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Jul
08
Author Joanna Smith Rakoff on Why She Hates Bookstores
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
I had the pleasure of meeting Joanna Smith Rakoff when she visited Fountain Bookstore this spring to promote the paperback release of her novel A Fortunate Age. We chatted over coffee about our shared taste in books, the really bad ones we’d read recently, and her experiences as a debut author, and I’m happy to welcome her today with this guest post about why she hates bookstores. Don’t worry—it’s not quite what you think!
Earlier today, I dashed over to my neighborhood bookshop to pick up a gift. In previous years, this would have been an enjoyable task—there used to be nothing I liked more than browsing in a bookstore for hours and hours—but for the past year or so, since my first novel came out, going to the bookstore—not just my local bookstore, but any bookstore—has become a monumental effort, one which requires either far too much emotional preparation. Because, of course, once one has published a book—or, I presume, many books—every time one sets foot inside a bookstore, one cannot help but wonder if that bookstore carries one’s book.
I should step back here for a second and explain, first, that I’m not a particularly competitive person. I was the proverbial kid picked last for teams and at some point post-Kindergarten I decided that not only did I not care who won at kickball, I didn’t care who won anything. Last April, when my novel first came out, I declined to read any and all reviews, a decision that my editor applauded as healthy, but led my many writer-friends to regard me as either an ersatz saint, a deluded sucker, or, of course, a liar. “You seriously don’t look at your Amazon ranking?” they asked me, over and over. “I haven’t even looked at my Amazon page,” I told them, truthfully. That page, of course, has reviews on it and I wouldn’t want to accidentally read even a word of one.
How, then, to reconcile my semi-psychotic behavior with regard to bookstores, which is to say, if I enter one—as I do fairly regularly, being a person who reads lots of books—and find that they don’t carry my novel, I am inexplicably bereft. Particularly if, as was the case last week, I happen into a store I’ve frequented for years and discover that no, they don’t have it—how could they not know that I’ve given them thousands of dollars over the past two decades!–or if the store is located in one of the neighborhoods in which my novel takes place (don’t they know that all of their customers will surely be fascinated by the setting!).
I suppose if I hadn’t loved bookstores so passionately, if I hadn’t spent my life driving my parents and boyfriends and, eventually, husband and children utterly crazy with my need to stop in every bookstore we passed, to find the used bookstore in any town we visited and, inevitably, emerge with a stack of Everyman’s editions of Faulkner and Dos Passos, and crumbling paperbacks of obscure Muriel Spark novels, and the long-forgotten fictional works of Elia Kazan, if I hadn’t been a person who was once accused, with true venom, of being “born in a bookstore,” and is now regularly dismissed as someone who “would never use a Kindle, if you even know what a Kindle is” (I do!), then maybe I wouldn’t take it as a personal affront when that bookstore I love in Raleigh, even if it is in a strip mall, has just one copy of the novel, or the Barnes and Noble by my parents’ house has declined to stock it.
On the flip side, there’s also my absurd, outsized joy at seeing the novel’s stark black cover on the tables of my beloved neighborhood bookstore—as I did today, thankfully—which I suppose would be slightly less if I weren’t a person for whom nothing is more exciting than rows and rows of unbroken spines below a sign emblazoned with the word “Fiction.” Eventually, I’m hoping, I’ll be able to make it to those stacks without anxiety, without having to come up with a plan of action—“Okay, I’m going to go straight to the kids’ books through stationary, grab a gift for Wyatt, then head directly to the register.” Eventually, I’m hoping, I might even be able to return to the fiction section and simply browse.
Learn more about Joanna Smith Rakoff and A Fortunate Age at her website, and read an excerpt here.
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Fantastic post! I’m intrigued to find out about your book now.
I tend to do the stopping at every bookstore thing, can’t help it, but what my friends don’t realise is it’s not so unique to me, lots of readers do it.
I find I feel miffed when an author I love has no books in the bookstore, and when they’re little-known I want to go to the counter and suggest the shelves are stocked up, but of course you can’t really do that.
I LOVE this post! I, too, am obviously a huge fan of books. Unfortunately, my closest indie store is quite a bit away so I must resort to going to the big box stores. The big box stores only seem to carry books by uber successful and well known authors, but I have trouble finding books by lesser known, yet still very talented, authors. Therefore, as of late I’ve been buying books online. It takes the stress, and the excitement at the same time, out of shopping for books. Yes, I do miss the smell of a bookstore, the experience of shopping for books, but this is outweighed by my desire to find books that I want to read, versus books that a bookstore thinks I want to read.
Jenn’s Bookshelves´s last [type] ..Review- Denial- A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern
Wow, now that is someone with an iron will! I know I would just HAVE to peek at a review somewhere and then take the chance of ruining my day or week. More than once I’ve gone into a Borders or Barnes & Noble and rushed the counter, incensed that they do not carry an OBVIOUSLY brilliant book. I give the bored clerk my two minute speech on why they need to carry it, and what the book is about. I’ll have to put Joanna on my list of missions next time I stop in.
Sandy´s last [type] ..Wordless Wednesday- Yosemite 1
Funny! Love the book store comments – I had never thought about what that must be like for an author!
Great chat!
Sheila (Bookjourney)´s last [type] ..Morning Meanderings…
I loved this post. How true! I found that even when my books were in bookshops, there was still much to be anxious about. Were they (a) just lurking unseen on shelves, or (b) sitting in pride of place on the tables at the front of the store with their covers in full view? The answer, almost always, was (a) when I walked in, and (b) when I walked out. I got quite adept at surreptitiously rearranging the stock when nobody was looking.
Full confession here: http://ahgeorge.com/authors-misbehaving-in-public/
love that cover.
erica´s last [type] ..Goodreads Debut Author Panel
This is something I’ve worried about in my gradual process of becoming an author. Would it turn my bookstore, an oasis of calm and peace, into somekind of unholy den of emotional frustration? I manage to dismiss it for the moment, but there are enough landmines of distress in my life as it is that it gives me pause.
I have to admit though that I don’t think I could exercise the fortitude to avoid reading reviews. Even though I agree that they are nothing more than opinions of single people best left out of consideration when judging the quality and worth of one’s own endeavors. So I applaud you for that.
I would do exactly the same thing! How sad that having such a great event in your life has to ruin something that has been a true pleasure in your life!
Lisa´s last [type] ..The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Great post. I would do the exact same in addition to also checking my Amazon page frequently (and just about anything else I could think of to drive myself absolutely insane). I’m putting A Fortunate Age on my list. Looking forward to reading it.
Juanita´s last [type] ..Prozac Nation