Rachel Simon's Blog

When I found out last fall that my memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister, was finally going to be recorded for an audio book, I was relieved, grateful – and nervous.

Relieved because that book came out ten, yes, ten years ago, and in all that time, the audio rights had languished, unsold. It didn’t matter that it became a national bestseller, or was adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Nor that a woman with disabilities once angrily admonished me – during the Q&A at one of my talks – for not having the book in all formats, thus making it more accessible. She assumed, as did seemingly everyone, that I’d blithely chosen to withhold the book from being read for audio, rather than that the original publisher (who will go unnamed here) held the rights, and had, for reasons unknown to me, failed to sell them to an audio house.

My gratitude didn’t go to that original, unnamed publisher, but to my current, wonderful, attentive, and smart publisher, Grand Central Publishing. When their parent company, Hachette Books, published the hardback of The Story of Beautiful Girl in 2011, they put it out in every format: book, ebook, large print, and audio book. I was so overjoyed when I first saw the audio book that I sent them a thank you note. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, a few days later my agent called and said, “Hachette wants to buy the audio and large print rights for Riding The Bus With My Sister.”

I almost levitated up to the ceiling. No more embarrassing moments as an audience member yells at me in front of five hundred people. No more awkward attempts to explain why such a popular book hadn’t ever become available on audible.com, or iTunes, or good old CD.

But then my agent said, “And they’d like you to be the reader.”

Were they kidding?

Me, who does public speaking but was never even in a school play?

Me, who can barely read my husband a paragraph of a juicy Gail Collins op-ed without flubbing a word?

Me, who can’t open her mouth in the streets of Seattle or Lansing or Little Rock without getting pegged instantly as a native of the Northeast?

My agent said, “Maybe they’ll do a test of some sort to see how it goes.”

And I said, “Ooookkaayyyy.”

For the next several months I heard nothing more about a test, a recording session, or even how one prepares for such a public display of slip-of-the-tongueness. I did get to listen to the audio book of The Story of Beautiful Girl, where the reader – a serious professional reader, named (was it possible this was her real name?) Kate Reading – did a magnificent job of distinguishing every character, major and minor, through her considerable vocal talents. Martha sounded like an elderly woman, Lynnie like a young woman with her own way of thinking, Homan like an African American southerner. Even the minor characters were distinct.

I wasn’t the only listener who admired Kate Reading. The audio recording received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Fans and friends recounted stories of listening to the book while on a bus or in their car – and crying their eyes out. (To listen to an excerpt, and to read the review, see this link.)

I suppose it might have helped that Terry, a bookseller in Arlington, VA who connected with me by Twitter shortly after the publication of The Story of Beautiful Girl, told me that she and Kate Reading met many years earlier at college – and that “Kate Reading” is, in fact, a stage name; the real person is Jennifer Mendenhall, a professional actress.

This insider knowledge served to humanize Kate Reading for me. But only until I looked at Jennifer Mendenhall’s website and saw that she’s a long-time star of the stage who’s appeared at The Kennedy Center and won the Helen Hayes Award.

Would I be expected not just to read, and to read without trippingovermywords, and without tawking like oy’m from New Joisey, but to come up with different voices for me as an adult, me as a child, Beth, Jesse, every bus driver, and all the passengers?

Maybe Hachette would forget.

Then, in December, I heard from Amber, a production coordinator in the audio department at Hachette. She wanted to book five days of recording time in a studio in Philadelphia. Would I be able to get there? Uh, yes, if we started after rush hour passed. Fine, Amber said; we’ll start at 11 a.m., and go until 5:00 p.m. Could I give her dates when I’d be available? Um, sure, January 9 to January 13. But how do I prepare? She said she would send other audio books they’d made that were read by the author.

The audio books came. Some were by authors who were so accustomed to being recorded – Tina Fey; Ellen Degeneres; a reporter for NPR, Eric Weiner – that I couldn’t really put myself in their shoes. I focused on the recordings by non-celebrities, like Kate Braestrup. Yet even she read flawlessly, emotionally, with a humorous or sad tone when it was called for. How would I do that?

I emailed Amber. “We can always take several takes until we get it right.”

Yes, of course we can. But “several” probably means two or three. Not fifty.

She said, “I’m sure that you will do a great job. The most important thing is to know the material (that is a given!) and to be confident. And I’ll be directing so I’ll be there the whole first day.”

“Should I try to do the voices differently?”

“It would be good to do the character voices. Since you are familiar with these characters and they are real I am sure that you will do a good job.”

What if my voice got hoarse from overuse? I mean, reading for hours a day could leave a person sounding like a two-pack-a-day smoker, right?

“Have a good rest, stay hydrated and you’ll be fine!”

Should I bring a copy of the book with me?

“We won’t be able to read from the book. It will create too much noise in the booth. I have a pdf of the large print edition of the book. I’ll send it to you in advance.”

A few days later, a package with a 540-page manuscript arrived, the large print version being almost twice the length of the 296 pages needed for the regular book. I didn’t even want to look at it – and not just because of the formidableness of the task at hand. The truth is that I never reread my books once I’ve finished with the edits. I’ve never seen the point, and frankly, I always have something better to do. So it had been eleven years since I’d read more than an isolated passage in Riding The Bus With My Sister. I wasn’t sure I should reread it in advance of the recording because I couldn’t tell which would be better: refreshing my memory, or losing the freshness of a suddenly remembered story.

So I didn’t reread the book. Aside from looking up the website for Baker Sound Studios, where I’d be doing the recording, and telling everyone I’d be unavailable for a week, and packing up the huge manuscript in my bag, I didn’t prepare at all.

Then came the day we were to begin. I drove into Philadelphia, trying not to think about making a fool of myself. I thought instead of terrific audio books I’d listened to that were read by their authors: Myla Goldberg’s rendition of Bee Season, Melissa Bank’s The Girl’s Guide To Hunting And Fishing, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. All were utterly mesmerizing. If they could do it–well, I didn’t know if I could do it. But Hachette thought I could do it.

I parked in a lot at 19th and Chestnut. Then I followed the directions to a particularly obscure block of Ranstead Street, one of the tiny, one-lane streets that are easy to miss in Center City Philadelphia. In fact, I’d never even seen this block of Ranstead, probably because it’s a dead end. Baker Studios is in an utterly inconspicuous building, with no obvious signage. But it had a purple door, I knew. I walked up to the purple door and opened it.

The stairs went down. I descended to a level beneath the ground and opened the door to Baker Studio.

There, in this windowless, softly-lit, impeccably silent space, I was greeted by a woman with a gentle smile. She introduced herself as Ellen, the Studio Coordinator: “I’m here to help you with everything other than the recording.” She walked me through a rabbit’s warren of corridors and rooms—all elegantly, yet simply, decorated. There was the restroom. There was the hospitality room, with a refrigerator, microwave, comfy sofas, and counter full of grapes, apples, bottles of water, and a tea machine–all of which I’d use over the next few days—as well as much I have no interest in: chocolate, pastries, wine.

Then she brought me to Studio B.

