Alex George's Blog, page 7

Books for Tupelo

In 2012 I was sent all over the place to promote A GOOD AMERICAN.  I visited many fabulous bookshops and met multitudes of wonderful people.  I went to many places that I never would have seen otherwise, and I had an absolute blast from start to finish.  Perhaps improbably, my most memorable stop on that book tour was in Tupelo, Mississippi.

If I’m being honest, this had nothing to do with books, not really.  The reason I loved my visit to Tupelo so much was because I was invited there by Emily Gatlin, who at the time ran the town’s bookshop.  Emily and I had been online friends for a while and she had harassed the Penguin PR department until they had agreed that I could stop in Tupelo for an event at her store.  The night I arrived in Tupelo Emily picked me up from my hotel and drove me back to her house.  I can’t pretend that I remember every detail of the evening that followed, but I do know that delicious ribs (cooked by Emily’s husband, Robert) and some stratospherically alcoholic beverages were consumed.  (There was also a delicious dessert that I think involved bananas, but things were getting pretty foggy by then.)  The following day, after the event at the store, the three of us took off for Oxford, Mississippi, where, amidst an unholy amount of the most delicious and unhealthy food I have ever eaten, our virtual friendship blossomed into the real thing.  When I got married in May, Emily and Robert drove a thousand miles from Mississippi to mid-Missouri to help us celebrate.

What is striking about this photograph is that Emily is smiling, despite the fact that a few days previously a tornado smashed through Tupelo and destroyed many homes, including ones on the street where she and Robert live.  Thankfully they escaped unscathed, but many were not so lucky.  Many of her neighbors’ homes were completely destroyed.

Emily no longer works at the bookshop, but she is still heavily involved in the publishing industry as a contributor to the excellent Book Riot website and as a freelance writer and editor.  She has used those connections to put together an astonishing fund-raiser for her town, called Books for Tupelo.  It’s in essence a mammoth auction of signed first editions which have all been donated specifically for this most worthy and needy of causes.  Please, please, go and visit the site and have a look at the amazing goodies on offer.  A signed first edition of THE CASUAL VACANCY by J.K. Rowling?  No problem.  A John Green collectible?  Why, of course.  Buying a unique present for your favorite book-lover  just got a whole lot easier.  Please go and bid on whatever takes your fancy and help out this wonderful community that is still trying to get back on to its feet. All proceeds go to the CREATE Foundation’s Northeast Mississippi Tornado Relief Fund.

Good luck in your bids, and thank you!  (Or thank y’all, as Emily would say.)

No Place Like Home

At the end of the week my children and I will be climbing on to a plane and flying back to England.  It will be the first time the kids have been back in two years, and the trip has got me thinking about a lot of things.  In particular, it reminded me of a small essay I wrote last year for my friend Caroline Leavitt’s excellent blog.  Here it is again, slightly modified.

For the past forty years or so, my parents have lived in an ancient market town about seventy miles west of London.  I spent a week there two summers ago with my children.  When we weren’t watching the Olympics, we took my parents’ dog, a lovely old black Labrador, around the same fields where I used to walk her predecessors as a teenager.  As we went past the pristine cricket pitches of the local private school and trekked through the adjacent dilapidated cemetery, I was struck by how reassuringly familiar it all was.  It’s been more than twenty-five years since I left home, but the intervening time always vanishes as I walk past the familiar landmarks of my youth.

I live four thousand miles away from my parents now, in central Missouri.  I moved to the States more than eleven years ago, and although I am happy here, every time I return to England I am struck by both joy and a sense of loss.  Missouri has natural charms of its own, of course, but they are not the same – by which I mean, of course, that they are not mine.  I can admire the lakes, the trails, and the sunsets of the Midwest, but they are not freighted with the same warmth of memory that enriched those rambles with my parents’ aging dog.

Paradoxically, England seems to exert a stronger claim over me the longer that I live in America.  I find myself increasingly nostalgic for my own childhood, perhaps because I am now finally at an age when I can look back with fondness, rather than toe-curling embarrassment.  As I walk the streets of the town where I grew up, the past rushes back up to me.  The candy shop where I spent my weekly pocket money is still there.  I remember the delicious agony of Saturday mornings as I tried to decide what to buy – my favorites were sherbet lemons which I would suck on until the roof of my mouth was sore.  Then, much later, there were the dark winter afternoons skulking behind the trees at the back of the supermarket parking lot, anxiously puffing on my first illicit cigarettes.  With these memories comes a palpable sense of belonging.  This place feels like where I should be.  It feels, in other words, like home.

