I fixed the dryer. Let me say this a few other ways in case you didn’t get it. I FIXED the dryer. I fixed the DRYER. I—as in ME—fixed the dryer. It was a thrilling moment in a month that also saw the republication of my first book, The Body Tourist, and the publication of my new book, a collection of twenty years-worth of my Chattanooga Times Free Press columns, called Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs. I’d be hard pressed to say which I felt prouder of, the books or the dryer.
The books required a fanatical level of patience to bring to fruition. I had to first get the rights to The Body Tourist back from the original publisher, who went under two years after publishing my book but continued to collect royalties for three more years. This required a few menacing letters from a lawyer at the Author’s Guild, plus a number of personal entreaties from me that she “do the right thing” so we could both move on with our lives.
After several months of this, she gave me my rights back, and threw in two unexpected gifts: the book’s original set-up files and my back royalties. All that was left for me to do was get a PhD in self-publishing with Amazon in a dead language, then get a second PhD in graphic design using only the portion of my brain not actively engaged in screaming and throwing things, then follow cryptic instructions on how to get my files together with my newly designed book cover, and upload.
Fixing the dryer on the other hand—with its unknowable system of electrical wires and magnets and motherboards and LEDs—required just one trip to Google. For “Why does my dryer keep stopping,” there was a veritable tome of answers, the simplest of which suggested the exhaust vent might be blocked. I conjectured that the exhaust vent was somewhere near the dryer itself, only outside, and so, clad in pajamas and socks and rocking my new PhD in dead languages, I traipsed outside, located the vent, and saw, with rising glee, that it did in fact appear to be blocked. No sooner had I clawed out a thick blanket of dog hair, dead skin cells and lint than the vent exhaled a whoosh of hot, fresh air, after which I went back inside and announced to my husband, who did not know the dryer was broken, that I had fixed the dryer.
A few days after I got my books uploaded to Amazon and the screaming and throwing things had ceased, a friend texted with bad news. There was a typo in the subtitle of The Body Tourist. It read, A Memoir of Hunger and and the Search for Home. Screaming and throwing things resumed.
Back I went, using everything I’d learned about graphic design to fix the cover—meaning I put my photo-shop savvy husband on the job, which I should have done in the first place because those are weeks of my life I will never get back. He fixed it in the time it takes a gnat to die in honey, and I re-uploaded the book to Amazon. Then I sank into a bed of low-level panic while I waited for the actual physical books to make their way from their print-on-demand birth mother to my front door.
Because, in the immediate aftermath of your book leaving your brain and arriving in the physical world where it can enter other people’s brains, there is not, as some might suspect, joy. Instead, there is what I can only imagine is the literary equivalent of empty nest syndrome: that despairing, destabilizing feeling you have when the thing you have created and nurtured at the expense of your youth and sanity marches out of your life to prove itself in the world. If it soars, you soar. If it crashes, you look the other way and pretend you never knew it.
Into the gaping maw of the newly working dryer I fed clothes, sheets, dishrags, dusters, and dog-hair laced blankets, and out it all came, crackling and pristinely dry. It was a moment of profound joy. A few days later my books arrived on my doorstep, looking as if a professional graphic designer and Microsoft Word had gotten together and had a perfect baby. It was a moment of tremendous satisfaction.
Which is all to say it’s been a big February, and don’t know how in the world March is going to top it.