Today is the actual day

ICYMI: I had an op-ed in the New York Times and appeared in Emi Nietfeld’s New York Magazine piece about postpartum depression. I was also featured in this UCLA Magazine feature on fatherhood and got to chat with Adam Fishman for his Startup Dad podcast.

I also kicked off my Substack book tour last week! I did a Live on the Wailing & Gnashing pod with Virginia Karnstein and Forest Gren, nerded out with Molly Dickens, PhD for the Maternal Stress Project, and did a Q&A for Being a Dad is Hard as F**k. I also had guest posts on Paul Bloom’s Small Potatoes and Awais Aftab’s Psychiatry at the Margins, I chatted with the amazing Lisa Sibbett for The Auntie Bulletin and did a Live with Tommy Blanchard at Cognitive Wonderland. More to come!

FRIENDS! My book is officially out TODAY, which means that you can walk into a bookstore and buy it! I am nervous and thrilled and already tired. I had my big Los Angeles book launch event on Friday night and it was absolutely magical. It was one of those mash-ups of everyone you know from every walk of life that makes you feel like you’ve bent space and time. I walked in, and I saw a table of my neighborhood friends sitting next to a few of my favorite colleagues from work, who were chatting with a couple I met in exercise class when our kids were babies. I was happy to see every single face and I loved getting to chat about my book and sign copies for so many of the people who made it possible. I read a passage about playing in a mom band, and the whole mom band was there to hear it. I got to chat with my hilarious buddy Ken Bensinger (author of Red Card, a great read!) about fatherhood and science and culture and gender and dad bods and testosterone.

After the bookstore event, folks went around the corner to a party at a nearby wine store, where we drank sparkling rosé and tried to make a dent in the world’s biggest carrot cake. I buzzed around and talked to folks and ate cake until the store closed and they kicked us out. On Saturday, I tried to stay in bed as long as I could, but I am constitutionally bad at bed-rotting. I got up and did email and then made these sheet-pan chicken meatballs from Caroline Chambers. The recipe promised to take me 30 minutes but I am so ADHD that they took me two hours. They were delicious, though.

On Sunday I packed an overnight bag and the family drove 90 minutes north to Summerland, a sleepy beach town right outside Santa Barbara. When my publisher asked me months ago if I wanted to do a reading in Summerland, I was initially confused - why would I travel to a town of 1400 people in the middle of book launch week? Then I saw the Instagram account for Godmothers Books and it instantly made sense. Godmothers is a magical temple for bibliophiles. In person, it did not disappoint. You walk in, and the first thing you notice is that the store smells wonderful, because they stock their own brand of candles that are burning in every room. The next thing you notice is that people are filming themselves walking into the store. A woman was walking into the store filming herself, and I actually asked her to film ME walking into the store, and my kids thought it was the cringiest thing I’d ever done. But I figured if I was going to walk into a beautiful store, I should get it on camera! It is three stories of impeccably curated book displays that make you want to sit down and read.

Once we scoped out the bookstore, we drove another 20 minutes into Santa Barbara to have lunch and walk around the (stunning) UCSB campus. As someone who went to college in a grim, frequently gray Northeastern city, the idea of going to college at the beach seems unholy. But the UCSB students all had smiles on their faces. In the late afternoon, we met my former Fulbright student Magda at the beach. Magda is now a research scientist at UCSB’s Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative, which is doing cutting-edge neuroscience on how the female brain reacts to reproductive transitions like pregnancy and menopause. She is also a new mom to a sweet eight-month-old.

The beaches around Santa Barbara are beautiful but you have to watch out for clumps of black, sticky tar littering the sand - a byproduct of the natural oil that seeps up from fissures in the ocean floor. I made the mistake of stepping on a big glob of it and it coated the whole bottom of my foot. I peeled some off and it turned my thumb and fingers black. I didn’t have time to deal with the tar situation fully, though, because we had to get back to the bookstore for my reading at 6pm. My husband and kids dropped me off at Godmothers and drove back to Los Angeles, and I checked into the Author Cottage, where I’d be staying the night. Yes, correct, Godmothers has an AUTHOR COTTAGE directly behind the store, which is the most charming and perfect space you’ve ever seen. I took off my sandy beach clothes, threw on my dress (question: should I do a book tour fashion round-up, Cartoons Hate Her style?), and ran back into the store to meet my conversation partner, Emily Jacobs, who runs the Bowers Initiative.

Emily did a lovely job, we had an engaged crowd that asked lots of questions, and I got to sign this baby’s book. After the reading, Emily, Magda, and I walked a few doors down to a divey bar called The Nugget where they told me about some of the cool science they’ve been doing lately and I had a beer and a surprisingly good salad.

Back at the Author Cottage, I had a fitful night of sleep - the bed was comfortable, but it was a little spooky being alone inside a tiny cottage behind a bookstore, like the opening scene of a murder mystery. I had an important podcast taping and an interview with a UK newspaper in the morning, and woke up way too early to check the time and couldn’t get back to sleep. I decided to get out of bed and hopped into the shower, but I forgot that my feet were covered in beach tar, which immediately started flaking off and staining the impeccable white marble tile bottom of the shower, leaving brown streaky marks that I could not rub off.

I started freaking out that I had DESTROYED the Author Cottage. I could not get the tar off with soap, so I tried rubbing moisturizer into it, which did absolutely nothing. I broke out the dishwasher detergent, but that didn’t get the tar stains out either. Finally, I found a canister of Barkeeper’s Friend under the sink in the kitchen and a scrub brush and got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed all the tar out of the shower. Because of the tar situation, I was too scared to use the beautiful white fluffy towels in the bathroom, so I ended up drying myself off with my ratty sweatpants, which were quite absorbent. Also, I tried to heat up some oatmeal in the microwave but it exploded and splattered all over the microwave, so next I had to clean out the inside of the microwave. In other words my glamorous stay in the Author Cottage was mostly characterized by me trying to frantically clean up messes I could not stop myself from making. I think the lesson is that I don’t really belong in fancy clean places. (That said: if anyone from Godmothers is reading this, please invite me back!). I was pretty thrilled that I got to sign the guest book immediately after Emma Straub, which inspired me to finally purchase her new novel American Fantasy.

I did my interview and my podcasts and checked out of the cottage and caught the train home and now here I am, getting ready for bed, and when I wake up my book will be OUT in the world. I said this to a friend recently, but getting ready to release a book is a little like getting ready to have a baby, except that people are going to rate your baby on the internet from one to five stars. You want everyone to look at your baby and admire your baby, but you also don’t want anyone to give your baby one star! So I hope people like the baby.1 If you are still reading this, thanks for hanging in there with me and I hope I get to see you on one of the remaining tour stops (next up, New York and DC)!