“Hi, Rachel!” It was Amber, rising from a seat beside a desk, shaking my hand.

“Hello, Rachel.” It was Jeff, the engineer we’d be working with. He turned from his console and shook my hand, too.

Beyond his console was a window looking into a tiny room. In it was one chair, one microphone, one music stand. That, I knew, was where I’d be spending this week.

I said, “Here’s the manuscript,” and I pulled it out of my bag. Then I saw that Amber and Jeff each had one as well.

I admitted, “I didn’t really prepare.”

“That’s all right,” Amber said.

“What do I do when I get to the bottom of each page? Won’t you hear it rustle?”

“Most people pause when they get to the last period or comma on a page, then move the paper and begin the next page.”

“What happens when I mess up?”

“I’ll be here. I’ll direct you to back up and read it over again.”

“What do I do now?”

I thought she’d say, Let’s do a practice run. Instead she said, “Let’s get started.”

Jeff sat me down in the little room, which had a thick carpet and bright lights, and was exceedingly warm. (This was great news for me, as someone who’s almost always shivering.) I placed the first fifty pages of the manuscript on the music stand and set the headphones onto my head. Jeff walked out, shutting the two doors between them and me.

He looked at me through the window. The glass was dark so I couldn’t see much, though I could see his face, and my reflection. Through the headphones I heard him say, “I need to do a sound check. Just read.”

So I looked at words I’d first written in a whole other life—before I was married, before I was a public speaker, before I’d been on a movie set, before I’d worked things out with my sister. I read them, hearing my voice in my ears, and suddenly I was back there, a single woman living alone, feeling guilty about being a “bad sister,” working in a bookstore while teaching and while freelancing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, getting on a bus with Beth for the first time.

“It sounds good,” Amber said from the other side of the two doors. I heard her as I heard Jeff: through the headphones. I saw her as I saw him: through the window.

Jeff fiddled with his engineering board in whatever way engineers do. Then he said, “Okay, ready.”

I took a sip of water and went back to the top of the page. This time it was for real.

And then, carried along by words someone I knew once wrote, reading in a voice that sounded an awful lot like mine, I traveled to another time. I was thirty-nine, Beth thirty-eight, and I was back in that first freezing morning, racing out from her apartment into the pre-dawn moonlight, hurrying down an empty, snow-filled street, into a MacDonald’s. I could smell the coffee she bought. I could see the other customers, huddled over their playing cards and want ads. We bolted out to a bus shelter—

“Bus shelter,” Amber said in my headphones.

Ah, yes. I’d said, “Busshelter” or maybe “Buh shelter.”

Pulled out of the memory, flung back into the present, I backed up to the previous comma, grateful for those natural pauses, which that other Rachel had put in just the places where this Rachel might need to breathe, and I read again. And I returned to the past again.

So it continued. For the first several hours, Amber, and sometimes Jeff, gently jumped in at least a few times a page. “Can you back up a sentence? You’ve picked up the pace.” “Go back to the last comma; we could hear the very end of the page turn.” “It’s ‘a’ bus, not ‘the’ bus.” And for those first several hours, I kept flitting in and out of the memories.

But sometime near the end of the first day, I began to see where my weaknesses lay: a word ending in an “s” sound followed by another that began with an “s” sound, leading me to speed up or mispronounce the first word. Letting my mind drift—usually because I was so immersed in the scene I was reliving it, or I was transported to other memories with that same person, so I missed words. Falling into my New Jersey way of pronouncing certain key words—“theater” being the primary one—and needing to hear Amber say it over and over until I could get it right.

Nothing could slip. The microphone picked up the tiniest growl of my stomach, the slightest smacking of my lips. The microphone does not forgive those common verbal accidents that friends tacitly agree to ignore, like final letters that are skipped, singulars that are made plural. The microphone reveals every emotion you’re feeling: the quiver of tears held back, the higher tone of anger.

But by the end of the day, for the most part I was able to catch myself. (Well, not with the growling stomach; I kept imagining that no one else heard that, until Amber or Jeff would say, “Let’s redo that line. There was some stomach noise.”) I’d recognize that a listener wouldn’t quite be able to follow what I was saying, or would get distracted, and I’d back up to the previous comma and reread.

Commas were my friends. Periods were my very good friends. Paragraphs were my bosom buddies. New chapters were the loves of my life.

I quickly gave up the idea of distinguishing all the voices. It took a level of skill I just didn’t have. I did decide to use distinct voices for Beth and Jesse, which wasn’t hard, since I hear them speak all the time on the phone and in person. I also decided to use distinct voices for a few of the bus drivers.

Mostly, though, I figured that people interested in audio books read by the author are willing to sacrifice the virtuosity of a real pro for the authenticity of the real author—and especially in a memoir. Indeed, in a memoir, a buoyant tone when the writer is smiling, or a slowing down when a writer feels longing, is appropriate, even expected. The more I let myself be myself, the better the book would be.

Once I understood that, which happened by the second day, Amber and Jeff stopped needing to jump in as often. And this wasn’t just because I’d gotten the knack of correcting myself. It was because I allowed myself to re-immerse completely in the world I’d written in that book.

I was again the guilt-ridden, giddy, confused, controlling, annoyed, admiring, lonely, and loving adult I’d been when I’d ridden the buses. And when I hit the flashback sections, I was, again, four, and seven, and thirteen, and sixteen, and in college. I was playing with my sister Beth in the fun hideaway under the house, looking up at a spider web, tickling her arm. I was again hugging my father as he stood beside his moving van when my parents separated, then running after him with my sister Laura as he drove away. Once more I was walking down the hallway in junior high, smelling the Clearasil and Herbal Essance, stifling myself as the Special Ed kids, Beth among them, walked by. And once more I was leaving Beth behind on a cold, sleeting February day, packing my belongings into my father’s car, along with my brother, as my mother retreated to her bedroom with the bad man who would become her second husband, and as Beth, with our dog Ringo in her arms, waved goodbye to us from the front door.

These were moments I’d never forgotten. But to my surprise, there were many memories I hadn’t thought of in years. It was as if, having written them in the memoir, I’d turned and walked away from them. As soon as each new scene began I would think, Yes, right. I would even remember writing each, and sometimes recall discussions (and occasionally arguments) with my editor. Yet those additional memories did not interfere. They were off to the side, like a conversation a few seats away on a bus.

All along, Amber and Jeff listened as professionals, which meant they followed every word. At the same time, they listened as regular people. Both of them, it turned out, had a personal connection to the material, one through kinship, one through friendship. They told me they were thinking about their own past experiences as I read, wondering if, and how, they might do something different in the future. When I finished each chapter, they sighed and murmured wordlessly, leaving me to imagine just how my own struggles were affecting them. When I emerged from the room during breaks, I could see my feelings mirrored in their eyes.

