Paris Past, Michigan Present, Nantucket Forever... and more!
Proposals, meet-ups, bike rides, Camus, and just a pinch of nostalgia
I haven’t done many public events in the past year, so I wanted to make sure and share this book festival / charity fundraiser (benefiting Bluebird Cancer Retreats) for my Great Lakes friends—because we’re going to be in Michigan this Saturday!
Me and Rachel will both be at the Third Coast festival signing books with our friend Erin Craig and a bunch of other authors. so if you’re in the area… stop by and say “hi” :)
I also wanted to check in here because Rachel’s widely and wildly-praised debut novel (Nothing Bad Happens Here) came out this week—I really hope you’ll pick up a copy… and thank you so much if you already have! For everyone in Pittsburgh, Rachel’s book launch party will be at Riverstone Books on Saturday March, 29th at 2pm :)
I don’t think I’ve shared her unboxing video here, and it’s so sweet (and features a cameo by Chaely)—so if you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth the watch :)
This is also the week—many years ago, now—that I proposed to Rachel in the children’s book nook at Shakespeare & Company in Paris!
It’s an easy week to remember because it was St. Patrick’s Day when we landed at Charles de Gaulle and we thought it would be funny to make a pit stop at an extremely French and empty Irish bar to mark the occasion—but I hadn’t realized Rachel’s publication date and our proposal were the same week until I went to the grocery store this Monday and saw everyone wearing green!
That trip was before I’d even thought about writing books for kids—I was writing little poetry chapbooks back then, if you couldn’t tell from the picture. Our friend Jocelyn (who’s on the Harper’s Magazine masthead now, but was a publishing assistant with me at Macmillan at the time) called it our “pouting tour of Paris” because we were with our best man Bat—now Matthew, proprietor of Les Enfants Terribles Haircut Bar in Brooklyn—and doing some pretty solid Criterion Channel cosplay. Except when we booked a bike tour (my favorite thing to do on vacation) and had to wear these reflective yellow vests:
I still think about that bike tour a lot, mostly because riding in circles around the Louvre is all I really want to do—but also because there were two women on that trip who booked the tour without ever having ridden a bike! Which was mind-boggling in the moment, but I appreciate the confidence more and more over time.
Anyway, I don’t want to get too deep into a nostalgia hole.
This is all just to say that this is an auspicious week at Courage HQ, and I’m so proud of Rachel and her new book… and I can’t wait for everyone to read it (the audiobook version has such a good narrator, if you prefer listening)!
If you do, please leave a big ol’ five star review on Amazon or B&N or Goodreads or wherever you see an option for reader feedback. I know you’ve heard that a million times by now, from every author you know, but it does really help! And thank you—thank you—to all our wonderful bookseller and librarian friends for all the support.
Rachel and I were having a celebratory breakfast at a bakery in our neighborhood when we saw this post and caption from our friends at Penguin Bookshop. I didn’t think I was going to cry on Rachel’s pub day, but it’s so much work writing and publishing a book—and to finally see this book in bookstores, to see all the nice reviews and notes coming in after all the late nights and revisions?
“Créer, c’est vivre deux fois / To create is to live twice”—Albert Camus
Hope you all have a wonderful spring!
More about my own books soon :)
Your friend,
