I Wrote A Book

About eight years ago, my husband and I redid the kitchen in our apartment. Our apartment is not the biggest, and our kitchen is similarly minuscule, and you’d think that this would make a renovation manageable but it did not. If anything, it just served to emphasize how much work needed to be done. Every nail in the floor that needed to be pulled; every warped layer of drywall to saw through; every floorboard that needed to be repaired was a gargantuan undertaking, because there was literally no room for it to be lost in. We spent Saturdays and late nights on our knees with nail-pulls, and then on ladders with sanders, and then on our knees again with sanders, then getting exuberant with sledgehammers. We became experts at microwave cooking; I had vivid, yearning dreams about washing dishes in a sink.

We finished and began moving back into the kitchen the dishes, the food, the microwave, the old coffeemaker which was on its last legs, the new coffee grinder because we killed the old one making deathwish-strength espresso to power through late nights. And once it was all put back together, we were so exhausted and sick of being in the kitchen that we ordered pizza and ate it on the couch. Then we did it again. We had a new kitchen and were absolutely done with kitchens.

But one morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to make my morning cup of deathwish and was literally stopped short, because for the first time in months, I really noticed how much we had done on the kitchen, and it was all great. It all struck me at once, and I wandered in a (very tight) circle, admiring drawer pulls, the counter, the double-sink, the sink sprayer. When my husband came in to get some coffee, he found his very happy and slightly deranged wife standing in the middle of the room, beaming. “I love this kitchen!” I chirped. “Look at it! Look at everything we did!”

Guys: look! Look at it! Look at everything I did:

This is my book: now called Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, it’s available for (frickin’) preorder (YOU GUYS) at several different places, even! Order it from Penguin Random House here, or, if you’d prefer, get it at Amazon, B&N, IndieBound, or iBooks. Word by Word will be released on March 14, 2017, and that is still the most surreal sentence I will ever write in my tiny, narrow life.

I’m sure you have questions. For instance, now that I am an authoress, will I abandon the blog and go hang out with Raymond Carver’s ghost instead? No. I find, after a long break, that I still have words and thoughts on words left over. You can expect me to blather in your general direction with more regularity.

What about book signings? Will I autograph copies? Where am I reading? Is there a launch party and will you be invited? IS YOUR NAME IN THE BOOK, OMG OMG OMG? Those are all excellent questions, but I am not going to answer them here on my blog. Let’s be honest: you come here for the witty commentary on what a gorgeous bastard English is, not for me to go over all Jonathan Franzen on you. So I have started up a newsletter, where you can get information about my book: where I’ll be reading from it, where I’ll be signing it, which bookstores I’ve left vandalized secretly autographed copies of that dumb book in, and all the public places you may accost me for a selfie or signed copy of the book. My newsletter will include all the best words, I guarantee it. Please sign up! Yes, even you, Kevin.

Thank you all for hanging in there through the radio silence. This is going to be fun.

 

 

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