A brief note from an unpleasant person

June 13, 2010

Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now

I know, you’ve been sick with worry—where have I been? How goes my quest to get to all 50 states before I turn 50?

The answer, dear readers, is that I published a book – nothing as fabulous as The 50th State will be – but a book nonetheless, a privilege for which I am eternally grateful.

But when you publish a book, even a tiny book like Mommy Prayers, you need to blog and tweet and Facebook the hell out of that sucker, and apparently you need to never stop.

That part I don’t enjoy so much. I’m a uptight, cold-hearted New Englander; all this social-media-fueled connectivity makes my head spin and my heart contract.

I have been thinking all the while about The 50th State, my first love, but truth be told, things aren’t looking so good. The chances of any of us getting to Hawaii anytime soon, like in the next decade, are looking bleaker and bleaker. I’ll run ya some numbers soon so you can see just how dire the situation is, but in the meantime, I leave you with this charming anecdote.

Thanks to a newfound Twitter connection (ugh. I hate Twitter, but shhhh don’t tell anyone; they’ll think I’m not taking Social Media seriously enough), I stumbled onto the site of an agent who happened to be hosting a contest to see who could write the best one-sentence summary of his/her novel or non-fiction book.

Here’s what I wrote about The 50th State, which I thought was pretty good, considering at least three-quarters of the others were writing Vampire books or books about Finding God:

Wry, wrung-out suburban mom doggedly pursues her dream of visiting all 50 U.S. states before her 50th birthday without going broke, abandoning her children or divorcing her husband.

Here’s what she thought of that:

[W]hen you begin your pitch describing an unpleasant person, you make it hard for anyone to want to read the book. This pitch continues with really negative language, “going broke, abandoning her children...” and so it ends up feeling like a downer of a book about a negative person.

Jeeze, lady. First of all, here’s a buck; buy yourself a sense of humor.

Second, is pleasant the goal? Do you rush up to your friends (or rush to your Facebook status box) and say/write breathlessly, “I just finished a book that was so pleasant. You seriously have to read it.”?

I was going to waste time writing up a list of all the unpleasant characters, fictional or non, who’ve done quite well for themselves (my personal latest: Olive Kitteridge, a book I am reading very, very slowly but loving).

But, thank you Internet, someone else – a writer called Aryn Kyle who was heretofore unknown to me – has already done just that. I hope she doesn’t mind if I steal her point and make it my own:

“You should write something happy,” people tell me, and I don’t understand.  Happy like Anna Karenina?  Happy like The Grapes of Wrath?  Happy like Lolita or Catch-22 or Revolutionary Road?  Happy like Hamlet? 

What, I’d like to ask people, are these “happy books” you speak of, and who is writing them?

Yeah.

What she said.