Home Again, Home Again

Some thoughts on book tours, the writing life, and middle-age representation

So that’s the Griffin Sisters book tour, done and dusted, and I cannot even tell you how glad I am to be home.

I know that there are authors who despise book tours. They’re introverts, they’re homebodies, they’re allergic to crowds, and the thought of public speaking makes them feel sick. The travel is exhausting, the itineraries are demanding, and the whole experience (as Dave Barry once joked) feels designed to kill the author, so the publisher can sell more copies of their book posthumously.

I’m not quite that bad. While I am generally an introvert, and, absolutely a homebody, I don’t mind public speaking, and I love hearing from readers who got something from my books – who laughed, who saw themselves, who were entertained on a plane ride, who felt like they were less alone.

There were some highlights on this tour. Katie Porter showed up at my reading in California – and sat in the audience, like a regular person! One of my mom’s friends came to my event in Traverse City! I got a little lost on my way to Doylestown, but, once I was there, it was the best kick-off night ever. And I’m still thinking about the man who waited in line to tell me that his son had died, and that reading my books gave him some respite in his grief.

I’ve heard actors say that the real work they get paid for isn’t acting, it’s waiting, the sitting around on set until you’re called, I think the real work of book tour isn’t the tour events, it’s the travel.

I’ve been on tours where it feels like you’re being lofted on the wings of angels, where every event is crowded, every airport is uncrowded, no one pronounces your last name wrong and all the news from home is good.

This tour, instead of being lofted on the wings of angels, I was trudging wearily through an airport somewhere in the Midwest, realizing I’d underpacked on underwear.

And traveling in middle age has its own set of challenges. When my kids were young book tour was practically vacation – I can go through security without a stroller and a diaper bag? You mean I get the whole hotel room to myself? I can sit on a plane and read my book and nobody’s going to bother me? Sign me up! Last month, with one kid getting ready to graduate from college and the other navigating junior year of high school – with college visits, the SATs and prom – it was hard to be away.

If you’ve been following the discourse on social media, authors are having a vigorous debate about book sales. The question is, can an author do anything to move the needle? Is all-hands-on-deck-level publisher support the only thing that matters? Is even that kind of support enough?

Respectfully, I think it’s the wrong question.

Yes, every writer who pours her heart into a book wants that book to sell; and yes, most of us will do every hard, time-consuming thing our publisher asks of us to make that success more likely.

Publisher support obviously makes a huge difference (and I’m extremely lucky my publisher supported this book so well). But sometimes, not even that is enough, and it’s the pixie dust of word of mouth (or word of Tiktok) selling more books than any media get or any publicity and marketing campaign.

Ultimately — say it with me — a book’s reception and its sales are not something an author can control.

Can we help our book’s fortune? Absolutely. Can we control our book’s fate? We cannot.

The only thing we can control are the words on the page.

Last week, at my daughter’s NYU graduation, I sat in Radio City Music Hall and heard the musician Maggie Rogers speak to a room full of writers and singers and actors and stage managers, young creatives who want to be on Broadway or write for movies or TV, she said – and I am paraphrasing – that artists cannot worry about numbers. “You do it because you have something to say.”

Maggie Rogers at Tisch graduation

And what you have to say is, ultimately, the only thing you can control.

I’m very glad to be back to my family, to my garden, and to my work in progress. Because that’s the true joy of being a writer. There’s always another blank page, and a chance to tell another story (and I really love the story I’m working on right now).

In other news, my husband and I watched the remake of “The Four Seasons” on Netflix, which is based on the 1981 movie of the same name.. We both liked the show, and decided to give the movie a try.

Here is what I can tell you about the difference between a limited series on a streaming platform in 2025 versus a major motion picture from the 1980’s.

The pacing, back then, was much slower. The dialogue, back then, was much more dense.

And the actors, back then, were much more likely to look like real people than the actors these days.

The film and the series both tell the story of three couples who vacation together once per season. There’s comedy and tragedy, the dissolution of a marriage and a May-December romance. The 1981 version has some funny bits about hypochondria and paranoia and a guy having affairs with “hat-check girls,” (does anyone know what those are anymore?) The 2025 version updates the couples (instead of three straight unions, there are two M/F couples and one couple with two men, in an open relationship), and adds jokes about gender fluidity, gluten-free baked goods, and Grindr is the best way to get to know a small town.

But the part I couldn’t get over is how, in the Netflix update, all the men are buff, and all the middle-aged ladies are slender. Tina Fey’s face is Hollywood smooth and plump-cheeked. Kerri Kenney-Silver, who plays Steve Carell’s wife, Annie, in the miniseries, looks like a woman in her fifties from the neck up, a twentysomething fitness influencer from the neck down.

And all the four of the male characters look like they’re ready to compete in the Crossfit Games.

Which makes sense for Danny and Claude -- at one point, Tina Fey’s character, Kate, tells Danny, played by Coleman Domingo, that she’s not interested in being single, insofar as straight men her age don’t take care of themselves the way gay men do, and she’s not excited about seeing “another pair of thickening toenails.” It makes sense for Danny and Claude to be gym-toned, meticulously groomed and fashionably clad.

However, hedge funder Nick, played by Steve Carrell, also looks like he’s been living at the gym, not the office.

Were we all sleeping on Michael Scott?

And Will Forte, as Tina Fey’s husband, Jack, who’s a teacher, is also extremely buff for a guy who spends his days giving lectures and grading papers.

The tyranny of thin didn’t extend to the series’ younger characters – the actress playing Nick and Annie’s daughter is normal sized, as are other members of the younger cohort– but all the Gen-X characters looked like they were waging war against Father Time and Mother Nature…and, if they weren’t winning, they were at least holding the line.

In the movie, the middle-aged women look their age. There are wrinkles, dark circles and unreconstructed necks. They’ve got what I’d consider normal-looking faces.

Among the three husbands, there’s an actual fat person, and his body’s not played for laughs, or commented on at all -- not even when he wins an impromptu motocross race and pulls off his shirt, shouting “The sexy dentist wins!” in celebration. He’s not treated like a ‘before.’ His body is just a body.

There aren’t any plus-size female characters in the movie so points to the Netflix seres for including a few…but the 1981 women’s faces don’t have the kind of buffed, plumped, smoothed, injected sameness that’s become so common.

I can only hope that we’re due for a pendulum swing. But my Instagram feed is full of the news about Kris Jenner’s new face, and how, at seventy, she looks like an uncanny valley version of her daughters’ big sister. I’m not going to hold my breath.

And that’s all for now! Ask me your writing questions in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.