bath is so me-coded

home from tour!

Hello friends—

First, some updates/links:

1. Interview and Review in The Telegraph

2. Review in the Daily Mail

3. Review in The Spectator

4. Review in iNews

5. Interview at Hero

6. Interview at The Evening Standard

7. Got reviewed on FRESH AIR, BAYBEEE

The Late Americans is purchasable, now in the UK, wherever books are sold and bought! And I signed lots so please get one.

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I am home from tour. I have been to the western states. I have been to the Midwest. I have been to Canada, to Toronto. I have been to England—to Bath, to Brighton, to Bristol. I have been to London. Now I am home.

I don’t have anything quippy or protectively ironic to say about tour. I just feel a lot of gratitude for the people who came to the events and the people who ran the events in their stores and their venues. I feel gratitude for my team, especially my publicists who made the whole thing run on time and got me from place to place and took care of me so wonderfully. I feel such gratitude for the readers who let my books and my characters into their lives and who spent time reading and engaging with words that I wrote. It just means an awful lot to me. I don’t know that it would have occurred to me that this would be the life I got to live. It still doesn’t occur to me, even in the midst of it happening, it doesn’t occur to me that this is my life. It feels like I’m just filling in for someone. But it’s really wonderful.

This trip was the longest I’ve spent in the UK, specifically London. I still didn’t get to see much of the city as I spent the week being put into and taken out of cars. But toward the end of the trip, I had a couple afternoons, a handful of hours in all, when I could get on the train and take it around to little places. Mainly, I was on the hunt for coffee supplies. I think I caused a little confusion on Twitter last week because people thought that I wanted to know where I could buy a decent cup of coffee that vaguely approximated American coffee. This was not what I wanted. Instead, I was after a drip coffee machine, something cheap I could use in the flat my publisher provided. I was beyond wanting one cup of coffee on the go. I had seen down to the root of the problem and conceived a perfect solution: the only way to get good American coffee in London would be to make it myself in my flat. Just go totally beyond the hunting for a good coffeeshop and skip right to making it with my own human hands.

There’s this store over there that people pointed me to, a kind of big-box department store, called John Lewis. I had to look it up because John Lewis is of course the name of an American civil rights legend and senator. So I always think, no, it must be John Williams, but then I think, no that’s a musician and composer. Anyway, it’s John Lewis and Partners. I went there to find a drip machine. They had an array of espresso machines from the instant ones to the fancier ones used by at-home baristas. Never in my mortal life have I seen so many espresso machines. Europe is simply in another realm of coffee development. They just sort of skipped right on over the whole put the coffee into a strainer of some kind and let it drip down thing. Which, I get. But also, espresso and brewed coffee are different. I didn’t want an espresso. I didn’t want an Americano. I wanted filter coffee. Like something you brew in the morning before work. I didn’t even want a French press. I longed for a perfect, clean cup of coffee. Something clear and sharp. French press is kind of chewy to me these days. I can’t go back. I’ve tasted the sweet release of Chemex and anything else just feels like trying to suck down mud.

There was one drip machine in John Lewis, but the very helpful attendant told me that you could only order it online. You couldn’t get in stores. I asked if I could buy the display model and she said, “Hahaha, no, sorry.” Then I asked if they had scales for weighing coffee, and she said, no, they only sold those with their barista kits and those only came with a machine if you bought one. I asked if they had a Chemex, and she asked me what that was. Now, this is a woman whose job is to sell coffee machines. She sells them as part of a brand rep inside of John Lewis. She spends her days looking at coffee machines. Talking them up. Convincing you to take this one over that one because of steep time and pressure build speed, etc. But she did not know what a chemex was. She had some sense of a pour-over because I asked for pour-over stuff and she said, well, we’ve got the long-neck kettles. Then she said, “You can try a cafetière.”

I thought, okay, might as well. So I went over and looked at the one cafetière they had. I was dubious because it said it had one of those reusable filters and in my experience, those really suck. But man, I was wrong about that. But more on that later. I then spent a lot of time looking for a scoop because well, they don’t really do tablespoons over there. I also needed something to measure water with if I wasn’t going to be able to track down a scale. And the notion of a fluid ounce to these people is…I don’t know, but my sense their measuring implements weren’t going to be totally helpful to me without doing some dimensional analysis. But I am good at that so I wasn’t too worried.

I did manage to track down a scale. But in a flash of intuition that I am forever grateful for, I turned over the display model of the one I wanted and noticed a tiny little screw fastening the battery compartment shut. Now, you might be thinking, why is that a problem? It would not be a problem if I were at home. However, I was staying in a flat provided by my publisher. Do you imagine that there would be a tiny screwdriver in this flat? I have stayed in many rented spaces over the last couple years of book writing and touring. I have a deeply, deeply Protestant sense of when I am doomed to experience an immutable inconvenience. I saw suddenly as vividly as if it were happening before my very eyes that I would take this scale home and not be able to open it and then cut myself when I tried to use a knife to pry it open. I had already experienced something akin to this the night before when I tried to open a coke bottle with a butter knife and cut my fingers on the ridges of the cap and wrenched my shoulder out of joint with the effort. So I put that scale back and turned all of the other display models over, looking for one without a screw. Of course it was the one that is also available in America that didn’t have one. So I bought that one.

