There’s a Facebook meme going around where you can make a collage of your status updates for the past year. I’m kind of horrified of it, because I suspect that 90% of my updates from the year were about book promotion, and there’s nothing worse than thinking back on the annum and realizing you honked your f*cking horn that loudly for that many months. It’d be like discovering you had food on your face for an entire year and kind friends tried to let you down easy by ignoring it while everyone else wondered why that mustard smudge was still there and if you were perhaps trying to start a new trend.

Converse to all the self-promotional activity I very grudgingly engaged in, 2009 was in many ways my year of learning lessons in humility. I think this actually began in late 08 when my editor started sending me comments on the manuscript in progress. After years of working on magazine edits in Word, I was shocked to see that big New York publishers edit in pencil. Pencil! And they make lots of comments, which are super helpful in most cases but still — one toils away on a book alone, with little feedback, and then FedEx envelopes start appearing covered in pencil marks. And then copy edits come a few months later… in pencil! Red pencil, as a matter of fact, and you have to write “OK” five million times for each edit.. in pencil! Green pencil in this case, and thus the damn thing begins to resemble a Christmas card sent from a demented writing student. And then fact checking and legal. And galleys and ARCs, and then marketing meetings (all on the phone, via conference calls where everyone is talking over one another and insisting I join Twitter, and I’m in sweatpants on my sofa in California picking lint balls off my socks while they’re in the Flatiron building in midtown Manhattan eating bagels. For some reason, I always imagine New York publishing people eating bagels.).

Hype is terrifying, because it does not last and inevitably ends in disappointment, a word I think most writers are intimately familiar with and still struggle to spell correctly. In my case, most of the hype revolved around reviews that were supposedly going to happen and did not, and occasionally about events that were supposedly going to draw crowds and did not. In the latter case, I learned not to give a sh*t, and happily read to groups of five or six people and happily read to groups of a hundred plus. But in the former case, humility became important. You cannot control book reviewers. You cannot control them when they express an interest in your book and then change their minds, and you certainly cannot expect a good review (thus these are a pleasant surprise when they happen). You can’t even expect Amazon reviews, especially if you wrote a book excoriating Amazon for undermining independent bookstores. But you can expect people to complain loudly and ad nauseum about why the book should have been about such and such a thing or such and such a place, or, in my favorite bad review of the year, why the book should have been written as a long form poem that I could “wheat paste to [my] student’s foreheads”. I think I might be sued if I so much as touched one of my students, so I passed on that particular suggestion.

But this is all part of the lessons in humility. My mantras throughout the year went from “I hope people like it” to “at least he/she didn’t call me fat”. Thankfully, however, I also found lot of support from a very unexpected source which I won’t go into here, but suffice to say I learned the practice of gratitude along with the practice of taking punches. Gratitude for my friends, who bought copies and flogged the book to their friends and came to events and listened to me piss and moan. Gratitude for my husband, who came with me on the world’s most absurd book tour and attended almost every reading I did — including the one in a church. Gratitude for my agent and editors, who massaged and pushed the book into publishable shape. Gratitude for my family, who also bought lots of copies and handed them out. Gratitude for the friends I made, the other writers and booksellers and a few readers who I got to know. Gratitude for quiet places to go and reflect on all of this. A lot of changes happened this year, both internally and externally, and even if I occasionally felt like the world was sh*tting all over me, I also occasionally felt, for lack of a better and less cheesy word, blessed.

Suspect the world does not need another review of Mary Karr’s newest memoir, but I do have some scattered thoughts on it. I feel, however, that they must be prefaced by multiple caveats, which may be the scattered thoughts in disguise. Caveat one: I’ve not read any of her other books. Have seen occasional poems of hers in magazines. Caveat two: She studied with a poet I also studied with, who makes a couple of appearances in this book as she begins to ascend into the poetry firmament. Caveat three: Much of this book is about poetry and the journey toward being a career poet, an occupation I’ve abandoned (fodder for a different blog entry/essay, but much of what Dan Nester writes here is true for me as well), so I tend to view that part of her story with a jaded eye. Caveat four: It’s a recovery story, and I’ve never had a serious problem with alcohol; aside from some typical twentysomething years of social binge drinking, I grew up to be a teetotaler. That being said, I do come from an alcoholic family, so I’ve witnessed quite a bit of what she describes. Caveat five: The book was loaned to me by my friend Father A, who’s a Paulist priest and someone I have a deep admiration for. Lest I sound like Ann Lamott, who always seems to be quoting her “priest friend”, I’ll just say that Father A was a writing teacher in seminary and reads a lot of interesting things.  And finally, caveat six: I was working at a bookstore around the time the big wave of memoirs began, and I’ve been appalled by some of the terrible writing that’s come out of this genre and the Augusten Burroughs, “I’ll write five memoirs before I’m fifty!” megalomaniacal style of rubbernecking, navel gazing memoir (no, they are not all like this, but you know what I’m talking about). However, I’m particularly interested in female writing about spirituality at the moment, so I’ve been trying to overcome my memoir-phobia in order to read some sublime stuff (Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, Theresa of Avila, Hildegard Von Bingen, etc) and some utterly appalling, smug, irritating, trite anti-feminist crap (Ahem, Eat, Pray, Love. Michael K over at Dlisted refers to that one as “Queef, Fart, Poop”, which just about sums it up for me).