It was the most private of public remembering. Alone in a room, where I could hear no one but myself and my audience of two, I felt myself in the most intimate of situations, and could let myself be fully vulnerable. I could go for a page, a few pages, sometimes several pages in a trance. Then I’d catch myself making a glitch, or, less often, they’d bring it to my attention. And I’d remember that inside those headphones sat not just Amber and Jeff, but thousands, maybe millions, of others. They were not here yet, but I could feel their presence, as I felt the presence of those in the past. I was with all those who had been while at the same time all those who have yet to be. But then I’d look back at the page, return to my time travel, and let everyone stay on the far side of the dark window. I could barely see through it anyway.

Jeff told me that the typical three-hundred-page book takes twenty-four hours to record, which usually means three eight-hour days. It turned out that my reading went more quickly; I actually finished in three six-hour days. (He also told me that Baker Sound Studios, which has three recording studios and a long, storied history, now gets used more often for audio books and other spoken word recordings than music. Among the authors who’ve read their own books in Baker Studios is local mystery sensation Lisa Scottoline. That said, I did see some musicians while I was there.)

The work isn’t finished, though. Now the editor needs to listen to everything, including all the corrected glitches. Then we’ll meet again to rerecord anything that needs yet another round. We’ll also add a few bonus tracks, including an essay I’ve just written about what’s happened in the ten years since the book came out. After that, Hachette sends the completed recording to an outside consultant, who listens with new ears. The audio book will be released sometime in the spring.

By then my memories will have begun to recede.

By then I’ll also have met Kate Reading. As luck would have it, Terry, the bookseller who I met on Twitter, got in touch with Grand Central Publishing and asked if her bookstore, One More Page Books, could host a double bill with Kate Reading—that is, Jennifer Mendenhall—and me. The focus would be on The Story of Beautiful Girl, since that’s the book she read.

The timing was just right, because, as regular readers of this blog know, Grand Central is sending me on a book tour in February, right after the release of the paperback. Originally, the tour was to take me to ten cities. But because I’ll be doing an event in my home town of Wilmington, DE a few days after I return, and because I’ll then be going to One More Page Books for the double-bill with Kate/Jennifer, it’s become a twelve-city tour.

So on Sat., March 3, 2012, at 2:00 p.m., this author will meet the actress at One More Page Books, 2200 N. Westmoreland St., Suite 101, in Arlington, VA. I’ll talk about writing The Story of Beautiful Girl, and she’ll read from the book. Then the audience will be invited to ask about the making of audio books. As someone with a lengthy list of audio credits to her name, she’ll answer most of the questions. But now I’ll be able to chime in, too.

“What’s it like to record a book?” friends keep asking me. And then they ask, as I asked myself in the months leading up to my time in Baker Sound Studio, “How do readers sound so flawless? If you make a mistake, do you have to read it over and over again?”

“Yes,” I can say now.

But I can also say that reading words a second time is, in fact, a very minor part of the experience. Far more important is that you read your life a second time. You live your life a second time. You become who you were, and you remind yourself who you are, and you take that long, potholed journey again, from there and then to here and now. And as you do, alone in a room with an audience of ghosts you cannot see, you can say to yourself, Hey, you did some dumb things, but in the end you made some good choices. You learned where your weaknesses lay. You got the knack for correcting yourself. You might have always known where you needed the commas, but now you also know how to breathe.

Photo collage generated with Smilebox

A few months ago, I blogged about how publishers almost never send authors on book tour anymore. I added that, although I travel a lot, it’s for professional speaking engagements. I’ve never been on a book tour.

But in February, 2012, that will change. I’ll be on my first book tour!

Grand Central Publishing will be releasing the paperback of The Story of Beautiful Girl on February 13, 2012 – the day my book tour will begin. All appearances will be in independent bookstores, taking the form of a reading, brief talk, and Q&A, followed by a book signing. All appearances will also be free and open to the public. (One bookstore, in Mystic, CT, is requiring a ticket, which is the purchase of a book.) The cities are Denver; Chicago; Wichita; Austin; Miami; Atlanta (2 places); Charlotte, NC; Mystic, CT; and Madison, CT. I give the details below.

I’ll still continue doing my usual speaking engagements. Right now my confirmed talks, which run through the spring, are in Wilmington, DE; Indianapolis, IN; Columbia, MO; Philadelphia, PA; Wooster, MA; Westmoreland, PA; Appleton, WI; Columbus, OH; and Lake George, NY, with more to come as soon as arrangements have been finalized. You can learn more about these, including whether they are public or private, by going to the Appearance page on my website (updated regularly). Please click here to see this page. The book tour is also included on my Appearance page.

As you might have guessed from the image above, the paperback of The Story of Beautiful Girl will have a new cover. And yes, it’s totally different from the hardback cover, which is to the right. It’s not uncommon for publishers to change covers between the hardback and paperback, and in this case they felt that the hardback design worked well for that format, and the paperback design would work well for the paperback format. I’m happy to say I love both.

The hardback will continue to be available in stores and online for a long time to come.

If you’d like to pre-order the paperback, you can find your favorite retailer by clicking on this link.

I hope you’ll share my tour itinerary with friends. They can also learn more about The Story of Beautiful Girl at my website by clicking here. At the end of this post you’ll also find a printable flyer with my book tour information, which I hope you’ll give to friends who prefer paper notifications. It’s in both jpg and pdf formats.

It would be great to see you at one of these stops!

Monday, Feb 13 7:30 pm
Tattered Cover
1628 16th St. (at Wynkoop)
Denver, CO

Wednesday, Feb 15th 7 pm
Anderson’s Books
123 W. Jefferson Ave.
Naperville, IL (near Chicago)

Thursday, Feb 16 7 pm
Watermark Books
4701 East Douglas Ave.
Wichita, Kansas

Sunday, Feb 19th 4pm
BookPeople
603 N. Lamar Blvd.
Austin, TX

Monday, Feb 20th 8 pm
Books and Books
265 Aragon Ave.
Coral Gables, FL (near Miami)

Tuesday, Feb 21st 7 pm
Eagle Eye Book Shop
2076 N. Decatur Rd.
Decatur, GA (near Atlanta)

Wednesday, Feb 22nd 7 pm
Peerless Book Store
8465 Holcomb Bridge Rd. in Rivermont Station
Alpharetta, GA (near Atlanta)

Thursday, Feb 23rd 7 pm
Park Road Books
4139 Park Road
Charlotte, NC

Friday, Feb 24th 12:00 Noon -ticketed luncheon
Bank Square Books
53 W. Main St.
Mystic, CT

Friday, Feb. 24th, 7:00 PM
RJ Julia
768 Boston Post Road
Madison, CT

Again, to pre-order the paperback of The Story of Beautiful Girl, please click on this link.

And here’s the flyer for the book tour, in jpg format. For the pdf format, click here. Rachel Simon’s book tour – pdf

It’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. While most people had large family gatherings with turkey, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie, I took my sister Beth to see Puss In Boots, followed by a trip to a diner for our holiday dinner. It was a nice, peaceful, private way to say thanks for a thrilling, non-stop, very public year.

In fact, the year has been so non-stop that I haven’t posted a new blog since August. It’s been so long that readers of this blog have gotten in touch, saying, “Where have you been?”

