Into the Great Wide Open

On publishing, parenting, and re-entering meat space after a long time away

You guys remember in “The Sopranos,” where Tony keeps brushing off Carmela and growling, “It’s my busy season!”

That’s me. I am Tony. It is my busy season.

THE GRIFFIN SISTERS’ GREATEST HITS comes out in less than two weeks, so it’s all promotion, all the time. Instead of working on my new book, I’m talking about what feels like an old one, because the book’s been done for more than a year, and I’m knee deep in a new book, which I would love to get back to revising.

But that won’t happen any time soon.

TGSGH is the first book I’m publishing with HarperCollins, and the team there has worked magic and managed to get a tremendous amount of media attention. Which isn’t easy when you’re talking up a mid-career author who has written eighteen novels and who publishes a new book almost every year. We’ve covered her already, they can (correctly) say. So she’s got another book. What’s the big deal about that?

It’s human nature to be attracted to the shiny new thing. And I am neither shiny nor new. But, somehow, the team there has done it. For the past few days, I’ve been yapping endlessly about the Griffin Sisters: where did you get the idea? Where’d the inspiration come from? How did you pick the setting, and how’d you pick the time period? How did you write the songs in the book and what drew you to sisters, again, and had you always wanted to write about music? In between, I’m gathering photographs and articles and juvenilia for the CBS Saturday Morning folks. Lucky for me, my mom was weirdly pack-ratty about this. She saved everything.

“This Bird,” by Jennifer Weiner, age 7, all rights reserved.

I like talking about my books. I like talking in general. All of the reporters and hosts were smart and thoughtful and asked interesting questions. It was fun!

But, in addition to the media, there’s other work of promotion. I’m supposed to be posting on social media: Instagram and Facebook, and Tiktok, which I’m barely on, and YouTube, which I’m not on at all. There’s a newsletter to be written, promotional videos to film (“Hello, Des Moines!”). And I’m going to be talking about other peoples’ books on “The Today Show” soon, so I’ve got to finish reading them. And then there’s being a mother, to a high-school junior, who needs me to help her find a prom dress! And also a college!

It’s not that I mind any of it. It’s just that there’s too much of it and not enough of me.

I wish I could clone myself, so that one me could post on social media, do the interviews and the pre-interviews and the videos, comb through fifty-plus years of photographs and documents so the people at CBS have what they need, hand-write notes to booksellers and to other authors asking them to give The Griffin Sisters a shout-out, and read all the books I want to boost. Another me could just be writing all the time, barefoot in her threadbare Target overalls and her hair in a messy bun. And Me #3 could be a mom: making delicious meals, spending hours combing through racks of prom gowns, researching the differences between the dozens of small liberal arts colleges in New England and upstate New York.

I try to remember that I’m lucky.

And, I think, if I got to go back in time and tell seven-year-old me what we got to do when we grew up, she’d be delighted. You get to write stories, and then talk about them? And then your publisher pays for you to go all over the country, and talk about your books some more to people who’ve read them? And you’re complaining because you don’t have enough hours in the day and you have to wear Spanx? Suck it up! And what are Spanx?

Second grade. Probably my best look ever.

Per my therapist’s instructions, I’m trying my hardest reframe this as I get to, not I have to. As in, I get to comb through shoeboxes of pictures trying to find a shot of me working as a reporter (I know there’s at least one picture of me at my desk at the Centre Daily Times in there, somewhere!) I get to have my hair and makeup done. I get to visit wonderful bookstores all across America, and talk to readers (“Hello, Tulsa!”).

Sometimes it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. I get to doesn’t really work when it’s I get to feel like I’ve been slapped every time I come across a picture of my father. Same with I get to rediscover clippings of I’ve written or that were written about me that make me cringe, and I get to see the documentation of years of weight fluctuations and regrettable hairstyles and what-was-I-thinking clothes.

I’ve been thinking about why this part’s so hard – the looking-at-old-pictures part, the getting-ready-to-do-public-appearances part, the being in public, in front of an audience part.