A Good American explores the complex relationship that immigrants have with the concept of home.  It tells the story of a young couple who leave Germany in 1904 and forge a new life for themselves in America.  There is a paradox inherent in the immigrant experience: you want to embrace your new country, but you don’t want to forget where you came from.  Living with both ideas can be a delicate balancing act.  To examine this in the novel, I performed a weird act of authorial schizophrenia, and split myself down the middle.  I attributed all of my positive emotions about moving to America to Frederick, the young husband, who embraces his newly adopted country with unwavering fervor.  In contrast, his wife struggles with homesickness, and is forever looking forlornly back across the Atlantic.  Seeing this contrast play out across the pages of the book helped me come to terms with my own bifurcated existence.  And it was considerably cheaper than therapy.

Even now, having lived here for more than a decade, I am confronted by daily reminders that this is not the country I grew up in.  There remains a vast cultural chasm down which I am apt to tumble at inopportune moments.  Whether it’s people’s obsession with college sports or Sean Hannity, there are things that I guess I’ll just never understand.  When confronted by these, I often feel an outsider all over again, and am ambushed by homesickness.

A life lived elsewhere is full of such conundrums.  My daily life is in America, with my wife and my children and my step-children, but my roots will always be in England.  Such is the bittersweet paradox of immigrant life.  And so, for me, home is an amorphous thing, shifting and mutating from one day to the next.  There’s no place like it.

 

Immersive Reading

 

Oh, it’s been a busy time, my friends.

Following my editor’s remarks on the first draft of my new book, I’ve spent the last few months performing a massive rewrite (“performing” seems like the correct word, as it sometimes felt like a surgical procedure.)  In addition my proverbial day job has kept me busy, and of course there are always the eternal joys of ferrying my children between music lessons, summer basketball practice, and the swimming pool.

And, oh yes.  In May I got married.

Throughout this time, of course, I have been reading – but it has been reading on a somewhat piecemeal basis.  You know, grabbing twenty minutes here and there when I can, and always with the slightly uneasy twitch of guilt somewhere deep inside me that I probably ought to be doing something else.  (The one blissful exception was my honeymoon, when I read four books in five days.)

Well, no more.  I delivered the revised manuscript to New York last week, and without the pressure of all those words bearing down on me, I have treated myself to ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, by Anthony Doerr.  It’s a wonderful read.  Set in France during World War II, it could not have been more in my proverbial wheelhouse.  It’s a thrilling novel, gorgeously evocative, fantastically well-crafted, and beautifully paced.  It’s selling by the truckload right now, and it’s easy to see why.  I highly recommend it.

It’s also 530 pages long, and I read it in three days.

It was such a joy to be able to immerse myself in a book so completely.  I just sat on the sofa and read, moving only to make more coffee and walk the dog.  One forgets how different an experience that is to the more usual snatches of a few pages here and there.  It’s particularly rewarding with a book like Doerr’s, which does such a good job of taking the reader into an entirely different world.

Inevitably, the manuscript will land back on my desk before too long, with more revisions required, more edits to consider.  Until then, though, I’m looking forward to a lot more guilt-free immersive reading.  What was the last book you thoroughly lost yourself in?

Thumb Twiddling

Ah, it’s a funny time, this.

The manuscript of the new book is with my editor, and I am caught between two worlds.

I am still (always) thinking about FLIGHT RISKS, wondering what I can change to make it better, what works, what doesn’t.  There is still so much work to be done, and I know I am nowhere near finished with it.

And yet I can’t help but look forward to the novel I am yet to begin.  There’s something delicious about not having yet written a word of a book, and just letting ideas bounce around your head.  I think it’s all to do with the limitless promise and possibility that lies in the as-yet unwritten.  In her excellent collection of essays, THIS IS THE STORY OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE, Ann Patchett calls this thinking phase “the happiest time in the arc of my writing process” – largely because she hasn’t yet started to write anything down.  Even for Patchett, ideas get traduced by the act of putting words on paper and actually, you know, telling the story.

But I’m trying not to think too hard about that right now.  I have characters charging through my head, plot ideas and little bits of business to try and make sense of. I have a shelf of books to read for research and inspiration.  I am giddy with excitement at it all.  And yet here on my desk is the completed manuscript of FLIGHT RISKS, lumbering and imperfect, which I anxiously paw at every so often, cruelly reminding me of the vast chasm that inevitably exists between conception and execution.  I suspect that it is our lot, as writers, to be eternally disappointed with the results of our labors.  Patchett likens the act of writing to running over a butterfly with an SUV.  All that was once so beguiling and exciting is lost, vanished, dead on the page.

