Why I hate book launches, as well as the Inevitable Progress of Time
Why I hate book launches, as well as the Inevitable Progress of Time
(But also, of course, love all these things immensely)
Earlier this week I went to the book launch for a friend whose first fiction collection is now out in the world. It was wonderful. She is wonderful. The launch was amazing—a packed house (literally! She sold out the space!) filled with people who were all there to cheer her on. She had a number of poets and performers there to read and perform excerpts from her collection alongside her. The whole evening was magic—visual and auditory magic. I felt so lucky to be there, and even luckier to walk up to her at the evening’s end and have her sign my copy of her beautiful new book.
Amanda! she said. I felt a presence in this place earlier and knew—look, it could only be you.
I laughed. She is so kind, this friend. So kind and fierce and dazzling. Lover, I said, the only presence here tonight is you. And then I took my newly-signed book and made my way out of that space, back to the subway and from there to Union Station and from there to the bus terminal.
There was a Leafs game in Toronto on Monday night, which I hadn’t known. In order to get to the bus terminal from Union Station you have to walk through the Scotiabank Centre, where the Leafs play, and as it happened I was walking in the exact opposite direction of all of the people filing out of the arena, which felt a little like a salmon swimming upstream except without any of the insistent call of nature that salmon enjoy and all of the danger and chaos that they brave to do what they need to do. I retreated to the wall for a time—fifteen minutes? Twenty?—as people kept on spilling out. I read Garth Greenwell’s wonderful review of The Zone of Interest while I waited. I am still not sure if I can see that film.
Sometimes it feels pointless, these grand gestures we make toward recognizing and acknowledging the atrocities of the past while we continue to perpetuate atrocities in our present.
Eventually the flood of Leafs fans dissipated and I made my way to the bus terminal. I sat for a while, waiting for the bus to Hamilton. I listened to Taylor Swift. (I am always listening to Taylor Swift these days, it seems.) And then the bus came, and I got on, and I listened to Taylor Swift all the way back to Hamilton.
By the time I got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home, an hour or so later, my foot was hurting so much and I was limping so badly that I half-wondered if I’d make it. I did, of course. It took a little longer, but I got there eventually.
The next day, I was so tired from the antics of the night before (antics! One four-hour trip to Toronto where all I did was sit and watch people read poetry!) and bent low by a migraine that it was all I could do to move around the house.
Today things feel a little bit better. My body is my own again. Sitka and I went for our regular morning walk and everything was fine. The sun is shining. Everything is manageable. My foot still hurts, but everything is okay.
Still, the void comes ever closer. I should probably get a cane.
I don’t actually hate book launches. I love them, especially when they happen for other people.
I hate my book launches. But also, I love those ones too. It’s so wonderful, this chance that we get to share and celebrate our work and read from it, to revel for a few short hours in the achievement of putting something from one’s very own brain—something from nothing!—out into the world.
But the lead-up to one’s own book launch? So stressful. It’s like planning a party when you’re not sure if anyone’s going to come. And I am never sure that anyone is going to come. We are all so busy these days, bowed under the realities of work and life and parenting and class and all of the things that the world has said we must keep on doing to feel fully human.
Come out and help me celebrate this little thing I made, I always feel like I’m saying. It always feels preposterous. Who am I to ask this of people? Who am I to think that anyone might want to come and hear what I have to say, might want to buy my book, might want to celebrate in the joy of it?
Other people’s books? Yes! Absolutely! But mine? No! Absolutely not!
Funny, isn’t it, how some of these feelings never go away.
My foot hurt a lot on Monday because I overdid it earlier in the day. It’s been hurting less for the past week or so—finally healing, I said to myself, willing the reality into being—and so I tried running on the treadmill for a little bit, thirty seconds or so at a time. And then Sitka and I went for a long walk in the early afternoon because I was going to be on a bus to Toronto later in the day, our evening walk suspended. And then there was the walking to the bus stop, and then once in Toronto there was the walking from the bus terminal to the subway, and then there was the walking from the subway to the venue. And all of that in reverse once the event ended. My FitBit clocked 16,000 steps by the time the day was over.
