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Last night, I was watching the Real World. This year’s cast is infinitely more interesting than in the past few years—there’s a body-builder alcoholic, a women’s studies major, a sorority girl, a hip hop producer, and a recovered meth addict stripper—but still, I found myself longing for the days of Puck and Pedro, when the show was about more than drinking profuse amounts of alcohol and hooking up under the covers.
In one scene in last night’s episode, they show Sarah (the women’s studies major) lying in her bed, which has a bookshelf for a headboard. And on the bookshelf, I noticed a book with an acid green spine. “I know that book,” I thought. So I paused and went frame-by-frame, and sure enough, it was Courtney’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. I took a photo to prove it.
Courtney herself watched the episode and didn’t notice this. But here’s hoping that the subtle product placement leads to lots of MTV viewers picking up the book.
As soon as I got on the plane in South Bend, the row in front of me started talking passionately about Notre Dame football. “Okay,” I thought, “I guess this is one of those everybody-fulfills-your-stereotypes kinda places.” Boy was I wrong.
When I walked into baggage claim, my new friend Amanda Littauer–the acting head of the women’s studies program at St. Mary’s College–gave me a big hug and invited me to go with her to a Halloween block party where her partner and her daughter (a bad ass cheetah) were already waiting. The second we showed up, I was wrangled into heading up the pumpkin painting station, where I met many a costumed baby, including a tiny, blonde Darth Vader girl that just about broke my heart with happiness. Lots of cookies, apple cider, and a haphazard but enthusiastic parade around the block later, I was just one of the neighbors.
In my very un-NYC journey, I am learning that there are some pretty fantastic towns smack dab in the middle of the U.S. and one of them happens to be Kansas City. This place has defied all of my expectations with its mint green tea mocha lattes, Spanish architecture, little, enlightening yoga studios, and awesome sculptures everywhere. Oh, and laughing all day and night beside beautiful Cristina Pippa isn’t half bad either.
I just had a long lingering lunch over cafeteria tables with a few students from Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. Over chicken fingers and iceberg lettuce we hashed out a range of topics, including September 11th, writer’s retreats, school rivalries, fame, their literary dreams, and yes, body image issues.
It was so refreshing to be outside of New York, talking to kids who think of Springfield (pop. 100,000), just 45 minutes away, as a big city. Many of them grew up in Jacksonville, a town of 20,000, or somewhere nearby. They love their school–the athletic tradition, the excellent programs in education and literature, the tight knit community feel of just 1,000 students.
The National Women’s Studies Association meeting in St. Charles, IL has been one long feminist party. Jessica Valenti, co-founder of feministing and author of Full Frontal Feminism, and I did a presentation on how to incorporate new media (blogs, video etc.) in the women’s studies classroom yesterday, and then today we did a little one-two punch on how to attract non-feminist types into the fold.
Though Deborah Siegel and I had a sparsely-attended reading last night at Women & Children First, it was truly an example of quality trumping quantity. My favorite comments came from Liz, a gorgeous red head college student, who is just discovering feminism. As a marketing and communications major at Purdue, she is already hatching how to “rebrand” feminism for a new generation. I love this girl.
And I love this store! (The other side of the marquee was Harry Potter. You can see I’ve officially hit the big time.) If you are ever in the Chicago area, be sure to check it out. The staff writes recommendations on note cards that are taped up next to the creatively displayed books. Chelsea, the young woman who introduced us, had actually read our books and had some powerful reflections about them. She also asked a great question about the distance between theory and activism. Man, the future is in safe hands!
San Francisco is all reds and yellows and blues. Unlike New York–which mostly feels like black, silver, white–the bay area is filled with a close-to-the-sea sensibility. Things move a bit slower. People seem less anxious. Ideas come in undulating waves unlike New York’s pulsing, beating apple heart.
After an anticlimactic television taping at KRON—where I was stuck in between a tear-jerking “Dear Olivia” story and some death-defying male cheerleaders—we spent the morning watching the pride parade. It was an absolute spectacle—wearable wings and leather and smiles everywhere. My favorite moment was when a huge group of families marched by with signs that said “love makes a family.”
Then we headed to Berkeley to take a wonderful hilly walk with Joan Blades, founder of Moveon and, more recently, Momsrising.
As my mom and I drove into wine country, we realized that a less deserving pair probably didn’t exist, considering that neither of us can tell a boxed rose from a really fancy shmance brand. Sommeliers we are not.
We stayed with the lovely and funny Carly, who used to be my babysitter back in Colorado Springs. Now she is a really high-end babysitter, i.e. human resources director. No, but seriously, Carly has one of the more coveted jobs in the universe as the head of HR for all of famous chef Thomas Keller’s restaurants (The French Laundry, Bouchon, Bouchon Bakery, and most recently, Ad Hoc) in wine country. As you might imagine, she gets to eat really good food.
Now we’re in San Francisco.
Reasons why I have officially fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest:
1. Powell’s (these people love books)
2. Forest abutting the sea
3. Espresso frickin’ everywhere
4. Tightwad Tuesdays at the bar near my reading: vodka tonics for $1.99
5. Industrial bridges proudly stretching, one after the other, across dark, blue rivers
After our weekend adventure on the coast, my mom and I headed back towards Portland and took over a basement bedroom in her cousin, Betsy’s, home in Vancouver, Washington (right at the WA/OR border). For the last few days we’ve been adventuring during the day and then returning to Betsy and her amazing family at night for old stories on the front porch.
Back on tour, I did a fun local TV stint on KATU with a perky redhead named Helen and her sidekick with a bad tie. It turned out Helen, too, had once named a pet Murphy Brown. We bonded.