Cheerful stuff, I know.  Einstein famously defined insanity as the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  And sure, maybe writers are all, to a greater or lesser degree, a little crazy.  But as I marshal my thoughts and ponder what’s next, I prefer to think of this as an act of hope, not madness.

Perhaps it’s a little of both.

Marathon Man.

Last October, I ran a marathon.  It hurt, a lot.  I spent most of the race in agony, telling myself that I would get a blog post out of the experience, at the very least.  That, and one of those smug “26.2″ stickers to put on the back of my car.

I never did get one of those stickers (couldn’t bring myself to, in the end) but here, at long last, is the blog post.

Long distance running provides a rich supply of analogy and metaphor for writers to plunder when talking about their craft.  Haruki Murukami squeezed an entire book out of the idea (a very good book, too.)  My slow trek through the streets of St Louis did not, if I am being honest, provide much by way of inspiring anecdote.  My own marathon story really begins when I crossed the finish line.

It feels like I can still remember every step of the last six or so miles of the race.  All I could think about was how wonderful it would be to stop moving.  They would pat me on the back, give me a medal and some chocolate milk, and – best of all – the pain would stop.

You can probably tell where this is going.

I got the medal.  I got the chocolate milk.  But the pain didn’t stop.

If anything, when I stopped running, the pain got worse.  I only began to realize the full extent of how traumatized my limbs and muscles were when my brain no longer had to focus on propelling my body forwards.  I hurt everywhere.  I wanted to weep with disappointment.

I am telling you this now because two days ago I sent the manuscript of my latest novel, FLIGHT RISKS, to my editor at Penguin.  This book has consumed me for the best part of two years.  It is the reason why I haven’t posted a single blog entry in months.  When I’m writing, I seem to have very little space in my head for anything else – rather like my marathon brain, I have been wholly focused on the finishing line.  But as I pressed “send” on Monday afternoon, I remembered what happened at the end of the race last October.  I’ve made it, kind of, but there is still a long way to go.

In other words, the pain has not yet stopped.

First, there is the text itself.  There will be editorial comments, lots of ‘em.  There will be rewrites, lots of ‘em.  There will be line edits and copy edits.  At some point I will lock myself away and read the whole thing out loud.  And of course there will be polishing, endless, obsessive polishing, until the document is finally ripped out of my despairing hands.  Once the actual words are done with, there is everything else to think about – cover copy and jacket design, discussions about marketing and publicity (one hopes), blogging, social media, all that.  Knowing my track record, there will probably be all manner of grief about the title.  I will have to learn how to talk about my book for anywhere between 30 seconds and 30 minutes.  The road to publication is going to feel even longer than those 26.2 miles around the streets of St Louis – which is really saying something.

So yeah, the race is just beginning.  I’d love to have you along for the ride.

 

All Together Now

More wonderful news on the heels of yesterday’s paperback launch – the good people at BookPage have named A GOOD AMERICAN as the “Top Pick for Book Clubs” for February.  Here’s a link to the piece.

I’m delighted by this, of course.  I love book clubs and reading groups.  The novel has already received great support from book clubs across the country, but now that it is in paperback, I’m hoping there will be many more to come.   (Penguin have actually included a Reading Group Guide in the back of the paperback edition.)  I have visited many local book clubs (in fact I am going to one tonight) and have Skyped in with groups across the US, and as far as Abu Dhabi.  I love these occasions – it’s always wonderful to meet with engaged and passionate readers and talk books.

These events are even better when there’s food involved, and there often is.  In case you missed it from an earlier post, here’s a link to an article in this month’s Costco magazine which talks about book clubs and how much fun it can be to ally appropriately-themed food to the book discussion.  There are also some recipes on this site’s Reading Groups Page for some of the food featured in A GOOD AMERICAN.  And yes, people have cooked these for me when I have turned up to discuss the book.  And yes, the jambalaya is as delicious as it sounds.  There are also some links on the page that will lead you to some of the music in the novel, too.  We’re a full service author website here, ya know.

So… please consider choosing A GOOD AMERICAN for your book club, if you haven’t already.  I’d be delighted to come and visit (if you’re in mid-Missouri) or to join you via the wonders of modern technology… unless you live in New Zealand or Hawaii and are willing to spring for the price of an airline ticket, in which case I would consider appearing in person there, too.  (No sacrifice too great, you see.)