16,000 steps is a really good day. 16,000 steps was a really good day even a year ago, when my foot wasn’t hurting like this and I was walking and running all of the time.
A year ago, I did not need a day to recover from 16,000 steps. Apparently now I do.
So much of the anxiety that I have around (my) book launches comes from the pressure to sell books. This feels both counterproductive and somehow traitorous, as though to voice the anxiety is somehow to spit in the face of all of the people who work so hard to bring a book into the world. Of course I should want to sell books. Selling books is the whole effing point! Why bother publishing at all if you’re not going to work tooth and nail to sell your product? Don’t you want people to pay for your writing in some way? Don’t you want to make a full-time go of it in some manner, writing and speaking and doing all of these bookish things instead of a regular 9-5? Isn’t selling your books one of the many ways to cobble this kind of life together?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes to all of these things.
And yet, try as I might to work with the anxiety, to be kind to it, to allow it space to be and do what it is, sometimes I still feel like we’re squished together in an elevator from which there’s no escaping.
Book launches are wonderful. And also, they’re horrifying. Living through your own is one giant trapeze act of vaulting from one of these things to the other.
When my novel The Centaur’s Wife came out in 2021 at the height of the pandemic, I had a virtual launch. It was spectacular. I did not have to stand in a room and worry about whether or not people would join me. (I did glance at the attendee numbers, but only once or twice.) The conversation I had with friends and moderators who were there felt intimate and special. When it was over I didn’t have to worry about making the long trek back home, because I already was home.
From an accessibility standpoint, I also didn’t have to worry about the nightmare of booking an accessible venue (oh Toronto, you and your venues with bathrooms in the basement! I would say never change but what needs to happen is you need to change now) or hiring captioners for the event. Everything was already there, courtesy of the software. I want to say it felt like magic, but the truth is it wasn’t magic so much as it was a realization of the accessibility that is possible when we really do try to think of everyone’s needs.
And yet even as I say that, I know that virtual launches can be difficult for people too. There are no easy ways out of—or even through—these kinds of things. We listen. We adapt as well as we can.
We move forward, recognizing that sometimes moving into the future means letting go of ideas we had in the past.
I am realizing, slowly but surely, that I might have to let go of the idea that I had of myself as a runner. A runner-of-sorts. Someone who didn’t run to do a 5K or train for a marathon or really to go anywhere but just ran because she liked how her body felt when the running was over.
I like feeling strong after a run, probably because I’ve spent so much of my life feeling the opposite of that. But this insistent pain and this gradual, inevitable twisting of my foot—and possibly my left foot now too, if the sliver of a bunion that I saw last night is any indication!—is reminding me once again that nothing lasts forever. We all have to let go of our bodies at some point. We all have to let go of the ideas that we have at certain times about ourselves.
What does any of this have to do with book launches?
Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I can’t make up my mind.
The thing that helped me get through my book launches was recognizing, ultimately, that there’s only so much you can do to sell a book. Sometimes books take off and sometimes they do not. Sometimes publishers put a lot of weight and money into books that don’t end up doing very well. And sometimes they publish books with small marketing budgets that nonetheless manage to take the world by surprise. One viral TikTok video, and sometimes that does it.
You don’t really have control over this as a writer, regardless of whether you’re all-in on publicity or not. As much as I hyperventilate over a book launch, I do love doing publicity for my books. It is one of my favourite things. But there’s only so much control I have over what happens when that publicity is over. Which is to say: no control at all.
Just as one disabled woman with a trickster foot only has so much control (which is to say: none at all) over what she can do to make herself feel strong again.
Books and the market have a life all their own, just as my foot and my body seem to do. I am roughly a year out from my next book launch and already dreading and excited for it in equal measure, in the same way that life since last December’s injury has been a constant march of trepidation and anticipatory grief but also of softness and expanse.
You can let go of a lot once you realize what your limits are. Maybe, by the time next March rolls around, I’ll have let go of my anxieties around the coming book launch too. All of these things that we do to be bright and beautiful and shining in the face of life’s inevitable arc—sometimes I think we forget that that inevitable arc is its own bright, shining thing too.