Do I make up the dialogue between fictional characters? Of course I do, but I truly believe that those are the words these people would say to one another in that moment. Did Lucy make up dialogue between her characters—real people who were there for real moments in her life? Absolutely. Who can remember what everyone says?
Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t telling the truth; we’ve simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don’t go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It’s the story we shape and improve on, we don’t change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear. There were plenty of things Lucy left out of Autobiography of a Face, mostly how relentless and long her illness was, how violently, boringly sick she would be for weeks and months at a time. She understood exactly how much the reader could stand without turning away. She didn’t write the story of what she had had to endure; she wrote the story she thought the reader could endure.
Just as every story we tell bears our own distinctive slant on the experience, every story we read bears someone else’s. Whether it’s a story in a newspaper or a chapter in a history textbook, the writer has made the decision of what to include and what to leave out. It doesn’t mean he or she isn’t telling the truth; it simply means that events can’t be recorded exactly. They can only be interpreted. Even a photograph reveals only part of the picture. The frame is defined by its own four edges. Whom do you choose to leave out of the portrait? Whom do you choose to include?
It was a subject that fascinated Lucy. Making art was much more important to her than making an accurate record of fact, especially since she understood that that was something that could never be fully accomplished. She wrote about it in an essay entitled “My God.” She wrote,
Vincent van Gogh, in his letters to his brother, Theo, outlined a life filled with the tangible. Vincent loved to look, to touch, to smell, and to taste the world about him. Most of all, he loved to look, and then feel, with his hands grasping the charcoal or brush, what he had just seen. His hands roamed all over his mind, trying to decipher the different grains of thought and emotion, the thin line between the actual and the imagined, between light and the things he saw with light. Though he never lived to hear of either wave or particle theories of light, Vincent understood that one doesn’t just simply “see” a chair or a table, but rather that one’s eyes are actually caressed by the light that bounces off them. Color, while being the most visible thing we can know about a tree, is also created by that part of light that the tree has cast off. The tree absorbs all the other light waves of color, welcomes them as part of itself; the green we see is the negative, the reflected-off reality it wants no part of. Where its definition of itself ends, our definition of it is just beginning.
There are two kinds of educational experience you can have in college. One is passive and one is active. In the first, you are a little bird in the nest with your beak stretched open wide, and the professor gathers up all the information you need and drops it down your gullet. You may feel good about this—after all, you are passionately waiting for this information—but your only role is to accept what you are given. To memorize facts and later repeat them for a test might get you a good grade, but it’s not the same thing as having intellectual curiosity. In the second kind, you are taught to learn how to find the information, and how to think about it, for yourself. You learn how to question and to engage. You realize that one answer is not enough and that you have to look at as many sources as are available to you so that you can piece together a larger picture. With Truth & Beauty, I have not written the definitive truth about the life of my friend, because that would never have been possible. I told one version of her complicated life. She told another, her family tells another, her readers tell yet another. Everyone adds a chip of color to the mosaic and from there some kind of larger portrait begins to take shape.
I hated high school. I spent a great deal of every class period imagining myself jumping out the first-floor window and running and running until no one in high school could ever find me again. Part of this had to do with my frustration at the one-question, one-answer, no-discussion method of education that was deemed appropriate for southern girls in a Catholic school. Part of it was feeling misunderstood, alone, and vaguely persecuted, a state fairly common among teenagers. When Lucy and I became friends and started spending long nights discussing the unhappinesses of our youth, she was thrilled to find out that I had hated high school too. To her, this was a great bonding point, something important that we had in common. I, on the other hand, felt my teenage angst was a trifle in the face of what she had experienced. Of course she hated high school, filled as it was with savage mockery and cruel exclusion. When she complained to a teacher that none of the other children would let her sit with them at lunch, he said she could take her sandwich to his office and eat by herself—which she did, for years. But even though our circumstances were dramatically different, the emotional outcome was very much the same. This was a great help to me as I started writing fiction. I might not have experienced what happened, but chances were at some point in my life I had felt the emotions.
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 thro
ugh 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
THIS 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.
When 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.
And 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.
In 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 publicist
s 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.”