Not Shameless

 A few months ago Janet Geddis, owner of Avid Bookshop in Athens, wrote an eloquent post on facebook about the challenges of running an independent bookstore. Her post was full of insights, but the one that struck me the most was how so often the perception of success can make it even harder to succeed. If a bookstore is not dying, we don’t need to feel guilty when we order on Amazon; it’s okay to browse for hours and purchase nought. That indie bookstore doesn’t need us, we think. See! They’re doing fine!

Now, as a newly published author of the novel Give, I suspect that the same might be true with books.

It is hard to write a book. Harder still, perhaps, to publish one. There seems to be almost unanimous agreement that this is true, and so when a book is written, and a publisher found . . . Wow! You did it! That’s amazing! The book may not even be on the shelves (it is quite possible that it may never be), and yet success, it seems, is already yours.

I do not diminish this. It is an amazing thing to launch a book into the world. I appreciate all the congratulations and the words of praise. I am grateful beyond measure that a manuscript I once thought would go no further than my google drive is now in the hands of readers I have never met and probably never will.

But the story does not end with that success, no matter how genuine it is. Because publishers and bookstores do not exist simply to make aspiring authors’ dreams come true. They are businesses like any other. To publish a book is to enter that world: a world of investment and marketing, royalty reports and sales.

I do not want to do it. I’d much rather sit in the basement with my laptop, writing something new. But I owe it to my publisher, to the handful of bookstores who are trying to sell my book, and to myself, to try. It does not come easily. When I open my computer, I want to write, not navigate to social media to promote . . . Because, oh, I know how it must look! Erica has written a book, and now we will hear of it again and again, ad nauseum. She is doing this event, or that; here’s a link to an interview, a mention, a review . . . It all smells like success, but, oh, it does not feel that way.

I have invested thousands of dollars in my book, and that’s not even counting all the hours I’ve spent. There’s this conference to go to, that event to attend, not to mention the hundreds of advance review copies to purchase and give away, in the hope that a bookseller might choose my book from their toppling stack and deem it worthy enough to try to sell.

I do not regret my investment— not at all. If writing a book is like birthing a child— a metaphor we’ve all heard a hundred times— then launching a book is like sending it off to college. It is an expense, surely, and an effort, but what parent would begrudge their child those? Not me.

And yet, unlike an eighteen-year-old left alone on campus, my freshman book cannot fend for itself. It needs a constant mother: networking, scheduling, building a brand . . . And so, there I am again on facebook, begging for a few warm bodies for an event, an amazon review, a mention to a book-loving friend.

“Shameless self-promotion,” I’ve heard it called, but that could not be farther from the truth, since each time it feels so much like shame. Please, my friends, forgive me all my book-related posts. They are not, in fact, the self-congratulations they might appear. Nor, like the owner of any indie bookstore, am I in this business for the money. I love to write. I want to write. And I’d really love for Give to pay for itself one day, so that this whole book-publishing journey might feel a little less like an expensive hobby and a little more like a legitimate endeavor that I can justify to myself when I have to choose between paid work and time to write.

So, when you see another post about Give that makes you want to puke, forgive me, please. I’m doing the best I can to give my book a chance.

What Time Does Not Touch

We recently took a family vacation to northern California, where I lived for five years in my twenties. I hadn’t been back since I was pregnant with my firstborn son, now ten, and I was looking forward to revisiting the places I had once called home and reconnecting with old friends. As it happened, even two of my closest friends from my Florida high school were living in California now, so I’d get the chance to see them, too.

I had left the Bay Area for the mountains of North Carolina when I was twenty-nine. Not wanting to drive a U-haul three thousand miles across the country, I’d sold my Cabriolet and bought an ancient Toyota pick-up, with hand-crank windows, no air conditioning, and no power steering. I held a small garage sale on the sidewalk outside my Oakland apartment, then piled what was left of my belongings into the truck.