I think it’s because the rest of my professional life is so easy. When I’m at home, writing, I am basically a brain in a jar. It doesn’t matter what I wear; it doesn’t matter how I look or how I looked five years ago or how I will look five years in the future. I don’t have to worry about being a body. I am just an imagination.

And now? Now I have to out in meat space. I have to be a body; a person with a history of bad choices and bad haircuts, who will soon be spending hours upon hours getting blowouts and makeup, having her roots touched up and her eyelash extensions glued in place and feeling deeply conflicted about every minute and every dollar she spends.

I wish I could just not care…or, at least, care less. I wish I could just wear sneakers like my friend Curtis Sittenfeld. I wish I could let my hair go gray, like my new friend Jessica Berger Gross. I wish I could set my shapewear on fire and wear comfortable clothes and comfortable shoes. But I can’t. Even though I understand that I’ve been socialized to believe that brown hair is intrinsically more attractive than gray hair; that heels are more elegant than flats, that a thin body is more beautiful and worthy than a fat one. I can understand, with my head, that it’s all a lie that capitalism and the patriarchy are pushing. I just can’t convince my heart.

I think being plus size is part of it. When you’re in a larger body (when you’re fat! Why can’t I just say fat?) you never want to look unkempt or slovenly. You don’t want to give anyone credence to the lazy part of the fat and lazy stereotype. Looking good at any size is a challenge, but doing it as a size sixteen or larger is especially difficult, because cute clothes sometimes don’t exist in your size.

And once, years ago, I did a speaking event. The group hosting the event filled out a rating form, which got forwarded to me. At that particular event — and I can’t remember where it was, or to whom I was speaking — but I can remember that they were very happy with what I had to say, but they rated my appearance, I think, a five out of ten.

I don’t remember when this was, or what I wore. I remember how I felt when I saw that number. It was not a good way to feel.

And so: hair dye. Shapewear. Eyelash extensions. Although I might finally be ready to break up with high heels. They’ve just gotten too painful. I would love to just wear cute flats. Catch me toward the tail end of this tour, and we’ll see.

Anyhow!

On Sunday, I had a piano recital. Yes, in the midst of all the travel and the craziness, I decided to sign up for a piano recital, too. I was proud of getting through it, not perfectly, but from beginning to end without stopping, and I’m trying not to beat myself up for not being better. It’s just so weird to me, that I can sit down at one keyboard and have words right there at my fingertips, and sit down at a different keyboard and have…nothing.

And I’ve been baking.

I saw Ruby Bhogal make a Sunken Malt Chocolate, Pistachio and Cherry Cake on Instagram and thought, “Chocolate, pistachios and cherries? These are a few of my favorite things!” and attempted to do it myself.

The deal is, you bake a chocolate cake, soak it in the drippings of jarred Amarono cherries, and serve it with a pistachio-flavored glippity-glop made with whipping cream and pistachio butter.

The cake was meh. I blame myself. I might have overbaked it. I also might have screwed up somewhere translating the quantities from metric to American. I subbed flour for ground almonds because I didn’t have any ground almonds and wasn’t sure if that meant almond flour, but I think even if I’d followed all the steps and nailed the measurements it wouldn’t have been any tastier than my go-to Samin Nosrat oil-based Chocolate Midnight Cake (the secret ingredient is hot coffee!)

Bhogal’s recipe called for malt powder, sour cream (or ‘soured cream’ if you’re a Brit), and chocolate butter, which looks divine but which you can’t get outside of Australia. I thought all that extra fat would translate to extra richness. Dear reader, it was not so. And I couldn’t taste the malt at all, which was a bummer, as I enjoy malt. But the cherry syrup soak, and pistachio-flavored whipped cream were A plus. If I try this again I’ll just do my standard chocolate cake with the accoutrement.

And that’s all from here, for now! Here are the tour dates again. I would love to see lots of you out there.

And here are the links to buy the book. I hope you’ll read it, and I hope you have as much fun as I did writing it.