Tunneling Deeper into the Sanctuary of Prayer
Recounting the painful, even frightening, reality of a book tour
A Behind the Scenes look at the rise of Blackbird, turning to prayer rather than partying, and the price an introvert pays to play America’s publishing game.
You’d think it would be heaven to stand at a podium and speak, FINALLY, about your book, your process, and the years it took to bring your creative work to the reading public. And it is…for about ten minutes. Then it feels wrong. Especially with a memoir because you get pummeled with deeply personal and probing questions (which people ask because, well, you wrote a book about your life, what did you expect?), and those questions churn up the pain you haven’t yet processed fully.
Fun times.
It started in Seattle, and Steve and Spencer came along for that first leg, offering moral support. It was hard to feel too gloomy with my boy nearby and being his fabulous self, but then they headed home on the Amtrak, and I was on my own again. The tour took me through the midwest, down south, and finally up the Eastern Seaboard. Interviews during the day, talks, and signings at night. When in front of a mic, I played the part of the sincere memoirist and did my best to be polite and professional.
Question: It must have been sad to lose your mother AND your father.
Answer: Yes. Yes, it was.
Question: How did you remember so many details? I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning!
Answer: I looked at a lot of photographs, talked to many of my living relatives, leaned into memory, and in some cases, took artistic license.
Question: Was the writing cathartic? I mean, do you feel like you’re over the worst of those things that happened to you as a kid?
This last question came up in every public reading and interview, and each time I stood there blinking for a moment and finally stammered out, “Ah. Well. I-ah-um-yeah, I suppose. I guess.” The answer I wanted to give was: “How would I know?” But, of course, I couldn’t say that; at least, I told myself I couldn’t say that. People were looking for answers (another story I told myself…how in the heck would I know why people came to these readings?) Still, I tried to give the answers I thought they wanted.
Praying Instead of Partying
By this time, I had learned something called Liturgy of the Hours, taught to me by a sweet collective of elderly men and women who gathered at the local parish early each morning to pray.
I had been sneaking into church behind them mostly to be in a sacred place without all the fuss of a Mass or being forced to endure some priest yammering on and on about sin. What I wanted…dare I say needed…was to sit quietly before a statue of one of the Marys—The Virgin and/or Magdalene—and gather up some much-needed grace.
In the midst of my sneaking and sitting quietly, the small Liturgy of the Hours collective waved me over and asked a few questions. What was such a young woman doing there so early in the morning? Was I Catholic? Or going through some deep grieving? When I told them I was about to go on a book tour, that I felt way out of my depth, and that I needed to learn how to pray—I mean really pray—they got busy teaching me how.
They gave me this thick book with a pamphlet-sized calendar in the back, and then showed me how to find opening and closing hymns and readings for each day of the week. The whole process was as complex as three-dimensional chess, but I figured it out and held tight to a routine of praying each morning while on tour. I’d sit on the sofa of this hotel room, or the floor of that hotel room, or sometimes convince my tour guide in various cities to take me to a local church (or just walk if one was close to my hotel). It was something steady amidst all the chaos of sleeping in a different bed each night, of being so far from home, and of facing collectives of strangers asking me personal and deeply painful questions.
Most my tour guides (professionals paid by the publisher who escort authors around each city) didn’t know what to make of me. “You want to go to a church?” they would ask incredulous. “Why?”
A few of them were delighted though. Apparently, an extremely famous author had been on tour just before me and had been tearing up hotel room after hotel room and causing general chaos. Drugs. Drink. Strippers.
Not me. I wanted quiet. I wanted prayer. And when I was in front of people, I wanted to do a good job for Kim and everyone at Pocket who had invested so much in me and my book.
New York. Again!
At last, I arrived in New York and the Pocket team took over. They had arranged for Blackbird to have an entire window in the Simon & Schuster lobby, right next to the newly released book, On Writing, by Stephen King.
And the PR ladies acted as my tour guides, getting me to readings and making plans for my appearances and interviews.
Steve flew in to be with me for the biggies: live with Rosie O’Donnell and the taping of my interview and B-roll for the Oprah appearance the following week.
With Steve on the scene now, my prayer life went underground, but I did manage to sneak into the bathroom and do my quiet time there while he snored in our shared bed, and on a few mornings, I hurried over to St. Patrick’s in Midtown. I’m not sure why I didn’t just admit I was praying to him. It’s not like he didn’t know I had been going to church back in Portland, but my fledgling practice was too new, tender, and personal to share. I didn’t want to have to explain what I was doing or why.
Rosie O’Donnell was very nice, slipping into the Green Room just before I went on her show to sit on the sofa and ask a few questions. Mostly she wanted to know about the church I referred to in the book and if I had changed the name…because she suspected it wasn’t what I was calling it, “The Freedom Community Church” but another well-known church. O’Donnell wanted to dish, it seemed, but I played coy. It might be the church she suspected, or not. I really couldn’t say.
She was quite nice. Personable. Generous.
I remember almost nothing of the actual appearance, what she said, or what I said. I do know that she told me that she read the book in a couple of nights. She said she loved it. That it made her cry. And I signed a copy for her before I left.
Gazing Wistfully Into the Distance
Then it was time to meet the producer from Oprah. I remember her name was Mary, which was a good sign, and things were going well enough at first. She was a shorter woman with cropped, dirty blond hair. Thick wasted and wide-bottomed, Mary had a schedule to keep. Mary had a plan. After shaking hands and discussing what she would need, the shoot began in Central Park. Mary wanted me to stroll up and down various tree-lined trails, pausing now and again to gaze wistfully into the distance. These shots were known as B-roll because they would be used as a backdrop for a narrated script read by Ms. Winfrey. A-roll was for video taken where the audio would be used, such as an interview.
