Everything I read and wore on book tour

The other day, I attended a sound bath. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for almost two decades, but this event was the most “California” thing I’ve ever done. The sound bath was conducted by a crystal healer at Mattress Central, a large mattress store near me. Mattress Central is, in fact, the store where I bought my current mattress over a decade ago, so I have fond memories of testing TempurPedics there while my son, then a preschooler, jumped on the display beds. The sound bath was sponsored by an intellectual property lawyer who handed out business cards. You could get your aura photographed for an extra $30. That seemed steep to me, so I still do not know the color of my aura, unfortunately.1

I shared a mattress with my sister. They gave us all sleep masks to wear, and then the crystal healer spritzed Reiki mist in the air and walked around playing little gongs and bells and shaking a giant drum full of ball bearings that sounded like a roaring ocean.

When my kids were babies, we bought a device called the Sleep Sheep, a cute stuffed sheep with velcro straps that you’d affix to the bars of their crib. Incongruously, the sheep played whale sounds, so we joked about the species confusion we were fostering in our children. The sound bath was like spending an hour inside a Sleep Sheep. Since Mattress Central is right off a busy road, there was also a lot of traffic noise, which created some species confusion with the gongs, ball bearings, and car vrooms all mixed together.

On our way out, we each got a free water bottle from the IP lawyer, and our own personal affirmation card (mine said, “I am grateful for all that I have”). I am grateful for all I have! And the sound bath was one of the few moments I’ve been able to catch my breath in the last few months, given a travel schedule that has been making me happy but a little seasick. My book has now officially been out for two months and I’ve done six live book events (Pasadena! Santa Barbara! NYC! Washington, DC! Oakland! San Francisco!) and so many podcasts that I’ve lost count. I’ve been reading a lot and wearing many clothes. I’ve also gotten to go on some fun recent side quests.

Side quest #1. Two weekends ago, I went to a book club meeting that was talking about my book! We ate brain-shaped strawberry-rice-krispie-treats and had a lively discussion with a mix of moms and dads about parenting, gender roles, the mental load, and the couple relationship. The men in the room, who were mostly in their 40s and 50s, were on the leading edge of a generational shift: Most of them didn’t see their own father playing an active role in day-to-day childcare, yet all were hands-on dads themselves. One man shared that when he changed his newborn son’s diaper, his dad walked into the room and proclaimed proudly, “You’ve now changed one more diaper than I ever have.” The moms had a wide range of opinions about how their partners were tackling the dad role, but we all agreed that today’s fathers deserve some credit.

Side quest #2. This past weekend, I did another really fun thing: I went on a science-and-storytelling retreat in Carlsbad, California, organized by the National Academies of Science and sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. The goal of the retreat was to forge connections between scientists and filmmakers to improve the quality of the science stories that get told on screen. I got to meet some amazing scientists (including Athena Aktipis PhD!) and hang with the writers behind films like Toy Story 3 and Black Panther. One of my favorite exercises from the weekend: Each scientist got to work with a writer to create a villain, based on our research. My villain was a perfect suburban mom who was secretly murdering all the stay-at-home dads in her vicinity by staging mysterious baby-care accidents.

Side quest #3. Yesterday I spent two intense hours taping a Big Deal podcast with an extremely handsome host (they fetched me in a black car, like a demanding lady-dater on X!), and then delivered a guest lecture on fatherhood for a UCLA class that is reading my book.2 The lecture was over Zoom, which I find energetically challenging, because you’re competing with the entire internet; there’s nothing to keep students from surfing their social media or shopping for shoes. I felt like I had to ramp up my delivery to 1000 so they would pay attention. Afterwards, I wanted to collapse into a catatonic puddle, but instead I made the lasagna-vibes skillet from Caroline Chambers. Surprisingly, I think I nailed it!

READING LIST

The best thing about travel is getting transit time to read! I’ve been making these nerdy book recommendation carousels on Instagram that feature parenting, gender, care, and relationships books, but I’ve been gravitating to mostly fiction and memoir lately. Here are some of the books I’ve picked up this summer.