“It’s like the Grapes of Wrath backwards,” my father laughed when he saw me two days later, at a pit stop in Colorado. He drove to the hardware store for two dozen bungee cords, which he used to reattach the tarp that had flapped loose a mere ten miles outside of Berkeley. Three days later, I drove the last fifty miles through the Smokies in a thunderstorm, peering through the rain-splattered windshield and silently thanking my dad.

When, in the summer of ‘08, I went back to California for my solo “babymoon,” the car rental company offered me a free upgrade to a convertible Sebring. I drove the dusty highways between the Sierra mountains and the Mendocino hills with the top down and the air-conditioning blasting, feeling, despite my growing baby bump, like a slightly rounder version of my youthful, California self.

On that trip, I had crashed at friends’ houses without a second thought, but it is impossible to be so thoughtless now. Wherever my family goes, we easily outnumber our hosts. My kids can devour a box of cereal in one sitting; a five-pound bag of apples is gone within two days. And we would be descending like the ravaging hordes on friends to whom I hadn’t spoken in a decade or more. I wondered if my memory was exaggerating the closeness of our past connection. Was I, to them, more a hazy recollection than a dear old friend?

I tried to recall the person I’d been in 2003, when I’d set out for Asheville in that overloaded truck. A few months earlier, perhaps a little reckless with my looming departure, I had had an ill-advised fling with a non-native speaker of English.

“You’re so shellfish!” he accused me bitterly, when things began, almost immediately, to turn sour.

And he was right; back then I did think only of myself: my desires, my happiness, my inalienable right to make whatever choices I thought best. Now I am the mother of three children, and, on any given day, I can easily fail half a dozen times at putting myself first.

But, despite the transformations that motherhood and middle age have wrought, I still feel essentially the same; the old (or rather, young) Erica Carpenter still rests at my core. Still, as I planned for our California vacation this year, I hesitated. How dear, really, was that Erica to the old friends that I emailed in anticipation of our trip, sheepishly asking if we could stay a few days?

Our first stop was with a friend I had first met at eighteen, when I went to work at a summer camp in northern California. I had just graduated from high school, she from college. Assigned to the same cabin, we spent four weeks together with a bevy of preadolescent girls. It was supposed to be a summer job, but I don’t remember it as work; I was too overjoyed to have met a kindred spirit, too absorbed in my own coming of age.

Time is a funny thing. At eighteen, a friendship forged in four weeks felt as solid and indisputable as bedrock. Even after we parted in August, my loyalty soldiered on; she was my friend, my mentor, my road map to the woman that I wanted to become. Still, I had not seen her in sixteen years; her elder daughter, whom I remembered as a toddler, would be off to college soon. It felt impossible to imagine my friend at the cusp of fifty, a few short years from an empty nest. I remembered her as I always had: shod in hiking boots or Chacos, the way her powerful shoulders would burst from the water as she butterflied across the swimming hole, showing me how.

I soon discovered that I needn’t have tried to imagine her as different than she was. Within minutes of arriving at her farmhouse in the woods, it was clear that she was not. My friend was the same as ever: her stride, her speech, her laugh, the way she drew me out and made me my best self.

So much is said of how much time transforms; this trip taught me how much there is it cannot touch.

Again and again, I learned it. Where were the so-called ravages of time? A decade, at least, had passed, and yet there my dear friends were, unchanged! On my own body, the marks of time are legion: the sunspots and the wrinkles, the poochy stomach and gray hairs. But my friends were as they always were. The way they ate, and moved, and talked— the same!

I have a dear friend in Asheville who, when we met, was already solidly in middle age. At times, hearing some story from her youth, I’ve wished I could have known her then. What was she like at fifteen, or twenty-five? It seems to me now I do know who she must have been: she was as she is, just with different hair and younger skin.

What is it that does not change? I know myself to be different than I was. I eat better, but sleep less well. I am less selfish, but more anxious. Less ecstatic, perhaps, but more content. I do not doubt my friends could catalog all the ways they, too, have changed. But still I find the truth is this: there is something about us all that does not change, an immutable quiddity that anchors us to ourselves and forever links us to the ones who hold us dear.