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.
I sometimes think I should put my novels in a sample case, the expensive new hardbacks on one side, the smaller, friendlier paperbacks on the other, and go door-to-door through some neighborhood in St. Louis with my wares. If someone wanted me to stand on the sidewalk and read to them, I would read. If somebody wanted his or her book gift-wrapped for the holidays, I would wrap. If they wanted to cry in my arms, I would hold them. The door-to-door sales perfected by Fuller Brush and various encyclopedia companies seemed to operate on a more reliable formula than the marketing schemes of publishing houses. Even as my audiences got a little bit bigger, most hovering in the fifteen-to-twenty-five range by the Magician’s Assistant days, I could still fly halfway across the country to a room full of empty chairs. Who knew I was scheduled to read in Chicago on the night of an NBA playoff game (back in the days when that meant something substantial), or that Ethan Hawke would be reading from his new novel in the room across the hall from me at the Texas Book Fair? I never minded reading to three people. I had plenty of experience. The key is that all of you must sit very close together.
All this raises the question: Why don’t I just stay home? Believe me, I’ve asked myself that many times, mostly in dark hotel rooms when the alarm goes off at four-thirty in the morning because I have a flight to catch. The answer is partly that touring is in my contract; selling is part of the job. But more important, I really do believe Allan Gurganus. Watching a book wither on the shelf would be worse than never having the chance to fight for its success. The market out there is big and crowded, full of noise and hype demanding the reader’s attention. The book, not weighing much more then a pound, with no jack to plug it into, can use all the help it can get. I know a lot of writers whose publishers, whether for lack of funds or confidence, don’t send them out. I don’t know any writers who wouldn’t jump at the chance to go.
Jane Friedman says what matters to her is that the tour is successful for the author, which means sending out people who have an established fan base. Gone are the days of simply dropping a newly minted novelist into the ocean to see if she can swim. The process is too expensive, and too emotionally damaging, to replicate the kinds of tours I lived through in the early nineties. Yet I wonder who I would be, and where I would be, without those early, soul-crushing tours of duty. It would be like opening directly on Broadway without the formative years in vaudeville, where I was, quite literally, getting my act together.
Late one night, I was reaching the end of my signing line for Run, after having given a talk at Washington National Cathedral. A woman came up to the table with a girl who might have been sixteen, though I doubt she was as old as that. “It’s awfully late for you to be up on a school night,” I said to her.
“And it’s going to be a lot later before she gets to bed,” the mother said. The daughter was looking at the floor. “We’ve got a four-hour drive back to West Virginia tonight.” She beamed at me. She was a mother, after all, and very proud of what she had accomplished for her child. “I knew you would tell her something she needed to hear, something she’d always remember, and you did. You’re her favorite writer, you know. She’s going to be a writer, too.”
I wished to God I had something to give that child, an amulet or a golden compass, something that would have proved just how completely I believed in her. She didn’t say a word to me, and I put my arm around her so that her mother could take our picture. I wrote her name and my name in her copy of my book. I thanked them both for coming, but there was no way to thank them enough. It was late, and people were still in the line behind them, and they had a long drive ahead.
(Atlantic Monthly, October 2008)
“The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal”
MY SISTER, HEATHER, first broke the news about my pornography in the middle of last July. She lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she was able to get her information from a couple of newspapers, the Greenville News and the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. My sister doesn’t watch television, but a friend e-mailed her a link to a local TV news story and she watched it on her computer. She then sent it on to me with the attached note: You’ve just got to laugh.
As I didn’t have to make my appearance at Clemson until the latter part of August, I had five weeks to decide whether or not to laugh.
This is the story: Clemson University, located in the button-sized hamlet of Clemson, South Carolina, had assigned Truth & Beauty, a memoir I had written about my friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, to the incoming freshman class of 2006. Such reading programs are popular nowadays. The idea was born of the book club, a social activity in which the book is often nothing more than an excuse for getting together with friends. Since Oprah took the book club national, entire cities have
decided to read a single book, high schools and colleges have picked one book as a way of bringing students together. Discussion groups are organized, papers are assigned, and then, if all goes well, the author is brought in to give a talk, do a signing, meet and greet.
I know this drill. I have been the all-city read and the freshman read and the radio-book-club read, as both a novelist and memoirist. It’s good work for an author: lots of books are sold, and an audience that might otherwise have never thought of you starts searching out your backlist. My extensive prior experience with one-book programs, both civic and academic, had been uniformly positive, so when a panel of Clemson administrators and faculty voted to assign Truth & Beauty some ten months in advance of the late-August engagement, I agreed to attend, marked it on my calendar, and then forgot about it.
I went back to my computer and watched the news clip again. The reporter shook my paperback at the camera as if it were a bloodied knife. “This is the book,” she said. “And for at least one parent, there’s nothing beautiful about it.”
That parent turned out to be Ken Wingate, a Clemson alum, a lawyer, and a member of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education. His own children were not members of the Clemson incoming freshman class, but two of his nieces and a nephew were. On the news, he outlined his problems with the summer-reading committee’s selection. “The book talks in graphic terms about pornography, about fetish, about masturbation, about multiple sex partners . . . The book contains a very extensive list of over-the-top sexual and antireligious references. The explicit message that this sends to students is that they are encouraged to find themselves sexually.”
Then the screen was taken over by a sleepy-looking coed who seemed to have been stopped and questioned on her way to class. She was a Clemson junior but her little brother was an entering freshman. “I’ve heard that there’s girls that are doing drugs and having sex at early ages,” she said in heavy South Carolinese, “and it’s just not good for people to have to read.”
