psychic equivalent of that aquarium car that's used for displaying the Pope. Wherever I am, I am there for now, and then I will disappear.
In all these days I've smiled at thousands of people, signed their books, and thanked them for their support. Among all those kind strangers, exactly four of them looked me in the eye and said, "You must miss your daughter," or "How long since you've been home?" Each time, tears sprang to my eyes in spite of myself. I am lost somewhere in this crowd. I'm ready to click my heels now and go home.
New York, New York: this has got to be the zenith of my tour. My very publisher himself, along with my agent and the head of publicity, rode with me in the taxi to my reading in Manhattan, and hinted that the three of them would be taking me out afterward for a triumphal celebration. No word on our destination, but sure enough, as we step out of the bookstore just before midnight, we are whisked off in a limo, headed uptown. I feel cheered. How can I complain of a boot-camp schedule when I get treated like royalty in the end?
We pull up to Rockefeller Center. I gawk at the fabulous Deco facade. In the elevator my ears pop on the twentieth floor and again on the fortieth floor as we glide to the top. We are headed for the pinnacle of glamour, the Rainbow Room.
As our excited little party crosses the marble floor, the maitre d' approaches us with a polite body block, looks down the full length of his nose, and delivers to us with poetic intonation the sentence of a lifetime:
"I assume you are aware...of our dress code."
We look at each other, bewildered.
"No jeans," he says, "and no sneakers."
I've been wearing this outfit so long I can't imagine the possibility of other clothes, but he's pegged me all right. Jeans. Sneakers. Suede sneakers, mind you, but no dice. The maitre d' turns to the rest of the party and asks then, "Will there be three of you tonight?"
No one speaks. Lest the congratulations of a thousand fans go to my head, let it be known, I'm a blight on the Rainbow Room.
I consider slinking home in my substandard apparel. Does he realize the alternative was cowboy boots and a T-shirt autographed by a four-year-old? Could his lip get any closer to his nose? Our ambassador of haute couture drifts off, leaving us to mortify in the foyer.
In time he returns. And since I have not yet evaporated, he allows regretfully, "It's a slow night tonight. I suppose I could seat you at a back table."
We follow him single file to a back table, from which we are in a position to look down upon the million bright lights of the city. My publisher orders Dom Perignon. "Good," I'm thinking to myself. "We'll show them to treat us like pond scum. We'll spend a pile of dough."
But as I toast the town in my jeans and sneakers, my spirits begin to tilt and rise. How is this for poetic justice? I wrote my way to this pinnacle of glamour by one means only: being true to the world I know, a tract of workaday lives where a person is no more likely than, say, a buffalo to rise fifty floors and step out into the hushed terrazzo of the Rainbow Room. My characters could never afford this place--and if by some wild chance they could, they'd probably get scuttled to a back table. That maitre d' is no fool. His keen eye caught the girl out of which, as they say, you can't take the country. And what's wrong with that? If I couldn't be myself, I'd have to be nobody.
Our waiter--bless your soul, wherever you are now--bends down and whispers, "I think you look great."
Thanks. But if I ever go back to the Rainbow Room, I'll be wearing ruby slippers.
I'm nursing a cold, but gloating. I've almost made it. The last stop is a regional booksellers' convention. The plan here is for authors to make an impression on booksellers, who will then go home with a special fondness for us and sell plenty of our books. All I have to do is give a reading in the morning, then catch a flight home.
I've taken to the behaviors of a stressed laboratory rat--eating furtively in my room, for example, odd things at odd hours. A little past midnight, bleary, sneezing, overdue for bed, I stagger out to the hallway to set out the remains of my room-service tray. The door clicks shut behind me. I don't have my key. I'm standing in the hallway of a finer hotel, wearing an extra-large T-shirt with my daughter's picture on it, and cowboy boots. That's all.
I peck at 1604 and am relieved, when the door opens, to see four ladies in bouffant hairdos having a party in there. They stop talking, arrested by this development at their door: a possible escapee from the Symbionese Liberation Preschool.
As a concise response to everything that has happened in the last month, I begin to sob. I ask one of the ladies if she would dial housekeeping and have them pick up the tray from 1605 and, please, while they're at it, could they bring the key to my room? The ladies do this immediately, since they are not at all keen on the idea of me hanging around crying in their room. They know all they need to know about who I am: namely, that I am deranged.
