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.

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.)

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.

_________________________________

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.

The second week in the life of The Story of Beautiful Girl has been demanding, stimulating, exhausting, full of happy developments with the book, full of friends old and new, full of events public and private, and overflowing with unbelievable excitement.

First, the BIG, BIG, BIG news: This evening, exactly two weeks after publication, I learned that The Story of Beautiful Girl hit the New York Times Bestseller List!!! It comes in at #30, and will first appear on the 5/29 list for fiction in hardback. The full list will be available only online, since the print edition covers only the first 15 (of 35) titles.

The following blog is about the many wonderful things that have happened over the last week. I just told you the most exciting news of all, but I hope you’ll read on. The first part of the blog is devoted to headlines, and the remaining five parts to photo-stories of the public and private events I did during the week just before The Story of Beautiful Girl became a New York Times Bestseller.

If you attended any of the events I write about below and would like to provide details that go beyond my brief introductions for each, I hope you’ll post comments at the end of this blog. I’m sure people would love to know about these experiences through your eyes as well as mine.

Here are the big pieces of news over the last week:

The June issue of Oprah Magazine listed The Story of Beautiful Girl as one of Ten Titles To Pick Up Now, calling it “heart-tugging.”

The Christian Science Monitor named it their #1 novel for May 2011, calling it “improbably beautiful.”

The Omaha World-Herald called The Story of Beautiful Girl, “The most compelling, resonating novel I’ve read in years….A breathtakingly beautiful, yet heart-wrenchingly aching story that, despite its cruelty and humanity, uplifts the reader….This is a story of people choosing to do the right thing, even though it might not be correct or popular. Readers will rail at the injustice of humanity, smile at the wonderments and cry at the ending.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer called my writing, “smart and laced with sweetness, presenting an optimistic view even when her subject matter is bleak. She brings an anthropologist’s eye to her stories, describing characters, action, and emotion as if she were new to the weary world. By seeing anew what comes naturally to most of us – cognition, memory, hearing, speech – Simon illuminates her characters’ interior lives and finds new and forgotten meaning.”

Friends sent word about the book getting high-profile display at bookstores everywhere – including the one in this photo, at the Salt Lake City Airport.

Late last week, the book sold out at Amazon.com and they had to reorder.

Over the weekend, it sold out at several brick and mortar stores and they had to reorder.

On Tuesday, it went into a second printing.

On Wednesday morning, two weeks after publication, it reached #15 on the bestseller list for independent bookstores, also known as the Indiebound bestseller list.

And on Wednesday night, it hit #30 on the New York Times Bestseller List!

But ordinary life goes on. Here in reality, both our dishwasher and dryer broke. Yes, two major appliances went kaput within the same afternoon! How implausible is that?

Never let it be said that success means you won’t have to sit around waiting for the repairman.

But mostly, I haven’t been sitting around at all. I’ve been running around, doing the first of many events and gatherings I’ve been planning over the last few months. I’ll share photos from five of them here.

Event Number One: Patricia’s Reception

My first event, exactly one week after the book’s release, was a private reception. It was hosted by a dear friend from college, Patricia Hamill, who’s a lawyer, and who wanted to hold a customer appreciation event for her clients. She and her assistant, Lydia Santiago, worked hard figuring out the right venue, sending out invitations, and attending to the smallest and largest of details. The result was a lovely gathering of almost 60 people in the elegant Pyramid Club, which is fifty-two stories above the city of Philadelphia. I was able to invite a few friends as well.

The evening began with mingling. Then I did a reading and Q&A. A book signing – where Patricia gave everyone books she’d already purchased from Joseph Fox Bookstore – brought the night to a close.

Event Number 2: JEVS’ Talk and Book Signing

The following night I did my first public event. It was hosted by JEVS Human Services, who also hosted my debut public event for Riding The Bus With My Sister many years ago. I returned to them a few months ago, asked if they’d like to host the debut public event for The Story of Beautiful Girl, and was thrilled when they said yes. (So now it’s a tradition!) I worked closely for the last few months with Kristen Rantanen and her colleagues at JEVS, who were just as attentive to detail as Patricia and Lydia had been the night before.

In addition, I worked hard creating a Powerpoint with artwork and photos to illustrate the talk I would be doing. You’ll be able to meet some of the people who helped me when you see the photos for Event Number 4, Sherri’s Garden Party.

JEVS wisely selected the Main Line Arts Center for our venue, which meant that I gave my talk, and did the book signing, in art galleries. This was a perfect choice for a book where one of the main characters communicates through art. The books were also from Joseph Fox Bookstore. The 75-80 attendees included people who work for JEVS, individuals who are supported by JEVS, and friends, private students, and former students who live in the area.

A few hours before the event began, I went to the bookshop at Bryn Mawr College, my alma mater, where I also taught creative writing until 2007. My 30th reunion is in a few weeks, so the bookshop kindly ordered copies of The Story of Beautiful Girl and asked me to come in to sign them in advance. Since Bryn Mawr is only down the road from the Main Line Arts Center, I took the opportunity to go to campus, where I then signed all 48 copies. Just as I set down the pen and was about to run off, a former colleague came up to me, expressing great interest in the book. She was not someone I’d known well while I was teaching there, so I was surprised. And then, when she asked me to sign a copy for her daughter, I was thrilled.

Astute observers of the photos below will notice that I’m wearing the same outfit I wore the evening before, at Patricia’s reception. Yes, you’re right. In fact, it’s also the same outfit I wore to walk the red carpet at the movie screening for Riding The Bus With My Sister. (You can see a photo of that moment by clicking here.) It happens to be a marvelously comfortable outfit that requires no ironing, which got pretty important with so much happening this week (and was why I didn’t wear my new red dress from Nordstrom’s). It’s also an indication of how rarely I go shopping – and how difficult it is for me to find comfortable clothes for my small frame. But I figure that no one expects writers to wear new clothes for every occasion. The way I see it, wearing the same clothes for event after event, year after year, is one of the perks of the profession.

Event Number Three: Nancy’s Lunch Celebration

This one was very easy and quiet.

The morning after my JEVS talk, when I was exhausted to the point of being woozy, I downed multiple cups of green tea to wake up, then drove to Newark, Delaware. There, I met with my friend Nancy Weiss for a celebratory lunch.

Nancy, Director of the National Leadership Consortium at the University, read The Story of Beautiful Girl last summer, and has been so overjoyed about its reception by both the disability community and the world at large that she asked to take me to lunch. I don’t have very expensive tastes, so we met at Panera, she brought plastic champagne glasses, and we toasted the moment over sparkling water.

Event Number Four: Sherri’s Garden Party

This is the first time I’ve published a book without doing any events in bookstores. As many of you know, I used to run events for Barnes & Noble, and I absolutely loved hosting authors. I also loved doing readings myself in bookstores. But when my last book came out two years ago, and I set up readings in several local bookstores, I discovered that turnouts had diminished severely. Indeed, it seemed as if the era of bookstore events had drawn to a close. I hope I’m mistaken about this, but to spare myself the frustration and heartache of setting up bookstore readings for The Story of Beautiful Girl only to find them terribly under-attended, I decided to focus my efforts on special events hosted by people like JEVS or my friend Patricia.

However, this created some disappointment among friends who lived too far from the events I set up. Thus I came up with the idea of doing house parties if people wanted to host them. The first person I discussed this with, Sherri, who lives in central Pennsylvania and who asked me to speak at her book club a few years ago, said she’d love to host a party. She called it a Garden Party, and we set the date for the second weekend after the book was released. I invited many friends in that area – as well as my sister Beth and her boyfriend Jesse. Among the twenty-five or so people who came were the artist John Dusko, who painted the images that opened my talk at JEVS, and the board of the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance, who provided me with information and archival photographs.

Sherri was as careful a planner as JEVS and Patricia had been. How could I be so lucky? And to make matters even luckier, the weather report called for thunderstorms – but what we actually got was a warm and sunny afternoon. I also got a gift that only I saw, right at the end of the day.

Event Number 5: A Conversation At Woodlawn Library

Last fall, Kim Tull, a librarian at Woodlawn, my favorite local library, recognized who I was when I was browsing the stacks in my usual incognito way. She struck up a conversation with me, and as we talked about books and authors and events, I happened to mention that I was putting out a novel in the spring. For the next few months, we chatted whenever I saw her in the library, and then a month or so ago, Kim asked if I’d consider doing an event for The Story of Beautiful Girl. Of course, I wanted to do something in Delaware for my new book (and, having received a 2011 fellowship from the Delaware Division on the Arts, I was also required to). The Woodlawn Library, a small, new, green-oriented library that serves a diverse array of patrons, and that has the friendliest staff I’ve ever seen at any library, seemed like the ideal location. I said yes.

