Book Tour

and Gratitude

The past few months, I’ve been on a small and interesting

book tour for the newest book I’ve written, ALL OF US.

The book is 52 stories and poems, and the premise is not

a popular one these days.  It’s a story about a small mythic

town in upstate New York, where neighbors are wildly

different from one another.  To say it’s not a homogeneous

place would be an understatement.  Some people work

in the prison system.  Some drive trucks.  Some write books.

Some practice law.  It’s one of those places where people

just live together, living the same small messy lives that most

of us do.  It’s a quiet book where no one gets murdered, for

instance. No one goes through a problematic time in history.

No one comes to a Large Understanding. 

Because I’ve been on this book road before, and because I’ve

long felt that the publishing world, and the world of literature

in general, catered to the same audience, people (and I am one

of them) who have strong opinions, pro and con, about Phillip

Roth, Isabel Wilkinson, Toni Morrison et al, I decided I’d try to

broaden the playing field a little by reading in atypical places,

(laundromat, grocery store, synagogue, wine bar, senior center)

as well as the typical ones (book stores, book clubs)

and by asking the audiences to write.  To add their US to the

story.

This weekend I was invited to a bookstore in Frenchtown, New

Jersey.  It’s a town and a bookstore that many people love. 

Good friends arranged for me to be there.  The reading was

on Friday, the day after Biden showed all of us watching,

nervous and holding our breath, that he could still smile his

strong convincing smile, and he could say (in some categories,

anyway) enough of what we wanted to possibly be elected.

Friday could not have been more beautiful. You could feel that

spring would happen in two weeks.  And that once again, in

spite of all the rest, we would have flowers and sun and the

hope that seemed, for a little while anyway, lost.

I called the bookstore owner before we went, to ask

if there was a good bar nearby.  I thought that after the

reading, if all went well, or if it didn’t, we’d want to have a

drink with people who came. The store owner said that where’s

a good bar was his favorite question.  He told me about an old

SJ Perlman piece in the New Yorker describing Frenchtown as

a place with a bar on either end.  Across the street

from the bookstore is a gorgeous refurbished place

Finnbar.  I called and the owner said because of

my reading (even though he knew absolutely nothing about the

book) he’d give us a room to drink and eat if we wanted.

What if no one shows up I asked.  I’ve been to readings before

with tiny audiences.  No matter what happens, he said,

you can have the room and a Negroni.

The store is very beautiful, on one of those Ted

Lasso streets where many people seem to be smiling,

maybe because of the sun, or the fact that the town

is on a river, or because there are many charming stores.

People arrived.  I handed out paper and pens,

then read from the new book a little and gave two prompts

for the audience to write.  The first prompt was The Story I

Want to Tell.  The second was Steve.  I can’t explain why

but nearly everyone has a good Steve story. One

of my favorites was written by my old friend Steve,

who came to the reading with his wife Cindy from

Nutley, New Jersey.  Steve said:  “In Miss Delouen’s

third grade class, there were seven Steves, including me.

Three of us had red hair.  I wish I could remember all their

names besides Steve.”

Other people’s stories always make me happy.

Love, Esther

PS:  Looking for Steve songs for you (Taylor Swift et al) I found this Steve Jobs music list.  Although some of the videos are now blocked for reasons of copyright, you get the idea.

Steve Jobs songs:

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/10-songs-steve-jobs-used-to-train-his-brain.html