DEBUT AUTHOR BLUES

I published my first book Drown in September 1996.  Thirtieth anniversary coming up.  In the year leading to publication, I made every kind of mistake.  My editor suggested we label the book a novel-in-stories, which in a way it was, but I insisted, (out of some sense of aesthetic purity) that we shouldn’t give it a label, let the readers decide what genre it was for themselves.  The pained look on my editor’s face: not soon forgotten.  Fretted too much over the cover, over the paucity of blurbs, nearly had a breakdown when none of my corrections to the Spanish made it into the first edition due to a publisher’s oversight.  My editor, beyond indulgent.  They included a cream-colored note card about the Spanish errors, absolving me of responsibility.  Every time one of these cards turns up at a signing I am hit with a wave of forgot-to-pick-up-lay-away shame at all the trouble I raised.

I have no idea what possessed me, all very uncharacteristic.  But then again I’d never had anything happen to me on the scale of publishing a book before, and was without any moorings.  I was a welfare-raised public school Dominican kid from Central NJ, who knew no one, was no one.  Some folks are ready-made for their graze with the spotlight.  Not me.  I was pretty much convinced that I was going to massively humiliate myself — while at the same time suffering occasional delusions that this was going to be a Big Book.  My own Dominican version of the Jhumpa Lahiri Triumph.¹ 

What I know now that I didn’t know then: when you get a book published by a mainstream publisher and they give you a hardback edition and a tour, any kind of tour, that’s a pretty big book.  Maybe not by the standards of los ambiciosos, but they rarely the best measure of anything. 

So, finally, it was show time: publication day and my debut as a published writer. 

So much easier than it is now — didn’t need to pitch myself on social media, covert, overt, or otherwise. The day came and if you had a tour you went on it.

My first stop was Boston, of all places (no premonition that I would end up spending a sizeable chunk of my grown life across the river in Cambridge).  Waterstone Books.  Now gone, but back then located in the brownstone and granite magnificence at the corner of Exeter and Newbury.  I was dying from nerves, had a bloody shaving gash on my neck like the streak of a comet, kept trying to rehearse what I was going to say to my adoring audience.  Arrived ten minutes before the reading and surprise, surprise, no one had shown up.  When I saw those empty seats the first thing that jumped to mind was Brian De Palma’s Carrie.  They’re all going to laugh at you.  Second thing: why did they have to put out so many chairs. 

Not to worry, the book seller assured me.  People tend to arrive to these things late.  We’ll wait for a few minutes.

Those few minutes did not feel Jhumpa Lahiri at all.