But I didn’t want to do a reading and wasn’t sure the venue would lend itself well to a presentation. “Why not have someone interview you?” Kim asked. “Who?” I asked. We both thought for about two seconds, and then said, “Rita Landgraf.” For those outside Delaware, Rita Landgraf is the Secretary of Health and Social Services. I’d met her a few times before and been as impressed by her warmth as I was by her knowledge. Kim got in touch with Secretrary Landgraf’s assistant, and immediately we were told, “She’d love to do this.”

Again, the preparations for the event went smoothly, thanks to the efforts of Kim Tull, the staff at the Woodlawn Library, the Friends of the Woodlawn Library (who got books from the Ninth Street Bookshop), and Secretary Landgraf and her staff. Eighty-five people attended, and Secretary Landgraf guided our conversation perfectly. It was a joy to work with everyone, and I just loved the entire evening.

The entire event was photographed and videotaped by Mobius New Media, the folks who handle my website. I hope to post their video soon.

But first – I must get the dryer and dishwasher repaired! And get some rest. Now that I’ve hit the Times list, I’m in completely uncharted territory. So I need to shore myself up for whatever Week #3 brings.

And I so hope you’ll go there with me.

So how’s it been going?

How’s it been going in the six days since Grand Central Publishing published The Story of Beautiful Girl?

That’s what people keep asking me – though they phrase the question in one of these three ways:

1. What’s been going on?
2. How are you feeling?
3. How are sales going?

I’ll start by answering #1 and #2 together, and will get to #3 shortly.

To provide a little context, those of you who’ve been following this blog know that The Story of Beautiful Girl generated so much pre-publication interest, Grand Central sent me on a ten-city pre-sale tour across the U.S. and into Canada. Independent booksellers gave the book the #1 spot on the Indie Next List. B.J.’s Wholesale Club selected it for their May Book Club. Literary Guild, Mystery Guild, QPB and Doubleday book clubs made it a selection, too. USA Today named it one of the Ten Books To Watch For this May.

It’s also a book that, as some of you might have already discovered, makes some people cry. This doesn’t seem to be limited to women; several male readers – a scientist, a CEO, and a bus driver – reported that they cried their eyes out. This happened in houses, hotel rooms, and even airports, where concerned strangers asked if the person reading was okay, and all each person could muster was, “Yes. I’m just reading this book!”

So hopes have been high among pretty much everyone I know, from friends to publishing people to fans to my sister Beth – who, as you might also know, brought her copy of The Story of Beautiful Girl onto the bus so she could get the drivers to sign it. Last I knew she had 31 signatures, but that was already a few weeks ago.

So, since publication day last Wednesday, what’s been happening and how am I feeling?

Let’s start with the night before. That evening, I stumbled downstairs to dinner after many bleary-eyed hours of putting together – with the assistance of my friend Marilyn – the mass announcement about the release of the book that I’d be sending out the next day. My husband Hal, who has been indefatigably giving and loving throughout these last weeks, had already set dinner on the table. He’d turned the lights low. He’d put on calming music. I sat down with a thud, and just as I was about to take my first bite of dinner, I happened to notice the latest New Yorker sitting on the edge of the table. I’d been so consumed by my work with Marilyn that I hadn’t even known the mail had arrived. “What’s in this issue?” I asked, and flipped open to the table of contents.

And there it was. My book. Featured in my first-ever advertisement in a national magazine. The May 9th issue of the New Yorker, on page 4, the table of contents page. (And reproduced here at the start of this blog. Just click on the image to enlarge and see all the details.)

A wave of excitement washed away my bleariness, and for the rest of the night, I was invigorated.

I also wasn’t able to sleep. Excitement battled with exhaustion battled with hope battled with worry. Would the next day prove to be a major milestone in my life?

In truth, I doubted it. I’d already lived through five other publication days since my first book came out in 1990, and all had turned out to be days that came and went with no fireworks except the ones I created for myself – by visiting bookstores to snap photos, by going out to dinner with friends, by throwing parties. Every publication day was fun, to be sure, but even my most successful book so far, Riding The Bus With My Sister, had come out to little attention from the outside world. Yes, in the first few weeks there were a few TV and radio interviews and some reviews, but none on publication day itself, and in fact the word of mouth that made Riding The Bus With My Sister a success (years before the extra push from the movie) took a few months to gather momentum.

The build-up to the release of Beautiful Girl had gone far, far beyond anything I’d experienced before, so I certainly had faith that this book would have a very different trajectory than the others. Still, I already knew that publication day itself would not be a day of running from the Today Show to Terry Gross. They’d not called, so I’d still be regular old Rachel, at home with Zeebee the cat (yes, this is a picture of Zeebee), and, once he got home from work, Hal. But what else might actually happen?

I decided that I might as well stay busy.

So on the morning of publication day, I scheduled my mass email to send itself just before lunchtime. Then I helped a few friends in need, took care of some household chores, and went out to visit the Alzheimer’s facility where I do my hospice volunteering.

While several thousand people across the country received my message, I helped the activities coordinators celebrate Cinco De Mayo, shaking maracas and dancing to Latin tunes with the residents. It was a joyous start to the day, and all the more so when I got to spend one-on-one time with a resident who’d just woken up, and to talk with her about spring and gardens and the pleasures of taking naps on rainy days. Then, with a hug for her, I returned, through the spring rain, to my desk.

There, waiting for me, were a hundred fifty online messages from the array of electronic media I now engage in. The day then disappeared into electronic correspondence, phone calls, and wonderful snail mail cards from well-wishers. Some were old friends and long-term fans whose names I was delighted to see. Others were new to my life. Several had already gotten their hands on the book and devoured it in a day or two (or, in a number of cases, a night or two). Some were already posting blog reviews and Facebook items. Others relayed tales of going to the store that day. One even changed her Facebook profile photo to my book cover. Another posted a picture of herself holding my newly-purchased book. The emails, Tweets, and Facebook updates came thick and fast, and I’m pleased to say that every one was congratulatory, friendly, warm, and happy. Heightening the pleasure was my observing that in the online world, a community of supporters had formed; not only were they responding to my posts, but to each others, and some had formed significant friendships.

After responding to as many messages as I could manage, I was exhausted, but I was also deeply touched by everyone’s support.

There were no visits from Oprah or calls from movie stars or NPR producers. No sparkling moment of feeling I’d transitioned from regular Rachel to New York Times Bestselling Rachel. But sometime in the afternoon, I received a profoundly moving gift. The Manda Group, which had interviewed me when I was in Toronto for the pre-sale tour, sent me links to the final video. This was probably the most emotional interview I’ve given so far for The Story of Beautiful Girl, and it was so powerful that I mentioned it it in my blog about that trip. (This photo is of me with the interviewer at the Manda Group, Allen Zuk.)

I set aside everything else and fell into the video, and it brought all the emotions back. This was true for the four-minute excerpt, where I discussed God Knows His Name, by Dave Bakke, the book which helped inspire me to create the character of Number Forty-Two. And it was true for the full twenty-six minute interview, where I covered issues like spirituality and what I’ve learned as a sibling.

I went to bed that first night feeling as worn out as if I’d walked for many miles along gorgeous terrain, enjoying every moment but relieved to be going to sleep.

Or at least trying to. Because again that night, as every night since, my head churned with so many To-Do’s that sleep came only in patches, and always with subtitles and voice-overs and commercial breaks for Next Week and Don’t Forget That Email Tomorrow and What If It’s A Huge Hit and What If It Fizzles After Today and How Could I Have Forgotten To Do That and I Must Thank Her, Too.

The next few days were similar. I was delighted by the correspondence, Facebook posts, and Tweets, that kept arriving, and the reviews and blogs that kept appearing. Like the absolutely wonderful posts by Janice Phelps Williams on her blog Appalachian Morning, Kristin at Dragondreamer’s Lair, and Idgie Atthedew at Dew On the Kudzu Book Reviews. And the fabulous online reviews by January Magazine and Bookreporter.com – which named it one of their Books We’re Betting You’ll Love.

I was also excited, as good news kept arriving. The audiobook side of the Hachette Book Group (of which Grand Central is an imprint) approached my agent about making the long-desired-but-never-made audio version of Riding the Bus With My Sister, possibly with me reading. A Chinese publisher bought the rights to publish Beautiful Girl in Mainland China. More ads appeared, this time in the iPad edition of the New Yorker. (The ad to the left of this paragraph was one of two that ran on the iPad.)