Karr is clearly a better writer than Elizabeth Gilbert, and no matter how much I can’t get into some aspects of her book, she can turn a phrase and tell a story — which ought to be plenty enough for a memoir. The thing about this book, however, is the sense of weariness about the enterprise (and this may be my misinterpretation having never read her other memoirs). There’s a kind of steady narrative interruption throughout where she stops in order to have a flashback, but these often feel like retreads of stories told elsewhere, and that’s again coming from someone who hasn’t read said stories before. Nonetheless, the vividness of some things here is irresistible, and I like the fact that she’s hard on herself; real writers are really fucking hard on ourselves, and in my experience we don’t really like ourselves all that much, which she gets. After recovery, however, Karr starts praying — I’m totally fine with that — but she also starts loving herself, and gets a great job (tenure track!) and publishes books (interestingly, she does the same thing I complained about in regards to Julie and Julia and says “blah blah you’re not a writer until you publish a book”, then repeats several times that the book was ignored, although it lead to accolades, tenure, better publication of her next book, meeting famous writers et cetera; I was confused about this part of the narrative). She has a torrid affair with David Foster Wallace (though her writing about it doesn’t feel exploitative — I had to re-read her description of him a couple of times before the faint ping of recognition went off), she becomes a responsible mother, forgives her own mother for being insane and drunk, and so on. It feels like a rather pat “happy ending”, and dampened my enthusiasm for the book. Her conversion story only takes up less than a forth of the whole thing, and she seems to have picked Catholicism kind of randomly — she complains the Episcopal church wasn’t heated enough in winter — and it’s kind of bunched together version of what must have been a pretty significant experience for her. I found myself liking Mary Karr the writer more than Mary Karr’s book, if that makes any sense. Perhaps it just needed a more merciless editor who might have trimmed down some of the digressive passages, but as much as the writing itself was compelling, much of the story left me a little confused.

You can tell I’m on a break from teaching because I’ve managed to read five books in seven days — much as I had great students this semester who really wrote well, it’s like I’m dying of thirst for books. God, what a cliche. Sorry about that.

After a long and demoralizing end-of-term* meeting yesterday (at which we were reminded that due to budget cuts, none of our excellent part-time faculty will be back in the spring semester), I came home and lumped out on the sofa for many hours, and caught most of Julie and Julia on the pay-per-view. I’ll spare you the same comments most people probably made about this film (blah blah Meryl Streep is awesome Jane Lynch! etcetera), but it did make me want to say something about the end of the film, in which both Julia Child and Julie, the contemporary blogger who whines a lot, both get book deals. In Child’s case, her cookbook arguably did change a lot about the way Americans cook, but in Julie’s case, she keeps repeating (and repeating) throughout the film that “if no one publishes you, you’re not a writer.” The end result in her case, as far as I can tell, has been a couple of whiny memoirs, the latest of which is taking a critical drubbing. Near the end of the film, there’s this kind of perverse sequence where she gets a zillion book offers because her blog was written up in the New York Times, and (it’s implied) lives happily ever after.

