Arbitrary as it is, I’m glad that it’s working for me.
That night, I have a launch event scheduled at Politics and Prose near the Waterfront. I’ve been here a dozen times as part of the audience. It’s the kind of bookstore that ex-presidents and celebrities speak at on book tours; a few years ago, I came here to see Hillary Clinton give a reading. Athena did the launch for her debut here. When Emily told me she’d booked me at P and P, I’d shrieked at my screen.
I have to steel myself before I walk through the doors. My publisher for Over the Sycamore set up a “multi-city” bookstore tour for me, but each store I visited never had an audience of more than ten people. And it is painful, truly painful, to struggle through a reading and Q&A when people keep leaving in the middle of your sentences. It’s even worse to sit and sign a pile of unpurchased stock after the events, while the store manager hovers and makes awkward small talk about how it’s probably because it’s the holidays, and people are busy shopping, and they didn’t have quite enough time to advertise that the attendance numbers were so low. After the second stop I wanted to call it quits, but it’s more humiliating to cancel a book tour altogether than to struggle through it, minute by minute, your heart sinking the entire time as you realize your irrelevance, your foolishness to ever hope.
Tonight, though, the store is packed—there’s so little standing room, people are sitting cross-legged in the aisle. I almost walk back out. I hover at the entrance, checking my phone, making sure the time and date are right, because this can’t be real. Did I mix my reading date up with Sally Rooney’s? But the store manager sees me and ushers me into the back office, where he offers me a water bottle and some mints, and then it sinks in—this isn’t a mistake, this is real, and all these people are here to see me.
Applause echoes around me as I walk out to the front. The store manager introduces me, and then I take my place at the podium, knees trembling. I’ve never spoken to this many people in my life. Thankfully, I’m set to do a reading before the Q&A, so I have a moment to get my bearings. I’ve selected an excerpt from the very middle of the book—a self-contained vignette that will serve as an easy entry point for the audience. More important, it’s one of the scenes that was largely written by me. These are my sentences, my brilliance.
“‘The British officer assigned to direct the men of Ah Lung’s squadron seemed perpetually afraid that these foreigners would turn on him any moment.’” My voice trembles but steadies. I cough, take a sip from my water bottle, and keep going. I’m okay. I can do this. “‘“Keep ’em contained,” his colleague had advised upon his station. “They do good work, but you’ve got to make sure they don’t become a general nuisance.” So he ordered that the men were not allowed to leave their barbed-wire enclosure for any reason without express permission, and Ah Lung spent his first few weeks in France tiptoeing around warning bells and trip wires, wondering why, if he was here to aid the war effort, he was being treated as a prisoner.’”
It goes over so well. You can tell when you have command of a room. There’s a certain hushed silence, a tension, like you have a grappling hook in everyone’s chest and the lines are pulled taut. My voice has smoothed out; it’s clear, attractive, and wobbly enough to make me seem vulnerable and human, yet composed. And I know I look good in the gray leggings, brown boots, and tight burgundy turtleneck I chose for this night. I’m a Serious Young Author. I’m a Literary Star.
I finish reading to enthusiastic applause. The Q&A goes equally well. The questions are either softballs which give me a chance to show off (“How did you balance research for such a niche historical topic with your day job?” “How did you make the historical setting feel so rich and realized?”) or baldly flattering (“How do you stay grounded while being so successful at such a young age?” “Did you feel any pressure after receiving such a major book deal?”).
My answers are funny, articulate, thoughtful, modest:
“I don’t know that I’m balancing anything. I still don’t know what day of the week it is. Earlier tonight I forgot my own name.” Laughter.
“Of course everything I wrote in college was utter tripe, because college students don’t know how to write about anything other than the romance of being a college student.” More laughter.
“As for my approach to historical fiction, I think what I’m drawing from is Saidiya Hartman’s technique of critical fabulation, which is a way of writing against the grain, of injecting empathy and realism to the archival record of a history that feels abstract to us.” Thoughtful, impressed nods.
They love me. They can’t look away from me. They’re here for me, they’re hanging on to my every word, the whole of their focus is consumed with me.
And for the first time it really sinks in that I did it, it happened, it worked. I have become one of the chosen ones, one deemed by the Powers That Be to matter. I’m riding high off my rapport with the crowd, laughing when they laugh, riffing off of the wording of their questions. I’ve forgotten about my stilted, prewritten answers; I’m going completely off the cuff now, and every word out of my mouth is clever, adorable, engaging. I’m killing it.
And then I see her.
Right there, in the front row, flesh and blood, casting her own shadow, so solid and present that I can’t be hallucinating. She’s dressed in an emerald-green shawl, one of her signature looks, looped over her slender frame in such a way that makes her shoulders look thin, vulnerable, and elegant all at once. She’s slouched gracefully against her plastic pull-out chair, pushing her shiny black locks back over her shoulders.
Athena.
Blood thunders in my ears. I blink several times, hoping desperately she’s an apparition, but every time I open my eyes she’s still there, smiling expectantly at me with bright, berry-red lips. Stila Stay All Day, I think wildly, because I know this, because I read that stupid Vogue feature with Athena’s makeup tips a dozen times before my launch. Beso shade.
Calm down. Perhaps there’s some other explanation. Perhaps it’s her sister, someone who looks exactly like her—a cousin, a twin? But Athena doesn’t have a sister, or any extended family in her generation; her mother had made that very clear. It was just me and my daughter.
The spell breaks. Dizzy, dry-mouthed, I stumble through the rest of the Q&A. I’ve lost whatever hold I had over the audience. Someone asks me whether any of my coursework at Yale influenced The Last Front, and suddenly I can’t remember the names of any classes I’ve ever taken.
I keep glancing down at Athena, hoping she’ll have disappeared and that she was a trick of my imagination, but every time I do she is still right there, watching in that cool, inscrutable way of hers, judging every word that comes out of my mouth.
Then the hour’s up. I sit through the applause, trying desperately not to faint. The store manager guides me over to a table at the front of the signing line, and I force a grin on my face as I greet reader after reader. There’s an art to smiling, making eye contact, making small talk, and signing a book without misspelling your own name or the name of the person you’re personalizing it to. I’ve had some practice at prerelease stock-signing events now, and on a good day I can juggle it all with only one or two awkward silences. Today, I keep fumbling. I ask the same person “So, how’s your evening been?” twice, and I flub one customer’s name so badly that the store offers them a free replacement copy.
I’m terrified Athena will appear before me, book in hand. I keep craning my head to search for her green shawl in the line, but she seems to have vanished.