In the meantime, don’t forget that I’ll be at Barnes & Noble tomorrow evening (Thursday February 7) at 7 p.m. with literary twin and Amy Einhorn stablemate Eleanor Brown.  The last thing I heard, Eleanor was on the road in a motel room in Memphis.  Unfortunately for her, it was Memphis, Missouri, not Memphis, Tennessee.  Them’s the breaks.

Fantastic Day? (With Apologies to Haircut 100)

The day of your novel’s paperback launch is a strange one, if only because it’s so very ordinary. Today I fed my children breakfast and drove them to school. I had my weekly game of squash. I went to the office and did lawyerly stuff.

The only sign that something was a little different was the proliferation of congratulatory tweets and emails and facebook messages from both reader and writer friends. This outpouring of support and general loveliness has been wonderful. I’m so grateful to everyone who’s taken the trouble to write and wish me and the book well. Thank you all.

But for the day itself – well, there’s actually hasn’t been that much to do, really, apart from a quiet celebratory lunch with the person I most want to share celebratory lunches with. Later on the in week I will start doing some appearances and publicity, but for now things are out of my hands. As a writer, you get used to exercising complete control you’re your characters’ lives. Consequently it can be a little difficult, having no control at all over your own.

Paperback publication is a funny thing, because, well, it’s still the same book as it was a year ago. But with luck, in a new format and with a new (fabulous) cover, a new audience of readers will discover A GOOD AMERICAN over the weeks and months (and years) ahead.

If you have already read the book, I’d appreciate it hugely if you would take two minutes to write a review on the amazon site, and maybe tell your friends about it.

Thanks to you all for your friendship and support. Keep on reading!

PS: I’m told the paperback would make a *marvelous* Valentine’s Day gift. Just sayin’.

Costco Buyer’s Pick!

More exciting news, on the eve of paperback publication…

I’m thrilled to announce that Costco have selected A GOOD AMERICAN as their book choice for February.  This is wonderful, amazing news.  I was interviewed for the company’s magazine, Costco Connection, that is sent to every Costco member – apparently that would be, um, about EIGHT MILLION PEOPLE.  (Thankfully they only told me this at the end of the interview.)   Here is the link to the piece.

Also in the same edition of the magazine there was a fun piece about book clubs who incorporate food and cooking into their events, which features various recipes inspired by the food in A GOOD AMERICAN.  Many of the book clubs that I’ve visited this year have really pushed the gastronomic boat out and put on fabulous spreads involving food from both New Orleans and Germany.  I’m hoping that’s a tradition that will continue!

IT’S ELEANOR BROWN, YO!

Yes, I really did write that “yo”.  Obviously I have been here far too long.  Ahem.

I’m really looking forward to the launch event at the Columbia Barnes & Noble next week.  I celebrated the hardcover publication of A GOOD AMERICAN there a year ago  before going off around the country on tour, and I’m delighted to be going back to mark the paperback launch, too.

I’ve lost count of the number of book events I’ve done over the past twelve months.  I’ve been to literary festivals, visited many wonderful book clubs, and given readings at a lot of bookshops.  I love doing this stuff – it’s always a treat to stand up in front of people and engage in a conversation about books.  But this event is going to be a little different, because rather than the usual author-talks-for-a-bit-then-reads-then-(if-he’s-lucky)-takes-questions-from-the-audience format, I’m delighted to announce that my friend Eleanor Brown, author of the New York Times bestseller, THE WEIRD SISTERS, will be there, and we’re going to have a conversation about all manner of things, including, quite possibly, the Olsen twins (for reasons that may, or may not, become apparent.)

Eleanor came to Columbia two years ago to read from her wonderful novel and those people lucky enough to be at that event will remember what an engaging personality she is.  She’s one of my favorite people and is an absolute riot – I think it will be a lot of fun.  I expect we shall share some war stories about life on the road – the author book tour is not quite as glamorous as you might think, you know – and have some thoughts on writing and publishing novels.  Anyone who’s interested in that sort of thing should come along.  I’d love to see you there.  If for no other reason, you should come just to hear Eleanor’s laugh.  It’s absolutely filthy.

Fun starts at 7 o’clock.

 

Guest Blog Alert

As we approach paperback publication day next Tuesday, I’m delighted to announce that the lovely and talented Caroline Leavitt, author of NYT bestseller PICTURES OF YOU and the forthcoming IS THIS TOMORROW, has been kind enough to host me on her blog today.   I’ve written about a subject close to my heart, and at the center of much of A GOOD AMERICAN – the meaning of home.  Hope you enjoy it.  Click here to go to the post.

Also, tomorrow I’ll be posting some exciting news about next week’s reading at Barnes & Noble in Columbia.  Watch this space!