In the interest of answering that question, I’m posting a photo journey through the last four months. It won’t cover everything, but will touch on many of the important episodes and people, and will give a sense of all I have to be grateful for. (And when I mention giving talks, I’m mostly referring to talks related to my novel The Story of Beautiful Girl, though occasionally I also spoke about my memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister.)

When I began doing appearances in connection with The Story of Beautiful Girl, the American Network of Community Options and Resources, or ANCOR, assembled an extremely helpful and easy-to-read brochure that provides additional information about the past, present, and future of the kind of institutions I wrote about in my book – and what we can do to improve that future. The brochure became so popular, ANCOR recently turned it into an electronic flipbook so people could share it online.

I hope you’ll click here to take a look at the flipbook, and then share it with others.

ANCOR also helped me connect with a number of very gifted artists who have disabilities, and who I asked to create artwork that I could use to illustrate key scenes in The Story of Beautiful Girl for my talks. The response was overwhelming, with drawings coming in from adult artists across the country who live in community settings. I chose several of these pieces for my talk (and, yes, compensated those artists for their work), and am including four of them on this blog post.

ANCOR recently created an online art gallery where they posted all the artwork that was sent in, and included biographies about each artist. You can see the art gallery at this link. I’m sure you’ll love looking at this online art show.

Now that summer has arrived, I’m taking a break from the relentless pace of the last few months and am living a life of solitude, silence, and deep concentration.

But with The Story of Beautiful Girl proving so popular among book clubs, I’ve also been visiting groups across the country – from the comfort of my own home in Delaware. This used to be impossible, but speaker phones and Skype video calls now make it very easy. (If you’d like to learn more about Skype, a free service that’s easy to install and use, just click here for their site.)

I’ve loved meeting these book clubs. It’s been deeply moving to learn when and where they read certain sections of the book, how the story related to their lives, and what they came to know, or question, that they hadn’t considered before. I’ve also enjoyed how open these readers were with both their laughter and their tears.

This week, I met with four groups. Each was such a delight that I asked if they would send me photos I could post here. My hope is that this post will inspire book clubs to contact more authors to see if they’re able to visit by Skype and phone, and that the authors they reach will have the time, and desire, to say yes. I can easily promise – and I’m sure the book clubs below agree – that a splendid time will be guaranteed for all.

So please meet these great champions of the written word. Whether or not I knew them before our visit, I now consider them all my friends.

1. My Girlfriends’ Reading Room
Atlanta, Georgia

This spirited, good-hearted book group started almost a year ago, after one of the members lost a beloved relative. The book group has turned into a form of group therapy for her, though the focus remains very much on the books they read. It was this woman who reached out to me through email, and after a little correspondence, we set up a phone call. Our visit, via speaker phone, was on Sunday, July 17.

2. Writing group from The Place for Words
Bedford, MA.

This group wasn’t technically a book club but a group of smart, inquisitive writers who study with the warm, lovely writing coach, Mindy Pollack-Fusi. They found me because Mindy connected with me online many years ago and stayed in touch. The Place for Words is publishing a book of its writers’ works, due out in September. You can click here to learn more about The Place for Words and their upcoming anthology. When Mindy finished reading The Story of Beautiful Girl during her summer vacation, her email had the subject line of “sobbing on the dock.” I Skyped with them on Thursday, July 21.

3. The “An Excuse For People Who Read Books To Get Together And Drink Lots of Wine” Book Club
Albuquerque, New Mexico

This lively, friendly, wonderful book club connected with me on Facebook, inviting me to join a group, An Excuse For People Who Read Books To Get Together And Drink Lots of Wine, where they post progress on the books they’re reading – with their next book being The Story of Beautiful Girl. As with the next group you’ll see below, they weren’t already users of Skype, but they downloaded the program and after a quick test run, we were set. The day we Skyped, they asked lots of questions. Then I did a reading of their favorite section of the book, and watched them wiping their eyes with tears two thousand miles away. Those of you who’ve read the book can easily guess what section I read. Our Skype call was on Friday, July 22.

4. The Bryn Mawr College Kalo Kale Alumnae book club
Seattle, WA

I graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1981, and while I was there, I became good friends with Pamela Carter. In fact, we laughed and suffered through the infamous geology field trip together! Pam and I have stayed friends over the years, and now, in addition to being a teacher, she herself is a writer. She reached out to other Bryn Mawr alumnae in the Seattle area and invited them to come to her house for a Skype book discussion of The Story of Beautiful Girl. Some of those who attended were already friends, others were meeting Pam (and/or me) for the first time; they ranged from the class of 1968 to the class of 2001, and majored in everything from Greek to Biology to Economics to French. Several of the alumnae were writers, so we discussed writing as well as my book, and since Bryn Mawr is so rooted in the classics, we were able to have a great discussion of the influence of The Odyssey on the storyline. (In fact, they’d already noticed the allusions to The Odyssey before I mentioned it.) Our visit was on Sunday, July 24 – an uncharacteristically sunny, warm day in Seattle, which they gave up to spend time inside doing Skype.

I’m so excited!

This morning, mega-authors Jennifer Weiner and Harlan Coben appeared on The Today Show to recommend their Books Not To Be Missed For The Summer – and Jennifer raved about my book!

Here’s what she said.

“Great title, great cover. Sad book. Two people who are institutionalized run away from this terrible place. The woman gives birth. It’s a dark and stormy night. They give this new baby to a widow, and say, ‘Hide her.’ And it’s the story of what happens to these three characters over the next forty years.” To which the host, Ann Curry, said, “Lot of buzz about that book on Twitter.” And Jennifer Weiner said, “It’s amazing.”

You can also watch the video. Jennifer mentions my book at time marker 2:28.

Thank you, Jennifer Weiner!

I don’t belong to any book clubs. But I sure do love being in them.

I grew up in the pre-book club era, when people who read books didn’t think in terms of gathering once a month in a living room with a dozen friends, food, wine, and maybe a set agenda, and then spending two hours, or at least some part of two hours, discussing the book. In my formative years, readers tended to read books on their own, then keep their pleasure, disappointment, and questions to themselves. At best they might have shared their reactions to a book in an impromptu way, with one friend, bookstore acquaintance, or library patron at a time.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t people who really wanted to talk in groups about the books they’d been reading. From what I could tell, many of them satisfied this need by becoming English majors, English teachers, booksellers, book reviewers, and people in publishing.

But I wasn’t someone who was bursting to talk about what I was reading with others. I was happy to ask if an individual person had read a certain book and even happier to take their recommendations, though I liked the solitary nature of reading. For one thing, I wasn’t a joiner. For another, I could read at my own pace, and according to my own taste. And for yet another, I was less likely to hurt other people’s feelings if they waxed rhapsodic about a book I hadn’t taken to, and I was equally unlikely to get strange looks if I sang the praises of a book they’d found wanting, or highfalutin. I could also explore subjects and authors without risking an unpleasant reaction. (“What do you mean, you love Rod Serling?” I imagined someone saying when, in eighth grade, I read everything he’d written.) I could also indulge in rereading books, which I was very fond of doing. Plus, if I didn’t understand the appeal of a bestselling thriller, or literary classic, or postmodern tour de force that I was supposed to enjoy, I didn’t have to admit it. In short, I liked to be on my own as a reader because I could avoid judging, and being judged by, others.

