ASTRONAUTS, DATA, AND MY BFF MAKING HISTORY

LIFE OF A BOOKMAN

Bookman: 1. a person who has a love of books and especially of reading. 2. a person who is involved in the writing, publishing, or selling of books. Oh, hi that's me!!

A slow burn: I finished Shy Creatures (finally! It was a whirlwind few weeks) I fully enjoyed it – but not in a page-turning, plot-grabbing kind of way. More like a TV show that has 5 episodes too many but I'm enjoying the unfolding, which is slow. But this weekend I was in all sorts of chats about creative books, including Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and The Creative Act by Rick Rubin...if you're looking for inspiration, they'll both meet you there.

What I'm Writing: My writing game last week was as strong as I needed it to be!! I moved through scenes that really brought Evangeline and all of her complexities to life. I wrote a fun scene of when her publishing idea comes to her, something that I know well is intimate, surprising, and so so fun. More this week, trying to hit the midway point of this dang novel!!

WOMEN’S STUDIES

What gets passed down becomes our history.

The Billionaire. The Psychedelics. And the Bestselling Memoir. Earlier this year, a memoir started showing up ev-er-y-where. Everywhere! From Oprah, From Reese, From Jenna Bush Hager, Gwyneth Paltrow, Whitney Herd, Gayle King. Like EVERYWHERE. And so, being the curious person I am, I was like wow...this must be quite some story and some woman if they're all using their firepower together, especially Reese/Oprah/Jenna who each collectively run the world's biggest book clubs. And they stood on stage – literally together – to push this book. So I started looking into the author, the woman, and her story...and I started to get REAL BOTHERED. Because it was immediately clear via 5-minutes of internet research that she was an investor in all of these women's endeavors. Because she is a billionaire. I remember looking everywhere for a thought-piece on someone who might be feeling what I was feeling: frustrated that women with insane publishing power would support someone with more means than she'd ever need to get exposure for her book, instead of doing the good work, the hard work to find authors who would have their ENTIRE LIFE changed with even a fraction of the support all those book club queens dolled out. I even thought about writing my own think-piece on it, but I didn't want it to be interpreted as anything wrong with the author or her story...I don't know the author or her story (as the author writes about out psychedelic-induced memories of trauma).. that wasn't the point of my frustration at all. My frustration was with the promoters and how/if they were using their very important publishing power for good...or for their other billionaire friends. But alas...this article in the Times is a deep look at many of the problems with this memoir and the runaway celebrity train it went on.

This Economist Knows How YOU can have it all...almost. Ever feel like you're working two full-time jobs—one at the office, one at home? Apparently you're not imagining it, and economist Dr. Corinne Low has the data to prove it in this piece. The most mind-blowing stat: In couples where the woman earns more than twice his hourly wage, women still work fewer hours...meaning the man's refusal to pick up household tasks is literally costing the family money. If you've ever felt guilty about not doing enough while simultaneously doing everything, this one might (I'm sorry) hit home...

Other links: For the first time in history, women outnumber men in NASA's new astronaut class.

PASS IT ON

Stories are heirlooms. Here's one of mine:

I just returned from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas...because my bestie Kate Spies BECAME A NASA ASTRONAUT. I had the honor of attending NASA's public announcement event where she strolled out on stage in her official Blue Flight Suit. And when I wasn't cheering my girl on from Row I, seat 2, I was crying...audibly. I'm so proud of her. I'm so grateful to have been involved in her selection process. And my heart is blown wide open from a weekend spent celebrating “our astronaut” with a very small group of her family members and dear friends (Hi Jeanie! Hi Judy!) I could go on and on and on and on and on about how happy I am for her...how inspired I am by what she was willing to do for her dreams...but on a plane ride back from Paris where we'd been celebrating her big secret, I typed a little something that I was feeling in that moment...a lesson, I think, for us all:

You will stumble upon something better than achieving your wildest dream…You will find the feeling in an unexpected knock on your door from a face as familiar as your own at 8pm on a Monday. And the joy, the news, the incredibility will sink you to your knees. She’ll pop Dom Perignon. You’ll pour. You’ll both drink it out of peach colored coups, the color of your living room walls.

You’ll walk through every detail. How it happened. Where. What they said. Then what she said. Then what they said back. Was the shower running? Was the oud candle burning? Leave no detail unturned. And then you’ll request to turn each second over again.

Before the world knows, you’ll both book a flight to Paris with three other besties. There will be before and after this day, but on that flight it’s merely right now, right here, with a long-nailed teenager flipping through TikTok for 7 hours in the middle seat between you, sound on. She has no idea.

You’ll smooth through turbulence at 450 knots, or was it 3? You’re not the aviator, she is. Still, at whatever speed at whatever altitude, you’re hurling toward a future promise of ripping Japanese heaters on French land. It’s the fourth exception to your three rules: a once-in-lifetime celebration of a near impossible feat.

One day, you’ll plan to rip those same ciggis earth side in a clapping contagion while watching her break through the atmosphere to the other side of gravity.

Under 1889’s World Fair heirloom, twinkling for five minutes each hour after dark, you’ll group hug and hug again. You’ll cry joy and cry again. You’ll beebop around to find the perfect friendship brooches and matching journals to memorialize this treasured time. Writing in that journal, you’ll recall the first time you heard about this possibility in space-time, this dimension you couldn’t touch yet but would later.

It was on the southwest corner of your porch, long after sunset eating crispy garbanzo beans together as brand new friends on their second serving of rice. You’ll wonder, mostly to yourself, if it’s hard for her to be holding onto this big of a dream, for this long. The answer to the question you never asked is yes, and so you decide right there to help hold it too. To not just believe, but to know, the dream is coming.

But over the years, across endless hours of eating vegetables and dissecting every subject, every experience, every obstacle on that porch, you’ll learn you were lucky. Not only for the pure delight, the pure sisterhood, the pure rock that is this friendship. But because you were invited to help hold the weight of her lifetime goal, at the final lap of a 3-decade finish line. Your assignment, unlike hers, was easy.

That goal neared with each and every month. “Might” became “maybe” became “of course” became inevitable. So much so that before it happened, it will feel past tense. Some would call it premonition. You just call it knowing your dearest, bestest one hell of a big heart and big brain best friend. And when it all happens on this timeline, finally happens, you discover the better, more rooted, more staggering feeling.

“Beyond your wildest dreams” was never about you. It’s the privilege of supporting the dream of someone you love until it’s no longer a dream...because it’s her life.

Years from now, when she’s floating somewhere beyond gravity’s reach, you’ll still taste those crispy garbanzo beans and burnt rice from that first night on your porch. And you’ll know: some dreams are too beautiful to dream alone.

Woman on xx