Ann Leary, author of The Good House
Author of The Good House
Well, if you’re in Northwestern, CT tomorrow(8/16), tune into WHDD-FM Radio 91.9 at 2:00 to to hear my interview with bestselling author Jane Green, whose wonderful new book The Beach House is currently on the New York Times best seller list. If you’re not in Connecticut, you can listen to it after it airs, anytime, by going to my radio page here on my website.
Well, if you’re in Northwestern, CT this afternoon, tune into 91.9 WHDD-FM radio at 2:00 to to hear my interview with author Dani Shapiro (Black & White, Family History, Slow Motion). Or, once it airs, you can click on the link above, or on my home page here on my website and listen to it any time.
Dani has an original letter written by Sylvia Plath just a month before she committed suicide, and Dani reads it aloud during the interview. She’s fascinating – Dani, I mean, and she has a lovely voice – so tune in!
So, I’ve been a little busy, these past 24 hours. Yesterday I had three interviews – two in which I was the interviewer for my new radio show, IN HOUSE, and one in which I was being interviewed about my book, Outtakes from a Marriage. I’ve gotten so caught up in this radio thing that I was a little confused when the other radio hosts asked me questions about my book.
“What’s that you say?” I wanted to ask, “Am I to understand that I have written some sort of …book?”
Well, I have completed the first two interviews for my new radio show, In House. How were they? They sucked. The people I interviewed – writer/director Richard LaGravanese and author Dani Shapiro – were great. But I’m no Barbara Walters. My only hope now is to learn how to dub over my sputtering, childish voice with a quieter, more intelligent sounding one.
Have some great interviews lined up so hopefully I’ll improve. I keep repeating the same things over and over in my head. Must listen when the subject of the interview is speaking. Must not speak over subject, nor guffaw and honk and snort while they are speaking. Must remember to turn the microphone ON, instead of allowing subject to spill her heart to dead air.
Just this, today, an Edith Wharton quote:
“I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawingroom, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”
I have done a couple of book signings this past week. Here I am at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca.
And here I am at my favorite bookstore, The Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Connecticut. That’s Fran Keilty, the shop’s owner standing next to me.
I never know what to write in a book I’m inscribing. My instinct/desire is to write something along the lines of: “Thank you so much for buying my book. I hope you like it, I’m really sorry if you don’t. Really, don’t feel like you HAVE to buy it. But if you do, I can’t thank you enough! You’re so nice. I like what you’re wearing. Thanks again. I love you, Ann”
Check out this interview I did with Rebecca Carroll from Paper Magazine last week.
I’ve met quite a few interesting people in the days since my book’s publication date but Rebecca is definitely one of my favorites. We bonded over coffee. We talked about our kids, our moms, our husbands, how fragile we are sometimes, our writing, our New England childhoods. Oh, and we talked about my book a little too. Rebecca is FASCINATING and I hope to get to interview her when she starts promoting the book she has up her sleeve.
In an effort to create a stir about my forthcoming novel, Outtakes From a Marriage, I have spent the last 24 hours cruising around Facebook begging people to be my friends. I’ve turned Facebook inside out on this friends quest and the process has left me exhausted, humiliated, demoralized and with very few new friends.
It all began when my new cyber-friend Doreen Orion told me that she had heard that fellow Authorbytes author Chris Bohjalian (stay with me now), attributed much if his latest novel’s great success to Facebook. This puzzled me. How could my 12 Facebook friends help me sell my book?, I logged onto Facebook and after a little research, I decided that I needed some new friends…fast.
Recently, I attended a book reading and signing at our local independent bookseller, The Hickory Stick Bookshop.
Honor Moore was signing copies of her new book. The Bishop’s Daughter. If you haven’t read it yet, go buy it – it’s my favorite memoir in years. Honor is a poet and the memoir is about her father, a famous Episcopal Bishop who had a secret life. It’s beautiful and loving and riveting as all good memoirs should be. You might have read the excerpt that ran in the The New Yorker a few months ago.
Today I received a review of my book, Outtakes From a Marriage from Publisher’s Weekly, which said that I have “an eye for the comedy of manners of the rich and idle.” Well, thank you very much, PW. Now I’ll turn my eye on some of the less idle, like the participants in this past weekend’s Celebration of Young Writers in Washington, Connecticut. It’s an annual event in which famous actors and writers read the works of students ages 5-18. The readers have included Denis, Frank McCourt, Rose Styron, Mia Farrow, Peter Gallagher, Christine Baranski and many others. The event is a fundraiser for the After School Arts Program. Denis hosts the reading every year.
