The fun widows book tour, p.1
The Fun Widow's Book Tour, page 1
Dedication
For my Zoedies
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Praise
Also by Zoe Fishman
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
IT WAS THE SAME DREAM, EVERY TIME. MIA’S husband walked through their front door in his short-sleeve button-down and tie and told her that he was leaving her for someone else.
In the dream, the new girlfriend was pregnant.
Mia watched her, the woman who had replaced her. From a distance, always.
Until last night. The girlfriend was short and pear-shaped, both things that Mia was not. Her hair was dreadlocked. She made her own milk out of nuts and was showing Mia how in her dirty kitchen.
Mia did not care about making milk out of nuts.
They fought.
“How can you live with yourself?” Mia had screamed at her. “He has two sons!”
The girlfriend had volunteered that perhaps she and Mia’s husband could visit and explain. Mia had jumped from the stool she had been perched on and put her hands around the girlfriend’s pale and sweaty neck, her dreads scratching Mia’s wrists.
It had been two years and nine months since her husband had died.
Recently, Mia had decided to try out his side of the bed. This was for two reasons: she was worried that the mattress would become lopsided and also she had gotten an ear-cartilage piercing instead of a tattoo and it really, really hurt. Mia couldn’t sleep on her right side anymore, even though that was the way she had been sleeping her whole forty-three years of life.
She had wanted a tattoo, but after the tattoo lady told Mia that her husband’s handwriting was too small to replicate and that in a few years’ time it would bleed and become illegible, the piercing had seemed like the next best thing. Mia hadn’t anticipated that the piercer would literally be plunging a spear through her ear, however. It had been a far cry from the gun they had used at Claire’s when she was nine.
The pain had been excruciating and shocking. Like childbirth but much, much quicker. Eleven months later, and it still oozed and throbbed.
Her phone alarm sounded, and Mia toggled it to off, blinding herself in the process. Next door, she could hear the soft rustling of her eight-year-old son. Downstairs, the faint whir of her five-year-old’s sound machine as he slept. The coffee machine sighed dramatically from the kitchen as it rumbled to life.
Early morning. Five A.M. Mia’s writing time. Or at least it was supposed to be. She rubbed her eyes and considered the dream. A white woman with dreads, of all things.
She hauled herself up to a seated position, wincing as her bones and joints argued with her decision. Mia could not imagine feeling older, but of course she would. Well, not of course. She understood that now.
She sat on her toilet at an angle because she couldn’t fit otherwise. It was a charming house, their house, but it was old and had belonged to a tiny married couple who had lived inside of it for forty-some-odd years with two angry dogs and an array of spindly cats before Mia and her husband had bought it. Their first house—the worst house in the best neighborhood, as they had been taught to seek.
It had been a year of looking, mostly by Mia with their sons in tow while her husband was at work; her biceps at Linda Hamilton in Terminator level because of the constant toting of their very sturdy younger child in his detachable infant car seat from room to uninspiring room as their older ran through each house, checking closets and longingly admiring toys he was forbidden to touch.
Mia could glean so much about a family from their home while they were out. What was disheartening to her was the fact that no one in the dozens of homes she perused appeared to read. There was not a book to be found, not even on a bedside table, and as an author herself, this was especially painful.
Mia had boxes and boxes of curated books, and she had lugged them from apartment to apartment during her thirteen-year tenure in New York and then from New York to their new rental home in New Jersey in a truck that had arrived one week late, in the dead of summer, when only the mosquitoes moved.
In the spring, three years later, when their beleaguered but loyal real estate agent had led them inside the house they would buy, Mia had grabbed her husband’s hand with her free one and squeezed it. Beyond the Technicolor-painted walls, pet hair–encrusted carpeting, and thimble-size bathrooms, there was a black-and-white-tiled kitchen filled with the very specific love for food and cooking that Mia did not naturally possess but wanted to. They had bought it at a shocking deal for the neighborhood; it had been a miracle, really. And then they had painted the walls a color they both agreed on called “Agreeable Gray” and ripped up the carpeting to reveal beautiful wood floors and moved in.
And then.
Mia grabbed her washcloth now, ran very cold water over it, and then plunged her face inside its folds. She brushed her teeth. She did not look in the mirror. It was cruel what grief did to one’s face, especially the eyes. All of Mia’s tears had taken a toll that creams and concealers could not disguise. But still, she tried.
She slipped her favorite gray sweatshirt from its hanger and zipped it all the way up, pulling its generous hood over her head. A tent of concentration, giant mug of coffee with a glug of half-and-half poured in, her glasses, her laptop. These were her tools.
Don’t pull up your email, don’t pull up your email, don’t pull up your email, you’re supposed to be writing! Mia chanted to herself as she pulled up her email. “Virtual Book Tour,” the subject line read.
