For the past two months, I’ve been in and out of New York on trips to get the word out about CHEER!. There have been some great moments—a packed reading at Duke University where people asked very interesting questions, a group of my favorite high school teachers showing up to support me on at a local bookstore reading, random people asking me to sign a dog-eared copy of the book. But promoting a book is also—how do I put it?—an extremely humbling experience. Let me give you a few examples.
A few weeks ago, I went to Myrtle Beach to man a CHEER! booth at an all-star cheerleading competition. Myrtle Beach was delightfully tacky—my hotel was across the street from a strip mall exclusively designated for tattoo and piercing parlors, with the exception of a Domino’s Pizza. I had a radio interview on my first day in town, so I called a taxi to take me to the studio. When it pulled up, it turned out “taxi” meant “1980s stretch limo.” It was too weird sitting in the back, so I sat up front with Johnnie, a Vietnam vet and car show enthusiast who I secretly loved.
At the competition, my booth was located in the hallway outside the competition. My table was piled high with books and my publisher had sent over huge versions of the book cover to decorate the space. I felt kind of excited. Then, down the hall, I saw another booth going up. It was for Soffe—a company that specializes in cheerleading apparel. A swarm of cheerleaders rushed towards the booth, totally ignoring me on the way. Turns out Mr. Soffe, in the flesh, was there signing a pair of heart-shaped shorts for each person on line. He had a full scale entourage with him, and even had his own special foam signing pad to prevent hand cramps. The line to get signed Soffe shorts was huge—at least a hundred people deep at all times. Meanwhile, I was having to yell out to people passing by to get them to come talk to me about my book. Humbling.
Then this weekend, I went to a cheerleading convention in Fayetteville, NC. The most humbling moment here? I was asked to be a judge for the Cheerleader of the Year competition, which is akin to a beauty pageant, only cheerleading skills and interview ability count for much more than appearance. I sat in a room for several hours, listening to the hopefuls talk about politics, the environment, etc for their interviews. One of the questions was, “Do you think we’re in a cycle of global warming?” I thought, “Who could possibly say ‘no’ to this?” Answer: a good percentage. Just another reminder that things are very different in the New York bubble.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I guess I’m just trying to say, man, it feels nice to be home. —Kate
It’s good to have you back!
Oh man, being upstaged by Mr. Soffe and heart-shaped shorts… that is wild. But hey, maybe there’s some relief buried in these humbling experiences, that there are entire other worlds outside of your book and NYC, that are just waiting for you to explore them, just like you did when you had the first kernel of an idea for CHEER!. I have no doubt that all of these experiences, weird, funny, or unnerving as they might have been, will be fertile soil for your next great investigation. Because you’re just awesome like that.
Hmm, as one of the 292 million Americans who don’t share your fabulous life in your NYC bubble, and as one of the few of those who also happens to own your book CHEER! and is currently reading it (you’re welcome), I can safely say that your NY-centric thinking comes thru at odd moments in the book.
And, far from making you seem sophisticated and worldly, you sound no less provincial than some small-town hick who’s never been out of his county. Instead of wondering what Jews look like or if a black person will kill him for being white like our hillbilly friend on his 6th-grade class trip to the big city, you instead wonder in agape awe at all that white-bread Americana you find so strange–like people suspicious of the media wondering if Global Warming is more of a political movement pushed by politicians for purely political reasons, than a scientific reality, for example.
Does your own set of biases make you the more sophisticated sheltered soul? Not to my thinking–it makes you and Mr. Hillbilly equal in your lack of breadth and open-mindedness.
That said, your book is very interesting, and I say this as a man who was never a cheerleader (nor dated any). I’m particularly interested in the team-building aspects of these squads, and the fact that you covered three different ones at once, each going for a similar goal, is an excellent study contrasting different styles and the relative success of each. (I’ve just finished the U of M All Girl story and was physically shaken for poor Kern; it seems a failure in the team’s makeup that anyone on the team would blame one girl for their failure–even if it’s true. A better approach, I’d think, would be for the coach to instill the idea that one person’s failure is everyone’s failure; just as success is everyone’s.)
But it seems clear just by reading your work you really don’t get out much. And just because your small town happens to be the self-important microworld of NYC, doesn’t make that any less myopic. I think your book would have been better if you were better-traveled and more open-minded; or perhaps had at least better hidden your own “OMG I’m not in NYC surrounded by the intelligencia anymore!” moments.
This blog entry just confirms that for me. I hope as you continue to write and travel, you’ll stop looking at the rest of us as an anthropological curiosity judged against your own prejudices.
Mmm…sounds like TC in DC’s got some judgment of his own going. I’m actually astounded at the way in which Kate manages to report without polluting her writing with her own personal judgments. And she’s from North Carolina dude. That’s certainly no big apple.
Kate, I hear you on the humbling bit. Being the author of a book, alas, doesn’t make life suddenly make sense or people adore you. It only makes you the author of a book.
I don’t know that it’s fair to criticize Kate for viewing the world through the lens of her life. I think we all do it, in a way that makes no one’s telling of anyone’s story completely objective (sorry if all those pronouns got a little ee cummings back there). At some level, the best we can do is to be willing to admit our biases and interrogate them through the act of writing. I am impressed with the way Kate’s insertion of herself into Cheer reminds us all that the stories are being told by a real person with a deifinitive viewpoint, an outsider looking in, not some omniscient narrator who is all-knowing.
I think what you refer to as “anthropological curiosity” comes through for me as a fascination with a subject that is, quite plainly, fascinating. And, I think it’s Kate’s enthusiasm (and sometimes her awe) that helps convey the magnitude of her subject, a cultural icon that we as a society continue to misjudge.
I don’t know that we can ask an author to do any more than to make that acknowledgement of the potential for bias. Would we really want to read a story that is completely devoid of the fingerprints of the storyteller?