So far it has been less a tour of “book” and more a tour of “laugh”–so hard that I tear up with my mom and one of her oldest friends, Malina. We spent the weekend on the Oregon coast, getting ourselves mixed up with all kinds of fascinating characters–old people dressed in embroidered aprons pushing their meatballs on us at the Scandanavian festival, a tiny Japanese waitress who gave my mom a bear hug when she told her that we were in town on my book tour (“Your daughter is so young and smart!”), and a Bible-toting barista who got in trouble for talking to us too long about novels and small town mark-ups.
It has also been a tour of hit-me-over-the-head-metaphors in my neverending quest to unlearn my perfect girl tendencies.
I’m headed out tomorrow for the west coast leg of my book tour. It promises to be quite an adventure with Portland, Berkeley, Chicago, and lots of little stops in between, to look forward to.
Already I know I will be facing a sand castle festival, wine country, the founder of Move On, and 18 hours of road trip conversation with Ma Dukes. Stay tuned for posts from the road…
As I continue talking, talking, talking about Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters–on the radio, at colleges, in documentary interviews–the more I am convinced that I have written the book I was supposed to write. Which, of course, is an amazing feeling.
You see I wasn’t that keen on writing about eating disorders specifically, and food and fitness obsession generally, in the first place. I thought my first book was going to be this memoir-ish thing that I wrote for my masters thesis at Gallatin about my grandmother’s mental illness. Perhaps that reflection will still make it out into the world, but after lots of rejections from agents and publishers, I realized that it wasn’t ready.
When I found out I would be reading at the amazing Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 5th, I imagined a wonderful outdoor event, adobe glowing, folding chairs set up in the front patio, the sun shining down on all of our shoulders. As it happened, there were snowflakes.
But another part of my fantasy was totally realized–a community of intriguing locals interested in the work and eager to share their own ideas and struggles. One of the things that came up in discussion was my relationship to feminism. A wise and beautiful member of the audience kindly expressed her fear that the message in my book about perfect girls being the “unintented side effect” of feminism (i.e. supermoms raise supergirls) might be twisted in the minds of unsympathetic media and made to look like I am blaming feminism.
In the last two weeks, I’ve had my face airbrushed with industrial strength foundation. I’ve had my hair yanked into straight, inauthenticity at the crack of a Saturday dawn. I’ve been made tanner, unblemished, pumped full of soundbites and spit them back out on cue.
All in the name of telling women that they should speak their complex truths and embrace their own imperfections.
Ah, irony.
Describing my book party turns out to be one of those rare occassions when words seem inadequate to me, but I’ll still give it a try.
It felt like almost every person I have ever loved, respected, walked beside, drank next to, sung with, embraced, worried about, debated with–and did I mention loved?–was in one sweet, little downtown bar. I wanted to press pause and walk around, inspect all of these incredible people from all different parts of my incredible life. It all moved so fast, seemingly propelled forward at warp speed by the sheer force of that many brilliant and beautiful people in one space.
“She really inspired me. I still call her Professor.”
So many of us thought of women and girls we know, and maybe ourselves, who too easily identify with Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. If only we could have fit hundreds more of them and the men who love them into the narrow Lower East Side bar where one of our favorite Crucial Minutists read passages from her newly released book.
My inspiration for the day? This little girl I saw rocking a tutu and eating chips at the Brooklyn Musuem of Art. In case anyone was wondering.
Okay, I’m officially overwhelmed and unofficially thrilled.
T, The New York Times‘ style magazine ran a great story comparing/reviewing my book, and one by the late, amazing Dr. Hilde Bruch. I almost fell off of our bright orange, almost broken though adorable (like everything from Ikea) couch when I read the words “…a spirited and smart rant that makes for a thought-provoking read.”
It also says that the book is a “rambling investigation,” but as my buddy Kendra wisely suggested, this surely means “rambling” as in cowgirl on the open road, as opposed to “rambling” as in your aunt on her second glass of boxed wine at Christmas time.
Anyway tomorrow is the big day–Perfect Girls hits stores. I am sending a wish/prayer/thought out into (yes Kimmi) the universe that it gets into the hands that need it most.
My book comes out in a week and I am feeling strangely calm about the whole thing. What can possibly explain this? (Especially given my predisposition to anxiety when I’m not staring down the publication of my first book.)
Maybe it was living through my first television experience—on Fox News’ Cavuto on Business no less—last week. It was me and five TV-veteran, business experts hanging in Bill O’Reilly’s green room with a collective foot of makeup on our faces. I lost track of how many times someone told me that I looked like I was 12-years-old.
Maybe it was being around my motley crew of a writer’s group last night and talking about the writer’s life, drinking beers, eating pizza, and laughing our collective, writerly asses off.
Maybe I am just too excited for my book party, which promises to be an overwhelming coming together of all the different facets of my life in one small room…with cupcakes and vodka.
Maybe it is that I have been getting really beautiful emails from young women who have their hot little hands on early copies and they’ve said things like this:
In case you weren’t sure, the world is officially full of gut-splitting ironies.
I showed up at the Hotel Gansevoort, a fancy schmance hotel in the disgustingly trendy meatpacking district, for an interview and photo shoot with British magazine You. (Yes, you read that right, photo shoot; I was dumbfounded too.) They bought the first rights to publish an excerpt and an interview with me from my UK publisher, Piatkus.
The photojournalist and his assistant decided that the roof bar would be a great place to take shots of me. We rode the elevator up while making awkward small talk (or was that me and my internal voice wondering what the hell I was doing in a photo shoot?).
The elevator doors opened and we stepped out…right into a sea of giant models in bikinis and high heels. That’s right. Victoria Secret was doing a photo shoot at the exact same time in the exact same place.
