Tour Diary (Part 1?): Los Angeles

On the six-hour flight from New York to LA, I read Tania De Rozario’s essay collection Dinner on Monster Island from cover to cover. It’s excellent, using horror films to explore De Rozario’s experience growing up queer in repressively homophobic Singapore, with a fervently religious mother who tried to exorcise the “lesbian demons” from her when she was a child. It’s also a master class in writing about place, examining Singapore from every angle, in ways both deeply personal and highly researched.

I also wrote 800 words for my work-in-progress, the first time I’ve touched it since March. (I’m still keeping the details of the WIP close to the vest for now, but the urge to talk about it is growing as it starts to feel more and more like a real thing. I’m just over 13k words in as of right now… maybe when I get to 20k I’ll feel like I can share a little bit about what it is.)

All of my energy for the last few months has gone toward preparing to launch First Love—writing related essays and sending emails and planning events and feeling anxious about reviews and sales and whether my chronically-in-pain body can handle the physical demands of a tour. I’ve been spinning around in a flurry of anticipation and nerves nonstop, feeling completely scatter-brained (I literally left for the airport in my house slippers! I realized it as the cab pulled away from my building and luckily was able to run back upstairs and change). But then the book came out, I overpacked my giant suitcase, I got on the plane… and I was finally able to stop and be still for a couple of hours. The work was far from over, of course, but for the moment, there was no more planning or preparing to do. I just had to make it to my hotel, and then to my event at Skylight. So I read a whole book and wrote some new words, and it felt great.

I arrived at the swanky hotel in Hollywood that my publisher booked for me, and discovered that they were also covering room service and meals in the hotel restaurant, and I remembered all of a sudden that this trip might be really fun, in addition to being strenuous and exhausting. My body hurts every day even when I’m sleeping in my own bed and doing my little stretches every day and carrying nothing but my phone, wallet, and keys when I go out. I know it’s going to hurt a lot after five flights in 10 days, with two heavy bags. But the question I find myself returning to over and over as I navigate a life with chronic pain came back to me again at the hotel check-in desk: What if I enjoyed myself anyway, even while in pain?

After a collective nine hours of sitting, I needed to move, so I dropped my bags off in my room and immediately left again to take a walk. I turned a corner, and then another corner, and found myself on a street covered in stars… The Walk of Fame is not something I would have sought out myself, suffering from a New Yorker’s aversion to cheesy attractions, but I admit it was fun to happen upon randomly. I even took pictures of a few favs:

Hedy Lamarr, Vincent Price, Nat King Cole, and John Belushi… ideal dinner party?

The next day, with several free hours before my event, I decided to lean in and be a tourist. I went to the Griffith Observatory, and even though it was overcast, the views were stunning. Then I had an amazing lunch in Thai Town.

Honestly, I like LA. I feel like maybe I’m not supposed to say that as a New Yorker—the two cities positioned as opposite poles, coastal metropolis sorting hats for distinctly different types of people. And yes there’s plenty about this city’s schtick that freaks me out (mostly the whole “west coast nice” thing that isn’t even specific to LA, and the car dependence). But I respect a city that mythologizes and idolizes itself so much, and that has to contend with so much mythologizing from the outside, too. LA is the only other US city that holds a candle to New York in that respect, I think. (Don’t come for me New Orleans or Chicago, I know you have character and stories, too.) Coming to LA helps me have a little more softness in my heart for people who come to New York already loaded up on stories about it, so clouded with the mythology that it feels like they can’t see the real place in front of their faces, or the people just trying to live their fucking lives there. (But just a little.) (Yes, it is fun to see places in real life that you recognize from books you’ve read and movies you’ve watched! But it’s also pretty easy to not be an obnoxious bore about it.)

So, smitten with the city and full of Thai food, I arrived at Skylight and saw First Love in the front window—a first for me, across all three books! And the event was everything I could have asked for: the audience was an ideal mix of familiar faces and new ones, Ruth Madievsky was a delightful conversation partner, people asked good questions and bought books.

And now I’m sending this newsletter from the terrible airplane WiFi (let’s see if it actually comes through), en route to San Francisco for an event tonight at Booksmith! And yes my back hurts, but not enough to stop me from being excited to start all over again in another city (and then another one, and then another one).

(I might write more of these along the way, or the travel exhaustion might hit in earnest and send me into survival mode for the remaining stops… we’ll see.)