In the Greenville paper, Mr. Wingate furthered his views. “I’m certainly not anti-Clemson,” he said. “In fact, I love Clemson, which is why I’ve waded into this sewer, both in terms of reading the book and being an outspoken advocate for an alternative book, because this is inappropriate to shove down the throats of incoming freshmen.”
“Did he call me a sewer?” I asked my sister.
“I think he’s saying the book is a sewer,” Heather said. “Or the circumstances are sewer-like. I don’t think you yourself are a sewer.”
Either way, the battle had been launched to keep the youth of Clemson and, I imagine, other citizens of South Carolina safe. From me. Ken Wingate had lost his bids for both the state senate and the governor’s seat (for which in the 2002 primary he garnered a total vote of four percent) and had now turned his attention to me. To save the parents of freshmen and other concerned citizens the trip through the sewer that he himself had endured, he posted excerpts from my book on a website: every instance of profanity, every reference to body parts and their uses and to pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs that appeared within my pages was on his list. That way the citizenry could be fully informed without having to go to the bother of reading the book for themselves.
Nothing about this seemed especially shocking to me. I live in Tennessee. We’re the people who brought you the Scopes Monkey Trial. I never did meet Ken Wingate, but I have been meeting people like him all my life. Still, his attention grated. To be charged with a crime you’ve committed is one thing, but a special kind of bewilderment comes of being wrongly accused, and I believed I had been wrongly accused.
Where Truth & Beauty errs, it errs frankly on the side of sweetness. It is a book that appeals to high school girls. In 2005, it won an award from the American Library Association for being one of ten adult books most suitable for teenaged readers. It is my own story, the story of Lucy and me meeting in college, becoming friends in graduate school, and trying to find our way in the world as writers. Lucy, who had lost part of her jaw to cancer at the age of nine, had endured years of chemotherapy and radiation. She had thirty-eight reconstructive surgeries over the course of her lifetime. She was a spectacular person, brilliant and difficult, demanding and talented. She was capable of great love and tenderness, as well as great suffering. She was my best friend for seventeen years. After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive. This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend. Even when the details of our lives became sordid, it was not the stuff of sewers.
My friends from New York offered to go with me to South Carolina, expecting a gladiatorial match I would surely win. My friends from home read drafts of my speech and howled over the ever-growing stack of newspaper clippings. My friend from Mississippi told me not to go. “Cancel,” she said. “Cancel, cancel, cancel.” Mississippians tend not to be cavalier about the dangers of bigotry in the Deep South.
“I never cancel.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
Over at Clemson a hue and cry was being raised from a quickly gathering organization of concerned parents, who had read all the juicy highlights on the Internet. Not only were they calling to have the assignment rescinded, or, at the very least, to have a more appropriate book like To Kill a Mockingbird serve as an alternate choice, they also appeared to want me barred from campus.
“At a minimum,” an alumnus wrote the university’s president, “I trust that the current assignment will be pulled immediately and that the author’s visit to Clemson will be cancelled. If not, shame on you and shame on Clemson University.”
In an article published in the Anderson Independent-Mail, headlined “Protesters: Little Beauty in ‘Truth and Beauty,’ ” a reporter wrote, “In the book, there is an implied lesbian relationship between Ms. Patchett and Ms. Grealy.” The article went on to quote a seventeen-year-old Clemson freshman who had joined in the protest. “The friendship and the love portrayed in the book are not exemplary,” she said. “The love between the two women is not normal.” The reporter and the seventeen-year-old had finally come out and said the thing that no one else had had the nerve to mention: Lucy and I must have been having sex with each other. That was the only possible explanation for our loyalty, love, and devotion. Sex was the payoff for a difficult relationship, and without the sex the whole thing made no sense.
I drove to Spartanburg and picked up my sister on the way to Clemson. “If it had been a couple of guys who met in college and saw each other through sex and drugs and illness, it would have been Brian’s Song,” she said to me in the car. “They would have made a Movie of the Week out of it and named the football stadium after you.”
We had been hoping that the controversy would have spun itself out like a summer storm before my arrival. No such luck. Mr. Wingate managed to keep his disgust and disappointment in the papers, culminating his efforts with an on-campus news conference the day before my arrival. Excerpts of all the bad reviews of Truth & Beauty that had been posted by readers on Amazon were assembled in a flyer and distributed to passersby, but if anyone missed them, they were also posted on the website of a faith-based organization called the Palmetto Family Council, under the heading “Praise Not Universal.” The site also provided a Bible-study guide for the book. The local paper claimed that seven students joined about forty parents, grandparents, and alumni to protest.
“It wasn’t that many,” a dean told me as I was whisked into an office upon arrival. “And he brought most of them with him.” Still, the people in the dean’s office, the people who had worked so hard to get me there, looked nervous. They looked really nervous.
“He took out a full-page ad in the paper.” An assistant woefully passed over that morning’s edition of the
Greenville News. It had been paid for by “Upstate Alive,” an organization I had never heard of.
In big orange letters, the ad in the Greenville News asked: “Is CLEMSON trying to educate students or socialize them?”
The freshman reading project at Clemson University is:
1. A violation of academic freedom of choice because it’s REQUIRED reading.
It’s not optional and denies students a choice, which violates the “marketplace of ideas” ideal of the University . . .
2. A violation of the University’s own sexual harassment policy, which states that sexual harassment of university faculty, staff, or students is prohibited.
Yet these freshmen are required to join in group discussions about virginity, pornography, masturbation and seduction . . .