This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (18 page)

There is something so irresistible about delivering a convocation address. You are a captive audience, you haven't settled in yet, you're probably more open to advice at this particular moment in your life than you're going to be a month from now or at the end of this semester or in four years when you file out of here. Both
Autobiography of a Face
and
Truth & Beauty
are books about how much compassion is needed to get through a life. They are also books about the value of friendship. Long after you have forgotten the classes you have yet to take, the books you have yet to read, and the papers you have yet to write, you will remember your friends. Some of the most important people in your life are sitting in this room with you today, and there's a perfectly good chance you haven't met them yet. But you have time. Time is the most extraordinary gift for friendship. You'll get to eat your meals together and study together; in some cases you'll even sleep in the same room. You'll have time to waste on each other. You'll find out every single thing you have in common and still have time to catalogue all of your differences. Don't underestimate the vital necessity of friendship in your life because it is the thing that will sustain you later, when there will be considerably less time.

After
Truth & Beauty
came out, I received hundreds and hundreds of letters, and they basically boiled down into two groups: the first group said they were very sorry for my loss because they too had a best friend and they didn't know what they would do without him or without her; the second group also expressed sympathy, but that sympathy came with a sad sort of puzzlement. These people wrote they had never had a truly close friend before, and even though I had lost my best friend they still thought I was luckier than they were for ever having had the chance to love someone so much in the first place. Both of the groups were right.

Some people have said they didn't want to read
Truth & Beauty
because they thought it would be too sad, but for the most part it isn't a sad book at all. It's sad that Lucy died, it's especially sad that she died young, but the truth is that every life ends. The quality of a life is defined not by its length, but by its depth, its actions and achievements. It is defined by our ability to love. By these criteria Lucy did a very good job with the life she was given. She soldiered through a terrible disease. She wrote two great books. And she had more friendships, more deep and lasting friendships, than anyone I have ever known, which isn't a bad list of accomplishments for thirty-nine years.

I wrote this book because I missed my friend, and I wanted everyone else to miss her and love her as much as I did. I wanted to extol the virtues of friendship, both ours specifically and as a good idea in general. I wanted to encourage people to ask questions, which is exactly what Lucy would have done. I appreciate your inviting me here today. I wish you and your friends a very successful four years of college.

My Life in Sales

T
HIS IS A
story about traveling salesmen, and so it begins in a bar at the edge of a hotel lobby in Mobile, Alabama. The hotel may or may not have been a Hyatt. My memory can only separate hotels into three categories: those that are disgusting, those that are very nice, and those that may have been Hyatts. What I am sure of is that I was sitting in that hotel bar with Allan Gurganus and Clyde Edgerton on the last day of the Southeastern Booksellers' Association conference. We were drinking, and we were talking about book tour. We all had books that had recently been published, or were about to be published, and now was the time for us to go out into America and sell them. None of us felt particularly energized by this prospect.

“You've got to drink plenty of water,” Clyde said and pulled a bottle of Evian from his bag to make the point. He had decided that the reason his last tour had been so hard was that he must have gotten dehydrated along the way (all that flying). He believed it was a lack of water that had led to his prolonged post-book-tour despair.
Post
-book-tour despair, that surprising companion to the despair one feels
during
book tour, was then discussed at length. Of the three of us, only Allan was sanguine. “The only thing worse than going on book tour,” he said, “is not going on book tour.”

Last week I e-mailed Allan to ask him if he remembered this conversation, and, if he did, was I right in thinking it had taken place in 1994? He wrote, “I think our meeting must have been in 1992, when I was out on tour with
White People
. War stories, those many miles. I didn't drink till Book Tour.” Clyde said he also remembered the conversation: “ . . . tho I was thinking 1997 or 8 was the date of the tour when I drank so much water and walked so much and meditated so much to avoid depression.” The fact is, I was on book tour in 1992 and 1994 and 1997 (and 2001, 2002, and 2007, for that matter), so anything is possible. Like the hotels, the tours all start to blend together. The books, the cities, the stores, the airports, the crowds, or lack of crowds, all fall under the heading “What Happened While I Was Away.” What I always remember clearly are the times I saw other writers, the way pioneers rolling over the prairies in covered wagons must have remembered every detail of the other settlers they passed, cutting through the tall grass from a different angle. “How was it back there?” you shout out from your wooden perch.

“Rough,” your fellow homesteader calls back, and raises his bottle of Evian in warning. “Be sure to drink your water.”

