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.