The team of photographers, including sound and lighting people, were local and hired for the day. We all worked together easily because I had a background as a reporter and shot this kind of B-roll for various stories I had reported back in the day. I had never been the subject of those stories, which was a little weird, but I knew enough to follow directions and allow the people to get the footage they needed.
Once that was done, we assembled in a hotel lobby for the interview. Mary had a list of questions she would ask, and I would answer them on camera. Later, when back in Chicago, Mary would edit the interview to suit her needs.
Or so I thought.
Amid my first answer to her question, which was something like: “What was it like to lose your mother at such a young age?” Mary stopped me from the answer I was giving and told me to start again.
“I’m sorry. What?” I asked.
“Start again. That’s not a good answer.”
“Oh,” I said. My mind washed into a blank white sheet of paper.
I didn’t even know what I had been saying when she cut me off; it was something like, “Well, it was hard, of course. I was scared and worried…”
Mary turned to the camera person, said something, and then turned to me. She asked the question again, and I started to answer, hesitant though. Confused. Stilted. Once more, Mary cut me off with a chop-like gesture.
“No. No. That’s wrong. Say it like this.” And she told me exactly what to say, but as soon as the words left her mouth, they vanished between us.
I was standing during this interview. My hands were behind my back. My hair was just so. My makeup, too. I wore a snappy outfit approved by Mary. I recall it was a lot of black, perhaps to signify mourning?
As Mary told me precisely what I was supposed to say, I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, looked past the beaming lights and the camera people, and toward the shadows where Steve stood.
He wore a black leather jacket and a button-down shirt with slacks. His glasses reflected the bright lights so that I couldn’t see his eyes. But when I looked over at him, he angled his head slightly as if asking what was wrong.
Everything is wrong, I wanted to say. This is wrong.
“Hello!” Mary said, snapping her fingers in my face. “Let’s go. Come on.”
It went on like this for another five or ten minutes. I tried, I did, but soon I just couldn’t do it.
When I was a reporter, back in the old days when reporting was actually reporting, you would never…not in a million years…feed someone their lines. That’s called acting, not interviewing. It was dishonest, manipulative, and rude. Don’t even get me started on the lack of professionalism. It was simply stunning, and I know because I was stunned at first, then burst into tears. Unable to stand there crying, I raced down the hall, and Steve followed, finding me in the outer lounge of the women’s restroom.
I was crying hard by then, sitting in a chair where I hugged my knees. Here was my answer to the “catharsis” question. Obviously, I was nowhere near over the losses and pain of my childhood. My entire reaction to this tour—giving people what they wanted, the overwhelming terror of the unknown, and allowing myself to be bullied and then overreacting by running away…come on. These were all markers of a life that would require far more examination and pain that would require far more integration.
“Kim is going to kill me,” I managed to finally say, “I’m ruining the most important opportunity of this tour.”
“No. That’s not true,” Steve said, handing me tissues and rubbing my back like I was Spencer.
“Why don’t you go out there and do it for me,” I said.
Steve laughed a deep chuckle sound. “Yeah. I look just like you. I can totally pull that off.”
Sitting back in the chair, I swiped at my nose and thought about that famous author who had been tearing up hotel rooms and drinking her way through her tour. “I need a drink,” I said, finally understanding that woman better.
Steve laughed again. “I’ll get you one after this is over.”
“It’s probably over now,” I said. “Shit. She’ll probably cancel the whole thing and tell Oprah I’m a basket case.”
A tap at the door then, and Mary eased it open. Stepping into the dimly lit space, she looked down at Steve and me sitting there, me with a pile of tissues in my hand, Steve suddenly aware he was in a woman’s bathroom and shifting awkwardly in his chair.
“How about this,” Mary said, opening her hands in supplication. “You say what you want, and I won’t interrupt. I promise.”
It turned out that Mary was trying to save time in her process because she was on a tight schedule that week and had already written her script for the opening segment. She planned to drop my interview into these pre-written spots.
Listening to her explain—this powerful woman who could flip a switch and bring the whole Oprah thing to a screaming halt—I realized she wasn’t a bad person. She was just a busy one. She had no idea it would upset me so much.
I fixed my make-up, returned to the interview, and answered all Mary’s questions as succinctly as possible with all those people standing around with their cameras, lights, and microphones. I wasn’t the same as I had been before. I was stiff, awkward, and nervous, but after a bit, I did manage to relax into the conversation. I can’t remember what I said, not exactly. I remember Steve staying with me, watching the whole thing from the shadows with his hands in his jacket pockets. He would tell me later, over a steak and a bottle of red wine, that I did great. But I worried, as always, and the next morning before he woke, I was out of our hotel and heading to St. Patrick’s. Please help me, I prayed to Mary and all the other saints. Please help me get through this thing. While deep down, I desperately wanted to go home.
Thank you for being with me, for sharing this journey, and for reading and sending your lovely comments.
~ Jennifer, 🙏🏽
(Go directly to the next post on the Blackbird journey now).
Thanks for sharing this story. I was feeling your pain and anxiety. The part where you feel your spiritual practices are so personal you can't even share them with your husband was amazing. I can relate to this, as our private mediations and source of serenity are precious, intimate and perhaps vulnerable when facing judgement from others. Not everyone is an evangelist.
Wow, thank you for so generously sharing your experience. We don't often get to hear about the stressful and uncomfortable parts of book publishing, which I'm sure there are many. Writing our personal stories and sharing them via the printed medium is one thing. Standing up in front of people and being expected to answer personal, vulnerable questions on the spot is quite another!