Just a Writer Standing Here with a Book...

Writers are fantastic complainers about the thing they also claim to, like, love, which is writing. It’s hard! It’s taking, like, so, long! Is anyone even going to read this thing? Also: it’s hard! All these things are valid even if they also make your writer friends just a teeny bit insufferable from time to time. You may feel like saying, “Yeah, you know what else is hard, Jen? Performing an emergency craniectomy at the food court in the mall.” Touche.

But I think writing is actually the easiest part, in the sense that it is the most straight-forward aspect of the whole craft: make things up; tell your story; invite people to see the world or an experience through your eyes. It’s the odd, emotionally fraught journey that comes after the novel or essay or short story or impassioned manifesto is released into the wild that makes a writer respond: “Well, at least with an emergency craniectomy you pretty much know where you stand.”

My first published book came out of my PhD dissertation work and was titled Acts of Conspicuous Consumption: Performance Culture and the American Charity Industry (step aside Tom Clancy! There’s a hot, new page-turner in town!). It was put out by the University of Michigan Press in 2012. In the lead up to publication I was still convinced, though increasingly less and less, that I was going to pursue a tenor-track job in academia. “The book” is one of those shorthand phrases people in that industry use to gently menace you. Without it your employment chances fizzle like a wet sparkler. I stopped chasing the university gig, got “the book” published anyway, and remain enormously proud of that work even as it lives in a modest academic niche (royalties be royalties!).

The League of Extraordinarily Funny Women: 50 Trailblazers of Comedy was my second book, aimed at a wide, general readership. Published in 2019 by Running Press (a division of Hachette), The League brought together my enthusiasm for comedy and my keen desire to amplify the contributions of gutsy, funny, creative women to the American humor industry. And I got to Trojan Horse in thornier ideas intersecting with humor about race and gender and social conventions that I really wanted to talk about without anyone feeling like they were sitting in the worst TED talk ever.

The League contains profiles illustrated by the reDONKulously talented Anne Bentley. On publication day she posted this artwork she created and I am still lying on the floor dead. I messaged her asking if I could purchase a copy and she graciously said, “Nope!” and sent me one. It’s framed in my study and I die again all over every time I glance at it.

I recently came upon a line by the author Sarah Manguso: “It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy,” wrote Sarah, “it’s that they make it look fast.” I’m ranking this cutting insight up there with “be careful what you wish for.” Though I would say it more broadly applies to anyone we consider successful or highly accomplished. Surely one night Lin-Manual Miranda was goofing around at a party making up a rap about Alexander Hamilton and the next day he was shoveling Tony Awards into his gym bag. That tracks, right? I spent years traversing rivers to bring The League to shore. And in case anyone is wondering, those waters were calm as Buddha, easy as spreading jam on toast, and no one ever, ever cried in the shower a lot.

Once the book arrived I was thrilled and excited and overwhelmed with gratitude for everyone who had a hand in making this book happen along the way. Let’s just say I will never, ever again roll my eyes at anyone’s belabored award acceptance speech. I also may have, just a little, slightly, entertained expectations of how I was going to introduce this labor of love into the world. Those primarily involved a version of the book-author-event tour of bookstores alla David Sedaris or Anne Lamott: lovely crowds of engaged readers, smart questions, maybe a wrist cramp from all the signing if I was lucky and being completely honest.  

Look, Ma! I’m an endcap! I’ll probably dine out on this kind of photo for the rest of my earthly existence.

The largest book event I did was for an audience of about 25, which came on the tail end of most of the appearances I had set up over the course of a few months after the book was released. Prior to this I was showing up at places all over New England to maybe 6 or 8 attendees. One of the more memorable events during that stretch was held at a small shop in Queens, New York. It involved a 4-hour car ride to a friend’s house in a suburb of the city; an hour train ride from their town into New York City; a 45-minute Lyft from Penn Station over to Queens because New York City and traffic, but mostly because New York City. The event lasted for about an hour and half. There were 5 people in the audience, one of whom was the singular employee in the store, and another was a woman unaware my talk was happening. She sat in the front row speaking softly into her cell phone while browsing the books on a nearby shelf. The poor bookseller looked like she was actively willing the earth to open up and swallow us all. I am a “show must go on” kind of gal and continued to chirp away about how humor is such a critical tool for things like building confidence and resilience and OH LOOK! BOTH OF WHICH SEEM TO BE HAPPENING IN REAL TIME RIGHT HERE HA HA HA HA!