At the same time, I was overwhelmed. In addition to kind comments, the waterfall of online communication – and phone calls – included many people with whom I had to iron out details for my upcoming appearances, many online updates I had to take care of for my own website and places like Goodreads, and many unexpected but necessary tasks for my publisher, both in the U.S. and the UK, where the book comes out in early June. (Among the things we worked on were the Reading Guide, which you can see on their website. I’m posting the UK cover below.)

But what about sales? you’re probably asking. How is the book selling?

Well, I learned something when I put out my first book. Unless the publisher contacts you to give figures, most authors have no idea how many copies their book has sold, and might have only the most general sense of how it’s doing. And most publishers have better things to do than call authors every five minutes after a book launch to deliver this information – if they even know it, which, back before online sales, when books were trucked into stores and word of mouth needed to spread, they might not have known for a while. In fact, I’ve never had a publisher call me ever, at any point in the life of any of my books, to give me sales figures; I’ve found out only by way of the twice-yearly royalty statements.

Once I realized all this, which was instantly upon the publication of my first book (Little Nightmares, Little Dreams), I decided that I wouldn’t call the publisher to ask about sales. Aside from my risking looking impatient, insecure, fixated, or, worst of all, needy, I just concluded that if and when they had something to tell me, they’d let me know, and otherwise I should just go about my business.

I didn’t change this practice when, at the launch of my fourth book (Riding The Bus With My Sister), Amazon became a major bookseller and began posting up their sales ranks. For one thing, I realized those rankings fluctuated by the moment, and reflected competition with books whose audiences would be unlikely to overlap with mine. More importantly, I was told by many authors that they’d gotten so obsessed with checking their ranking throughout the day that they came to feel as if they’d been taken over by a form of madness. Seeing no point in worsening the anxiety of putting out a book, I decided not to check my Amazon rank, nor ask others to do it for me. Instead, I would gauge a book’s success by the quality and quantity of the comments people sent me.

(And, I should add, most other authors I know do the same, so if you’re inclined to ask an author about their book, I hope you’ll skip the “How’s it selling” question and just say, “I’ve heard so many good things about your book! I’m going to buy and read it right now!” And then, please, do.)

So in those first few days, I did not look at my sales ranking on Amazon.com. At one point someone did tweet that my ranking was ridiculously impressive, and later on someone who will go unnamed (but who answers to “Dad”) told me it was even higher. But, as with my other books, I’m waiting until Grand Central decides to tell me whatever it is they want to tell me.

This doesn’t mean I’m not hoping the book does indeed sell fabulously well. It doesn’t mean that I’m not wondering – yes, hoping – that The Story of Beautiful Girl gets to the dream milestone that every writer hopes for: The New York Times Bestseller list. It means that, in the interest of staying as calm as possible in a time when hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people are learning about me and my book, and I’m feeling, as I’ve said, excited and exhausted and hopeful and worried – in short, vulnerable – I’m just going to focus on the readers who reach out to me, and remain patient about everything else.

Throughout Thursday’s crush of emails and calls and Tweets and posts and To Do lists and hellos and Will you do this’s and Hey, look at that’s, Hal kept calling from work and asking how I was holding up. By the end of the day I was so overextended that I said, “I’m almost out of my mind.” The next thing I knew, he was arriving home with Indian take-out and saying, “I think my role right now is to tell you when you’re doing too much, and make sure you stop.”

I almost melted with relief. Trying to live in the moment so I wouldn’t project into the future of this book’s life had made me lose sight of my own well-being. I realized my neck was hurting, my head was throbbing, and my eyes almost felt swollen. “And I’m taking tomorrow off,” he said.

The next day, Friday, the electronic messages kept pouring coming in. And reviews from Entertainment Weekly (“truly stirring”) and the Boston Globe (“Its protagonists’ quest for freedom and dignity will tug at the most stubborn of heartstrings”) appeared as well.

But in the afternoon, Hal, who had decided to rename himself Dr. No, told me it was time to say No to my work.

So we just shut everything down, and Hal took me out into the spring. The Wilmington Flower Market was underway, a three-day festival of plants and amusement park rides and crafts and happy toddlers and live music. It was a cool, sunny day, and we walked around, hand in hand, forgetting the future just as much as I’d been doing, but this time without the busyness of the endless To Do list. We bought flowers and vegetables that he later planted. We went for a walk in a nearby neighborhood. When I grew distracted by thoughts of this or that person reading certain scenes in the book, Hal reeled me back with his silly skits and facility for puns.

Saturday I left the desk entirely, and drove up to the Main Line in Pennsylvania. There I met with the warm and thorough folks at JEVS Human Services, a fine organization that provides services for people with disabilities (among others). They’ll be be hosting my first public event for the book, held at the Main Line Arts Center this Thursday, 5/12. We met at the Main Line Arts Center and walked through all the details for the event, and I realized that the venue couldn’t be more appropriate, given that the character of Beautiful Girl communicates through her artwork. What could be better than an event in the middle of an art gallery?

Then I had a hurried and late lunch with a bookseller friend, and after that I taught a class to one of my private students. It was a day of 100% regular old Rachel.

Still, all the while I was concerned about the work I wasn’t keeping up with. To my relief, I saw, when I got home, that the “work” consisted mostly of people who’d read the book, and were writing me about how deeply it had affected them.

After all this, you’d think I could sleep Saturday night. But no. I knew that the next morning, the New York Times would be running an ad (yes, yet another one) in their Book Review. This is the kind of attention writers dream about and I’ve never had, so I burst out of bed early and ran to the front door.

It didn’t matter that the ad was similar to the others. It was still there, big and eye-catching, taking up almost a third of page 5. (On this blog, it’s to the left of this paragraph; again, you can enlarge it by clicking on the image). And I did a little dance around the kitchen.

Then Dr. No said, Now, let’s turn everything off again, and take some time to enjoy the day. So that morning, we went out into the sunshine, ventured into the park near our house, and walked slowly and happily, pausing for pictures, listening to the birds, saying hi to neighbors, making jokes.

I am writing this blog Monday evening. Monday was much like the days that preceded it, though I was told at the end of the day that The Story of Beautiful Girl was already one of the top 100 books on bn.com (Barnes & Noble). (And yes, I did learn the sale ranking, which was, as of Monday afternoon, #90.) I was also told, soon after dusk fell, that Amazon was down to its final two copies.

And I will not lie. That is truly thrilling news.

But so was this: that the number of friends and strangers sending me messages – friends and strangers who had already read and fallen in love with my book, and wanted me to know they were telling everyone they knew about it – was increasing by the day.

I don’t know what the next several days might bring. I do know that I will embrace whatever it is, and whoever is a part of it. And I’m thankful that, whether or not the book gets within landing distance of the New York Times Bestseller List, I will still have a loving husband who will remind me of joys of Indian take-out. I will still have wonderful friends and supporters who will cry over my book in airports. And I will still, if I stay conscious about it, have my perspective: when you want to forget the future, just pick up some maracas, give a ninety-five-year-old a hug, and walk in the sun or dance around the kitchen or take a long nap in the rain.

Suddenly, a mere seventy-five minutes after take-off from Philadelphia, I step into an airport where the sign saying “Exit” is coupled with a sign saying “Sortie,” wall-sized advertisements are for companies I’ve never heard of, and my most valuable possession is my passport.

I make my way through Customs, trying to adjust my vocabulary. On my last trip to Canada, in 2004, I blundered into a faux pas almost immediately: on my cab ride from the airport, I used the word “provincial” to mean people of limited outlook – only to have my driver casually remind me that “province” refers to Canadian jurisdictions, like American states. So now, as I leave baggage claim and begin my search for someone holding a sign with my name, I tell myself: Remember, it’s not restroom; it’s washroom. Dollar bills are dollars; dollar coins, loonies. My greeter, a young woman, waves to me, then leads me outside to wait for the car that will be conveying me to my hotel. As we’re waiting for the car to pull up, I ask what the temperature is, adding that it’s a summery 80 degrees at home. “Oh,” I catch myself, “that’s right. You don’t use Fahrenheit. You use Centigrade.” She gives me a blank look. “You mean Celsius?” The blush bursts across my face, and doesn’t recede until my car is miles – uh, kilometers – away.