Perfection (Vincenzo Latronico). Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Latronico’s slim novel focuses on Anna and Tom, a hipster expat couple who settle in gentrifying Berlin. The story opens with a voyeuristic look inside the couple’s apartment, full of tasteful, bohemian-luxe details that summon up a millennial avocado-toast shorthand. The reader soon realizes that Anna and Tom’s life is all surfaces. Social relationships are brief and transactional, and the couple spend their lives inside the “uni-context” of the internet: viral posts and memes and controversies are their daily diet. After a failed sojurn to gentrifying Lisbon, which looks a lot like gentrifying Berlin, Anna and Tom run out of places to go. Perfection is a nihilistic novel that captures the anomie of the digital nomad. I’m not sure I enjoyed it, but it’s worth a read.

American Fantasy (Emma Straub). During the first leg of my book tour/ college tour/ roadtrip to Dollywood, I picked this up at Straub’s NYC bookstore, Books are Magic, and read it immediately. It’s about a boy-band reunion cruise and it’s as light and frothy and fun as the pink-and-blue clouds on the cover. But, like Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, one of my all-time faves, there’s sadness and depth to the nostalgia, too.

Yesteryear (Caro Claire Burke). I read this mostly so I could plug into the Substack discourse, but I’d already been opinion-pilled by all the haters, so I didn’t enjoy it as much as I probably should have. Conclusion: Great premise, decent execution; liked it, didn’t love it. I would have enjoyed the behind-the-scenes peek at tradwife influencing, but I’d already gotten that from Jo Piazza’s Everyone Here is Lying to You.

Famesick (Lena Dunham): I also read this to catch up on Substack discourse, and found it riveting. I already had a few points of connection with Dunham (she went to Oberlin College, in my hometown, and I lived in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Girls is set), so reading about her past was like catching up on gossip from a particularly cool acquaintance a few degrees of separation away. It helps that Dunham knows how to spin a story. Most importantly for any memoirist, she is willing to make herself look bad in service to the truth.

Things in Nature Merely Grow (Yiyun Li). My flight from San Francisco back to Los Angeles was delayed, so I read this standing up at the airport bookstore and then hugged my teens extra hard. It’s a slim but devastating volume. Li wrote it after her son James died by suicide, seven years after the suicide of her first son Vincent. The book will frustrate readers who want to understand why both of the author’s sons chose to end their lives. Li spends much of the book grappling with the fundamental unknowability of that question, and searching instead for a kind of radical acceptance that allows her to continue living, finding it in the simple rhythms of nature while taking walks and tending to her garden.

I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself (Glynnis MacNicol). After MacNicol spent the pandemic alone in her NYC apartment, she craved touch and adventure. This memoir describes her sojurn to Paris: she goes on the apps in search of male company and finds plenty of men willing to oblige. Although this book was marketed as a kind of slutty sexcapade, to me, the heart of the book is really female friendship. MacNicol has managed to build a cohesive friend group in a city where she doesn’t live - I would have read a longer memoir to find out more about how she pulled that off.

The Children (Melissa Albert). Guinevere Sharp grew up the envy of millions of readers, as her mother parlayed her and her brother’s childhoods into a best-selling series of children’s books set in a magical fantasy universe. But in reality, Guinevere and her brother, Ennis, were neglected by a mother who cared more about her literary fame than about washing and feeding her children. Guinevere is now shopping around a ghost-written memoir and Ennis is an artist preparing to launch an installation about their mother. The novel jumps back and forth between their troubled childhood and their even-more-troubled present. I found the premise intriguing, the writing captivating, and the ending unsettling. It reminded me of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, exposing an overly-adult underbelly of children’s fantasy literature. I’m not sure Albert managed to land the plane on this one, but I loved reading it.

The Correspondent (Virginia Evans). I was late to the party on this book, because I’ve never been a fan of epistolary fiction, and it was hard for me to imagine how a novel told through the letters of a cranky septuagenerian could be anything but a slog. I’m so glad I finally picked it up, because it was an absolute delight. So many great novels follow the bildingsroman format, spotlighting a young hero’s coming-of-age. Evans’s creates a late-life bildingsroman, showing how the protagonist comes to terms with past tragedy and even finds love. I was a puddle of tears by the end of the book.