Her book, a memoir of her life after losing her husband, would be released into the world today, even though she had finished copy editing the fourth round of rewrites a year before. The time it took for a book to be born was glacial in a world where you could order printer ink at midnight and find it on your doorstep the next morning.
Before a book was a book, it was a galley. A galley was a much cheaper version of the book, printed before final edits were made, and its purpose was to garner reviews from book bloggers who in turn would encourage their voracious reading fans to preorder, all with the goal of turning the book into a bestseller and thus the author into a financial success, because publishing was a business, and businesses needed to make money.
Mia had known this at first in a tangential way, but five books later she knew it in a very personal way. If her books didn’t make money, she didn’t earn out her advance, and if she didn’t earn out her advance, her career was in jeopardy. Best-case scenario was that her next advance would remain the same. Worst case was that there was no next advance; there was no next book. It was a constant roller coaster for her, one tied to her heart.
She was a good writer, but was she good enough? With each book, she climbed another rung of the proverbial ladder to success. And by success, Mia meant two things: she would be able to support her family, and she would debut on the New York Times bestseller list. It was a very long ladder.
Her galley had been mailed all over the country to every book blogger on the block by her publicist’s assistant, who likely was paid less an hour than a Trader Joe’s cashier and lived in Queens with three roommates in a one-bedroom apartment while bartending at night. Authors made no money, but publishing assistants really made no money.
Starting today, and for three weeks thereafter, a different blogger would post their review of Mia’s memoir. This was what they called a tour now, Mia guessed. She had only one in-person reading at her beloved bookstore in town, and Mia had arranged that herself.
This was standard practice, although the general reading public always assumed otherwise. It was part of the facade, created by movies and reality television stars promoting books that they had most certainly not written themselves. They got the book tours because actual humans showed up. And bestselling authors too, the big guns whose names everybody knew—they got them. But the mid-listers like herself? Forget it.
Mia couldn’t blame her publisher, really. Her first book, about a group of women in a yoga class in Brooklyn, had been a smash, and she had somehow wormed her way into a business-class ticket to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where she had been whisked from booze-laden party to booze-laden party and signed copies in a freezing conference hall the size of twenty football fields. None of her book sales since had compared, hence the tour that wasn’t a tour at all. Again.
Mia pulled the strings of her sweatshirt hood tighter, so that now only her glasses and nose were visible.
Books and Dogs; Book Junkie; Book Babe; Rabid Reader; Words and Turds—these were just a few of the blogs with which her memoir’s fate resided.
“Oh, come on, Book Babe, don’t be a Book Bitch,” Mia whispered as she clicked the link. She had been reviewed hundreds of times before, but those reviews were of
They had to be nice, right? The author was a young widow with two sons. She had endured sudden tragedy and still she stood, still she wrote, and wasn’t that something to be praised for? Mia took a deep breath and then she read.
I wanted to like this book, I really did, Book Babe had typed in purple font.
“Oh fuck,” said Mia.
But where was the author? A memoir is supposed to be about the person writing the book, yes? Sure, her to-do lists are hers, but where is her emotional journey? It’s all about keeping her sons happy and tracking their feelings like a sniper, but what about her own? I finished the book with no idea who she was, where she is now, or where she’s going. Bleh. Two out of five stars.
“Fuck you, you fucking fuck,” Mia growled as tears sprang to her eyes.
Book Babe probably had a partner who was alive and maybe one kid, a baby who went down for a two-hour nap after lunch so she could beach-wave her hair. Mia sneered at Book Babe’s photo before slamming her laptop shut.
“He was forty-four and he left for work one morning and never came back,” Mia said to her empty room. “I’m still here. He’s not. His story is my story, you idiot.”
Mia took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The truth was that she knew what Book Babe was saying because she had heard it before, from her editor.
This is a heartbreaking story of loss, her editor had written in her letter, the letter that came as an email attachment three weeks after Mia had turned in the first draft of her memoir. I love the idea and the first thirty pages, but the rest needs some work. In book speak, needs some work meant start over. It was the editorial equivalent of bless your heart.
It was hard to hear start over when Mia had spent thirteen months writing her first draft, but to say that she was surprised would have been a lie. She’d written it right after her husband had died, oscillating from the page to her sons to the horrid business of dismantling his life and then back again. Of course it needed some work.
She had called her agent to commiserate, but her agent had agreed with her editor.
“There’s no you here, Mia,” she had told her. “It’s all about him.”
“Because he is me! That’s the world I’m living in right now,” Mia had replied. “He’s gone and I’m here and I don’t want anyone to forget him. It’s a memoir of not surviving, not a memoir of, like, me being chubby in middle school.”
“You were chubby in middle school?”
Mia had hung up the phone.
