The Book Sense 76
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We've been curious about what goes on on when authors are out on the road, reading and signing their books. We keep a listing of some of the events at BookSense.com, but we generally only get to readings in the New York area.

So we asked a few authors if they would send us tour diaries. This first one is by Kelly Link (Stranger Things Happen). Kelly is touring with Shelley Jackson (The Melancholy of Anatomy). They are driving across the country reading from their debut short-story collections on a 16-bookshop tour that has taken them from their hometown of Brooklyn, NY, to great independent bookshops in Cleveland, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Day One: Brooklyn to Cleveland
by Kelly Link

Shelley picks me up at 7:30am. I have one small suitcase filled with clothes, and several grocery bags containing books, CDs, and two dozen Kinder Eggs. Shelley has a bag of wax lips, stretchy miniature severed hands, ears, and noses, and an electric guitar. Later we will wish that we'd packed sandwiches and fruit, but Shelley does have chocolate eyeballs, wrapped in foil, which turn out to have peanut butter insides.

Earlier: While packing, I discover all my socks have mysteriously disappeared since the last trip to the laundry. I picture some sort of sock migration, or mass elopement, a sock Rapture. I'll go sock-shopping in Cleveland, or Chicago, or maybe I will even knit socks while Shelley drives. I am filled with improbable ambitions.

We fill the tank of Shelley's aged, family-heirloom, brown-and-town van with gas, and then drive back to Shelley's apartment. (She's forgotten her iBook's power cord.) We drive off again. We imagine that all the cars around us are driven by other authors, setting off on their own book tours. This makes the traffic seem more bearable, interesting, even. The Great Race has begun: there goes T. Coraghessan Boyle, in a zippy white Honda. Grace Paley sits in the back of a limo, with Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. They are drinking Bloody Marys.

Some of the books that I've packed:

• Little Casino by Gilbert Sorrentino
• The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
• Escapes by Joy Williams
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• Disobedience by Jane Hamilton
• Winter Tales by Isak Dinesen
• Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey
• The Scar by China Mieville
• Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go by George Pelecanos

There won't be any time to read these books, but it was comforting and necessary, nevertheless, to pick them out. (The road-trip equivalent of the stack beside the bed.) If at any point, we somehow become locked inside Shelley's van, we'll have something to read.

Shelley is driving. We open a Kinder Egg. I eat the chocolate superstitiously -- Kinder Egg chocolate is utilitarian rather than tasty -- and Shelley assembles the toy, which is a Viking berserker. He has a sword in one hand, and also wheels. He goes up on the dashboard, along with the patron saint of our trip, Little My (from the Moomin books), who is plastic and has a coin slot in her head.

Shelley drives. I drive. The van bounces. The van is noisy - it rattles and the wind roars around its eaves. ("The van is all eaves," Shelley says.) Shelley fiddles with her new digital camera. She takes photos of Little My in her red dress, transparent with sunlight, framed by the highway. We buy inedible sandwiches from a gas-station refrigerator. Shelley spurns hers. I put a condiment on mine -- chopped onion. There is nothing chopped about it. It is viscous and colorless, a sort of smelly onion sandwich lubricant.

Kelly & Maureen McHugh

We arrive in Twinsburg, where we are staying the night with my friend Maureen McHugh. More friends arrive. (Two of them have just flown in from London. Maureen is internationally famous for her cooking.) She's made roast pork with sweet-and-sour chili cilantro sauce, spicy pumpkin soup, homemade bread, and chocolate chip cookies. We eat and eat -- my mouth is watering as I write this, several days later. Maureen, why can't I come and live with you and do your dishes?

We eat and talk about paper flowers, Martha Stewart, Cthulhu, The Necronomicon, and books, books, books. Maureen's novel, Nekropolis, is about to appear in paperback. We talk about cover art and romance novels. Then we pile into my friend Ellen's PT Cruiser, and swan around town, feeling well-fed and luxurious. The names of all the businesses that we drive past are strange, as if translated. Or maybe we are now translated. But how pleasant to be driven, after driving all day.

Kelly & friend

At Mac's Backs, a homey, crammed, new-and-used bookstore, we have no time to browse. Shelley reads "Foetus," and behind her, on the shelf, I spy a fat red paperback spine with the title, Shelley, in yellow. Later, upon examination, this proves to be a biography of Shelley Winters. I read "Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water." We sign books -- one woman already has a copy of my collection, mysteriously pre-signed by me in glittery pink. She bought it on vacation, at St. Mark's, in New York. She's driven to Cleveland for the reading, from Erie, Pennsylvania. I feel like giving her a Kinder Egg, but we've left them back at Maureen's house.

I buy a used copy of Eva Ibbotson's Madensky Square for Maureen, and Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon, and for myself, several booklets of Dover tattoos: mermaids and little circle tattoos that are meant to wreathe around your bellybutton -- the three blind mice; two octopi wearing jaunty sailor's caps and holding hands; daisies. Even better yet: Dan Chaon's first collection, Fitting Ends and Other Stories.

Day Two

Further Reading:

• Shelley Jackson interview
• Eva Ibbotson interview
• Maureen McHugh
• Dan Tripps (Just kidding!)
• We like Diana Gabaldon, too!
• Events Calendar

Browse Archived Interviews
Browse Archived Excerpts

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