I was at an event Sunday that featured authors sitting at tables filled with their books. One woman approached my table and said aloud "The joys of travel."
"Yes," I said hopefully. "There are seven."
"I'm sure there are," she said a bit dreamily, and then walked away.
I sat there thinking: Really? Why are you sure? Why couldn't there be 10, or 5?
Later, another woman approached, and opened the book.
"Oh," she said in a voice of profound disappointment,"I thought there'd be pictures."
I've been invited to speak at an event later this month, and the woman who extended the invitation asked if I would like a table set up where I could sell my books after my talk. I told Hania about this, and my concerns that it would look a little cheesy.
"In America," she said, "selling yourself never looks cheesy."
In yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, the reviewer of Paulina Porizkova’s new memoir noted that the book has a number of “clunky, drawn-out metaphors” but cites one exception: the former model’s analysis of the start of her love affair with the rock star Ric Ocasek. Porizkova compares it to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. “At 19, I watched Ric roll into my life in his tank,” she apparently writes, “and I greeted him with flowers and cheers.”
I seem to recall the Soviets getting a very different reception in the country.
Sunday morning we took our fruit bowls and cranberry and nut muffins and sat on the front porch of the Colony Hotel, watching Delray Beach wake up. We were joined by other guests, mostly couples well into their retirements; two of the men read hardcover books. The group next to us were visiting from Santa Fe, enjoying no doubt the nearness of the ocean.
A little before nine we got in the car and drove A1A north to Palm Beach. (We were meeting friends from Ohio for lunch.) The route – the loveliest of A1A, hence the loveliest in South Florida – took us past million dollar mansions, through green tunnels of shade trees, and along open stretches of the Atlantic Ocean. (I should have told the New Mexicans about it.) Driving along S. Ocean Blvd. in Palm Beach, we came upon a group of about 30 women, all in red dresses, posing for pictures at the Worth Ave. tower. We pulled over.
“What is this group?” I asked an attractive blonde (one of many).
“We’re the Palm Beach book club,” she said.
I took a few pictures and asked another attractive young woman, hoping she didn’t share the first one’s sense of irony.
“We’re a book club,” she said.
"Do you have to be young and beautiful to join?"
"We have some people in their 50s," she said smiling, "40s."
She gave me the title of the book they had recently read, a bestseller I had never heard of, and told me of all the money they had raised for charity. She explained that this was their holiday outing, and they were soon heading for lunch at the Meat Market. I told her I was an author, and gave her my card.
You never know.
The news of Brittney Griner’s imminent return to the U.S. as part of a prisoner exchange is being received with justifiable elation, particularly among her family and American publishers, who will soon start a bidding war on her memoir.
I'm taking it as a sign of the times rather than the place that the big names being touted at the Miami Book Fair this year include a former football coach, a former football player, a former model, and a former rock star.