Hello again from book tour hell. Remember my birthday when I was stuck in the airport in Chicago? Well, at least the airport here in Toronto is much nicer than O’Hare. But I’m stuck again in an air travel nightmare. My flight this morning back to New York was cancelled due to weather and I’m now scheduled to depart at 4:15 - if that flight too is not cancelled. I even had to come all the way back through customs to re-book a later flight and have to make my way back through security and customs a third time to get back to a gate if the later flight takes off. I have a sinking feeling that it won’t and I will be spending another night in Toronto. I keep trying to breath and not stress out and remember how lovely the last day was in Miami at the end of my three-week leg of the tour before taking two days back home in Manhattan to re-bond with my dog, Archie. When I last posted I was about to walk along the beach in Miami. It was just what I needed - and I need it again right about now up here in cold, rainy stormy Canada. Later in Miami I went to a concert by the New World Symphony on Lincoln Road, the orchestra made up of recent graduates of musical schools across the country which Michael Tilson Thomas directs. I wrote Mississippi Sissy while listening to many of Bach’s adagios. Every word of the book, in fact, was written with Bach filling my ears from my iPod. I suggest maybe playing a bit of Bach while you’re reading the book if you haven’t already. So as the long three-week leg of the tour for the book came to an end in Miami it seemed only fitting that I found myself sitting at the New World concert hall on Lincoln Road - where I sat so often when I had a condo down there - and listening to classical music. They performed beautiful renditions of Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, an adagio by Brahms, and Richard Strauss’s suite from Der Rosenkavalier. They also played a composition by one of their own violin fellows, Piotr Szewcyk. It was his graduation piece from the University of Cincinnati and won the composition competition there. It was titled - yet another heightened coincidence considering that I was winding down a tour I was on to promote a memoir - Transposed Memories. I keep trying to hear all those melodies I heard on my last night in Miami again in my head - an inchoate ache instead is beginning to make itself known around my sinus region - as I sit here in the Toronto airport and attempt to remain calm at being stuck yet again on the road. (I left my iPod at home.) I also keep thinking about Archie that first night back in New York a couple of days ago now when I slept like a baby as he curled up next to my stomach under the sheet. Just the thought of him curling up next to me can calm me a bit. I know that sounds corny and too asininely caninely of me, but humor me. It’s been a rough day so far. I had to board Archie yet again to come up here and now he might be spending another night at the kennel, his own version of the Westin I fear I’ll l be heading back to in a few hours.

I arrived in Toronto yesterday to do a reading at the International Readings series at Harbourfront Centre. Last week Lionel Shriver read from her new novel, THe Post-Birthday World. Others who have read at the Harbourfront Centre series over the years have included John Banville, Maeve Binchy, J.P. Donleavy, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Amoz Oz, Umberto Eco, Oriana Fallaci, Hikaru Okuizuma, J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Orphan Pamuk, Martin Amis, Alan Ayckborn, J. G. Ballard, Clive Barker, Howard Barker, Julian Barnes, Alan Bennet, William Boyd, Howard Brenton, Anthony Burgess, A. S. Byatt, Bruce Chatwin, Antonia Fraser, Michael Frayn, Simon Gray, Thom Gunn, David Hare, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, P.D. James, Pico Iyer, John le Carre, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Jan Morris, Harold Pinter, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Edward Albee, John Ashberry, Hilton Als, Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, Saul Bellow, John Berendt, Amy Bloom, Robert Bly, T.C. Boyle, Harold Brodsky, Josef Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Mae Brown, James Lee Burke, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Pat Conroy, Michael Cunningham, Don DeLillo, James Dickey, E.L. Doctorow, John Gregory Dunne, Deborah Eisenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, Lousie Erdich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Mary Gaitskill, Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Gilchrist, Allen Ginsberg, Nikki Giovanni, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Spalding Gray, Barry Hannah, Beth Henley, Patricia Highsmith, Christopher Hitchens, Alice Hoffman, Richard Howard, John Irving, Bret Anthony Johnston, Edward P. Jones, Erica Jong, William Kennedy, Ken Kesey, Jamaica Kinkaid, John Lahr, David Leavitt, Fran Lebowitz, Elmore Leonard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Peter Matheissen, Mary McCarthy, Joseph Elroy, Jay McInerny, Larry McMurtry, Terrence McNally, Daphne Merkin, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Arthur Miller, Sue Miler, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Minot, Toni Morrison, Howard Moss, Walter Mosley, Gloria Naylor, Tim O’Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Camille Paglia, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jodi Picoult, Marge Piercy, David Plante, George Plimpton, Richard Price, Annie Prouix, James Purdy, Ishmael Reed, Adrienne Rich, Tom Robbins, Norman Rush, John Sayles, Wallace Shawn, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, Robert Stone, William Styron, Gay Talese, Amy Tan, Peter Taylor, David Foster Wallace, Alice Walker, Edmund White, Colson Whitehead, John Edgar Wideman, Joy Williams,, Meg Wolitzer, Tom Wolfe, and me.

Putting “and me” at the end of such a litany …. well… floors me. I have always had a bit of an inferiority complex about my abilities as a writer since I became known for writing celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair. Getting an invitation from Harbourside meant a lot to me. And the writers with whom I shared the stage were exceptional. The lyrical award-winning Irish novelist Colum McCann (nice guy) read from Zoli, his haunting tale of exile and survival based on the Romani poet Papsuza. Brit Howard Jacobson read - brilliantly - from his brilliant Kalooki Nights, which spans the decades between WWII and the present day as told from the perspective of Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist. I’ll go read every book ever written by Jacobson now that I’ve finally discovered him. I whispered that to him when he sat back down next to me after he read. Howard has been called the funniest writer in Britian and The Independent said that Kalooki Nights is “a masterpiece.” Judging from what he read last night, I’d be prone to agree. Howard has called himself “the Jewish Jane Austen.” But I think he’s more like the son she would have had if Philip Roth had fucked her. And first time Amercian novelist Phil LaMarche read from the opening of his acclaimed new book American Boy which tells the story of a southern New England teenager who is confronted by a moral dilemma following a firearms accident. When Phil sat down next to me at the dinner beforehand, I have to admit I had an instant crush on him. Maybe we bonded because we were the “new boys” in the group since we each were promoting our first books. Phil teaches creative writing at Syracuse and just got married to the womens volleyball coach. He was a wrestler in high school but also, he claims, a sensitive type who loved reading and was often ridiculed as “the pansy.” I can’t imagine that, but I trust him. He told me after I read from Mississippi Sissy - I was given the honorary clean-up slot of fourth after the other three had read, which I found flattering considering the esteemed company I was in - that he was very moved by my excerpt. “I was considered the jock when I got to graduate school for creative writing. But in high school I was the one ridiculed. I can’t wait to read your book.” I can’t wait to read his too. Google his name and you’ll see what a lucky woman that volleyball coach is. Then go buy his book. I plan to. Phil seemed as sweet as he obviously is talented - and, yes, he’s really, really sexy. That’s the trifecta.

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