I am here in Canada for yet one more leg of the pre-sale tour for my upcoming novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl, which will be published in both the States and Canada on May 4. Faithful followers of this blog know that a few months ago, in January and February, my publisher, Grand Central (an imprint of the Hachette Book Group), sent me around the United States on a nine-city pre-sale tour. During those thrilling two-and-a-half weeks, I attended a series of fancy dinners hosted by Grand Central for the purpose of introducing influential booksellers to my book. Over sumptuous meals, in elegant private rooms, I talked about the writing of the book and got to know the booksellers, as well as the sales reps and publishing executives who were running the show. I’d loved every minute of the pre-sale tour, which I blogged about here, city by city, and which I’d said good-bye to only reluctantly.

Then, after I got back from Denver – which I thought was the final stop of my pre-sale tour – my publicist sent me an email. Would I be willing to do another pre-sale tour – in Canada?

Canada! The last time I’d been to Canada, in 2004, was to visit the set of the movie made from my memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister. I’d flown into Toronto, the largest city in the country, though had stayed there only long enough for a meal and a quick drive around to see the sites. The movie, which was originally scheduled to be shot in Toronto, had been relocated to nearby Hamilton, after the specially-outfitted bus on which many scenes would be shot – which had a huge scaffolding on which lights were hung, and was operated by a driver sitting on the roof – didn’t fit on the streets of Toronto.

I have many fond memories of those days on the set, where I didn’t only hang out with the stars, Rosie O’Donnell and Andie MacDowell, the director, Anjelica Huston, and the producer, Larry Sanitsky, but with the crew members who handled hair, make-up, clothing, sound, and transportation – all of whom were Canadian. I’d had a lively time talking with each, and learned as much about their specialty as I did about ways Canada resembles, and differs from, America. When fans of the movie talk with me about visiting the set, they usually focus on the celebrity angle, neglecting to ask about what it was like to be in the land of the Maple Leaf Flag.

So would I do another pre-sale tour in Canada?

Yes! Though this time, I’d try to be a little less clumsy about it.

The wheels started turning. Between February and this past Monday, April 11, Melanie, the Publicity Manager with Hachette Book Group Canada, worked hard to pull together a set of meetings with key people in the bookselling world. I later learned that the book industry in Canada is heavily centered in Toronto and the surrounding region, so she focused on that city only. I also learned that, as in America, there are both independent bookstores, like Ben McNally Books, and big retailers, the largest of which is Indigo Books and Music. Melanie arranged meetings with both, as well as with Canadian Manda Group, a rep group which handles sales to independent bookstores and libraries. I also later learned that my pre-sale tour in Canada was the first to be undertaken by Hachette Book Group Canada. So Melanie, along with Jean (who works in the New York office), decided to do something a bit different from the one-fancy-dinner-per-city approach that I experienced in America. They would pack all my meetings into a single day – and all would happen before dinner.

Still smarting from my verbal goof, staring out the window at huge numbers of high-rise condos and a scattering of low brick buildings, I listen to my driver as he drives me into the city from the airport. He’s from Sudan, he says. Toronto is very immigrant friendly, and as a result is one of the most international cities in the world, with a wider range of restaurants than you can find anywhere. He says unemployment is low – “Only about eight percent,” he adds, which is of course considered high in America. He says there is a major election going on now, which I was vaguely aware of. It turns out that he’s only vaguely aware of the fact that a few days earlier, the federal government in the States almost shut down. This will not be the only time I wonder if the average Canadian pays as little attention to the U.S. as the average American does to Canada.

It’s sunny, windy, and a balmy twenty-one degrees Celsius when I get out in front of the Hotel Le Germain. Like many of the places where I stayed during the pre-sale tour, it’s referred to as a boutique hotel: small, artsy, intimate, atmospheric, and elegant.

This hotel has a chic and modern ambiance. The women at the check-in desk are lean and stylish, and speak with gorgeous French accents. The front desk and corridors are decorated with green apples. And in my room, two sides of the shower are glass, with one side facing into the washroom, the other overlooking the rest of the room. A modest bather who steps under the rainfall showerhead could draw wooden blinds shut to shield herself from the eyes of her roommate, but otherwise she will be fully on display to anyone present.

In the midst of all this exotic ambiance, I know that I am really back on the tour. And that knowledge makes me realize something. Since the American pre-sale tour ended, I’ve been so caught up in the outreach I’ve been doing to set up events, create videos, contact people in the disability community to talk about the book, etc., that I’ve forgotten how it feels to be so well-treated by a publisher. In fact, for the last few weeks, things have been so quiet, I’ve started to think that maybe I hadn’t written a book at all, or if I had it wasn’t about to come out, or if were did no one would be paying attention. After all, most books come out to no attention, as I’ve learned firsthand over the course of my twenty-three years as an author. But here in the Hotel Le Germain, I’m reminded about the huge effort that Grand Central is putting into my book, and that they are doing everything humanly possible to get it attention. I spin away from the see-through shower and gaze out the window to the great city of Toronto, feeling a rush of gratitude and excitement.

Then I fly downstairs.

As on the American pre-sale tour, I’ve taken the opportunity to set up visits with friends who I’d otherwise never see. In this case, the friend is Donna, who I haven’t seen since we were both sixteen and living in New Jersey. At that time, my siblings and I were living with our mother, who was in a state of complete meltdown. I’ve written about this period in Riding The Bus With My Sister and The House On Teacher’s Lane, so I’ll just summarize here. My mother, hoping to find some salvation from a life of single-parenthood, loneliness, and depression, had spent the last several years dating what I can kindly call ill-advised romantic choices. My friend Donna saw all of this.

She also saw my sister Beth. She saw my brother Max and my sister Laura. And she saw me: in my room, where we played Monty Python records and drew pictures on scratchboards (Donna was a real artist; I an amateur); in school, where we suffered through the most inane chemistry class in human history; and on the road between her house and mine, where we walked and talked at all hours of the day.

Then my mother made a very ill-advised decision, and impulsively married an ex-con she’d just met in a bar. He didn’t want us around, so, on a single day in 1976, my father took custody of Max, Laura, and me. Beth stayed with my mother, and a terrible story ensued that I won’t go into here. But on that one day, just before I drove off with my father, I called Donna and told her what was happening. I don’t remember this, but Donna does. “I might never see you again,” I apparently told her.

And I didn’t for thirty-five years, until we found each other on Facebook last summer.

Now, here she is, standing in the lobby of the Hotel Le Germain with her husband, Gregg. After several years doing missionary work in Spain, they recently moved to Toronto to do missionary work for the Liebenzell Mission. They have devoted their lives to serving others.

We take each other in our arms and hold each other.

For the next many hours we talk about their lives, my life, and the time we spent together, so long ago. I realize that Donna was more inside my life than anyone at that time, and as a result she remembers so many of the sad details that I’ve written about. It is strange and hard to be transported back to such an unhappy period in my life, but it is beautiful to share it with the main person who understands. We go to the famous Tim Horton’s, a coffee-and-donut chain much beloved by Canadians. We go to an Indian restaurant. We sit again well into the night in my lobby.

I do not think this until the next day, when I tell some booksellers about seeing Donna, and it hits me: the story of my own life – of losing people you love and missing them terribly and wanting to be back hugging them once again – resonates completely with The Story of Beautiful Girl. It’s funny how you can spend years writing a book and months talking about a book, yet miss one of the most crucial antecedents for how the book came to be.

I go to sleep with a feeling of release. For so long I’d carried a sorrow about being forced to part from Donna. Now we’ve found each other.

The next day is my big day. So of course I wake up as early as I can so I can begin it with some exercise.

I skip the hotel gym. Lake Ontario, I’m told, is relatively nearby, if I walk briskly. So I head out into the streets of Toronto, camera in hand. It’s the morning rush hour, and the sidewalks are full of pedestrians. I don’t know how characteristic my observations are, but it seems as if just about everyone is wearing black and just about no one is overweight. Despite the throngs, the streets are almost silent, with no cell phone conversations underway. I pass old buildings and new, streets packed with cars and streets without a soul in sight. I pass through a tunnel that runs alongside a train station, taking note of the Bicycle Station where, it seems, commuters can pick up a bike after arriving in the city. I pass the CN Tower – the most recognizable landmark in Toronto, though one that’s probably visited as rarely by the locals as the Liberty Bell is in Philadelphia. I cross underneath a raised road, which is, I guess, the famed Gardiner Expressway.

Then I get to the lake. The walkway that runs along its side is full of boats, but, to my surprise, no people, aside from one dog walker and one jogger. I would imagine that this area is crowded later in the day, but at eight in the morning, it’s a solitary delight.

I let myself slow my pace for one precious minute. And I look out onto the glittering water and up into the wide, blue sky. Life might be full of loss, I think, still feeling the final hug from Donna. But it can also be full of found.

