Tehrangeles is Here!

Pub week is upon us (yay/yikes) & I have thoughts

Well, well, well. . .

On Jan 31 I wrote a Substack post that said “Tehrangeles is coming” and now, on the night before my launch, the coming is over! We have arrived! Tehrangeles is quite literally here: there are boxes of books (author copies) in my kitchen, people are seeing it on shelves early in Barnes & Noble bookstores, and tomorrow I have my first event! I got a new haircut, I have a dress I got from TheRealReal, I have ordered a cake, I have invited everyone!

PLEASE COME, NYC! 6:30 McNALLY JACKSON, the stunning Seaport location! (RSVP here, which will help support the ever-lovely McNally Jackson).

And here are the other dates, but please note June 14 and June 21 should be FRIDAYS not Thursdays!

But wow, Substack, that Jan 31 Tehrangeles is Coming era feels like a whole other life. What a winter of loss before this so much spring and now almost-summer. My old dog Cosmo was still alive, just a few days from dying. The dog I now have, Canelo, was born just two days before, on January 29, somehow in the same week as Cosmo’s passing. I want to make a whole post about Canelo the wildchild, a little red mini-poodle/mini-goldendoodle (we aren’t sure which) we rescued last month but the truth is I am still trying to understand him. It’s been just over a month that I picked him up on a street corner in the West Village, from a woman who was fostering him in New Jersey. He was rescued from an Amish puppy mill in Ohio—apparently his rescue involved gunpoint (??!!)—and suddenly he finds himself in Harlem where he is extremely popular with my entire block. And I find myself suddenly in a whirlwind of wee pads, chewed-on everything, baby dog shrieks, nylon dog bones, puppy kongs, and of course, the zoomies of this sentient crouton and his few guiding braincells. He is ridiculously cute, like one of the fried-chicken-looking dogs through he has suddenly after one grooming gone very longboy. We love him so much.

Guess what? I’ve decided to bring him on book tour with me! I already can feel in my bones that this will be a mistake but I have committed to it. I can’t be apart from him. Possibly maybe because I am still grieving Cosmo I want him around always. And so does everyone! His pretty privilege made him a hit at a Catskills hotel we went to see the Northern Lights (we couldn’t see it), it made him extremely welcome at the most fancy boutiques at the Woodbury Common Outlets, it also made him somehow not get kicked out of an ER room for 8 hours (boyfriend had a hand injury that needed stitches—he’s ok!) He has not been refused anywhere. This just stuns me. It helps that he is barely 10 pounds, but I also get the feeling that this guy just has luck on his side.

Anyway, I’ve been doing tons of interviews and I am so extremely exhausted, but I decided to Q+A myself on this eve of my 5th book launch:

So. . .are you nervous?

I am not nervous, and I am a little nervous too. I am not nervous about the book’s performance this week because, well, anything is better than last time when my book came out less that two months after the start of the pandemic (May 2020). I’ve never been a NYT bestselling author so I don’t have that pressure! I am just happy my team is happy and people I love seem to love it, etc. I am just grateful to be alive and healthy and writing after a very hard few years. I have not been on tour since 2018—six years!—as I got very ill during the SICK book tour and had to make some event virtual and then of course the pandemic hit. So compared to all that, what is there to be nervous about?

Well, you can always be nervous about silly things and I am! We announced the tour a bit late, so I am convinced no one is going to come. I had one reading in Berkeley in 2007 where only one of my dad’s friends from his undergrad days in 60s Iran showed up and I am still traumatized by that (there was also one unhoused/homeless person too who ended up walking away after a few sentences). I was once in the audience for a successful writer friend’s reading and it ended up being only me and another friend. What was shocking was that this man had written a bestseller and gotten a huge advance and usually his readings were packed. It was painfully awkward though fine in the end—we all went to dinner instead and I truly have not thought about that moment until now. But just dwelling on it now and that weird smalltalk with my dad’s friend and the all those chairs with no one in them: YIKES. A fear of mine for sure!

But why?! Why is this a fear? I am 46! Who cares?! (“Kim, there’s people that are dying,” Kris Jenner’s voice booms in my ear.) I guess I am just always so close to tipping over into my old traumas, which are not hard to access these days with the rampant Islamophobia that is everywhere. Iran-hating season feels so very back, and with it comes all the feelings I had in the early 80s as a scared kid who barely spoke English, a new refugee in a country that very openly hated us. I didn’t really care about being popular—I knew even then I didn’t stand a chance—I just didn’t want to be unpopular. Especially in that way where everyone notices. And so I guess I still feel this way. Many people say it’s better to be hated than not thought about at all, but I’ll take the latter! I’ve had way too much hate in my life.

