Free Copies of "Meeting New People" For Anyone Who's Been Recently Dumped By A Friend

You do have to come to one of the book events. I'm not made of money

The next week will be an exciting one.¹ My third novel, Meeting New People, will be released on Tuesday, June 2nd, and I will be going on an abbreviated book tour to launch it.

On Tuesday, June 2nd I will be at Powell’s Books in Portland.

On Friday, June 5th I will be at Local Economy in Oakland.

On Saturday, August 22nd I will be at the San Diego Book Festival in San Diego.

That’s all, so do come out if you happen to be on the West Coast and can spare an hour or two to say hello. I would very much like to see you.

Often a book launch involves being genially quizzed by a friend of the author’s, or, more interestingly, a professional rival or employee of the bookstore hosting the event. I won’t be in conversation with anyone at either reading, because I forgot to ask around ahead of time.

Besides, I always feel a little self-conscious about asking a friend to pretend to finish a book of mine in order to sit onstage with me and say things like “It seems like you really cared about your themes. What was that like?” I like my friends; they shouldn’t have to do that sort of thing.

I will be offering a free copy of Meeting New People at each event to whichever audience member has most recently gone through a friendship breakup. You won’t have to prove it or anything. We’ll go by the honor system.

In the event of a tie, I will cut the book in half, and whichever two people who have been most freshly dumped will have to share.

There is a curious and heady mixture of indignation, self-justification, self-pity, humiliating attention to detail and clarity of recall, and abjection that attends the friendship which has ended definitively, rather than being allowed to gracefully fade out. (A shared vacation, booked on points, non-refundable.)

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Please don’t worry that I’m going to poll the audience about their freshest emotional wounds. Really, I won’t. But the thing people always say about friendship breakups, isn’t it, is “it’s so hard how nobody talks about it,” so I’d like to create a little opportunity for people to talk about it.

The idea for Meeting New People came to me a few years ago when I was working on Women’s Hotel, a book about quite a few reasonably polite people living in a fairly constrained environment with a number of internal and external inhibitors governing their behavior. It interested me to think about a single person, exhausted by politeness, incapable of self-governance and desperate for intimacy, eager to speak and unable to find anyone to speak to.

Here’s Barbara, eating at home alone and making the best of things:

I made it home late enough to make it up the stairs in peace. Lorraine had already retreated to the back of her apartment to watch TV at the loudest possible volume, and all the hallway lights were out. I was too hungry to make a big production out of dinner, so I just threw together a big plate of pieces of cold, shaved vegetables and meat. I don’t have a name for it. It’s not quite a salad and it’s not quite a ploughman’s, either. It’s a good sort of meal to keep ingredients on hand for, when you live alone, because you can assemble everything in just a few minutes.

The real key is that the thinner you slice everything, the more vibrant it all tastes, because of the increased surface area. In spring, a lot of what people think of as big, tough winter staples are actually very delicious, very crisp and tender, like celeriac, horseradish, and turnip. A small spring turnip is an absolute dear, and nothing at all like those huge softball-sized things you see in the supermarket in December.

So I had a big bin of very thinly sliced roots I’d run over the mandolin earlier in the week, tossed in a very lightly sugared brine, just bay leaves, sugar, vinegar, water, salt, a few juniper berries, all of them still snappy, and I arranged them on a very wide dark green plate with a salad of celery leaves, lots of parsley (I like using parsley as a lettuce), and a little parmesan-rind dressing, and some cold ribeye, also very thinly sliced, that I brought home last night from work. You eat the whole thing with chopsticks, one ingredient at a time, very slowly, and it’s just terrific. A hot, bright breakfast and a cold, unhurried supper, that’s the right way to finish a day. I only had water to drink because I’d already cried once today and didn’t want to get maudlin.

If my sister and my mother were still alive, I don’t think I would be in this position. I would have needed Susan less in the first place, and probably would have been easier to get along with as a result. We might have still ended up quarreling, but it wouldn’t have gotten as bad as it did, and we probably would have ended up closer than ever after we made it up. Things would certainly be better between Ezra and me, and the improvements would keep radiating outwards from there. I didn’t realize this until after she was gone, but I loved my mother more than I loved my son. And I did love him, quite a lot as it happens, so I’m not saying I didn’t try. But my childhood was better than his was, I can admit that. Sometimes it’s like that with people, and you don’t always find out which kind of person you are until you’re done having children, which is a shame. Immediately and in almost every way, I became a worse person after my mother died.

I do hope you’ll give Barbara a chance. I’ve been so looking forward to introducing her to people.

[Image via]

1. For me. I don’t know what’s new with you.