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t an English major. I loved hanging out with them, but I was just fine reading on my own. During graduate school, when I got my MFA, I had to share my thoughts about books, but I never became comfortable doing so. Since then, I’ve mostly retreated to my old ways, with occasional lapses.

The first time it occurred to me that large numbers of people really, really wanted to read in a more social way was when Oprah Winfrey began her book club in 1996, and suddenly book clubs began springing up everywhere. I was working in a bookstore then, and even though it never occurred to me to join a book club, I saw how quickly and easily they turned strangers into intellectual companions. I also saw how marvelously book clubs could deliver a book from obscurity to popularity. Since I ran the events, I could see how, by creating book discussion groups (which were essentially the equivalent of book clubs), I could hold events that would reliably bring in a dozen, two dozen, maybe even forty people a month – and not just as people who sat beside each other in a circle, but as people who became central to one another’s lives. I could watch these relationships grow month to month, and see the rewards of social reading growing right before my eyes.

Of course, I also learned that sometimes book clubs don’t work out smoothly. Friends have told me about book clubs spoiled by a lax commitment to reading, or a domineering personality, or a tendency for more members to talk than to listen. But most people I know are now in book clubs, and most book clubs seem to be sources of great joy. Plus, they inspire people to read.

Those alone would be reason enough for me to love book clubs, even without joining one. But I also love book clubs because, as a writer, I am sometimes asked to visit them, and when I do I often discover a warm, friendly, mutually-respectful, often long-term community of smart, well-read, good-natured, open-minded, story-admiring women. That is, women who, except for being in a book club, are a lot like me (or at least a lot like the me I hope I am). They tend to be passionate about their families or careers or both. They tend to enjoy a good laugh. They appreciate craft on the page and often in additional realms, like interior design or fine art. They’re people who like to ask questions. They’re people who like to think.

I have been lucky. Many of the readers who love my books belong to book clubs, and sometimes, when my book gets selected as their next title, they get in touch and ask if I might possibly come for a visit. I suppose their goal is to enhance their understanding of the book and to demystify the mysterious author who produced it. My goal is a little different. Yes, by visiting their clubs, I can give the members insights into my writing that they couldn’t get anywhere else. But that’s far from the only goal. I also love having the opportunity to be, however briefly, around the kind of people who are in book clubs. Sometimes I even get to feel that sense of community, even if I’m on the outside. So in a way, it’s the best of all worlds.

My schedule doesn’t always allow for visits, but fortunately technology is now providing new options. So sometimes I visit on speaker phone, as I will be doing with a book club in Atlanta, Georgia in mid-July. Sometimes I visit on a Skype video call, as I’m discussing doing with several book clubs right now. Sometimes it means I can get there in person.

This week, I was in three book clubs. One was online, one was in person, and one was on the radio. Despite how varied the situations were, I loved all three.

The online book club.

The retail bookseller Borders decided in May to start an e-book club, and to make The Story of Beautiful Girl their first selection. Kelly and David, the folks in charge of the e-book club, had a long, lively phone conversation with me in early June to discuss how the club would play out. They wanted to put several posts with additional material about the book on their e-book blog, with readers being instructed to read to a certain page before looking at each. So for the last few weeks, I’ve worked with them to create these posts. It was fun to discuss the material in the book with people who really care. It was also a delight to see how personal their posts turned out to be.

You can read their initial post about the book club here.

The first post with additional material brings up the real life person of John Doe #24, and provides links to the book God Knows His Name, by Dave Bakke, and the song “John Doe Number 24″ by Mary Chapin Carpenter. It also gives the story behind this incredible painting of the opening of my book, which was done by the artist John Dusko. You can see that post here.

The second post with additional material provides background about institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This post also clarifies that, in most states, these were different places than institutions for people who had mental health issues. This post also gives information about what’s happening with institutions today. You can read it here.

The final post focuses on the character of Kate, the direct care worker who’s so important to Lynnie over the course of the book. In this post, you can learn about the field of Direct Support Professionals, including what they do and why they’re so important. You’ll also learn about the severe labor shortage in this field and why it’s such a dire problem. You can read it here.

Then the book club culminated on Thurs., June 30, with a live chat on Facebook. What a thrill that was! The messages flew thick and fast for the entire two hours. Many of the participants had read The Story of Beautiful Girl, but some got involved with the chat because they were fans of my earlier books, like Riding The Bus With My Sister, or The Magic Touch. It was exciting to get so many questions and comments, in real time, from readers I already knew, and readers I was just meeting for the first time. And yes, they were all smart, interesting, engaged people. It was a total pleasure!

The chat, which went on for five screens worth of material, can be seen at this link.

The in-person book club

A new friend named Joani is in a book club based in Cherry Hill, NJ, and when they selected The Story of Beautiful Girl for their June read, she asked if I could meet with them. I said yes, adding my caveat for driving to a book club: twenty or more people needed to be present, with each person buying my book in advance. To my delight, she said that would work, adding that she’d make sure the group was even larger.

Her book club members then invited two friends each, with everyone being expected to read the book in advance. On Monday night, they rented a small restaurant, Chef’s Kitchen Bistro, for the entire evening, and I drove to Cherry Hill and met them there.

Thirty-two people showed up at 6:30 PM, and we then spent the next two and a half hours eating delicious food prepared by the owner, Seth, and his assistant Vlad, and discussing the book at length. The book club members, who’d made a point of finishing the book before our visit – with one person reaching the final page at 5:02 PM that very night! – were full of insight and heart, and were as excited by the opportunity to meet me as I was to meet them. Vlad took pictures throughout the evening, which you can see at this link.

It was a joy it was to talk with people who already knew the whole book, as it gave me the freedom to speak about details that I would otherwise have been forced to ignore or be elusive about. It was also a joy to answer questions at length, since I knew they really wanted to hear everything I wanted to share. The leisurely duration of the evening also have me the opportunity to show them the artwork by self-advocates that I use in my more formal talks; I just opened my laptop, everyone crowded around, and Seth and Vlad turned off the lights. We stood there in the dark restaurant, smiling away as we looked at laptop screen.

Finally, I signed books – when I could. Several people had read a digital version so they didn’t have anything for me to sign, though one enterprising woman suggested that I sign my business card. But whether I signed something or not, when we said goodbye and the group fanned out into the night, many people said they were going to tell all the book clubs they knew to read The Story of Beautiful Girl. I waved goodbye, and hoped they would.

I know I can’t visit every book club in person, but it’s nice to know that my characters might do the visiting for me.

