There is no public space more comfortable than a book festival courtyard. People are sitting, chatting, reading, eating, playing cards, laughing, chasing kids, and standing in line for author events. The lines to get into events are quiet and orderly. (Most people are, shocker, reading.) The movement of filling up a hall for a ticketed event is calm and organized. Events are precisely 45 minutes with 15 minutes for questions. Everyone is polite, and everyone is going out of their minds with glee. Author conversations have substance. Standing in line for book signings is holding vigil with dozens of people who share a particularly odd trait, and you look around at one another thinking, ah yes, this is the throughline for all these bodies and ages: It’s R.F. Kuang!
Sometimes when I watch comedians I think, but what have you done? What life have you lived? Why are you up there? Watching authors is a totally different experience, because they have indeed done something. They wrote a book. A whole book. And it’s being sold around the corner. They have nothing to prove. This is a victory lap. There’s no wondering if they’re going to be total shit. So what if they are! They already wrote the book! Don’t like this chat? This wasn’t about the chat! It’s about the book!
I suppose it all boils down to removing the stress that so many live events cause: no one will push past me to get a better seat, no one will stand in front of me so I can’t see the stage, and I know exactly when I get to pee again.
And everyone around me shares the feeling of being seen by a particular story. That is a very tender, wonderful thing to share. If I could choose to hang out with the people who like the same music I like, or watch the same TV I watch, or read the same books I read, I’m picking the book people, hands down.
I met Caroline O’Donoghue (The Rachel Incident and the Sentimental Garbage podcast), R.F. Kuang (Babel, Yellowface), Samantha Shannon (The Bone Season, A Day of Fallen Night), Anton Hur (Toward Eternity), and Marian Keyes (16+ novels about Irish families). I loved every minute.
As far as how the show is going, here’s an Instagram message I got yesterday that reveals more than anything I could say about it:
Hi Steph,
I hope you don’t mind me writing - me & my friend bought tickets to your show yesterday after the taglines of comedy & opera piqued our interest. We were the two who came in almost late & you kindly waited for us to come back from the toilet and sit down on the sofa before starting.
Your show was funny, moving, and touching in so many ways that were particularly poignant and personal to me. I was going to say to you at the end but you were busy talking to someone else and I was also a bit emotionally overwhelmed – but now I’m so sorry I didn’t as the more I think & write below the more I realise there’s so much I am grateful to you for, as I hope my message expresses!!
I was already predisposed to love your show as I work in opera (sorry…I didn’t say when you asked the crowd as I am a typically shy British person), but as the show went on it became more and more moving and touching to me as my mum also died of cancer 2 years ago. I’ve recently got my dream job at [redacted]; I’m now the company manager! Something my mum would be so amazed and thrilled by as she thought opera was just totally weird and fascinating and brilliant, and here I am now, immersed everyday in opera’s life force.
It sounds as if our mums had the same approach to life: my mum encouraged me to follow the weird and wonderful; she was brilliantly charismatic (although she interrupted all the time!); and she danced along with joy to all the rhythms life brought her way, whatever beautiful or terrifying turns they took. She wasn’t afraid of feeling everything – she looked the horror of cancer in the face and treated it with fascination. When that dance with the disease reached its close and my dad, brother and I moved home to care for her, she shared the intimacies and pains and absurdities and goriness of dying with us which felt like her last act of mothering. Despite it being the most shocking and surprising thing to witness, thanks to her I’ve somehow seen every truth and reality there is to her death.
A couple of other chords that struck…One: my mum (hilariously, I think) chose to walk down the aisle with her dad to O Mio Babbino. She had hardly seen any operas but heard what this was about and thought it’d be appropriately dramatic (I know you didn’t sing it but the fact it was even in the show..!). Two: I was watching with my best friend who travelled all the way to the South of England from Edinburgh to my mum’s funeral, like your friends. And 3: I always play ‘Life is a Cabaret’ as I agree it’s such a brilliant song about life – that’s what ultimately moved us both to tears!
Your show was the most beautiful love letter to your mother: she is clearly so alive inside you; you’ve written your own harmonisation to a tune she wrote and you are singing it to the world. Sometimes I feel my mum’s own tune inside of me almost physically: it’s like a powerful fireball in my stomach that equips me to grasp everything that comes my way and scream or sing or sob or just sit with it in silence.
So, I guess I am just wanting to say thank you for sharing your story. I’m really, really sorry your mum is no longer here, but from the vivacious picture of her you painted it is clear she would be so immensely proud of you telling it loudly and beautifully. And I will remember and carry your message with me!!
That’s my starfish. Everything else aside, I made an impression of that magnitude to one person. I haven’t felt like this since teaching high school. And it feels amazing.
11 Lessons on Being Loud (from an American Opera Singer) is coming to Berlin. I’ll perform an extended version of the show (70 minutes, up from the Fringe 50) at Wein Salon in Friedrichshain on October 12. Tickets on sale soon.
One last thing about the unseen impact we can have on one person: This week I found out that one of my favorite teachers passed away suddenly and far too soon. Caroline Howard taught me AP US History from 2005-2006, and for nine months, I tried and failed to pin her down as a Republican or a Democrat. She pulled off what someone today might consider impossible: she taught me about America without spin, without bias, and with a constant invitation be awed by the challenge of democracy and the impossible beauty with which we manage to pull it off. She moderated Model UN, and I traveled to Washington DC with her twice. Her husband Jeff Howard was my first high school Dean, and is now Principal at the school in California where I taught for four years.
One of the best known quirks of Mrs. Howard when I was in high school was that she had a massive crush on Alexander Hamilton, who was, in 2005, practically a nobody. She heavily championed his cause for celebrity. We made her a valentine using his photo. Caroline Howard very clearly manifested the Tony award-winning musical, which means the world owes her more than anyone can know.
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