Hello friends,
I write to you from the road. It doesn’t matter where it was, because it could have happened anywhere, to any author—and famous writers report it has happened to them, too. Let’s just say it was somewhere in the West, in a town that required a five-hour drive over a mountain pass in light spring snow, at a lively bookstore where I was an invited guest.
And I could blame the weather, which would have ground my own city to a halt. But I write to you from one of those places where people get on with events despite the snow.
It was not the weather, not the promotional effort put into the event. It was me. Just one person came to hear from me about my book. The sole attendee was a colleague from my time in Washington, D.C., someone I haven't seen in a decade.
What is worse? Having no one show up? Or that only one person from your past is there to witness the humiliation of no one else showing up? And that they're from a particular era of your life where you said: "So long, suckers, I'm off to see the world without you!"
When it was obvious there was no need to go through the motions of an event, my former colleague kindly invited me for coffee next door. I dutifully said yes, even though I craved nothing more than a return to my hotel for a big cry. I exited the bookstore, thanking the booksellers who were too embarrassed on my behalf to meet my eyes. (It's not their fault.) I didn't do what I almost always do, which is offer to help put away chairs. Instead, I snapped a photo of the unfilled seats, documenting my mortification. I will write about this, I told myself. I will want to remember what it looked like, how all those empty chairs are visible through the windows facing two streets.
For 90 minutes, I held back my tears in front of a sweet person from my past who bought me dessert after disappointment. I nodded and asked questions, but in the back of my mind, I anticipated the relief of my solo walk back to the hotel. With each bite of tiramisu, I savored the future sob I knew I was due. A 49-year-old woman is invisible. And in a few minutes, I told myself, I will be able to walk unbothered down the slushy streets of a western city at 9:30 p.m. on a Friday, bawling my eyes out. No one will care, no one will stop me. No one will ask if I am okay. It will be bliss.
It was bliss.
For a few blocks, I sobbed, indulging myself in recalling all the mortifications that come with releasing something creative into the world. The empty chairs. The indignity of being constantly fed Instagram ads of another nonfiction book released around the same time as my own, one that has landed on all the 2023 must-read lists. The bookseller who asked me not to autograph too many of my books at their store, because if they go unsold, they can only return unsigned copies. "It's a business," they said, shrugging.
I allowed myself a moment of dwelling in even darker places. How mortifying it is to enumerate all this failure, some of it so petty! But when no one shows up to your event, your inner critic has her dream day, speaking out loud the things she normally only whispers. See, no one wants to hear from you! There on the street, I finally got to bawl my eyes out in response, so loud I hoped to drown out her lies.
"Never complain, never explain,” the model Kate Moss once said. I think about what that means, how unattractive it is to write from that chipped place on your shoulder, how readers sniff out resentment and a lack of self-awareness. You wrote a book! I remind myself. People send you emails almost every day telling you how much they like it, how they, too, have mineral rights and ancestors like Anna who were committed to asylums! And so many people showed up to all your other events! Then I think: How can I be humorous about my public humiliation, like Nora Ephron? "I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me," she wrote in Heartburn. "Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it."
And so how can I tell people the story of what happened without sounding bitter or entitled? I consider how Stephen Marche scolds "no whining" over and over again in On Writing and Failure. Yet he also concedes that "every literary essay takes the form of a complaint."
Later, in the bright sunlight of the morning after, I will drink cup after cup of coffee in the elegant lobby restaurant. I will also remember that Kate Moss once said "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," a sentiment that betrays so much about how women my age internalized the message that they must forgo nourishment for success. We know now that women who are not allowed to acknowledge their appetites will eventually crack, victims of their own unfulfilled desire and all that unexpressed want. It is not lost on me that in my book, I write of the rage women must suppress until they cannot take it anymore—my own, that of my ancestors locked in asylums.
l will ask myself in my notebook why I think I owe it to people to be funny or self-deprecating or even gracious about a deeply humiliating professional moment. "Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure," Nora Ephron also wrote. "I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from failure is that it's entirely possible you will have another failure."
But first, that night in the dark after sobbing in the street, I called home to relate everything that happened. I rested my forehead on the window looking out over the snow-covered roofs, imagining the fictional and historical figures I know from a novel I love about this city. Perhaps the redoubtable, estimable, formidable Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also walked down that street, I thought. Now there was a woman who admitted to wanting so much!
A plaque in the hotel lobby commemorates the poet Vachel Lindsay, who lived and wrote his poems here from 1924 to 1929, on the very same floor where I have a room. I looked up his biography and his poetry. In the early 1900s, Lindsay tromped around the country trading poetry recitations for food and shelter. “I had had very little response anywhere and very little understanding," he wrote to a friend, of the years leading up to his time here in this town. "No one cared for my pictures, no one cared for my verse, and I turned beggar in sheer desperation." As you have probably guessed, things end poorly for Vachel Lindsay, despite his fruitful years at this hotel. At least you're not a poet, my inner critic cackled at me.
In the window glass, I saw that my eyes were puffy, but that my hair looked really, really good. I had finally achieved the 2023 version of what my college roommate and I used to call “Heather hair,” the elusive, perfectly tousled blond of Heather Locklear’s Melrose Place era. Tonight, of all nights. Looking at my reflection, it was not lost on me that I wrote in my own book about not wanting disappointment to settle its patterns on my face.
My inbox contained an email from a reader who wrote that day to say that he and his wife had just finished Windfall, and that they appreciated its structure and themes. He shared their theory on why my great-grandfather Andrew did his wife Anna so wrong. During my call home, my husband urged me to read the praise out loud to him, and I did. I tried to smile at myself in the window glass, thinking about how these readers each devoted 10+ hours of their lives to this story I wrote, and then how they took the effort to thank me for what I made. I recreated in my mind the conversations they must have had about Anna and Andrew, and I laughed at my reflection. It was not lost on me that these characters—my ancestors—live on in the imaginations of the book's readers. Is that not what I wanted?
I promised myself to take to heart the final line of my correspondent’s note: Keep writing.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
Make your art no matter what. From screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. “You work for the world. Just make your story honest and tell it.”
Is it time to put a stop to right on red? I wrote about the idea for Stateline, which has some news of its own!
Seattle is now building more ADUs than single-family homes.
Walking in Los Angeles, by Rosecrans Baldwin, whose Saturday newsletter is one of my favorite reads each week.
The ubiquity of the Blundstone. But is there a more perfect winter boot, especially in the Pacific Northwest? See this delightful comic, too.
Thank you for sharing, Erika. Showing up courageous, honest, vulnerable, real. I understand this happens to most authors somewhere along the line, each time it's deeply personal. Know that you have readers everywhere who have enjoyed your book, as I have; learned so much about our planet, climate, oil, history all in the background of a very personal family story ---- I couldn't put it down. You write with clarity and experience with parts of reality we should all be paying more attention to. Reading your book has influenced the way I think about researching my own family roots, taking into consideration the context of the world in which they lived. Keep writing. Anna Marie
Oh Erika. I guess it’s nice to know you’re in such good company on this one (and I blame the snow!). Thank you for writing about this so honestly and beautifully.