Then I hurry back to my hotel. Where – yes, I get daring – I shower with the blinds wide open.

Down in the lobby at nine forty-five, I wait for one more friend. This time it’s a relatively new friend, Richard, a bus driver from Oshawa who works for the Durham Region Transit system. Richard learned about Riding The Bus With My Sister from a fellow lover of all things related to buses. He read the book and found me online, and for the last several years we’ve corresponded. When I told him I was going to be in Toronto, I also told him I didn’t think I’d have any time for a visit. But Richard, who spends his holidays riding bicycles with his wife on long trips to places like Mexico, Australia, and England, is not one to be daunted. He also feels it’s important to meet distant friends, having grown close to other correspondents who he never had the chance to meet. And, as luck would have it, he attends a bus trade show in Toronto once a year – and that one day coincided with today! So even though we’d have only about half an hour to visit, we said, We must do this.

And there he is! Wearing his bus driver uniform, because he already drove a shift earlier in the morning. And wearing the biggest smile at finally meeting the person he’d been sending stories and pictures to for several years. We hug, too, and then walk around outside, looking for a Tim Horton’s to sit in. But neither of us knows the city well enough and time is tight, so we return to the hotel, where he gives me transit maps and souvenirs like a squishy bus – and a newsletter from the Hamilton bus system about how much help they gave the filmmakers when my movie was filmed in their city.

Before we have a chance to settle into anything resembling a conversation, Melanie is walking up to us. It’s thrilling to meet her – and all the more so because she has, in her hand, the first finished copy of my book that I’ve seen. Yet my delight at taking the copy into my hand is complicated by my disappointment in having to say goodbye to Richard so soon after we said hello. But, great bus driver that he is, he knows that life is a long chain of entrances and sorties, greetings and farewells, losses and founds. He asks if he can snap a picture of Melanie, me, and this first copy of the book. Of all the souvenirs he gives me, this might be the most valuable – other than the photo that Melanie then took of him and me.

Richard and I say good-bye.

I turn back to Melanie, and there, standing beside her, is her colleague Jean, who’d arrived from New York the day before. We shake hands. We gaze with amazement at the book – which, I now see, has a pearly sheen to the white background, thus removing all sense of starkness from the black-and-white color scheme, and giving the book a gentle sparkle. We talk quickly about the day ahead. Then Melanie, Jean, and I jump into a cab.

Our first appointment is at Canadian Manda Group. We’re greeted by Allen, who’ll be conducting an interview with me in their office. We go to a conference room where the walls are lined with books. I sit on one side of a long table, he sits across from me. Turning on a Flip camera, he tells me that he’d like to ask me questions that other interviewers haven’t asked me yet, and elaborates just enough for me to understand that Allen has put major time into preparing for this interview. Then he starts asking his questions, and as we do indeed cover topics that few others have asked me, and he responds to my answers in a way that manages to be literary, compassionate, and insightful all at once, the interview starts to transform into something deeply moving. Halfway through, I understand why. He has just asked a question about my sister Beth, and when I ask him to try to narrow it down so I can give a more specific response, he reveals that he too is the sibling of someone with an intellectual disability. Suddenly our professional rapport, which was already so strong, becomes personal. A sense of empathy overtakes both of us, I can’t keep myself from tearing up, and the remainder of our conversation – because that’s what it turns into – feels almost transcendent. It is as if the pearly light that illuminates the cover of the book were shining down upon Allen and me.

I am in a daze after we finish the interview. I have no idea if the camera captured the experience as I – and, I think, he – felt it. I’ll find out when I see the final edited version, which will go out to independent bookstores and libraries across Canada. But for the moment, I can’t think about that. I am shaking with the sense of having been enveloped by something far more powerful than I expected when I walked in here, and that I know will stay with me throughout the rest of the day.

Then Melanie, Jean and I zoom off in a cab.

Our next appointment is lunch with key staff from Indigo Books and Music. This takes place at Brassaii, an upscale restaurant located in an older building off a cobblestone courtyard.

The booksellers as already at our table when we arrive. Also at the table are Terri and Martha, who are Melanie and Jean’s colleagues from Hachette Book Group Canada. Unlike the dinners at my American pre-sale tour, which sometimes ran as long as four hours, we have only about an hour and a half for this meal. So after the booksellers introduce themselves, and explain some details about Indigo (their 250 stores include the chains Chapters and Coles, with some stores combining books with tie-in merchandising), we move right into my talking about The Story of Beautiful Girl.

Because my interview at Manda was so emotional and I don’t want to start crying so soon after stopping, I try to maintain a professional demeanor. But within minutes, Terri is wiping tears from her eyes, and soon Martha is, too, and then I start losing it myself. I don’t know if the booksellers are weeping along with us, because all I can see is Martha digging into her pocket for a pack of tissues and passing them around. I also get so caught up in the feelings that I’m not able to eat my meal. And after I finish, as I’m encouraging others to talk, Martha mentions that, one day when she was describing my book to a client, the woman was so overtaken by her feelings that she ran sobbing from the room. And that was before she’d ever read a word – or, certainly, seen the book cover, whose sparkle conveys, I hope, that the story resolves in something, well, beautiful.

All too soon, we have to wrap up. I sign everyone’s book and thank them for coming. Then, as they leave, we hug each other goodbye.

Still savoring the pleasure of speaking with these booksellers, we jump into another cab. Melanie and Jean are eager to show me the flagship Indigo store, and I’m eager to see. Not only have I just met some of the main people who work for the company, but I once worked for Barnes & Noble, one of the major chains in the States. So we pick up our suitcases back at the hotel and taxi across town, passing sites like the University that Melanie and Jean point to but that the cab turns too quickly for me to see.

We get to Indigo. Melanie hands me a copy of the book. I stand in front of the store, and she snaps this picture.

We walk inside. At first it look like a variation on American chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, with front displays, multiple levels, and a cafe. But there are many more display tables in the front than I see in American stores, and among those tables is a special display called “Heather’s Picks.” Heather Reisman, the CEO, personally selects books she loves, and then highlights them on this table. I’m told that Heather lives nearby, and sometimes just drops in. I know the thought of a chance meeting isn’t why we came to the store, but I can’t help but wonder if it might happen.

We wander up the steps to the fiction section. I learn some authors have different publishers in America and Canada, others don’t. (One reason for this is that Canadian authors who want to be eligible for Canadian literary awards might need to be published by Canadian publishers.) I learn why, even with the same publisher, the American edition will be priced differently than the Canadian. (The price is set many months in advance, so the publisher must estimate the exchange rate. Also, shipping costs need to be factored in.) I see the tie-in merchandising area, which is extensive indeed.

As I snap this photo of Jean, I wonder whether Indigo might prohibit the use of photography in their stores. I know when I worked for Barnes & Noble, part of my job was to prevent people from taking pictures. The concern involved security; we needed to make sure there could be no visual record of anything that might provide information useful to a thief. Might Indigo have the same policy?

Moments later, a staff person comes up to me with a slightly suspicious look.

I immediately ask if it’s all right for me to take pictures of the store. “Will you be using a flash?” she asks.

It seems an odd question, but one I can easily answer. “No.”

“You can’t take any shots of fixtures.”

“I won’t.”

Then she notices the book in Jean’s hand. “What’s that?” the staff person – Lorna, I see on her name tag – asks.

“That’s her new book!” Jean says enthusiastically. “It’s not out until May 4.”

Jean takes it from Jean, holds it up, and says, “What a stand-out cover! And it’s so beautiful!”

And Jean, thinking far more quickly than I, says, “It’s a copy for you! Rachel will be happy to sign it.”

Jean is startled and thrilled and amazed. While Jean digs a pen out of her bag, Lorna asks me what the book is about. “That sounds wonderful!” she says. Then, as I sign, she explains why she was concerned about the flash on the camera. “We have two customers on the floor right now who have epilepsy,” she says. “They have problems when they see a flash.”

I look up at her, and say, “So you’re sensitive to the needs of people with disabilities.”

She nods at me with a smile. “Yes,” she says. “I am.”

We pose for another photo – without a flash, of course. And I remember that, on my American pre-sale tour, I kept having serendipitous encounters with people who turned out to be writers, family members of someone with a disability, and travelers at turning points in their own lives; and our exchanges, brief though they were, left us both newly revived. I might not have met Heather, but serendipity has clearly accompanied me to Canada, too.

Jean, Melanie, and I hastily walk for a few blocks – which look strikingly like 57th Street in Manhattan – to Annona Restaurant, where we’re to have High Tea with other book-related people.

