Seeing Things Differently

When I started my graduate program at Fairfield University, I had one goal: to finish a novel. It happened faster than I thought it would, and during my second residency, which began exactly 6 years ago today, I remember talking with a good friend of mine named Valerie. We discussed my “updated goals” since I had set my sights on learning how to find a literary agent, now that my novel was done.

“How do you define success?” she asked. “What’s the big dream?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I replied. “I’ll know I’ve made it if you can find my book in the airport.”

I don’t know what it is about the airport specifically. Maybe it’s the idealism that accompanies vacations, that feeling that good things await you wherever you’re going – but somehow, at the time, the notion of someone about to jet set off to some fabulous faraway locale grabbing my book to accompany them on their journey felt more exciting than any other prospect I could think of. (I now realize, all these years later, how incredibly difficult it is to occupy real estate on an airport bookshelf. Very few titles get the honor. Even authors who have established careers and boatloads of sales might not be easy to find at a Hudson News.)

Over the past 6 years, my goals have changed a bit. I’ve tried to conscientiously create a ladder in the wild west publishing landscape, focusing on measurable, attainable goals that I have a decent shot at achieving. I’ve done a pretty good job so far. I’ve managed to keep my cool and maintain perspective even when the grind is grueling, even when life throws monkey wrenches in my plans and even when everything inside of me says it’s time to quit. I wear disappointment like a badge of honor. After all, it is an honor to be able to share my stories with the world, regardless of how well they sell or what people think of them.

To be fair, critics like my work – a lot, in fact. Booklist recently said this of my new novel, One Week Later: “The twists and turns along with heartfelt family relationships and dysfunctions elevate this book to the must-read level.”

But no critic is as loud as the one inside my head.

If you’ve been following me on social media, where I’ve been mostly quiet for the past few months, you might know that I recently had a four-page spread in Cosmopolitan magazine. They printed an excerpt from the book, and it looked absolutely beautiful. I was (and am) really proud of it – this is probably the greatest achievement I’ve had as an author to date.

My parents are aging. My mother is in an assisted living facility now. My father lives in Florida (they’ve been divorced since I was 17) and we are mostly estranged. He called me, back in October, out of the blue. We spoke for almost an hour – he’d heard from my aunt that I had to move my mom out of her home and into the facility, and I guess he was curious about that. He also shared that his wife had recently suffered a heart attack. At the end of the phone call, he said we should try to talk more. He said he would try to be better about being in touch.

I sent him a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine in late November, along with a handwritten letter and my family’s Christmas card.

I never heard back.

Mind you, this is a man who obviously knows how a phone works.

But I know someone else who also lives in Florida, who I did get to speak to recently – my friend Valerie, the one from grad school. She and I connect on Zoom once a month. She’s so excited about my upcoming book that she asked her boss if she could take off from work to drive four hours from Miami to Orlando to visit me on my book tour. “There might not be anyone there,” I warned her. “You might do all that driving for nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” she explained. “I’d get to see you.”

I smiled, acquiescing.

“Do you remember back at Fairfield? You used to say that you wanted your book in the airport, right?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Well, Cosmopolitan magazine is in, like, every airport bookstore in the world – you know that, right?”

She paused as the recognition swept over my face.

“So, technically, your words are in the airport now.”

We should all be so lucky to have a friend like Valerie.