The author returns (to making sunbutter sandwiches)

As April draws to a close (what?? how????), so does the paperback leg of my tour for Company. I feel happy, sad, grateful, and exhausted, in various proportions. But mainly I feel Ohmygod I need to get more cheese sticks for the kids’ lunches. I feel Shit, I hope I didn’t miss the deadline to order the first-grade portraits. Those things more than anything else.

For those who are unfamiliar, the average book tour is…a very special animal. It’s the loftiest heights of glamour married to the humblest depths of DIYness. If you are lucky (I was!), your publisher helps you secure a few events for each edition of your book (mostly in cities where you have a good shot at drawing an audience), then pays for you to get to those events. If you want to commune with readers beyond that, or to continue doing so after the book has been out for a while, you will have to take the logistical reins, and maybe the financial ones too—or maybe not. Good literary citizenship helps a lot with all of this. If you’ve been kind to the fellow book people on your journey, shown willingness to talk about your work in an interesting way, been friendly—if you’ve done all those things, then it’s not hard to get invited to do cool things. And if you’ve been a good literary colleague, taken an interest in your peers’ manuscripts and careers, kept in touch after workshops/residencies/classes ended, etc.—then it’s pretty easy to find conversation partners in situations where your publisher does not. (My publisher generally did, and this was great; it was how I came to know the brilliant Margaret Wilkerson Sexton and the tack-sharp Tiphanie Yanique, for which I’m so thankful! But I was also able to call on some literary heroes and former teachers, as well as online and IRL friends, including Danielle Evans, Tony Tulathimutte, and Amber Sparks.)

But there is always (or, at least, to this point) going to be a level of, I don’t know, grit to it. You aren’t Beyoncé. For what I’m calling the paperback leg of my tour, I went to DC (I live just outside DC, so this was mostly a matter of my cussing out local drivers and finding someplace to park), San Francisco, Atlanta, and Long Beach. The first three of those were all set up by my publisher; for San Francisco and Atlanta, Graywolf helped with the flights, the hotel, and my transportation expenses. (Long Beach was a little different—I went there at the invitation of a lovely group of women, who covered the expenses of all the authors.)

For all the events, regardless of who was paying, I had to do all the backend work to make the trips possible. The kids’ school schedules are the primary structure for everything I do; my own work schedule is like a whisker behind. I spent the weeks beforehand getting my case docket into shape, then cashed in vacation days I’d banked for this purpose. Atlanta and Long Beach were only a week apart, and I spent days trying to work out the best departure/arrival times. How could I shrink the imprint of my absence? Where intraday flights were possible and not too expensive, I chose those (kids happily playing at school don’t care what their parents are doing); otherwise, I kept myself home to make dinner or a school event, then woke up at 4 a.m. or similar to drive or Uber, grouchy, to the airport.

My husband was so great about this. I don’t mean to gloss over that at all. He is infinitely supportive of my writing career, especially now that it adds to our bottom line (but also before that was the case). He’s capable of keeping the kids alive and happy for a couple days. But it’s a big lift. They were, for much of this time period, ages 6, 3, and 3. Three kids under age 7 require constant work for two people, let alone one working solo. That said, he and I—in large part due to gender and gender expectations—play very different roles in our house. While he can get the kids dressed, fed, and out the door on a school morning, Wes generally doesn’t track their weekly schedule—that’s my job. And the kids themselves prefer for me to be the one who doles out food, reads bedtime stories, and provides an audience for existential complaints. So it was a lot that I asked of him.

The trips were magical and, in their ways, restorative. All parents of little kids know the slice of heaven that is traveling alone. Traversing an airport with only your own luggage to keep track of?? A night in literally any hotel room???? I arrived in Atlanta on a Tuesday afternoon with nothing to do until lunchtime Wednesday, the most free time I’ve had since before my four-year-old twins were born. I wish I could say I used Tuesday night to sightsee, but no. I watched Heretic in my pajamas, FaceTimed my kids, drank wine and people-watched in the hotel lobby, and then wrote a newsletter post. I made very similar moves in Long Beach, but with more wine and less writing. In both locations, the core events themselves were transcendent. I wore the same outfit to both, a cute midi dress in bold checkered cotton. I had infinite time to get ready, so I looked and felt better than I normally do. In Atlanta—did I mention this event took place at my alma mater, Spelman College?—I met some wonderful, thoughtful students and caught up with professors I haven’t seen since I graduated almost 20 years ago: incredible. In Long Beach, I gave a 45-minute talk on the importance for women of building and then trusting our own expertise. I signed books, which never gets old. I fellowshipped with other writers—Marcela Fuentes (who was so sweet to me), Emily Habeck, and Safiya Sinclair among them. I sat by the hotel pool for a while. At home I don’t even get to sit on the sofa I own, because the other people in my house need things every second.

After spending years working on the book—dreaming up the characters, working out plots, smoothing the tonal shifts between one story and the next—I was overjoyed by all of this. Writing is such a solitary pursuit; most of it can only happen with no one else around. So for it to be the very thing that takes you on cross-country flights and helps you connect with the world is a little bit like a miracle.

And then, of course, the trips ended. I scheduled my return flight from Atlanta to get me home, I hoped, before the children’s bedtime; the flight from Long Beach, before dinnertime. Because what kind of a mom misses dinnertime and bedtime two separate times within 10 days?

At the airports, I tried my best to hang onto my short-lived feeling of coolness. I wore my favorite traveling outfit: black Unionbay cargo pants, Hanes tank, signature denim jacket. At LAX, I carried around a festival poster bearing my own face (though in fairness, because I mask indoors everywhere, that might not have been obvious to the people around me). But the closer I got to my home airports, the more I felt my physiology returning to status quo. Boarding the planes, I started thinking about what time I might land, where the boys would be in the bedtime routine. I wondered whether I’d get home in time to read from A House Is a House for Me for my younger kids or Holes for my older. I spent the first several minutes struggling with the Wi-Fi so I could check on the school picture thing from the air. When the flight attendants came by with Biscoff, I thought about the school lunches I’d have to prepare a few hours later. When the lights dimmed, I tried to take a nap, knowing how tough the following morning would be. Work and the kids clawing for my attention after 56 hours away or whatever. After the Atlanta trip, I drove myself home from the airport; my parents (who live locally) kindly picked me up from the Long Beach trip. In both cases, it was at least 90 minutes between the plane landing and the moment I climbed into bed.

The morning after Long Beach—my official first morning back from launching Company, a year and a half after its release—I crash-landed to one email from my preschoolers’ teacher, strategizing about some difficulty we’ve been having with emotions at pickup time; then another email from a contractor involving an expensive household plumbing issue.

Authors often talk about feeling depressed after publication ends, and how suddenly there’s a giant void that was once filled with thoughts of the all-important book. One good thing about my life is that there’s not much time to wallow.

I replied to both emails over my morning coffee. Just as I signed off on the latter email, my loudest child hollered good morning from the stairs. I’d been gone a whole day, from his perspective; but—thanks to my creative flight scheduling—not the nearly three days I’d actually been gone. Great! But, I hadn’t started on the school lunches yet. I hugged my kid tightly and then started assessing the groceries, finding that we were out of lunch-ready cheese sticks. (When I am out of town, no one thinks of buying groceries.)

I quartered a few slices of cheddar and stuck those in his lunch instead. I do not think he minded.