The funny thing is I didn’t realize what book this was, really, until I was waiting for my train home from the book fest thing. In my head I called it ‘a first edition Lorrie Moore’ which I know makes me sound kind of pretentious (and lol-worthy because it is from um, 1986), but still, I was kind of too overwhelmed to really read the title until I was gone from everything and down on the train platform thinking about the day and looking at the book and reading the cover and thought, Oh shit.
ANYWAY so today was the Brooklyn Book Festival. I got there and was in that special kind of indecisive limbo where you wander aimlessly, stopping every few minutes to consult your Festival Schedule and study it and memorize what you want to see but then every panel starts before you look at your watch and by the time you stare at your Festival Schedule enough times, wandering through booths and feeling happy and excited to see all of these names you recognize—The Paris Review, WORD bookstore—filled with people you probably now in some way or another, you still don’t stop. You don’t want to talk to anyone, you’re just glad they’re there. You consult your schedule and are sure you are failing at the book festival so you go sit down and gather your focus and go into some building and find the bathroom and then go through double doors in the middle of a reading and it’s hot and awful and filled with insane Brooklyn old people and you feel faint and spend 10 minutes wondering just how rude it would be to leave in the middle of it, because you thought Sam Lipsyte was on the panel but he isn’t and none of these people are compelling and panels are the worst and maybe even readings are the worst and this guy is like, the usher for this thing and I hope he doesn’t judge me because I am going to leave and never look back and never go to a panel again.
And then I left and I wandered more and wondered if it was too late to see Lipsyte, surely it was too late, and I wondered if I should live in this neighborhood because it seemed quaint, it seemed like the kind of place I would have wanted to live before I moved here.
I wandered the booths looking for the Kickstarter booth and couldn’t find it anywhere, feeling like surely there was a great panel I was missing but when I consulted the Festival Schedule I only saw things I didn’t care about. Good, what a relief, to not feel like i was missing anything. I looked at booth numbers and names and felt happy they were all there but where were my people and then I saw Rachel at Housing Works’ booth and I yelled hi and did she know where Kickstarter’s booth was? And she yelled LAST CHANCE TO JOIN THE RAFFLE, or something like that, to a lot of people, TO WIN A LORRIE MOORE BOOK she continued and I perked up a bit and she pointed to me and said YOU. YOU LIKE LORRIE MOORE and I said yes, what is this? And a guy next to me with a blond beard said, MY GIRLFRIEND LOVES LORRIE MOORE, I WILL ENTER FOR HER. And I thought, You and what army? Just kidding, I just took a red ticket and Rachel said she was sure I was already on the mailing list and I thought, Of course I am, but later realized I was not, so um, Rachel? Feel free to add me to the mailing list.
Anyway so she told me where the booth was and I nodded and someone came up and was all, DO YOU NEED TO BE HERE TO WIN? And Rachel or her fellow boothmate said, no, you didn’t, but you needed to be on the mailing list, but the 3 or 4 of us stood there anyways and then she drew my number and I very quietly said ME and the blond bearded gave me a high five but then I felt guilty, like his girl friend might be let down, but this was no time for martyrdom and Rachel swore she didn’t do it on purpose—draw my name, that is—and I was kind of in shock, because I am also one of those people who thinks, “Oh, I never win anything,” although I try not to say that because no one is walking around saying, “Oh, I always win everything,” except maybe Rhonda Byrne, the “inventor” (lol) of the Secret. Ha! So anyways I took the book and squealed and jumped around for good measure then ran off to the booth, where people bought our book from us, and where we stood in the rain, and where I let people look at the book and ask Yancey or Ted about it. Like, they’d say, “Oh so these girls wanted to make their book so they raised money on Kickstarter and?” and then I’d pipe up, “Oh, ha yeah, that’s me,” and they’d be like, “Oh, oh. Hahah. Hi, I didn’t know!” And then I’d say, “Ha, good thing you didn’t say anything bad!” and they’d look at me like I am crazy and a bad salesman. All true.
Anyway so this is a First Edition of Anagrams.
It was the only Lorrie Moore book I didn’t have, because Halle lent it to me the first year we lived in New York, and it is the book my blog is named after.
So fuck that guy and his girlfriend.