The radio book club

Voices In the Family is a relationship- and psychology-oriented call-in show on my local public radio station, WHYY-FM. It’s hosted by a compassionate, thoughtful, and deeply open man, Dr. Dan Gottlieb, who’s a nationally known speaker and the author of several books. Dr. Dan is also a person who knows firsthand about suffering and survival; in 1979 he was in a car accident that rendered him paralyzed from the chest down. His wisdom about what it means to be human, and his honesty about his own sense of vulnerability, have made him one of the most popular and beloved broadcast personalities in the Philadelphia area.

So when Dr. Dan read The Story of Beautiful Girl, and told me, “This is the best book I’ve ever read,” it meant a lot. And when he asked me to appear on Voices In The Family, it meant even more. But I was over the moon when he informed me that he’d decided to start a Voices In The Family book club so his listeners would be encouraged to read the book.

When it comes to public radio, I’m what you’d call a heavy listener. We have a radio in every room in the house, and all of them are tuned to WHYY. And for the last two weeks, I’d had a little thrill several times a day when the announcers read a brief promo about the book club, inviting listeners to tune into my discussion with Dr. Dan on Monday, June 27th.

In advance of the broadcast, Jennifer Lynn, the producer, told me they hoped to have a few additional guests: a person who could speak about the history of institutions for people with developmental disabilities, and a person who had lived in one. I told her I knew just the right people to contact, and I put her in touch with Jim Conroy and Jean Searle. Jim is the founder and president of The Center for Outcome Analysis, a non-profit firm founded in 1985 to perform evaluation, research, and demonstration projects in the human services and health care services. Jean is a self-advocate who was institutionalized at age 12 and released years later only as a result of the judge-ordered closure of the Pennhurst State School. Jim and Jean are also co-presidents of the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance.

We all showed up early, gathering in the lobby of WHYY well before the show began at noon. Soon Dr. Dan and Jennifer Lynn led us back to the studio. A man who helps support Jean took photos of us, along with intern Emily Hauze.

Then we were on.

It was quite a powerful experience with just the four of us in the room. For the first segment, Dr. Dan focused his questions on me. In the second segment, he spoke with Jim about the history of institutions, and Jean about her personal experience. During the third segment, all three of us spoke. And throughout, there were calls and emails from listeners.

The four of us exchanged many smiles and knowing glances over the course of that hour. We also had to watch ourselves so we wouldn’t make a peep except when we were being asked to speak up. Despite the effort we had to put into keeping quiet, the sense of camaraderie was a great pleasure, and it helped offset the challenges of discussing such serious topics.

Even though I didn’t get to meet the members of this book club in the way I did with the Cherry Hill group, I still had the opportunity to speak with several callers. One shared his love of the book in a way that was so emotional, it brought me almost to tears. Others had questions or comments about the interview and the subject matter. And others sent in emails that didn’t make it onto the air, but that told deeply personal stories about their own family histories.

Later in the day, I received emails and calls from friends and supporters who told me they hadn’t called in but had just listened. They’d tuned in too late, or realized the format wouldn’t allow them to speak at the length they might have liked.

But maybe some of those people didn’t call in because, like me, they’re solitary readers. If so, I hope the Voices In The Family book club gave them the same feeling of camaraderie as it gave me.

You can listen to the podcast of this show by clicking here. Then you can be a part of this book club, too.

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I hope you’ll consider reading Dr. Dan’s latest book, The Wisdom of Sam, for your book club. It’s about his special bond with his grandson Sam, who has autism.

To learn more about Dan Gottlieb, please check out his website here.

You can also watch a video of him and Sam by clicking here.

Yes, I did.

For the first three books of my career – the books that preceded my first bestseller, Riding The Bus With My Sister – I wore fun, whimsical costumes to do author readings in bookstores. In fact, during these early years of my career, from my first book, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams (1990), through my second book, The Magic Touch (1994), to my third book, The Writer’s Survival Guide (1997), some people came to my readings just to see my latest costumes. I often worked with props and actors as well, creating what I called “literary performance art.”

I retired the costumes in 2002, when Riding The Bus With My Sister came out. By coincidence, I began doing professional speaking then instead. I’ve continued dressing like a regular old author ever since, and have also continued to do professional speaking – most recently for my first New York Times bestseller, The Story of Beautiful Girl. I wrote about all of this in my last blog post, which you can read here.

But I have many fond memories of my days in costume. So when my friend Cecily asked me to guest blog for her at Uppercasewoman.com today, I decided to share one of the most prominent.

It’s about the paper dress. It’s also about how I met Cecily, way back in 1994, and we became friends.

Please go to Cecily’s blog to read about it. You can also see photos of some of my other costumes, as well as how I look in the paper dress now. (Well, last week.) Here’s the link.

And if you’d like to learn more about my first books – all of which were well received and critically acclaimed, but none of which led to national recognition or stayed in print – please go to the Books page on my website.

For the last nine years, since Riding The Bus With My Sister came out, people have said to me, “Boy, your book tour is lasting a long time!” or “Don’t you get tired of being on book tour?” For the last month, since The Story of Beautiful Girl came out, people have said, “Please come to my city on your book tour.”

And over and over I have the same answer. I’m not on book tour. I’ve never been on book tour. Yes, I travel all over the country talking about my books, but I’m not on book tour.

Then I get the blank looks.

When I first got to college, every professor said the same thing: “Define your terms.” So, what is a book tour, and why am I not on one?

A book tour is when an author’s publisher schedules a series of events, usually taking the form of readings in bookstores or other author-oriented venues, in a limited number of cities over a period of two or three weeks. The timing of a book tour usually coincides with the release of a new book. The publisher pays for everything – hotels, flights, food, cabs. The publisher sets up interviews with local press. The publisher sends an editor or publicist along. The author receives no payment.

This is not what I do. I came close to it this past winter, when Grand Central Publishing, the fabulous publisher of The Story of Beautiful Girl, sent me on a “pre-sale tour.” But as those of you who’ve been following this blog know, it didn’t fit the definition above. It happened months prior to the book’s release, not after. There were no bookstore readings, just private dinners with booksellers in restaurants. (The photo to the left is the dinner in Ann Arbor, with people from Borders.) The purpose was to generate behind-the-scenes excitement to lay the groundwork for book sales, but no books were actually sold. (You can read more about this in the many posts I wrote during the pre-sale tour, starting with my first city, Washington, DC, in January.)

Pre-sale tours are very, very rare. And, contrary to popular perception, book tours are only slightly less rare.

This is because publishers almost never spend the money for book tours except for huge, huge authors. And that’s because the era when readers flocked to bookstores to hear an author do a reading is long since over, if it ever existed. For my first two books, a collection of stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, in 1990, and a novel, The Magic Touch, in 1994, I traveled to bookstores – and, of course, since I was a total unknown, it was on my own dime. If the stores were local and I worked very hard at doing outreach, sending cards and letters to friends and acquaintances, I could get a sizable turnout. It helped that for those first few books, I also did my readings in costume, using actors and props, creating something I called literary performance art. (My next post, a guest blog for Uppercasewoman.com that I’ll link to here, will be about this. For now, I’ll show you a photo of my flag dress. I’ll post a photo of the candy dress and the paper dress in that guest blog.) But if the stores weren’t local, I couldn’t get anyone.