(Actually, Melanie explains, if it’s before dinner, it’s considered Low Tea. But Low Tea doesn’t sound very appealing. So she calls it High Tea.)

Again, our guests have already arrived. They are a bookseller from Ben McNally, a sales manager from Canadian Manda Group, and an associate in the Literary Arts Department of Harbourfront Centre, a cultural events organization that, among other things, hosts a prestigious festival of authors every fall. Terri and Martha have joined us, too.

Since I wasn’t able to eat lunch, I’m very hungry by now. Fortunately, High Tea includes not only tea poured into elegant china with floral designs, but little sandwiches. I order the vegetarian option, and get a small plate with five different delicious treats.

But once again I don’t get to eat, at least for awhile. Instead, I share my story about the writing of the book. This time I manage to do so with minimal tears. However, when the questions then come, my answers lead me to talk about what happened with my mother years ago, and therefore with yesterday’s reunion with Donna. Again, I can’t stop myself from welling up. Neither can some of the others. Martha’s pack of tissues gets used up.

But it’s time to go – now to the airport with Jean for our flights home. I sign books, I hug everyone, I grab some extra sandwiches. At the car, Melanie and I have one more moment together. I want to tell her how incredibly grateful I am for everything she’s done. But in the flurry of the goodbye, I don’t say just what I want, the way I want it. This is the problem with so many goodbyes. You don’t have the presence of mind to express yourself adequately. You forget to say the most important thing. You blurt out something you later can’t believe you said.

You’re so sad about the loss to come that you get clumsy.

So with only half of what I want to say having been said, Jean and I make our sortie. And half an hour later, at the airport, Jean and I part company, too. I am on a different flight, to a different city, and we wave as I run off to get my ticket.

Only when I reach the ticket agent do I learn that my flight has been delayed, and it will miss my connection, and so I will have to spend the night in a hotel near the airport, waiting. The ticket agent kindly makes the arrangements (all paid for by the airline), and sends me on my way.

And so I check into the Sheraton, and settle in. This hotel has no nifty see-through shower. It has no view except a rooftop parking lot. It has no delicious treats, no Lornas, no crying booksellers, no interviewer who turns out to be a sibling, no bus drivers, no missionaries, no serendipitous encounters.

But it has something else: time with absolutely nothing scheduled.

Life is, as any bus driver can tell you, a long chain of entrances and sorties, greetings and farewells, losses and founds. They can happen so fast, and we can get so easily caught up in the next cab ride, appointment, friendship, chapter in our lives, that we don’t take the time to let the goodbyes linger.

So I decide to take this unscheduled, unexpected gift of time to just sit at the desk in my hotel room, look at these photos, and remember the pleasures of this trip. Tomorrow I’ll go home. Later this week I’ll fly again, this time to Kentucky, where I’ll be giving a talk. And soon May 4th will be here, and with it many new hellos. Right now, though, I just stay a little longer with these people, letting myself feel the hugs of the last two days, enjoying the gentle sparkle of each person.

Yesterday I received wonderful news from IndieBound, a community-oriented movement begun by the independent bookseller members of the American Booksellers Association.

Every month, IndieBound releases a list of recommended books called the Indie Next List. These are all new novels and memoirs that independent booksellers have fallen in love with and decided to promote, both within their individual stores and collectively as an organization. I know from many years buying and reading books that the booksellers in independent bookstores are serious readers who champion great stories that are well told. They also love to discover the next literary gem and hand-sell it to avid readers.

I’ve known about IndieBound, and the importance of personal recommendations by booksellers, for a long time. But until the pre-publication journey I found myself on after selling my next book, The Story of Beautiful Girl, to Grand Central Publishing, I thought that booksellers fell in love with new books because they, like me, read reviews, heard interviews, and happened to open up an eye-catching hardback in their bookstore. Certainly when I worked for Barnes & Noble in the late 1990s, running events at the stores in Princeton, NJ and Willow Grove, PA, that was how I found books. Only when Grand Central, while preparing for the May 4, 2011 release of my book, sent me on a pre-sale tour for The Story of Beautiful Girl (click here for the first post of that tour), did I begin to understand that booksellers can be introduced to upcoming titles in a more deliberate way.

Indeed, one of the goals of the pre-sale tour, I began to see, was that booksellers not just receive an advanced reading copy of my book, but, by having the deadline of a sumptuous dinner in a fine restaurant with book-loving friends, a trustworthy sales rep, and an author who’s passionate about her novel, be prompted to crack the spine and start the first chapter. And then, the theory went, they would get so engrossed by the book that they would zip right through, finish in a state of rapture, become huge supporters well before publication, talk it up among staff and customers – and spread the word to their colleagues in IndieBound.

And voila! It seems that has all happened! Though the pre-sale tour wrapped up a month ago (well, with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment), it has begun to bear fruit! I know this because the May 2011 Indie Next List has just been announced, and The Story of Beautiful Girl is not only on the list, but it’s Number One on the list. This means it’s been given the independent booksellers’ seal of approval. I’m told it also means that many others in the book industry and media might take closer note of the book – again, even before publication.

Time will tell if this amazing development plays out in that way. In the meantime, I’m savoring the many glowing testimonials from booksellers that accompanied the announcement of this news, and which I’ve included at the end of this blog. (Please note that a few include spoilers, though none that will intrude on your enjoyment of the book.)

And I’m packing my bags, getting ready for one more leg of the pre-sale tour – this time in Toronto! I won’t be leaving for a few weeks, and it will be a very quick trip. But I’ll write about it here when I return, after meeting and dining with more booksellers. And thrilling in the opportunity to talk about books with people who still fall in love with books, and who’ll do all they can to keep the world reading.

Fantastic Praise for

THE STORY OF BEAUTIFUL GIRL

“Wow! The Story of Beautiful Girl is a story starting in 1968 and a couple that have escaped from a state hospital long enough for her to have her child in freedom and put her in the arms of a widowed school teacher, the one person that willing to sacrifice everything to give the child a life and a chance. The Story of Beautiful Girl is a story told with understanding, insight, compassion and filled with the grace of human kindness. This novel will get into the deep recesses of your mind and linger in your heart long after the last page is turned. I loved this book―thank you!”
Books Inc. (San Francisco, CA)

“The beauty of a great novel is a wonderful story well told, populated by interesting, richly imagined characters that leave the reader entertained, deeply moved, understanding more about the world, and maybe a little bit changed. The Story of Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon delivers on all levels. Seeing the world through the eyes of Homan and Lynnie was a profound experience. Seeing how we treated people with differences in the not too distant past was a horrifying reminder of how far we’ve come, yet it was also an education in how far we still have to go in respecting and embracing differences.”
Tattered Cover (Denver, CO)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is gorgeous. Rachel Simon did a fabulous job developing each of the characters. I feel that I know them all personally. I am haunted and yet fascinated by the scenes at the institution and of course I fell in love with Lynnie, the beautiful child whose sister never forgot her―even when their parents turned away. Martha, who gave up everything to protect and raise Lynnie’s baby is a true hero. Homan, the deaf and very bright man who never gave up on finding Lynnie, moved right into my heart. This is a book that will be a pleasure to sell. I think book clubs will adopt it. There’s so much to talk about here. Through fiction, Rachel Simon has shown us the truth about what was done to too many people for far too long. Thank you for sending me this treasure.”
Book Passage (Corte Madera, CA)

“Simon perfectly captures the tapestry of life through her well-crafted story and characters—the loved and the despised. It leaves you thinking about the course of your own actions and the impact they may have on others.”
University of Minnesota Bookstores (Minneapolis, MN)

“Rachel Simon has created a handful of amazing characters and has brought them to life in what should be THE praised novel of Spring 2011.The style she chose to write The Story of Beautiful Girl flows smoothly from chapter to chapter. Each of the main characters develops before your eyes and become part of you. You experience the gamut of emotions as the lives of Lynnie, Homan, Martha and Julia are shared. You do feel special, as if this wonderful tale of amazing people is being shared with you by a close friend. Simon’s is that friend and she tells her story in glorious words. What Simon has created is a beautiful story of a group of truly beautiful people.”
Barnes & Noble (Vernon Hills, IL)

“I’m loving Rachel Simon’s book―all I want to do is read about Buddy, Lynnie and Martha. I haven’t loved a story with multiple perspectives this much since The Girls.”
Anderson’s Bookshops (Naperville, IL)

“I thought the characters’ ‘voices’ were wonderful. I was captivated and read it through in one sitting!”
Partner’s Books (Holt, MI)

