BOOK SIGNING, ACTUAL MATH, AND FAMILY 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!!

I DM’d the Author: I finished San Francisco-based writer Nina LaCour‘s MEET ME IN THE GARDEN…and my word. This is a stunner of a novel, which is based on the author’s family history. It begins in 1944 New Orleans, and follows Odette, the youngest in a trio of glamorous sisters from a prominent Creole community. Odette is an artist, and secretly in love with a woman, and her best friend Delphine, has a secret of her own. What happens over the next decades is gut-wrenching, beautiful, moving. I could go on. The themes of friendship, sisterhood, creativity, and identity were so well executed and broke my heart wide open. I think my DM to Nina pretty much sums up how I felt about this book:

What I’ve been writing: Inspired by how well Nina knew her characters, I’ve begun a big revision of Evangeline. My first draft was finding her and my story on the page, and now I want to write as if I’m really with her in each moment, knowing where she is, and where she wants and needs to go. Maybe I’ll be working on this book forever? jkjk, but she deserves this big revision, and so do I!!

WOMEN’S STUDIES

What gets passed down becomes our history.

The Psychological Reason Smart Women Stay Exactly Where They Are. I should know – I wrote this because I do this! If you’re facing a future choice – where you want something different or something more, but you’re scared of how it all might turn out – I wrote this one for you. We’re all facing the unknown everyday, but this mantra that I included (and my favorite journaling prompt) will help you move toward more of what you want. Instead of staying in more of the same that you don’t want.

You are no longer invited to dinner. Derek Thompson wrote a great piece on one of my favorite topics: community and gathering. He found that the share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975. Fun fact, I once named my short-lived bowling team “Not Bowling Alone” after Robert Putnam’s seminal work on the decline of social gathering: Bowling Alone (which was cited in Thompson’s piece). Historically, I haven’t been a natural in-home host: I default to worrying if people are comfortable, feeling embarrassed for not having something “basic” like the right dish, if I’m being judged bc their house is much fancier (silly, I know). But then a few years ago I started hosting my mahjong group at my house once a month in Savannah. And they were my favorite nights!!!! Having three women I love so much, in my home, while we play and drink and eat, made all of those previous worries just wash away. Since coming back to SF, I’ve yet to host in my new apartment because I don’t have all my furniture yet…but I’m realizing that’s an excuse. I need and want to have my friends over, imperfect and all. This was a GREAT read, I highly recommend.

50 + 7 = 57. This instagram post by Celine Levy really gut punched me. I have literally zero to say about the Cornell rape case other than !!!!!!!!!ABSOLUTE RAGE AND HORROR AND WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH SOCIETY AND THESE MEN AND FRATERNITIES!!!!!!!!!!! But the salt in the wide-open wound of this whole thing is the group chat, where seven friends messaged to their fifty other buddies that there was an unconscious woman they could come take advantage of. Celine, my somatic therapist, said it best, “if there are 7 r.pists in the group chat, and 50 men who said nothing, there are 57 r.pists in the group chat.”

Inside the Burnerverse: The Network of Anonymous Men Destroying Young Women’s Lives. This is a super tough read in Wired, but it’s important, especially as a follow-on to what’s going on at Cornell. And especially if you know young men and women in college right now. I’m horrified by what young women, like the one profiled in this piece, are going through online. And even more horrified how there’s so little recourse to what anonymous profiles are doing, even thought it’s literal cyber-attacking.

PASS IT ON

Stories are heirlooms. Here’s one of mine:

When I look at these book signing photos, I see a hundred tiny stories. Moments you wouldn’t know to see. Celebrations and connections and heartbreaks and hard work.

Like how the year You’re Not Lost came out, I took my first class about creating fictionalized worlds. My BFF’s short film was screened at the HBO Women in Comedy festival, and I workshopped what makes plot lines work, and thought maybe I could apply this to books. 6 years later I completed my first manuscript for DAISY, and it was the greatest creative challenge of my life.

Or how Destiny and I are meeting here for the first time taking a selfie to send to my friend Alaina. Destiny first read YNL because Alaina gave it to her years ago, another reminder in a sea of reminders that every success comes from women connecting, supporting and recommending me. That support flows forward.

Nicole Lapin and I signed books in the same two feet of space and lucky me!! I’ve known of Nicole’s work since my community-building Levo days and we share a lot of amazing women I’ve collaborated and respect. She was signing all four of her books!!! Goals.

I’m a close talker baby!! And it’s proof of my deep appreciation for every woman taking a chance on my books, for every road that led her to me.

Somebody said something and I’m tickled. I’m also probably thinking of what to write bc for every dedication there’s me blanking for a half second before getting that sharpie going. You’d think I’d have this down, I don’t.

The gals!! Getting to talk to them about coaching their client through her fiction, rolled out lots of stories and appreciation for my fiction coach Julie Artz bc Daisy wouldn’t exist without her (nor would my creative fiction craft).

More faces. More stories. More connections. More faces. More appreciation. More deep gratitude that I haven’t let anything stop me from writing, even all the rejections, even all the “not for me”, even all the not yets. And it’s bc of a lot of support to keep me going.

So glad my friend Rebecca’s photag team captured these special book signing moments at Create & Cultivate. And thank you Reparations Club bookstore for carrying both books, making this possible, my first signing with both books.

woman on xx