|
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
As I understand it, I'm supposed to write about the experience of book tour. This
shouldn't be a problem since book tour is the only thing on my mind these days, and the
people I know are getting pretty tired of hearing me talk about it. I also feel a great
deal of freedom to speak frankly, as I cannot imagine anyone would want to read anything
that anyone has to say about book tour. If a tree prattles on alone in a forest does it
make a sound?
Let's go back to the beginning: When I was ten or so I was sent to a Girl Scout camp for
two weeks in the summer. The camp was only about forty-five minutes away from where I was
living in Ashland City, Tennessee (City of Ashes) but it might as well have been in
Vietnam because going home was not an option. Two weeks is about ten months when you're
ten, so contrary to appearances, I was going very far away for a very long time and I
begged my mother not to send me. My mother sent me. One miserable, hot camp day my best
camp friend Lee Ann Hunter and I were taking a nature walk with a group of campers, and
the counselor pointed out a small field of poison ivy, which we were told we should never,
never go into. Lee Ann and I decided this was our ticket out, so we went back that night
and threw ourselves into the poison ivy. We rolled in it. We picked it and stuffed it into
our clothes. We rubbed it in our hair. We ate it. You are thinking that ten year olds are
smarter than this, but we weren't. The long and short of it was that after we got out of
the hospital we did get to leave camp, and I had a pretty good time at home for a
week, eating Jell-O through a straw, until my sister got home from camp and told my mother
that I had done this to myself. Until this point my mother had been under the impression
that the poison ivy had done this to me. After that the Jell-O slowed down considerably.
My mother and I forgave each other for this and continued our close relationship. She went
on to become a famous writer who did not have to go on book tour for her novel, JULIE AND
ROMEO, because her publisher decided the money it would cost to send her would be better
spent on snappy ads in The New York Times. I have to go on book tour. I have to
leave tomorrow.
This evening I was out trimming my hedges, which won't be trimmed again until sometime in
July when this is all over, and my arms broke out in a terrible rash, and for one happy
moment I thought it was poison ivy and I thought of the end of the William Carlos
Williams's poem, "The Widow's Lament in Springtime."
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
In short, I would rather not go on book tour. I want to see how the tomato plant would do
if there was someone was here to water it. I've been on book tour before. There are some
lovely moments of meeting people, but 98.9 percent of it takes place in an airport eating
Cinnabuns.
One bright note: I went to Target yesterday and bought a raft of chic plastic bottles and
a zipper case to put them all in. I have this pathetic hope that having my shampoo and
moisturizer well organized will make some sort of emotional difference to me when I'm
flying into Petoskey, Michigan. We cling to whatever we can cling to.
Please check out my website www.annpatchett.com.
--- Ann Patchett
(c)
Copyright 2001, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
|