Literally. Zero.

This happened once in North Carolina and once in Florida, when well-meaning friends or family set up events for me at their favorite local store and then no one came. Just about every author out there has had this happen, but that doesn’t make it any less demoralizing. And, given that most authors pay their own way, the financial incentive to avoid repeating such dispiriting occasions is very high.

As a result, I mostly stopped doing bookstore readings unless they were local. This personal policy was reinforced when I ran events for a bookstore, which I began before my third book came out in 1997. I saw then how impossible it was to get readers to attend events if the author didn’t have strong local connections or wasn’t a household name. I watched several literary writers, some who’d won prestigious awards, get horribly depressed when only three people attended their events. I knew how they felt, and I told them so. But sympathy, even with a free cup of tea, rarely stemmed their sense of despair.

Yet I’ve been on the road for Riding The Bus With My Sister since it came out in 2002, and I’ve been on the road for The Story of Beautiful Girl since it came out in May. If I’m not on book tour, what am I doing?

Back to defining one’s terms. When Riding The Bus With My Sister came out, I started getting asked to do keynote speeches at conferences, gala dinners, fund-raisers, etc. That is, big, often annual, events hosted by non-profit agencies, advocacy organizations, universities and high schools, government agencies, hospitals, trade associations, etc. The event was going to happen anyway but they needed a featured speaker whose name would help induce their members to attend the event. Since Riding The Bus With My Sister was becoming a prominent title, especially in the disability community, public transit industry, and places interested in diversity awareness, I received requests to be that speaker. These came from places all over the country, from Florida to Alaska, California to New Hampshire. I solicited none of them; they just found me. And all of them said I could bring in a bookstore to sell my books at the event – to audiences of a hundred, three hundred, maybe even seven hundred, who were already in the room, predisposed to want my work. So I could still help generate revenue for bookstores, even if my event was what’s called an “off-site.”

At first I was surprised that these requests kept coming, but then I just got used to it. I also enjoyed doing the talks enormously, and discovered I had a facility for it. And – unlike the book tour model – I got paid for it. My hosts would cover all my expenses plus a speaking fee. Indeed, my speaking fees became a substantial part of how I earned my living.

None of this was planned. I still saw myself as an author. Yet I’d inadvertently entered a new profession. I’d become a professional speaker.

Most people have never even heard about professional speakers, but there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of us. Having met a few others while on my travels, I’ve ascertained that most of us fall into this career, usually as an outgrowth of some other career that catapulted us to prominence, from business to medicine to the arts to, of course, politics. The better known the name, the higher the speaking fee. Some people book themselves, as I did for the first several years; others hook up with firms who do their booking – as I did, after the movie of Riding The Bus With My Sister aired, and I had way more requests to speak than I could possibly handle. I found a wonderful man named Marc Goldman, at Damon Brooks Associates, who handles speakers who talk about disabilities. (Some of his other clients are Geri Jewell, Temple Grandin, and Laurie Potter from Glee.) You can read about him and his firm here.

And you can see a video clip of me speaking about Riding The Bus With My Sister here.

So since 2002, yes, I have traveled to forty states and done hundreds of talks, and at every one of them a bookstore has come to sell books. But I’ve done this on my own, without the involvement of a publisher. My talks are also talks, not readings. And just about every one leaves me elated. It’s an entirely different model from a book tour.

I would still do bookstore events under the right circumstances. I know from my pre-sale tour that there are incredible booksellers whose stores have strong customer loyalty, and that when they run events, the seats get filled. Some of these booksellers have asked if I’d go to their stores, and if I could find a way to do so that was financially feasible, I would. I just know it would be a wonderful experience for everyone.

But as our world undergoes many changes because of the online revolution, I increasingly think that the approach I lucked into, of writing and publishing books, then going out to talk about the book as a professional speaker with a bookstore available to sell the books right then and there, is likely to emerge as one of the more sustainable models. The publisher doesn’t put up money it doesn’t have, the author doesn’t go to events with zero people in attendance, the gala dinner has its headliner speaker, and the bookstore sells books.

There are some catches. Authors have to have gregarious personalities. Their books, whether fiction or nonfiction, have to be of interest to the kinds of organizations who need speakers. Their family and job responsibilities have to be light, or at least flexible. And they have to feel reasonably comfortable with the complications, discomforts, and irrational, unpredictable nature of modern air travel. So this model is not for everyone.

But it has been for me. And I hope it continues to be. Given that I just returned from two weeks on the road to do talks about The Story of Beautiful Girl, and I have lots of requests coming in for the fall, I have to say it looks promising.

So, to get back to those questions.

How long will I be doing this? For as long as people invite me.

Have I gotten tired of it? Not in the slightest.

Will I be coming through your city? Quite possibly. One of the great advantages to being a professional speaker is that anyone at any moment could invite you to any city. As you’ll see below, in the last two weeks, I was in Stamford, CT; St. Paul, MN; National Harbor, MD; Washington, DC; Baltimore, MD; and Conshohocken, PA – and, whenever I could, I met up with friends who lived in those areas. Coming up later this summer and fall, I already know I’ll be in Kentucky; Green Bay, WI; Sioux Falls, SD; Toronto; Los Angeles; and Atlantic City. (None of which I’ve gotten onto my website just yet. Give me a few days.) And that’s just for starters.

I might not wear costumes anymore. I might not be able to make personal plans months in advance, so forget things like subscriptions to theater companies or the symphony. And I might see a lot more public art in airports than I do in museums.

But by being an author on an ongoing Not-A-Book-Tour tour, I get to see the world, and meet like-minded people, and help inspire them in their own lives. I get to share messages. I get to develop friendships all over the country. I get to sell books – long, long after those few weeks after publication.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to meet you.

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Here’s what’s happened with The Story of Beautiful Girl in the last two weeks. I’ll give the news first, then the photos of my many events – including a rally on Capitol Hill, where I shared the stage with a senator.

Recent news

The Story of Beautiful Girl received a tremendous review in the Washington Post. “This novel is the author’s gift to those who never had a chance to speak for themselves. [It is] part love story, part mystery, part social commentary….Readers are likely to emerge from ‘The Story of Beautiful Girl’ with a new level of empathy for those who were once hidden away — and for all those living with a disability.” You can read it here.

Borders launched an e-book club, choosing The Story of Beautiful Girl for their first title. As Borders says on its blog, “All you need to do is download the eBook (or use the actual book) and start reading. We will add posts (starting 6/15/11) that will add some extras about the book (inspiration, pictures, etc.) and some questions about what we’ve read so far that everyone can chime in about. At the end of the book (probably 6/30/11), we’re going to have a Facebook chat with the author that everyone is invited to join in for.” You can read their initial message about the club, and also start reading the posts with the extra material, by clicking here.

The public radio show Voices In The Family, which is broadcast out of WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and is hosted by Dr. Dan Gottlieb, also launched a book club, and also chose The Story of Beautiful Girl for its first title. Readers are asked to read the book before Dr. Gottlieb interviews me live, on Mon., June 27th, at noon. This will be a call-in show, so please call in with questions. You can listen to Voices In The Family live by tuning into 90.9 FM in the Philadelphia area, or going to the website for WHYY, which you can find here.