She hadn’t changed her memoir’s focus because she hadn’t wanted to—it was the first time in her career that she had stood her ground after dozens of title changes and point-of-view shifts and turning her beloved em dashes into commas over a ten-year span. Mia wanted to write her husband back to life, just for a little bit; she would figure out herself later.
Next door, two size-four boy feet hit the wood floor with a thud, rattling the ceramic vase filled with pencils, pens, a pair of scissors, and a rainbow ruler on Mia’s desk.
“Hi, Mom,” her elder said, shuffling into her room, reminding Mia exactly of Bugs Bunny with his naked stick-legs and long, skinny feet.
His father’s feet.
“Hi, buddy,” said Mia, taking him into her lap even though he was just shy of being too big for it.
Downstairs, her younger hit the ground with a thud of his own and ran to fling open his door.
“Mom!” he yelled from below.
“Morning!” Mia yelled back.
“Did you have a good sleep?” he yelled, taking the stairs loudly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Her elder smiled up at her. His dark hair smelled like roses.
“I did,” she said.
A LOT OF people seemed to think that Mia turned in her manuscript one week and then after a team of Keebler Elves ran it through a giant printer and bound the pages with ribbons of tree sap, it appeared.
That wasn’t how it worked. Every writer seemed to have their own system, but Mia’s went like this: synopsis; outline; and submittal of her official first draft—she had two unofficial drafts that would never see the light of day—to her agent and editor simultaneously. Mia was not a critique-group kind of writer because she didn’t like too many cooks in her kitchen.
After her submission, Mia still had another two rounds of revisions to go until the manuscript was perceived as something people might actually want to read, and then came the line editing, the copy editing, the marketing pitch, the publicity push, the galley, and then and only then: a real-life book.
Back in the olden days, when Mia had a husband to help with their sons and even going back as far as the Mesozoic Age of her career, before she was married and all she had to worry about was herself, it would take Mia around nine or ten months, give or take, to write a book. Her memoir had taken her double that time.
The only way she had been able to do it was with her best girlfriends’ help. She had three of them: Chelsea, Rachel, and George. They were not a package deal; they were from three very different and specific phases of Mia’s life: Chelsea from her childhood in a suburb of Atlanta, Rachel from college in Boston, and George from post-college/early-twenties Manhattan.
Each of them had taken turns coming once a month and banished her to the garage while they entertained, fed, and bathed the dudes—a moniker Rachel had come up with—with limitless patience and affection.
It was the kindest act Mia had ever witnessed, much less been on the receiving end of. She had a father and she had her in-laws, but they had all been and still were grieving too, too filled with sadness to be selfless.
Mia’s mother had died from pancreatic cancer when Mia was thirty-six, which should have prepared Mia for the death of her husband but hadn’t. The difference, and Mia had thought about this a lot, was that she had gotten to say goodbye to her mother. She hadn’t gotten to tell her husband goodbye, to tell him how lucky she had felt to be his wife. He was just gone.
Then again, she had also had to accept the fact that her father had married a woman named Judy less than two years after her mother had died, a woman whom he had met in the fish aisle at Petco.
People said all the time to Mia, You can’t make this up! when she was cognizant enough to tell them about the last ten years of her life and Mia always thought, Yes, you can make it up, but I wouldn’t unless I really hated my protagonist.
During the eighteen months it had taken Mia to write her memoir, her brain had felt like a punching bag: her editor was right; no, Mia was right; Less him and more of you!; No, more him, who cares about you! In the end, her memoir was half prose and half prescription. Mia had wanted it to be called The New Widow’s Guide to the Uncharted Hellscape of Your New Life, but her editor had insisted on New York Minute because Mia and her husband had met on the F train.
The book could never have been about Mia. If she put her husband down on paper, he would never really be gone; that was her thinking, and it was true. But writing it as a single parent had also nearly killed her: exhaustion and grief as a package deal will fuck you up, Mia had learned. She had even gone to the doctor halfway through, thinking she was dying.
“Healthy as a horse,” her doctor had informed her over email when her blood tests had come back.
Mia realized now that she probably should have included that anecdote in the memoir—that would have been a personal detail about her tangential demise—but she hadn’t. And now here she was, reading the very same criticism she’d willfully ignored from the start. It wasn’t a great sign for sales.
Mia sighed and stood up. Time to put the house back in order for the day that had already begun. Morning was a shitshow in their house: soggy cereal and walks to school, kisses on both cheeks from her younger as she said goodbye, breathing finally in the quiet of daybreak. Then back home; coffee at the counter as she begrudgingly read the news: disaster, death, corruption—Oh look, a salmon recipe!; back upstairs to clean out her inbox and then make the beds; do the dishes; plan dinner; scrub the toothpaste from the sink; pay the bills; call the roofer about the crack that never stopped leaking no matter what; retrieve the dudes; drive them to practices; feed and water them; and then, only then: sleep. Her favorite part of the day was closing the blinds.