And I do. The reason I have so assiduously followed Clyde's advice (I drink water by the bucketful whenever I'm out on the road) and chanted Allan's words like a mantra in my head (
It is worse not to go. It is worse not to go . . .)
is that these are pretty much the only guidelines I've been offered on what is a very important aspect of my life. Even the ever-professional Iowa Writers' Workshop, where I was a student in the mid-1980s, doesn't have a seminar on book-tour techniques, though the thought of them having one is more chilling by far. Sometimes in life you're better off not knowing what's coming.

W
hen I published my first novel,
The Patron Saint of Liars
, in 1992, I was told there wouldn't be much of a budget for publicity. Of course, I was free to stretch that budget: to drive rather than fly, go cheap on motels and food, keep the collect calls to a minimum, and therefore get to more bookstores. As green as a soldier first reporting for duty, I practically leapt to my feet. “Oh, yes!” said I. This was my book, after all, the physical manifestation of all of my dreams. I was willing to do anything I could to help it make its way in the world. My publicist at Houghton Mifflin set up my itinerary. I covered about twenty-five cities and kept my expenses under $3,000. With one good dress in the trunk of my car, I would drive to Chicago, find the McDonald's closest to the bookstore, change clothes in the restroom (say what you will about the food, they have the cleanest restrooms), go to the bookstore, and present myself to the person behind the counter. That has always been the hardest part for me, approaching the stranger at the cash register to say that I am the seven o'clock show. We would look at each other without a shred of hope and both understand that no one was coming. Sometimes two or three or five people were there, sometimes they all worked in the bookstore, but very often, in the cities where I had no relatives to drum up a little crowd, I was on my own. I did freelance writing for
Bridal Guide
in those days, and more often than not there was a girl working at the store who was engaged. We would sit and talk about her bridesmaids' dresses and floral arrangements until my time was up; then she would ask me to sign five copies of the book for stock. This, I was told, was a coup because signed copies could not be returned to the publisher, so it was virtually the same as a sale. (Please note: this is not true. I have pulled ostensibly brand-new copies of my novels from sealed cartons and found my signature in them. Somebody shipped those copies back.) But none of that mattered, because my publicist told me that the success of book tour wasn't measured in how many books you sold on any given night. What mattered was being friendly, so that the girl at the cash register, and maybe even the store manager, would like you, and in liking you would read your book once you had gone, and by reading your book would see how good it was and then work to hand-sell it to people for months or even years to come. And I believed this because if I didn't, I had no idea what the hell I was doing out there. After saying all my warm goodbyes, I would leave the store in the dark, drive the two blocks back to the McDonald's to change out of my dress, and put in a couple of hours on the road to Indianapolis, where I was scheduled to appear the next night at seven. I was exhausted and embarrassed, and yet I told myself the experience had been worthwhile because I was friendly and would be remembered for that.

A
nd who knows, maybe that's what did the trick. While I was out with my fifth novel,
Run
, I routinely had audiences of two hundred people a night. As those patient readers stood in line and waited for me to sign their books, I realized for the first time that book tour really is more than just a goodwill gesture. It's about selling books.

I
n book-tour lore—the publishing equivalent of urban legend—Jacqueline Susann is given credit for the idea that authors should not only write their books but also personally hand them out. She showed up with her husband, Irving Mansfield, at stores all across the country to sign copies of
Every Night, Josephine!
(the one about her poodle). By the time
Valley of the Dolls
arrived, she was lounging on Merv Griffin's couch and keeping up a publicity schedule that allowed her book to sit in the No. 1 spot on the
New York Times
list for a record-breaking twenty-eight weeks.

Signing books in a store is one thing, but book tour in its more advanced form is credited to Jane Friedman, who until recently was the CEO of HarperCollins (my present publisher). She had started out as a twenty-two-year-old publicist at Knopf, where she was assigned to work with Julia Child for
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume Two.
Julia's cooking show was doing well on public television in Boston, and so Friedman decided to contact all the public-television stations in the major markets. After that, she scheduled appearances at the big department stores (which, in 1970, had significant book sections). “I said, ‘I'll bring Julia to your town, we'll work with the local public-television stations, we'll get newspaper coverage, and then she'll do an autographing in the department store.' ”

