That's Show Biz!

Home from book tour and pondering what it all means.

(With the incomparable Julie Orringer at Greenlight Books in Brooklyn)

I just returned home from a mini booktour for A Perfect Hand, the first tour I’ve been on since A Really Good Day was published in 2017. ARGD was the leading edge of a wave of psychedelic books published by mainstream publishers. Though I was obviously not the first person to microdose, I was perhaps the first to write about it for a non-Erowid audience. (IYKYK). Normies were excited about psychedelics in a way they hadn’t been since the 1960s, and I was profiled by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and a host of other print and web-based magazines, a couple of which still exist today, will wonders never cease.

My events were mobbed. I remember showing up to a theater in Tulsa, looking out at the standing-room-only crowd and thinking, “Is every single person in the State of Oklahoma who has ever dropped acid here tonight?” My signing line at a packed event in San Francisco (the marvelous City Arts and Letters) was a hallucinogenic Halloween, with strangers dropping off all sorts of treats. (“I’ve been experimenting with a psilocybe cyanescens/psilocybe cubensis hybrid. Enjoy!”)

The standing-room-only crowds didn’t necessarily translate into book sales. ARGD sold about as many copies as my other books, but the experience sure was validating. I’m an extrovert with an introvert’s job, so any chance I have to be around people is terrifically exciting. Before I started writing (and before my detour into the law) I had theatrical ambitions, the pinnacle of which was the role of Lotus Blossom, an Okinawan geisha, in “Teahouse of the August Moon.”

(Yeah. I know. Different times).

I get a thrill every time I walk on stage, and nothing charges me up as much as a feisty Q&A.

As every wanna-be actor knows, it’s easy to get the necessary adrenaline going for a packed house. But what about when you’re called to perform for a room full of empty seats?

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I did a handful of events at some of my favorite independent bookstores. One or two of these were well-attended. Others were not.

My bluster and veneer of confidence cloaks (ineffectually) an insecurity that can tumble all too easily into self-loathing, and appearing before a tiny crowd beneath a poster advertising Zadie Smith or Sally Rooney (or my husband) can be, as the kids say, triggering.

A number of years ago my husband Michael Chabon wrote an essay in the Paris Review adapted from the speech he gave at sleight-of-hand genius Ricky Jay’s memorial service. (You should read the whole thing, it’s wonderful). Lurking behind a moveable bookcase in the marvelous Parnassus Books, waiting to be introduced by a truly delightful events coordinator named Hannah to the nine people who’d turned out to hear me talk about A Perfect Hand, I thought of an incident from that essay.

We met in 2001, when the late Sydney Goldstein asked me to interview Ricky for San Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures, back when it was still at the Herbst Theatre. Ricky seemed a bit weary that night, and as we waited backstage to go on, I found myself thinking about all the hundreds of times that he must have stood there like that, in the darkness, listening to the murmur of the house, waiting for the curtain to open and the footlights to come up.

“You must get tired of it, sometimes,” I whispered to him, “night after night, show after show.”

“Yes, Michael, sometimes I do,” he told me. “But once I get out there, I guarantee you, not you or them or anybody is ever going to know.”

Then the curtain opened, and the footlights came up, and Ricky went out there and killed.

My interlocutor Libby Callaway and I killed, too. We gave, as the old show business credo goes, the same show to the audience of nine as we would have given to one of 9000. Because that’s the job. If you, Dear Reader, are going to go to the trouble of getting off your ass and into your car (or onto the subway), if you are going to spend an hour or two perched on an uncomfortable chair in a bookstore or an event space, if you’re going to spend $28 on my book, I am going to show you a good time.

And the thing is? Invariably, I end up having a good time, too. I had a blast at Parnassus. I had time to talk to every single person, to hear stories about their kids, to look at photos of their grandmother’s quilts, to exchange book recommendations and of course … OF COURSE … to bond over our mutual devotion to both Jane Austen and Heated Rivalry.