Lost Lambs (Madeline Cash). Zadie Smith famously described her debut novel, White Teeth, as “the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old.” After the first few chapters of Lost Lambs, I was reminded of Smith’s self-depiction: there’s a lot going on in Cash’s book, and plenty of self-conscious authorial cleverness. But a few more chapters, and I was on board: this is a zany, maximalist novel with all the fun tropes, from the evil billionaire to the precocious young sleuth. It felt like a mix-up of The Corrections and Inherent Vice.

The Last Straight Woman (Phoebe Maltz Bovy). As a fan of men and defender of husbands, I was intrigued by Maltz Bovy’s account of female straightness. She argues that women’s sexual desire for men has been long misunderstood and underappreciated, and uses British ‘90s sitcom comedy tropes - the himbo plot, the frumpy-but-horny older lady - to illustrate how it’s always been lurking in the corners of popular culture. If you like sex talk and Fawlty Towers references, this is definitely the book for you.

Currently on my bedside table, will report back: For Better or Worse (Stephanie Coontz), Dolly All the Time (Annabel Monaghan), Like, Follow, Subscribe (Fortesa Latifi), The Story of Your Life (Kathryn Jezer-Morton)

BONUS LISTENING PICK: I am loving the new podcast Birth of a Parent from Michael Feigelson at the Van Leer Foundation. Feigelson interviews some of the best researchers and thinkers about the transformations of parenthood, and every episode features a phone call with his own hilarious mom. In a great-minds-mashup, Elissa Strauss mentioned it in her newsletter this week too.

FASHION TIME!

When it comes to fashion blogging, I’m inspired by Cartoons Hate Her and her periodic outfit roundups (although then again, she says that she loses subscribers every time she posts them, so let me caveat that this is probably my last fashion post). I’m not as much of a fashionista as CHH, but when one is promoting a book, one thinks about one is wearing much more than usual.

According the internet, my Kibbe body type is Soft Gamine. I don’t totally get what this means, but I will say that as a short curvy person, when I wear the kinds of long flowing garments that look great on tall people, I look like I’m smuggling several sacks of potatoes. I also look washed out in beige neutrals and monochrome outfits. I look better in more structured clothes with retro silhouettes and fun patterns, which is lucky for me, because those are the kinds of clothes I like.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve done most of my clothes shopping second-hand through my local Purge group, in which women sell their cast-off clothes. Since I’m in Los Angeles, some of these women are very au courant, so I’ve gotten some great deals. Here are the outfits I wore to my marquee events, and they are mostly Purge-sourced and from local or indie designers.

LOS ANGELES @ Vroman’s Bookstore

I got this dress at a backyard sample sale organized by a Purge mom, and it’s from the local brand Porridge. This dress was an epic score because it brings together everything I like in a dress: it is plaid, it is sparkly, it is GOLD, it has fun sleeves that aren’t too short, and I got it at a discount. I wore it with baby-blue Doc Martens, also from the Purge group.

SANTA BARBARA @ Godmothers

I figured that Santa Barbara called for a coastal grandmother look. I wore this lavender dress from Bel Kazan, purchased from the Purge of course, with vintage Isabel Marant ankle boots that I also got from the Purge at a total steal (I paid $25 for boots that cost $600 new, and then shelled out another $50 to get them resoled). I didn’t get a pic of the outfit plus shoes, because the boots are half a size too big for me, so I always lurch around in them unsteadily until I get a chance to take them off. The amber necklace was purchased by my brother for his wife, but it wasn’t to her taste, so it got re-gifted to me. The next morning I woke up in the Author Cottage and taped Dr. Becky’s podcast in this rad Porridge polka-dot sweater that I bought at the same backyard sample sale as the gold dress.