“Let me tell you about this book. I ran home from the bookstore every night Christmas week to get back into the world Rachel Simon created in The Story of Beautiful Girl. Lynnie and Homan escaping from the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded with Lynnie’s infant seeking shelter from the storm is a powerful beginning. From the first page the reader is wrapped up on the lives of Lynnie, who has difficulty speaking, Homan, who is deaf, Martha, the widow who takes them in and the infant Julia. It is a story of beautiful love across decades and along the way we come to face the inhumane way we have treated people who are different. Loved this novel.”
That Bookstore in Blytheville (Blytheville, AR)

“I loved the book. The contrast between the brutality with which the disabled characters were treated and the tenderness they displayed toward each other made this one of the most memorable novels I’ve ever read. And what a wonderful character Martha is; a tribute to all teachers who invest in their students and can reap the rewards.”
Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)

“Rachel Simon reveals the terrible history of institutionalizing the disabled by telling a story so compelling and beautiful, so heart-breaking yet also heartening, you will not be able to turn the pages fast enough to find out what happens next.”
Gibson’s Bookstore (Concord, NH)

“Rachel Simon’s The Story of Beautiful Girl is an intricate and expansive novel that explores what it is that truly makes us human. Overflowing with compassion and populated by one unforgettable character after another, Beautiful Girl should be a huge hit with reading groups everywhere.”
Next Chapter Bookshop (Mequon, WI)

“I enjoyed the book…having worked as an aide in an Easter Seals classroom many years ago, I had somewhat of an idea about how hard it is to diagnose some things, and how easy it is for people to miss signs of hidden abilities. Maybe there will be another time. Thanks for the book, I appreciated the good read.”
Boswell Books (Milwaukee, WI)

“I read the book, and have to tell you I was really impressed. I think that this is really going to do well, especially with book clubs.”
Newberry Library Bookstore (Chicago, IL)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is written with heart and knowledge of people with disabilities. The character development and description was exceptional. Also, I appreciated the research on institutions.”
Barnes & Noble (Easton, PA)

“Her easy writing style and her sympathetic characters sucked me into their world and I cannot put it down. I am convinced that this book will be her first major bestseller. Mark my words.”
Partners (Holt, MI)

“Loved the book and am looking forward to selling it to my customers!”
Watermark Books & Café (Wichita, KS)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl was absolutely fabulous. Not very often do I go to bed late reading a book, then can’t wait until the early morning to pick it up again, and then make my way through the day until I can come home to finish it. Rachel Simon has woven her five characters, Lynnie, Homan, Martha, Kate, and Julia, together into an astonishing story that starts in darkness and evolves into the light, with a high sense of dread, of shock, and a sense of the unknown. She writes it in high tension, from 1968 to the present and one really cares about the outcome of each one of the five involved. I loved her sense of compassion and understanding for each one. And the happy ending makes one believe in humanity once again! Thank you for sharing such a jewel with me―and I can’t wait to share it with my customers in early May.”
The Book Stall at Chestnut Court, (Winnetka, IL)

“I loved this, found it very hard to put down. It is such a lovely story with great characters and also touches on an area that people often avoid, the disabled and their struggles. I think you have a bestseller on your plate here―this seems to me that it will have legs to hang on for a long time.”
Follett Higher Education (Oak Brook, IL)

“A touching story of goodness triumphing over evil, of wrongs made right, of characters with character. I remember the existence of ‘the’ institutions. Well portrayed.”
Barnes & Noble (Annapolis, MD)

“In an era of acceptance, The Story of Beautiful Girl gives us a window onto a scene not too far in our past. Three characters never share a complete sentence, but their lives are tangled together for four decades. Written so solidly, any reader will want a highlighter on hand for those perfect sentences.”
Tattered Cover (Denver, CO)

“I think you will see tons of bookclubs picking The Story of the Beautiful Girl for the wealth of discussion it will spur. It is not often we get the chance to truly explore the lives of people who are developmentally disabled and Rachel allows us that opportunity to step into the shoes of another human being, to see things from their perspective.”
Bookworm of Edwards (Edwards, CO)

“Rachel Simon has written a lovely novel.” Book Passage (Corte Madera, CA)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl paints a landscape on which the journey of three adults and a baby girl unfolds and expands over a 40 year period. Lynnie is the true hero of this novel. With her feeble mind as her guide, she finds her way through the many atrocities that befalls her and does so with grace and honor. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.”
The Reader’s Loft (Green Bay, WI)

“I was quite impressed with The Story of Beautiful Girl, both as a novel and as a document of casual brutality of the not too distant past. Honestly, it is not the kind of book I normally read, but I couldn’t put it down. Very compelling.”
Books Inc. (San Francisco, CA)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is a lovely, quiet novel in which a whole world changes. There are no terrorist attacks, deadly plagues, or earthquakes. Just constancy, integrity, helping hands and yes a whole lotta love-but not the sappy kind. Perfect for anyone who likes redemption.”
University Book Store, Inc. (Seattle, WA)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl…is so much more than that. It has all the elements of any well crafted novel, but also opens a porthole into the minds and hearts of people with varying intellectual disabilities and the institutions in this country that held them hostage. Still, a sweet and hopeful work.”
Baker Books (N. Dartmouth, MA)

“Rachel Simon has a unique talent for giving voices to the voiceless and the ignored. In her nonfiction book club favorite, Riding the Bus With My Sister, she gave eye-opening insights into the world of the developmentally disabled. Now in her gorgeous new novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl, she tells the story of Homan, a deaf African-American who is institutionalized because of his inability to communicate. In the brutal setting of the institution, he meets and falls in love with Beautiful Girl, the only one who makes the effort to understand him. You’ll cry, you’ll cheer, you’ll want to tell everyone you know to read this book!”
Schuler Books and Music (Okemos, MI)

“I was swept away by the The Story of Beautiful Girl — the story of three lives that intersect only briefly, but are connected in an unbelievable way through the long years of each life. These lives are all tragic, yet triumphant, and vividly described against the backdrop of a changing, awakening society. And if a time when few books seem to end well, the last chapter of this book made me smile.”
Tattered Cover (Denver, CO)

“Occasionally you open a book and continue to read because you just cannot put it down! That was my experience with The Story of Beautiful Girl. If you recall the state institutions you’ll find this book fascinating.”
Emery Pratt (Owosso, MI)

“The story of Lynnie and Homan extends over four decades and Rachel Simon touches the heart of the reader through the entire period. The mentally disabled girl and deaf man struggle against a society that brutally institutionalizes them but through their own perseverance and the help of a courageous retired teacher manage to triumph in the end. This is a stirring account of what is good and possible in the human spirit.”
Nicola’s Books (Ann Arbor, MI)

“Rachel Simon’s intelligent and insightful glimpse into the world of the differently-abled and the gifts that can be found in their worlds is deftly brought to life in her novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl.”
Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is an elegantly written and beautifully descriptive novel. It opened my eyes to the world of institutions. Simon has captured a bygone time and subculture of our society in a way that will stay with you for a long time. Both heartwarming and heartbreaking, this is a novel that I will share with friends and family for years to come.”
Boulder Bookstore (Boulder, CO)

“I truly enjoyed this book and had to keep getting back to it to find out what happened to Lynnie. As a retired teacher of the hearing impaired, I found Homan’s story realistic. Rachel Simon explained the different language systems Homan employed before learning a sign language which made communication possible. The Story of Beautiful Girl makes you cheer for the “underdogs” and does not disappoint.”
Little Read Book (Wauwatosa, WI)

“In The Story of Beautiful, Rachel Simon gives voice to two unforgettable characters who, due to their disabilities, have no actual voice of their own but who remain in the reader’s imagination long after the book has been put down. A generous compelling read.” Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is a brilliant, yet heart wrenching novel that will affect every reader to the core. It is a story of the imperfect and unwanted misfits of society, sent away to be forgotten. Unacknowledged, robbed of their dignity, freedoms, and even of their human existence, they are subjected to the exploitation and cruelty housed within their small contained world, yet still harbor hopes and dreams for their lives.”
Chester County Book & Music Company (West Chester, PA)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is a true get-lost-in-a-story book. A story filled with wonder and love and hope, weaving through the lives of our unlikely heroes, even during the darkest and most horrible of times.”
Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park, WA)

“A remarkably well constructed novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl is equal parts engrossing historical narrative and an examination of love in many of its different forms. The love between man and woman, between mother and child, love across time and distance, etc. Rachel’s previous work and life’s experience breathes such life and realism into these characters that I found myself moving deeper into her world than I had initially expected.”
Joseph-Beth (Cincinnati, OH)