Having gotten the coffee stuff home, I set about looking up coffee ratios and doing some math, trying to convert my at-home scheme to London units. I eventually got there, and the cup was very good. Just so clear and good and strong compared to instant, but softer on the nerves than espresso. I also managed to find a canister of Cofffeemate creamer in a Sainsbury’s. And sucralose! I was living high. I was untouchably American in my coffee consumption. I suddenly felt that I was going to make it to the end of the trip after all. Nothing could go wrong!

And nothing did.

While I was in London, I ran out of a medication that my doctor prescribed me some years ago to help with anxiety and my racing pulse. It’s a beta-blocker. But since I’ve switched doctors to New York, and my current office is…well, the doctors are great. But the staff are not the most efficient, let’s say, when it comes to medication. Anyway, I couldn’t get it filled before the trip because of insurance and I couldn’t get it filled in London from the same script because I am not on the NHS, which left me in a bit of a pickle. But then I found an online clinic that would prescribe. I filled out the questionnaire and they said they’d mail it to me shortly. But then, I checked the Royal Mail dispatch and it would take several days. I didn’t have several days. Running around a strange city slightly dehydrated and feeling anxious about the publication of a new novel is not the time to be skipping your beta-blocker.

I found a clinic that specialized in tourists and Americans abroad. So I went there. The clinic was inside of this thing called the Spaces building. It’s like WeWork, but British, I think. It had the standard Scandi-Danish lobby where it’s all gorgeous and modular. There are these beautiful wood accents and nice tile. Everything is comfortable and seemingly pro-social. I love Democratic Socialist Eurozone Minimalism. Upstairs, it was also the usual co-working space. Some sort of Wayfair-style couch, coarse carpet, cheap Democratic Socialist Eurozone minimalist kitchenette in the lobby. The hall was the same long, dim corridor sliced by fluorescent lighting. Doctor’s clinic next to morally dubious startup jobs whose sole function is to corral the excess of white middle class people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-seven before spitting them out into dull corporate work or selling insurance in a strip mall on some outer edge of the city. The doctor was very nice and she gave me a prescription that I could have filled that day.

I took the bus back to the flat where my publicist was waiting to take me to Tate Britain. I had an interview and later a photoshoot for the FT centered on fashion and clothes and the role of clothes in my writing. That afternoon, I had to myself. So I went to the pharmacy up the street from the flat. The pharmacist was rather confused. “She wants you to have…five pills?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m leaving after five days and I just need these until I get home.”

He squinted at me and then left. I wandered around this tiny little pharmacy and looked at all the items they had. I wanted a pair of scissors in order to trim my mustache. I thought hard about buying a set I spotted, but didn’t. Too complicated to pack. He came back with this cute box of pills and I paid and went home.

I had another interview actually after I left the pharmacy. With Barry Pierce, who I have known for a long time. Maybe know is the wrong word. But Back in the day, maybe a decade ago or so, Barry was a YouTuber who specialized in books. He was one of the only people on Booktube who read classic literature. He was a big part of me getting back into Jane Austen, actually. When I was very lonely in Wisconsin, I used to watch his videos. He is now a very astute literary critic and journalist, and I find that very cool and very funny. Anyway, he was interviewing me for Hero magazine, and as I was walking up the street to get a bottle of water, I spotted him walking in the direction of the flat, and I called to him across the street.

 The next day, my publicist and I took the train to…Brighton, I believe it was. For a festival. Brighton is very cool. Perhaps too cool for me. You walk out of the station and it’s just these gorgeous buildings, music streaming from every direction, lads as far as the eye can see. I liked the pace of life there—both fast and slow, light drenching everything, a breeze shooting up the canals of the streets. Seagulls as big as toddlers zipping down and scooting up, their shadows falling across your hands or pavement in front of you. It was just very cool. And very gay. Which is shocking because so much of London was almost oppressively heterosexual. There were straight people…kissing in the streets! I was horrified. I thought, “Is that allowed????”

My favorite part was Bath. The houses tucked among the trees on the rolling hills. The clarity of the air. The lush green of canopy, the deep blue of the sky. The ochre of the stone buildings and the moss framing them. Also the cool of the shade and the slope of the streets. The fountains. The sense of something lifting from the moment you arrive. The sweetness of the grass. And distantly, some roaring alive thing. I felt very tingly to be there. I wanted to stay a long time. I’ll go back. I must go back. Sometimes you arrive in a place and you know you are not done with it and that it is not done with you. Mostly, this feelings has been bad in my life. A sense of a place working on me in some way I don’t like or enjoy. But in Bath, it was a sense mutual intelligibility. Loving and being loved. It reminds me of certain in Iowa City or Madison—long, hot stretches when you step out just as the blue hour is coming on and everything gets cool and hushed, and you feel totally at ease and that you know the place and that the place knows you. There’s sense sometimes that I’ve had in Madison and Iowa City, a sense of a perfect correspondence between the buildings and the people in the streets, the sky and the trees, the lakes of Madison, the dome of the Old Capitol in Iowa City, all of it in perfect correspondence, and you just feel like, goddamn, what a place. That is how I felt in Bath. Goddamn, what a place.

I’m just so grateful for all that has come out of this wacky life choice I made to write books. And also grateful for all of the people who have made it possible and not just possible, but fun. And rewarding and enriching. I’ve been so lucky to have had such a great line-up of interlocutors and panelists. Some of my favorite writers and people. And so many wonderful booksellers and bookshops on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s been a dream, really. It’s just been an awful lot of joy around these parts lately.

Tour phase one, complete. I will be packing my suitcase again because I leave next week for Paris. But in August, I will be at Edinburgh book festival. I am hoping to have written a third of my novel by then. Please pray for me.

B