Sun Buzz Magazine, in the United Kingdom, reviewed the book, saying, “A moving and disturbing tale of love and loyalty. And you might cry.”

There were a number of terrific blog reviews, too. Here are four.

The Betty and Boo Chronicles begins with this extraordinary comparison: “Every once in awhile, a novel comes along with the power to significantly change one’s perspective while simultaneously being a beacon of hope for people who have been forgotten, who are disenfranchised, and who remain on the fringes of society. It happened with To Kill a Mockingbird, the classic novel by Harper Lee that illuminated race relations in the Deep South. And it has the potential to happen again (as I hope and pray it does) with The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon.” You can read the full review here.

Kayla the Bookworm says, “The plot is 100% original. I don’t think I have read or heard of a book like this before, nor read something like this ever in my life. The forty years that this book covers is filled with magnificence, desolation, lightheartedness, and wonderment. You think you know what is going to happen, but you will be blown away by what is truly in store. Rachel Simon truly created a piece of magic that should be on everyone’s bookshelf.” You can read the full review here.

Thin Places: Faith, Family, and Disability, by Amy Julia Becker, discusses the spiritual aspects of the book. It begins, “I stayed up late every night this week reading The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon. It’s no great surprise that I loved it.” And it concludes, “Read this novel for a story that gives a glimpse of humanity in its basest depravity and its most glorious possibilities.” You can read the full review here.

The blog My Zen Nana has a short but superlative review that says, “an amazing heart-filled tale of love and triumph over the most challenging obstacles life can throw across our path. Without sentimentality or cliche….she gets it right — every detail, every nuance, every facial expression, grunt, punch and childlike painting….Beautifully written, I will hold this story in my heart for a long long time. It will remind me that there are always bright spots of genuine love amid the cold harsh realities of human life. The full review is here.

Lastly, I wrote a short essay that will appear nowhere but on the Amazon.com page for The Story of Beautiful Girl. In fact, it’s called an Amazon Exclusive Essay. It addresses some of the top questions people keep asking me about the book. You can read it by going to this link.

Recent events:

In the last two weeks, I’ve traveled up and down the East Coast, and to the Midwest and back. I’ve spoken at a range of events, from an author luncheon to disability-related conferences to a rally on Capitol Hill to a house reception. The photos below will take you through the journey – otherwise known as my Not-A-Book-Tour Tour.

The Author Luncheon – Stamford, CT – Thurs., June 2, 2011

The Friends of Ferguson Library host a lavish author luncheon every year, inviting the public and giving them the opportunity to meet major authors. It was incredible to be on a bill with Barbara Delinsky, author of nineteen New York Times bestsellers, and Oscar Andrew Hammerstein, grandson of the great lyricist Oscar Hammerstein and author of The Hammersteins. I was also lucky enough to get to Stamford the evening before the event, which gave me the time to see my old friend, Cybele Eidenschenk, and a new friend, Barbara Thomas, who has interviewed me for a podcast that will soon be available through the website of the Darien Library.

The Annual Conference of the AAIDD (American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities)
St. Paul., MN – Mon., June 6, 2011

I flew to St. Paul two days after I returned from Connecticut. The day I arrived was gorgeous, and my hotel looked right out onto the Mississippi River. My friend Greg actually flew up from Kansas City to see me (as well as his mother, who lives in St. Paul). We went out to dinner, then did a little sight-seeing. The next day I saw some old friends and made new ones at the conference. My talk was part of a double-bill with Dan Habib, a father and very talented documentary filmmaker. You might know his film Including Samuel, about inclusive education. He spoke about his follow-up film, which further explores that material. About 150 people attended our talks. I then signed books for an hour.

The Annual Conference for ANCOR (American Network of Community Options and Resources)
National Harbor, MD – Tues., June 7, 2011

Unfortunately, the AAIDD and ANCOR conferences coincided, so I, like many other people, flew between the two. In my case, I rose at 3:30 AM in St. Paul the morning after my talk, caught a cab to the airport (talking with the cab driver all the way, of course), flew to Washington, and then did a talk that afternoon for ANCOR. Incredibly, I managed to be awake! And that was very helpful, because many of the 200 people in the audience got onto the book signing line, making it last for two hours. Afterwards, I had dinner with Barbara Merrill, with the MENTOR Network, who I’d met a few weeks ago at the NASDDDS conference in Philadelphia. It was a fine day, but very demanding.

Rally for Community Living
Capitol Hill, Washington, DC – Wed., June 8, 2011

But no rest for the exhausted! Because early the next morning, I jumped into a cab and went to Capitol Hill to speak at a rally. Co-sponsored by ANCOR, the Direct Care Alliance, and the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals, the Rally for Community Living called on Congress and the White House to adopt policies that support the right of individuals with disabilities to live and receive services in their communities, instead of in institutions. Nearly 150 people attended, including agencies, direct support professionals, and self-advocates. Despite the high temperature and sauna-like humidity, it was thrilling!

Lunch with people from UCP (United Cerebral Palsy)
Washington, DC – Wed., June 8, 2011

After the rally, I zipped across town to have lunch with Mike Hill and Lauren Cozzi from United Cerebral Palsy. We discussed many ideas for how we could collaborate, since our missions overlap in so many ways. As you can see, I was dealing with hat hair by then, as well as going on adrenalin. But the air-conditioning, and more iced tea, helped.

House Reception
Baltimore, MD – Wed., June 8, 2011

The meeting at UCP was so lively and fun, it invigorated me, and left me in great spirits. So I didn’t feel tired or hot at all when I then took the Metro to Union Station, where I met up with self-advocate Liz Weintraub. Together we rode the train up to Baltimore, where my friend Nancy Weiss was throwing a house reception for me. Although I kept thinking I might not get through the evening, the excitement among Nancy’s friends, and Nancy’s wonderful spread of food, ensured that I never faded. Fortunately a student from Temple University, Kelly George, attended, and when she drove back to Philadelphia late that night, she brought me home to Delaware. Unfortunately, I was so dizzy from such intense travel by then, I left my camera at Nancy’s house. I would have posted this blog much sooner, but she had to ship my camera – and all these photos – back to me.

Annual Banquet for the POTA District V (Pennsylvania Occupational Therapy Association)
Conshohocken, PA – Tues., June 14, 2011

But I wasn’t quite done! After a few days – when I wrote up the Exclusive Essay for Amazon and the guest blog for Uppercasewoman.com, did an interview with the News Journal, worked out the details of the e-book club with people at Borders, and did the same for the Voices In the Family book club – I drove to Conshohocken, PA for one more talk. This was for one of the most active groups of occupational therapists in Pennsylvania. My friends Marilyn Paige and Skip Decker attended, and, since my camera was still with UPS, they took these photos. These shots might be the last new pictures you see on this blog for a while – because after the intensity of these last two weeks, I need to take a break.