“I remember one year my friend Carpenter and I had books out on the same day. We talked about it all summer. We each had modest expectations. I had modest expectations for his book; he had modest expectations for mine . . . Finally the big day arrived and I woke up happy, embarrassed in advance by all the praise and attention that would be forthcoming. I made coffee and practiced digging my toe in the dirt . . . Then I waited for the phone to ring. The phone did not know its part. It sat there silent as death with a head cold. By noon the noise of it not ringing began to wear badly on my nerves. Luckily, though, by noon it was time for the first beer of the day. I sat by the phone like a loyal dog, waiting for it to ring. Finally, finally it rang at four. I picked up the phone and heard Carpenter laughing hysterically, like some serial killer, and then I became hysterical, and eventually we both had to be sedated.”
(c) Anne Lamott
I’ve been posting this every publication date for, I think, three years running now. Yes, my publication dates tend to be full of events, but this still has a certain emotional truth.
A new tradition, started last year, is the 5:30 a.m. signing at Book Crossing in Brunswick, where I drop by to meet the commuters who are the store’s bread-and-butter. Meanwhile, through the magic of pre-taping/filming, I appeared to be everywhere this morning — on the “Coffee With” segment on WJZ, chatting with Sheilah Kast, one of the most attentive readers I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet.
ETA: Click <a href=”http://www.wypr.org/MD_MORNING.html”>here</a> and scroll down, and you’ll find my conversation with Sheilah, along with a short reading from LIFE SENTENCES. If I sound a little more arch than usual, it’s because I’m reading from the memoir within the novel, and Cassandra Fallows is much more affected than I am. Or so I keep trying to persuade people.
And don’t forget, one piece of President Obama’s stimulus package will kick in this Friday the 13th, when those of us who are payroll wage-earners will see our witholdings reduced, and our net dollars increase…just in time to gas up the car, snap up a copy of Life Sentences, and say hello to the author while she’s in Carmel….so that everyone is stimulated all around!
I posted the link on your Facebook page but I called it People Are Talking because I didn’t take a nap.
On the plus side, I DID read a lot of your book but can’t read now because I am at work. (If I had a Kindle, it could read to me while I cut video.)
Sarah’s on a roll this week! Between this wonderful information (all new to me), her sleuthing work on Spencer Quinn and the jewels in her Twitter feed, she’s entitled to take the rest of the week off.
Brian, I like how you think. Buying Life Sentences is one’s patriotic duty!
“one of the most attentive readers I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet.”
Ahh – well, I’ll be in the running for the most slovenly of your readers that you’ve met, after March 19 at Carmel.
This makes mysteries and suspense endlessly more effective for me, since I never see the next thing coming ’till it runs past
(I WAS looking for a green shirt to wear to Indy, but upon seeing the effect upon me, the idea was abandoned)
Sheilah is so detail oriented that she picked up what appeared to be a misspelled “It’s,” then was delighted a few sentences later to learn that it was misspelled on purpose.
But the thing I like about her as an interviewer is that she will put me on the spot. We had a great conversation about Cassandra’s name and how it does/doesn’t fit the prophetess for which she was named.
By the way, just for fun, and I know Lizzie will get this if she’s checking in: Anyone remember the character in children’s literature who felt so burdened by the name Cassandra?
I just heard it on NPR, and I can’t wait to read it. I love the subtle way you comment on race. The chapter from Every Secret Thing where Cynthia Barnes confronts the “white trash” woman, and goes into how she feels and how she is supposed to feel was so revealing and felt so real. I read it twice.
Cassandra, I think is in The Pistacio Prescription?
Congratulations Laura!
Zelda nailed it. And I didn’t even offer a prize!
You can still change your mind on that prize thing if you wanted to…..
An interesting, if bittersweet, backstory on the quote Laura uses annually: “Carpenter” is Don Carpenter, the Mill Valley-based writer and neighbor whom Lamott dedicated BIRD BY BIRD to. He’d had one bestseller (HARD RAIN FALLING, his 1996 debut novel, which stands up as his best book – George Pelecanos raved about it a couple of years back, and an excerpt appeared in issue 2 of the late, lamented MURDALAND), wrote and produced the cult 1973 movie PAYDAY starring Rip Torn, and was one of the very best chroniclers of the Hollywood machine I’ve ever read. And at the time Lamott recollects, they had both changed publishers to North Point Press (now, barely, an imprint of FSG), which brought out Carpenter’s CLASS OF ’49 AND OTHER STORIES and Lamott’s JOE JONES that year (and thus the same day) and portended a fresh start for the both of them. Lamott’s story we know. Carpenter wasn’t nearly as lucky. A year after BIRD BY BIRD was published, blind from diabetes and very ill, with his last manuscript FRIDAY AT ENRICO’S consigned to the dresser drawer, Carpenter shot himself to death.
A couple of years ago I read all of Carpenter’s published work for an essay I hope will see the light of day someday. He really is one of the unsung, overlooked post-WWII novelists, almost at the opposite spectrum of Updike/Cheever (which makes sense, because he hung outwith Norman Mailer, Evan Connell, and Richard Brautigan) and, as he got older, acidly funny. I wish his work would come back into print.
i sent that EXACT paragraph to Cornelia Read the day that A FIELD OF DARKNESS was released. Makes me snort every time, imagining the whole thing.
Laura, I enjoyed your talk last night at the Pratt
and thought you’d be interested in this from a Washington Post story on Lincoln’s Watch by Neely Tucker. “The old man’s memory had not been exact. He had not forecast the end of slavery, or Lincoln’s critical role in its demise. And the fort had actually been attacked on April 12.” The full article can be
found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/10/AR2009031001449.html?sub=AR
One of my father’s favorite expressions was ‘mke a memory”. Indeed, we do.