My one and only NYC-ish-Carrie-Bradshaw-esque moment! The Astoria Book Shop is divine! Visit if you are able, but maybe save the phone call until after the anxious nobody-author is done speaking? Okaythanxbye.

All of that said, I would go back to any of these places in a hot minute and speak to the same 3 or 7 people because indie bookstores are quasi-sacred spaces and some of the remaining bastions of intellectualism and progressive thinking and creativity and safe networks to connect with others and express yourself. I’m just going to say it: indie bookstores save lives, ya’ll. Change my mind.

Aside from a couple of remote events during the pandemic—one of those my fourth grade teacher popped in on (#WUT?!)—I figured it was time to gingerly move on. There’s really no rule book about how to guide your art through the world, if it makes it that far. You can check a lot of boxes on some kind of promotion or marketing spreadsheet and find yourself no closer to “award-winning” or “my special guest on Fresh Air” than you were when you were sweating over your keyboard. You can do barely anything and wind up with a Netflix series and your own Bobble Head figurine (terrifying). We can’t really say what will happen after we release the art, which is why that’s the toughest part of being any type of creative do-er. We dream, we imagine, we hope, we hustle, we add a little more expectation here and a lot more pressure there. Most of us are gnarly little control freaks trying to go at it all casual and breezy like we’re still in middle-school pretending the cute person talking to you is no big deal: “My notes from class? Yeah, sure, like, whatever you can use them, or like, whatever, that’s fine. Whatever.” Smooth.

That was really nice, I said about it all, like a mom standing at the window as she watches her college-aged kid who had been home on break climb into an Uber and drive away. I put myself back at GO! so I could start working my way around the board all over again: This is hard! Is anyone even going to read this thing?

And then last spring I got a text from a friend who lives in Milwaukee and works at Marquette University. This friend wanted to put me in touch with a faculty member in the Communications Department named Tracey Sturgal. Dr. Sturgal was teaching a Communication in Comedy course and using my damn book in class.

My nerd heart exploded.

And: Tracey would be interested in having you come and speak to her class. Here’s her info; I told her you’d be in touch.

My nerd heart exploded…some more.

You can keep your 26-city  book tour THIS WAS SO MUCH COOLER!! (Um, Future Publisher: Please know I can also find the time for the 26-city tour. Thanks.). Two minutes into my first Zoom with Tracey I was sort of braying with excitement. She, in turn, was extremely gracious.

And so it was that last week I found myself in a classroom at Marquette University talking with about 24 students about women and humor and many related things such as ongoing sexism in the comedy industry, why we can cure polio but we can’t tolerate seeing a woman permanently host late night on a major network, and how being funny is serious business. They asked really smart questions like why I organized the book the way I did and why I thought Chicago was an epicenter of comedy. They tolerated my references to comedy tapes and CDs and momentary breathless gush over my love for Weird Al Yankovic. And they were so polite! Each one personally thanked me as they left class. If I were in a classroom somewhere in Massachusetts, the most I could hope for would be a “That didn’t suck as much as I thought it would!” The future is in pretty good hands, at least from about Ohio through Iowa.

I sort of floated through the rest of my time there, high on conversation and ideas. It truly doesn’t get any dorkier than that. In a way, it was the charge I had been clumsily chasing all along, getting to talk about something I feel passionate about, something I deeply believe in with people who were open to listening. That I found it in an unlikely place, in surprising circumstances was just further proof that we really don’t know where the art will go or where it will take us. Maybe that’s still the hardest part, but maybe it’s actually the best part.