Yikes, why do you sound so glum?

It’s not the book stuff honestly. I am gutted for Gaza still. There were four hostages released this weekend which should be great news, period, but then hundreds of Palestinians were killed to do it. These hostages and more could have been released months ago with a ceasefire. The pain in Gaza is with me daily and I don’t think I will get over the images we are seeing and the atrocities we are reading about. And of course, there is so much in the Iran woe arena, some intertwined with this and some not. There is so much that is heartbreaking at the moment. I feel shattered by the news daily.

I also just found out a few days ago that an old beloved grad student of mine died of cancer. I can’t stop thinking about the light she brought to that class, how perfect her life seemed, how effortlessly she wrote, how inscrutable her suffering must have been for so many. I wish I had done more for her, a feeling I always have when people pass away like this. I wish, I wish, I wish, and what does that do.

Also, I’ve recently become extremely plagued by worries about the future. Mine, ours, everything. What’s going to happen? Things seem very bad! What is the plan? Is there one? Or is this because I’ve been with this novel for 13 years and now it’s out of my hands and there is this perfect crater for anxiety to fill with its goo?

Oof, okay, so have you been doing anything to keep it together?

Yes! A whole lot of WNBA (what a season already for Liberty, the amazing rookies, the too-spicy antics on the court of the players!), a lot of puppy time, and a lot of baking (I got into perfecting cookie recipes in a big way these past few months and gave my usual olive oil cakes a rest). I did a ton of writing at VCCA in March and I will have months of residencies in the fall (Civitella, MacDowell!) so I felt okay pausing the writing and diving into my second year of becoming absolutely obsessed with women’s sports. And watching it with a squirmy puppy on my lap is just the most heavenly heaven.

What are your hopes for this book?

An interviewer asked me this and all I said was “I never know how to answer this” but I actually think I do now. . .it always comes back to this: I just want the book to do well enough so I can write more books. The privilege of publishing books! A dream and yet I’ve been doing it somehow. But sadly we are all trapped in a numbers game—and I don’t just mean as Americans, but us authors specifically. Book sales, advance money, royalties, etc—it’s all just a bunch of evil numbers and somehow it’s never good enough.

In the past six months, I lost my editor (she left the publishing house), I lost a couple publicists (one left the publishing house and one got reshuffled), and last week we lost our publisher (she and another top publisher were fired from Knopf Doubleday). Publishing seems in crisis but it’s seemed in crisis since forever. I remember sitting with some famous writer friends of my professor’s at the old iconic literary haunt/bar Elaine’s when I was in my late teens, and they were saying the same things we say today. It was bleak. When has it not been? And yet we are always sure it is a bit bleaker today (it is!)

Anyway, I’ve finished a short story collection that I think is better than all my other books, as well as a draft of a dog memoir whose ending was gifted by the very existence of Canelo. So these Books 6 & 7 will need homes and this autumn with those two residencies ahead of me, I will embark on Book 8. But I don’t think the general public realizes that we are often only as valued as our last book’s sales. Only one book of mine sold well (the memoir Sick) and its sales added up to more than all my other books combined—much more. So I know it can be done with me. But in this world? This moment? This book? Now?

(My last two books were paperback originals, so I feel like $28 is a lot to ask of people. But people seem to love hardcovers? It’s just a weird feeling to think I can barely afford buying my own book. I wish everything was cheaper right now but everything feels so expensive and impossible. Sigh.)

Who knows. At this point just not having anything bad happen is something good happening, to be honest.

This is all to say: Please buy my book, if anything for its great cover and/or just to help me survive! (Lord, I sound pathetic, lol!!!!) If you want, read about the press updates, here and here! (Somehow we got on 20+ Most Anticipated/Best Of lists, wow!) And pleeeeeeeeease come to my book tour! Say hi and hang with the puppy! There will be cake! And nice people (my readers are always the nicest people)! Including Iranians, who I swear are not your enemies! <crying emoji>

As ever thank you and sorry, and sorry and thank you! <3 p