I just returned from a month on the road, promoting my paperback of THIS IS NOT THE STORY YOU THINK IT IS. It was a fast forward into spring, the rolling hills of Ohio budding with forsythia and the pink pointillism of fruit trees, the Japanese magnolias bursting on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, the daffodil and …
I just returned from a month on the road, promoting my paperback of THIS IS NOT THE STORY YOU THINK IT IS. It was a fast forward into spring, the rolling hills of Ohio budding with forsythia and the pink pointillism of fruit trees, the Japanese magnolias bursting on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, the daffodil and hyacinth bedecked planters on the streets of Manhattan…my Montana garden still under four feet of hard-crusted snow. I was dreading this tour in a way. I knew that I had to be up for a lot—like a card game wherein the whole deck is dealt and you’re still learning to hold a hand of cards in the first place, never mind twenty-six of them.
The playing directions looked something like this:
One day the 6:00 am hot pursuit of a Fox station in a cornfield to do live TV with the wrong directions, no GPS, no cell phone service, applying mascara in a parking lot in your rental car. Another, a NYC limo is picking you up at a boutique hotel in mid-town Manhattan and taking you to do one of the three major morning shows and you’re in hair and make-up with a producer telling you that the big shows just don’t book authors anymore, as if to say so don’t screw this up. Another, you’re in a Motel Six because you have seven hours to kill since the radio show cancelled and you’re in western Pennsylvania with the shades drawn and the smell of teenaged girls (cantaloupe and nail polish) seeping under the door as they prepare for their marching band competition (consequent drumming on the walls). Another, you’re meeting the president of your publishing house, comforted by his cashmere sweater as you embrace him with infinite thanks, holding on just a little too long. Another and it’s the ladies-who-lunch crowd at a Boston brahminly country hunt club– the childhood demographic you left behind– so you’re not sure they’ve made a mistake and will end up booing you off stage. Instead, theirs is one of the most gracious groups you’ve spoken to, and you don’t want to leave their lavender roses and hydrangea and polite round tables with little notebooks at each place just in case people actually want to write down something you have to say, hounds barking in the distance. 
At a library in suburban New York, a dear fan presents you with a shopping bag filled with “things to help keep your sanity on the road”—bath salts, a bottle of wine, two mugs with the cover of your book on them, a framed photo of your new paperback, a crystal bracelet for “spiritual grounding,” and a novel about horses because she knows you love horses, just in case there’s time to read. Which there isn’t. 
There’s barely time to eat breakfast. Barely time to call your children and tell them you miss the way they smell. Barely time to map out where the hotel bathroom is before you turn off the lights, because you will trip over something like a toilet on your way to the toilet in the middle of the night and you won’t be able to figure out how to turn on the lamp on your bedside table even if you thought to try. Every writer knows: the road is not for sissies.
And along the way, writers will come to your readings and look at you the way your mother looked at you when you were sixteen going off on a date with a high school senior in his 1974 Buick Wildcat convertible. An eyebrow lifted. Caution. Worry. Get home by midnight. Nothing below the waist.
I’m not complaining. I’m just saying: it requires a certain confluence of temperament and moxie to make it on the road.
Organization: you need little theme pouches so you don’t look like Mary Poppins trying to fish out a coat rack from your purse every time you reach in for that thing you know you put somewhere accessible like your hotel key or your reading glasses or your Advil.
Flexibility: see Motel Six/marching band.
Rules: No, you can’t go out for wine after the reading. You have morning interviews. You have to drive to Cincinnati. You have a last minute booking and a speech to write. Plus, you might be going to Providence—you’re still waiting to hear from the radio host.
But what you really need is shampoo. You’ve run out and your hair is all frizzy and dry and you have live TV the next day, even if it is in a corn field. And especially if it’s in Times Square. Can someone get you some decent shampoo? That old boyfriend in the front row– can he get you shampoo? Pureology. For treated hair. In the purple bottle. The travel size. And word to the wise: Don’t you dare look at your grow out line. It’s enough to know it’s there and there’s nothing you can do about it. Hopefully you are taller than most people, especially in your boots. 
Boots are the deciding factor on how your whole tour is going to go, in fact. Be grateful for your boots. You have lived in them for weeks now. You want to cry you love your boots so much for taking you safely and without pain or consequence, through the streets and sidewalks of ten American cities. When you get home, you might frame them in a shadow box. Now you know how Elvis felt.
I’m home now. I can afford dramatics. It’s actually the only way I can process the road—to lie in bed with my favorite tea in my favorite mug and stare at the ceiling and be dramatic. Make a slide show on my computer of my favorite moments, and even the corn field, and the forsythia and the crystal bracelet and the little notebook, and the cashmere sweater…and watch it go by like a moving grocery store marquee of the last month of my life, which no one else will value or care about quite like me. I am the witness to this dream come true. I’m the one who dreamed it in the first place. No one asked me to dream it.
And lying in bed, it occurs to me that a college friend gave me an envelope in Ohio at a reading and that I haven’t opened it. I take out the stack of papers that have been the breath of my last month and smile at my last minute notes on my sixty-four page itinerary– the phone numbers and restaurant addresses and confirmation numbers. I hardly know how to throw that stack away, but I will. You can’t keep everything. You wrote a book. It got published and people are reading it. That’s all you need. I see the envelope from my college friend. I get back into bed, the slideshow playing, and untuck its contents. A big forgotten bell resounds and immediately, I am crying. Dramatics. It’s a short story I wrote in college. It’s on dot-matrix computer paper, in a font they no longer make.
On the top it says, “Laura, congrats! You really did it! I saved this for this very day because I knew it would come!” And then in my college handwriting, much puffier than it is now, it has her name on the top and her mail box number. Now I remember: I wrote a story for my closest friends when I graduated in 1988.
I hardly have the guts to read it. I was so angry then. I was so conflicted. I wasn’t supposed to be a writer. That was a reckless swerve off a very well-paved highway, last minute. Broadcast journalism. Advertising. Something practical and lucrative. Not spending the next twenty-three years writing books. Unpublished ones. In a small town in Montana.
With that same moxie I’ve known on book tour, I bear down and begin to read. 
It’s a scene with a newly graduated girl at the dining room table with her parents, breaking the news: she’s going to move west. She’s going to bartend or waitress or something. She’s going to be a writer. The response: not favorable.
Here is hers:
“I’m going to pursue this writing thing until I’m burned out or dead or something drastic, but I’m not going to just blow it off because I’m afraid of being poor, and for God’s sake, different.” I’ll throw back the contents of my wine and with wet, angry lips, I’ll speak my final peace on the subject. “Look, if I don’t do it now, I’ll end up married in a northern suburb of Chicago before I’m twenty-five, and all that will be left of this whole dream will be some old dusty manuscripts in a filing cabinet somewhere. I’m going to try hard to get what I want and then, well we’ll let fate or God or whatever, take it from there. Okay? Can you just support me, not financially, but mentally, and respect my decisions? I am a writer of books.” I’ll remind myself when I see their faces that it’s all because they love me. I love them too, but there are things I want to do. Is that so weird?
Yes, twenty-one year old Laura. Yes and no.
I drink my tea and I let myself be proud. Until the slideshow is over. And then it’ll be time to unpack and get back to the work and leave the drama behind. I am a writer of books.