NEW YORK CITY

I bought this Lularoe bicycle dress on Ebay for $25 after we locked in the bikes on the cover. It’s a little gimmicky but it’s also a very comfortable dress! My husband always says that when I wear it, I look like Bill Nye the Science Guy, but I think that’s a plus. I’m wearing it here with royal blue Camper balloon sandals that I also got on Ebay. I also wore this dress on a ton of podcasts, including the one I did yesterday.

WASHINGTON, DC @ Politics & Prose

I have mixed feelings about this outfit. After wearing dresses to all my events, I wanted an excuse to wear jeans, which I paired with the Camper balloon sandals and a sparkly glitter top that I got from, you guessed it, the Porridge sample sale. But then my conversation partner Matthew Yglesias showed up looking dapper in a SUIT, and I felt like a drunk PTA lady who overdressed for the school book fair. I was still in my hair and makeup from the PBS News Hour interview, which made me feel a little more stiff than normal (but I guess a TV newscaster look is on-brand for DC).

BAY AREA Storytime for Caregivers & KALW/Litquake

I went to two events in the Bay Area, one event in the morning in Oakland and the other in the evening in downtown SF, but I wore the same dress to both, because I’m lazy, and also because this dress is uber-comfortable. It is from Nooworks, an indie brand that makes the best prints. At Patricia Zaballos’s Storytime for Caregivers event, I am wearing it with this amazeballs Karl Lagerfeld cardigan that is covered with little butterflies that I got for $10 on the Purge! I thought this was the deal of the century but it turns out you can purchase it for $35 on Poshmark. I also wore the Nooworks dress to the Los Angeles Festival of Books and on Derek Thompson’s podcast.

AUTHOR PICS

I got this stripey dress about a decade ago from Matrushka Construction, a local indie brand that I’ve adored since I was a broke graduate student in the early aughts. The owner used to hang out in the back of the store with her sewing machine and do on-the-spot alterations for customers. I didn’t wear this dress to any book events because it’s on the inside cover and it seemed too on-the-nose, like a band wearing their own T-shirt, but I did wear it for the Modern Wisdom podcast and a lot of commenters joked about the blue-and-black/white-and-gold dress meme.

ARMCHAIR EXPERT

Ironically, for someone who loves a zany print, I wore my most boring dress to be on Armchair. I psyched myself out and decided that a plain dress would work better on YouTube. I do love this forest green color. I got this dress from a brand called wool& that was doing a promotion where, if you wore your dress for 100 days straight, they’d give it to you for free. I made it about six days and then felt the need for another outfit. But it is a really comfortable, breathable dress. In an attempt to jazz up the outfit, I am also wearing a fun Sobral necklace that I got on Etsy.

BONUS FASHION PICK: I love merch, so I made myself, my dad, and my husband Dad Brain t-shirts to wear around town. Last time I flew, I sat next to a sweet couple on the airplane who asked about the image on the shirt and wanted to know where they could get one for their son-in-law, who just had a baby. “Everywhere books are sold,” I said. “No,” they said, “He doesn’t read! Where can we get the shirt?” The answer is here (although I also pitched them on the audiobook).

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Past recs (Playlist link!): Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black // James Mercer // Playboy Carti & Car Seat Headrest // Weyes Blood // Matthew Sweet // Fontaines D.C. // Elvis Costello Spanish Model // Lily Allen // Geese // Olivia Tremor Control // Beulah // Rosalia // A$AP Rocky // Dirty Projectors // Mitski // Foxygen // Teenage Fanclub //Aimee Mann // Nick Lowe // Mary Timony // The Pretty Flowers // Night Moves // Guided by Voices // Beach Bunny // Archers of Loaf // Dolly Parton // Kelley Stoltz // Wednesday

SNARKY PUPPY

I’m not usually a fusion-jazz listener, but Andrew Xu, of the podcast Frames of Space, has been sending me Snarky Puppy recommendations over the last few months, and I gotta admit, these guys are really good at what they do! The band formed at the University of North Texas and has been playing in various configurations over the last 20 years. Here are a few of the songs that Andrew has kindly shared with me.