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What I Read These Months: March and April 2015

• The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters. This was the only book I read in all of March. I love Sarah Waters, but The Paying Guests invoked this terrible dread in me, in part because the entire second half of the book is just a catalogue of varying degrees of intense feelings of terrible dread; in part, I think, because I am pregnant and my brain is kind of scattered and I would rather not read about bad things happening to people at the moment. It was still very good, I think? But it also broke my brain, made me unable to focus on written words for several weeks, forced me to turn to television instead, #noregrets.
  
• Short Stories: “The Blueprint of Your Brain,” John McNally. “A Death,” Stephen King.” “An Inventory,” Joan Wickersham.
  
• The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman. Hard to know if I would find this quite as funny and engaging as I did if I didn’t hate Men quite as much as I do. But needless to say I found it very funny and engaging!
  
• The Town in Bloom, Dodie Smith. I keep reading Dodie Smith books waiting for one of them to be I Capture the Castle again, but none of them are. They’re still very light and charming and pleasant! But none of them are I Capture the Castle (except for I Capture the Castle).
  
• The Folded Clock: A Diary, Heidi Julavits. Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa amn, girl.
  
• The Daughters, Adrienne Celt. I was already halfway through this book when I met Adrienne at Google and ate free food while listening to Disney soundtracks, so this review is not actually that biased: it is totally gorgeous. It is lush and dreamy and strange and it will make you feel like a beautiful witch has put you under a sinister spell. PRE-ORDER IT NOW AT THE PROVIDED LINK OR THE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE OF YOUR CHOICE AND LET’S DISCUSS IN MORE DEPTH COME AUGUST.
  

Thursday, April 22nd, 2015

Last week, I was in Austin on a business trip. I spoke on a panel at the Texas Librarian Association conference, and my publisher paid for me to fly there and stay in a hotel and eat queso and ice cream and BBQ, to stand on a bridge until dusk and watch the largest urban bat colony in the world emerge from underneath. This is the first business trip I’ve ever been on–before very recently, I had no business doing anything at all–and for all I know it could be the last. So I made sure to tell just about everyone I encountered that I was in Texas on business. The cab driver who brought me back to the airport was the only one to really question what business that was, and when I told him, he flipped out. “ARE YOU TELLING ME I’VE GOT A BESTSELLING AUTHOR IN MY CAB?” he shouted. I was not telling him that, but he ran with it, shook my hand as I was leaving, told me it was an honor to meet me, that he’d see me on TV. No one has ever been more excited about the existence of my book than my cab driver, not even my own mother. Heaven is a business trip to Austin, or maybe just a ride in that guy’s cab.

I had a lot of free time on the trip so I went to BookPeople, the glorious Austin bookstore, and bought a copy of Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock. I bought it because it’s so beautifully designed and I love reading other people’s diaries. I walked to the river from the conference center and sat at a table in the sun behind a cafe and read the first fifty pages in one sitting and realized how little track I’ve been keeping of my own life. Today I am twenty-two weeks and a couple days pregnant, and I’ve written barely a word about any of it. There’s too much to talk about, but also not enough. I am not the first pregnant woman ever to exist. I cannot adequately or particularly interestingly describe how weird it is to feel my child moving around inside me. Th ere are “kicks” and then there is whatever happened this morning, as I lay in bed with my hand on my stomach. It felt like something big and round sliding down the center of me and then disappearing–if I had to guess, I think she did a flip forward and what I felt was the top of her head? But, like, who fucking knows, man. I’ve had this persistent pain that I think I’ve finally identified to be my ribcage expanding. Bodies are weird.

And obviously it’s more than bodies. It’s hopes and fears and dreams and anxieties that I should, as a writer, be parsing. But I’m at a loss. In four months this fluttering concept inside me will be an actual human being living with me in my one-bedroom apartment. In a decade or so, she will be a walking, talking conscious thing, with opinions and questions and the ability–I presume–to Google herself. I feel very protective of her already, unwilling to say much about her in so public a forum. And also there’s just the fact that I’m not that scared. By all rights I should be scared, but the scariest thing about pregnancy so far is how not scared I am. She is so desired, so anticipated, so loved. She has been since we saw her for the first time on the second day of the new year, a flickering blueberry-sized embryo on a screen in a doctor’s office. She has been since before that, I think, since Kevin and I sat beside each other on a couch in my apartment in New York watching the director’s cut of That Thing You Do! seven years ago and all I wanted was to hold his hand. 

People are so happy to see you when they see that you’re pregnant. In Texas two teen boys approached, said, “Yo miss, spare some change?” and I inched past nervously, apologetically, and still one called out “Congratulations by the way!” with such genuine warmth. I’ve been given two (2) seats on public transportation. I don’t fit into my normal jeans anymore. I haven’t been craving specific foods so much as I’ve been craving summer. I want soft-serve and Phillies games, fresh air, Monkees records, baked beans and Arnold Palmers and afternoons at the beach. This is all I can think of, for now. Please don’t ask me how my new novel is coming along, because the answer is “I’ve been writing an 80+ page flashback for the last three days.”