“The Story of a Beautiful Girl is a heart wrenching portrayal of what families used to do when faced with a disabled child, whether mental or physical, put them away and pretend they do not exist. Here in her novel full of pathos, Simon shows us what love, forgiveness and redemption can do for our souls.”
Bank Square Books (Mystic, CT)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl had my full attention from the first chapter. The characters immediately gained my sympathy, and I read the novel quickly, hoping for the unlikely reunification of Lynnie, Homan, and Julia throughout. Rachel Simon writes with great sensitivity about what it might be like in our not so distant past to have a disability, to be misunderstood, to be surrendered by your family to an institution, to be forgotten, and yet to persevere and reach for real life. If Rachel Simon meant to give voice to the unseen silent lives of individuals placed historically in mental asylums, she has here been successful.”
Northshire Bookstore (Manchester Center, VT)

“Rachel Simon has put together a tightly woven little tale that came directly from her big & emotional heart. It doesn’t compare well with The Help or The Room because it’s not running with those wolves, but more alongside The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Winter’s Bone: two novels that cut through to the chase and excel in the raw.”
Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)

“The Story of Beautiful Girl is a rewarding book to have read. Rachel Simon is an incredible storyteller, and she puts her gifts to use here. It is a great read on multiple levels: as a story well told, which independent of anything else is the most important part of any great book. It also is an accurate and unsparing look at the attitudes and practices of the time and place it portrays. And that, I think, is its greatest accomplishment. It is an honest look at the past, an accomplishment which is all too rare today.
Green Apple Books (San Francisco, CA)

“I tore through this novel, picking it up at every spare moment, but the issues it brought to mind stuck with me long after I put it down. A cast of diverse and fascinating characters exhibit the shift in America’s attitude toward the rights of people with disabilities over a 40-year period, from the moment a widow decides to care for a stranger’s child in 1968 to that child’s adulthood and discovery of her past. An excellent book group selection, I wanted to pass it on right away so I could discuss it with friends.”
Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park, WA)

“The Story Of Beautiful Girl introduces us to characters a reader can love and cheer for. Lynnie and Homan are two young lovers who meet at an institution for the disabled. As they plot their escape from the facility, their devotion to each other becomes insurmountable. Lynnie secretly gives birth to a little girl, Julia, and leaves her with a retired schoolteacher, Martha. For the rest of her life, Martha raises for Julia as though she were her own child. With Martha’s respect and devotion, this novel restored my faith in humankind. Filled with many interesting points for discussion, Simon’s tale makes for a great book group selection.
The Book Cellar (Chicago, IL)

“What a gorgeously told novel of hope, love, and the tenacity of the human spirit overcoming the blight of ‘Institutions’ on our collective American conscious. Rachel’s characters are rich, growing in strength throughout the course of the novel and woven together for a great read while telling a story that needed to be told – and told so well. Thank you, Rachel!”
HearthFire Books of Evergreen (Evergreen, CO)

The pile of mail that awaited me upon my return home two weeks ago has been opened. Mostly.

The phone messages that were left while I was all over the country have been answered. Pretty much.

The Himalayan mountain range of electronic communication that grew steeper and higher and farther until it touched the deepest blue of the sky and extended well beyond the known world has been assessed. Hiking expeditions have even gone up the first few summits. Though there are many to go, and already, more mountains are forming.

All of this is happening while my sweet, quiet routine, with husband Hal and kitty Zeebee and long work-outs and mugs of tea and a hardback novel in my rocking chair and a spiral notebook in the library – all of which rose tantalizingly in my mind while I was flying from city to city – still await my return.

This is not what people expect to hear. They expect that, having dispatched with my on-the-road commitment to my publisher, I’ve flung off the adrenalin, sense of purpose, extroversion, and list of commitments I needed on the road and simply pulled my regular life back on, as if I were changing from a tailored suit and too-tight pumps to comfy khakis and a much-worn sweater.

But The Story of Beautiful Girl is my sixth book, and, having held other writers’ hands for the twenty-three years I’ve been in the business, I know that the whole year leading up to a book’s release is critical. The writing and editing might be done, and the publisher – in the best of worlds – might be sending out advanced reading copies to reviewers and interviewers, figuring out a marketing strategy, and encouraging bookstores to place their orders. So to the uninformed it would seem that the writer’s work is behind her. However, the publisher – in the best of worlds – can accomplish its goals all the more readily if the writer is a full member of the team, since, among other things, the writer might have contacts in niche markets, or creative ideas for how to reach readers.

In the case of The Story of Beautiful Girl, and as those of you who’ve been following this blog know, my passionate efforts during this pre-publication phase of my novel aren’t simply because I’m the author of this book. They’re also because this is a novel that takes readers deeply into the hearts and minds of two adults with disabilities, like my sister Beth and her boyfriend Jesse, or like the thousands of individuals I’ve met through my talks for my memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister. It’s also a novel about the moral conflict and selfless devotion of a direct support professional who provides support for the character of Beautiful Girl, like staff people who’ve worked with my sister and others I know. And it’s about a childless, elderly widow whose life suddenly changes when a newborn baby is left in her care. (She is not like anyone I know, though I’ve had some early readers say, “I wish that would happen in my life.”) So despite being fiction, this book is intertwined with many people who mean a lot to me. And I feel I owe it to them to do all I can to generate an audience for this book.

So in the interest of assisting my publisher further – while not spending my usual five hours writing a long, detailed, here’s-everything-that’s going-on blog, thereby freeing me up to keep scaling those endless, snow-capped electronic summits, not to mention doing my hospice volunteering, seeing my sister, and visiting friends in need, such as a wheelchair using writer who just had a terrible accident and is now recovering in a rehab hospital – I’m devoting this post to a few book updates, and one very personal thrill.

BJs, the wholesale club, has a book club, and they just announced that The Story of Beautiful Girl will be their May selection.

Publisher’s Weekly, the influential trade journal, has given the book a glowing review. Please note that this review comes with a Spoiler Alert, so read at your own peril by clicking here.

ANCOR is a trade association advocating on behalf of 800 private providers of services for 500,000 Americans with disabilities that employ over 400,000 direct support staff in almost every state in the country. To help me spread the word about The Story of Beautiful Girl, they’ve posted an informative page on their website devoted to my book. If you’d like to support ANCOR, please order your book through their site.

I have had many discussions with organizations that will be hosting me at upcoming talks, and then I’ve updated the Appearance page on my website accordingly. The current page reflects only what’s been finalized as of today. I expect to add many more events as the time of publication nears.

My publisher has been busy too. Mostly this is with things I don’t know or feel the need to ask about. But one thing I do know about, and adore, are four terrific animated ads they’ve created.

One of these ads, the one with the white background, hints at the plot; the others include endorsements from some of the booksellers I met and dined with during the pre-sale tour, as well as the wonderful writer John Grogan, author of Marley and Me and The Longest Trip Home. These ads, which have been posted in in several places online, have continued the publisher’s mission of building pre-publication excitement about the book.

To view these ads in their animated form, just click on one and wait a moment for the animation to begin. You can also add them to your own website by right-clicking on an animated ad to download the file to your computer, then opening it using Quick Time, and following the same procedure you would when adding a regular image.

But my life hasn’t been just about The Story of Beautiful Girl and seeing friends and others in need.

Despite my not being able to return to a contemplative routine, I have celebrated a momentous occasion with my husband Hal: the debut musical performance of the trio he plays in, Puddles In A Gondola. On February 13th, Hal and his two fine musician friends, bass player Matt Stein and violinist June Bender, played two improvisational pieces at the Highwire Gallery, an art gallery in the Philadelphia neighborhood known as Fishtown.

I know what you’re wondering right now. What type of music did they perform? Those of you who don’t already know about Hal’s unusual, undefinable music from my last book, The House On Teacher’s Lane, might want to prod me with such helpful but ill-suited suggestions as, “Rock ‘n roll?” “Blues?” “Jazz?”

The best response I can give is that, although Hal, Matt, and June all have training in classical music and although their tastes run from jazz standards to English folk, the music they played that night was a blend of many elements that add up to something avant-garde. As you can see in the photos below, in addition to Hal’s guitar, he played an electronic bassoon. He also used electronic looping throughout the performance. Matt and June each stayed acoustic, but added toy instruments (yes, like Fisher-Price), selecting such things as plastic saxophones and flutes at random.

The audience was small but spirits were high. And everyone – especially the guitarist’s wife, who was tired from climbing but invigorated by loving – had a fabulous time.