The next morning, as I give my reading in the convention auditorium, I spot the four ladies in my audience. Turns out they all run bookstores. They are looking at me now as possibly the best story of their lives. If I was sent here to make an impression on booksellers, Lord knows I have done it.
I'm on the plane home, and the devil take my silk jacket. If it's not coffee-stained by the time I get to Tucson, I'll go ahead and have it bronzed. In a few hours I'll hug my little girl. Make dinner. Do laundry. Go to the movies with my friends. Have a life. Return to the work I love, the written word. For the fates and kind readers who allow me to support myself as a writer, may I never forget the height and breadth of my debt. But right at the moment I can't stop thinking of those four booksellers whose party I crashed, and what they will be telling their customers about me. Heaven only knows how the word will spread. Maybe it will get all the way back to the publicity department and the sales reps, by the time I get my next book out. What will they think of me? Maybe that I am...this is my wicked thought...untourable.
THE MEMORY PLACE
This is the kind of April morning no other month can touch: a world tinted in watercolor pastels of redbud, dogtooth violet, and gentle rain. The trees are beginning to shrug off winter; the dark, leggy maple woods are shot through with gleaming constellations of white dogwood blossoms. The road winds through deep forest near Cumberland Falls, Kentucky, carrying us across the Cumberland Plateau toward Horse Lick Creek. Camille is quiet beside me in the front seat, until at last she sighs and says, with a child's poetic logic, "This reminds me of the place I always like to think about."
Me too, I tell her. It's the exact truth. I grew up roaming wooded hollows like these, though they were more hemmed-in, keeping their secrets between the wide-open cattle pastures and tobacco fields of Nicholas County, Kentucky. My brother and sister and I would hoist cane fishing poles over our shoulders, as if we intended to make ourselves useful, and head out to spend a Saturday doing nothing of the kind. We haunted places we called the Crawdad Creek, the Downy Woods (for downy woodpeckers and also for milkweed fluff), and--thrillingly, because we'd once found big bones there--Dead Horse Draw. We caught crawfish with nothing but patience and our hands, boiled them with wild onions over a campfire, and ate them and declared them the best food on earth.
We collected banana-scented pawpaw fruits, and were tempted by fleshy, fawn-colored mushrooms but left those alone. We watched birds whose names we didn't know build nests in trees whose names we generally did. We witnessed the unfurling of hickory and oak and maple leaves in the springtime, so tender as to appear nearly edible; we collected them and pressed them with a hot iron under waxed paper when they blushed and dropped in the fall. Then we waited again for spring, even more impatiently than we waited for Christmas, because its gifts were more abundant, needed no batteries, and somehow seemed more exclusively ours. I can't imagine that any discovery I ever make, in the rest of my life, will give me the same electric thrill I felt when I first found little righteous Jack in his crimson-curtained pulpit poking up from the base of a rotted log.
These were the adventures of my childhood: tame, I guess, by the standards established by Mowgli the Jungle Boy or even Laura Ingalls Wilder. Nevertheless, it was the experience of nature, with its powerful lessons in static change and predictable surprise. Much of what I know about life, and almost everything I believe about the way I want to live, was formed in those woods. In times of acute worry or insomnia or physical pain, when I close my eyes and bring to mind the place I always like to think about, it looks like the woods in Kentucky.
Horse Lick Creek is a tributary to the Rockcastle River, which drains most of eastern Kentucky and has won enough points for beauty and biological diversity to be named a "wild river." The Nature Conservancy has chosen Horse Lick as a place to cherish particularly, and protect. The creek itself is 16 miles long, with a watershed of 40,000 acres; of this valley, 8,000 acres belong to the Forest Service, about 1,500 to the Nature Conservancy, and the remainder to small farms, whose rich bottoms are given over to tobacco and hay and corn, and whose many steep, untillable slopes are given to forest. The people who reside here have few choices about how they will earn a living. If they are landless, they can work for the school system or county government, they can commute to a distant city, or they can apply for food stamps. If they do have land, they are cursed and blessed with farming. It's rough country. The most lucrative crop that will grow around here is marijuana, and while few would say they approve, everybody knows it's the truth.