This bothered me and is still bothering me this morning.  The message I try to send my students — knowing that the vast majority of them have no desire to be full-time or even part-time writers — is that anyone can write, and that you do not need to publish a book, or even an essay, poem, whatever, to be a writer. Also, speaking from personal experience, while publishing a book is a cool thing to do, it does not necessarily change your life. I’m guessing that the vast majority of authors are still working at the same jobs they had before publication. Also, in these lean times in the publishing industry, we have to shoulder almost all of our own publicity, which is a nightmare for introverts, and since many writers are introverts, the end result is some halfhearted Twittering and Facebooking and some lame stabs at querying Slate and The Daily Beast (who, ahem, might never get back to you). Sure, it’s an awesome moment when your galleys and ARCs come in the mail, and for the couple of months that your book is interesting to bookstores, it’s equally cool to see it displayed on tables, but — and this is what bugged me about the film — your daily life is most likely not going to change that drastically. I joked when my first book came out (after nearly two years of delays) that I was hoping to wake up with clear skin, straight teeth, and lustrous hair, which obviously did not happen, because I still have to use acne medication and my teeth are still jacked up. Nor have I been able to generate any additional income from freelancing, since I published my second book around the same time that the newspaper and magazine industries went into their current death spiral. Nor have any job offers “floated down”, as Mary Karr says in her new memoir (which a friend just loaned me) about landing a tenured gig , because academia is also gasping for oxygen.**

I fear this may sound just as whiny as poor Julie in the film, but I was reading some blog comments about it and one poster said that sequence with all the book deal offers made her cry because she wanted that to happen for her so badly. I hope it does — I’m not such a hard -hearted cynic that I would want to deny anyone their dream — but I do wish people understood that unless you are very, very, very lucky or have extremely good timing to pick a subject that really hits the zeitgeist, publishing is a brutal, cutthroat business and an uphill battle for any kind of attention. Someone told me recently that less that 10% of books sell more than 5000 copies, and while 5000 sounds like a lot to someone like me who comes from a small press background, that means that 90% of books are considered to be commercial failures.

The bottom line message here is that you do not have to get a zillion messages on your answering machine all promising to CHANGE YOUR LIFE via publication to be a writer. The thing about landing a book deal is that it opens your eyes to the fact that writing is now your job. You are being paid for it, and that changes your relationship to the process — it’s no longer just about you and the work, because an army of other people are now involved, and they are working for a living too. If you’re lucky, like I’ve been, many of those people will become your friends and will really care about you and your writing. But you’re just as much of a writer if this never happens, and there are so many other ways to be published.  And you’re still a writer if you never publish a damn thing. When my father died, I found sheaves of poems he’d written over the years, many of which were brilliant and heartbreaking, but he never expressed any interest in publishing them, and never whined or complained that he wasn’t a writer because that didn’t happen for him. Like a lot of people — myself included — he wrote because that’s what felt right in the moment. All of the other stuff is just a bonus. It’s writing in the moment, because that moment counts, that matters, and lasts.

*End-of-term, though I am not yet done grading, which is another story entirely.

** Though, I should add, I would not resist such an offer.

Some writerly folks decided to use today as a day to pay tribute to our agents on our blogs, and since I think my agent is the cat’s pajamas, I decided to join in. My lovely agent is Michelle Brower, who recently relocated to Folio Literary Management. Michelle is pretty much solely responsible for the existence of Slanted and Enchanted, since she contacted me based on an essay I wrote for Kitchen Sink and asked if I wanted to develop a book proposal. If it weren’t for her, I’d probably be writing long, cranky essays for obscure literary magazines nobody reads… well, I actually still do a fair amount of that, but thanks to Michelle I also have a book that people can buy pretty much everywhere. She has also been an excellent advocate for my work and helped me learn the ropes of the proposal process, working with editors, signing contracts and all the hoo hah involved in the business side of writing. Also, though she is super sweet she’s got a steely interior this comes in very handy in contract negotiations), and has a knack for picking clients whose work is unique, funny, and interesting. I’m very glad she’s decided to stick with me!

Today was the last teaching day of the semester, as Berkeley enters its first “Reading, Review, Recitation” period, which other schools call “Dead Week”. Normally, we’d have another week of classes ahead of us and wind things up around December 10th, but the RRR period was announced right around the same time the University started furloughing folks, so RRR may really be about the fact that there aren’t enough custodians still employed by UC to keep the classrooms clean. Anyway, my R4B students — the ones in the underground music class — asked me whether I was working on a new book, and I told them something I haven’t told you, dear reader. I am. I’m at the very beginning, just getting my feet wet, not really ready to tell you much about it stage of things. The proposal is mostly done, I’m hoping to knock down another three chapters or so in the bleak midwinter, and I’ll just let you in on a few things:

It’s a genre I swore I’d never mess with.

The people who wrote crappy reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably like it.

The people who wrote good reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably hate it (one of my students astutely observed that this means I am now following Bob Dylan’s career pattern).

It’s nonfiction, will be written in first person, will also involve field research and a lot of mucking about in rarely visited parts of the library, and will bear a closer relationship to much of the writing I did for Kitchen Sink than S&E did.

It will probably offend a lot of people.

More to come…