What followed was a perfect storm of media and retail, and it established the gold standard that publicists still work for today. The stores were full of signs. The cities were full of buzz. Nothing had been left to chance. At the first stop, in Minneapolis, Friedman looked out of her hotel room window at seven-thirty in the morning and saw a thousand women lined up outside the department store. “It was a Cecil B. DeMille moment,” she remembers. “We had parted the Red Sea. Julia made mayonnaise in a blender. We sold five hundred books.” The formula paid off in city after city: Julia cracking wise and whisking eggs, while ladies waited in line to buy the merchandise. Any modern author short of Stephen King and John Grisham might feel a quiver in his lower lip to think of such large numbers. “Today you're competing with six other authors on the
Today
show,” Friedman says, and suddenly she is speaking as the publisher of
my
books. The CEO who still has a publicist's soul is shoring me up for my own next show. “What hasn't changed is the connection between the author and the reader. If anything, it's even stronger. The people who come out to your signings are real Ann Patchett fans. I'm
glad
I wrought that. It was always my intention.”

And yet I struggle with my own intentions. I can never get very far from the niggling belief that there is something inherently wrongheaded about book tour, that the basic premise of authors selling their books is a flawed one. Most people who are capable of sitting alone day after day, year after year, typing into the void are probably constitutionally ill-suited to work a room like a politician (though I am not, in fact, afraid of public speaking, and I'm good at it). We're a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit. No matter what book clubs tell us, reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves. “I love the way you read,” a woman in a signing line said to me recently. She told me about a favorite author whose books she had loved for years. But when she heard this author read, she couldn't stand her voice. “She was awful. I haven't touched her books since then.” I told her with no small amount of passion that this woman, this author, wasn't important and should be forgotten. “Keep on loving the books,” I said. “You don't have to love her.” “I know,” the woman said, “I know, but I can't get that voice out of my head.”

The author's voice isn't the only thing that can be misleading. Chances are I can explain, in the course of a Q&A, my novel's dissatisfying ending or my character's cloudy motivations, but who's to say I'm right? Once the book is written, its value is for the reader to decide, not for me to explain.

Of course book tour isn't just a month of living out of a suitcase, eating in airports, and cracking your forehead open against a wall in the middle of the night because you've forgotten where the bathroom is (I've done it twice). It is, if you are very lucky, also the excruciating repetition of interviews. I can do three radio shows, a ninety-second spot on a noontime local TV talk show, and telephone in two interviews for two newspapers, all before showing up in a store. If the timing can be jiggled in the right way, I might even squeeze in a podcast. Ninety-five percent of the questions will be exactly the same. I don't expect them to be otherwise. But the twenty-eighth time I find myself in a glass booth with a microphone and a headset and someone says, “So tell me where the idea for this novel came from,” something in my brain starts to come loose. “The book is about
you
,” I want to scream. “I've been stealing your mail for years.” Instead I dig down for my inner Laurence Olivier and try to
act
like a novelist. There were, after all, many years that no one wanted to interview me, and then all the years when people interviewed me without reading the book. (You know when the interviewer hasn't read the book because the first question is always, “Let's talk about this really great cover.”)

Excepting the consistent success of Jane Friedman and Julia Child, selling books isn't much of a science. Although you appear to be promoting your new novel, you never really tour for the book that's just come out. You tour for the book before that, the one people have read and want to talk about. Unless, of course, you're on tour for your first book, which no one has read or wants to talk about. A column in my local paper, the
Tennessean
, recently reminded me of that. The reporter remembered my appearance at a book-and-author dinner in Nashville in 1992, during which I sat alone at a signing table while huge crowds assembled for the other authors, Ricky Van Shelton (a country-music heartthrob who had written a children's book), Janet Dailey (the best-selling romance author), and Jimmy Buffett (no explanation necessary). The editor of the paper felt so sorry for me he quietly instructed twenty-five members of his staff to buy my book, stand in my line, and get my autograph, something I never knew had happened until I read it in the paper fifteen years later. All those dutiful employees were later reimbursed for the price of a hardback.

A few of the people who did eventually read
The Patron Saint of Liars
(whether they were paid to or not) came to hear me when I went out with my second novel,
Taft
. Then both
Patron Saint
and
Taft
readers came when I was in town with my third book,
The Magician's Assistant. Magician's Assistant
people came to see me when I toured for
Bel Canto
. There was a great deal of weeping on that tour. I kept extra tissues in my purse. People wanted to talk about the death of Parsifal, the magician, and what had become of Sabine, his assistant. No one wanted to talk about Roxane Coss, the famous soprano held captive in a nameless South American country. They wanted to talk about
her
six years later, when I went out with
Run
.