Tour Diary (Part 4): Philly, Providence, and home again

I’m back again with one last tour diary, but first:

ICYMI, I’ve just launched a nine-month Essay Collection Incubator that will include workshops, generative and revision exercises, author visits from some amazing all-star guests, and agent and editor panels. Check it out and apply by July 15!

I also have a bunch of exciting shorter classes coming up this summer, including “Shaping a Narrative Around Questions” for Corporeal Writing, “Telling Shared Stories: Writing About Other People in Memoir,” and a four-week Hybrid Memoir master class for Off Assignment.

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This week, I brought my book about my cousin Sabina to her hometown, Philadelphia. Every time I go to Philly, I feel like I’m on my way to see Sabina. And also like I’m on my way to her funeral.

I know I already wrote one of these about how haunted San Francisco is for me, but bear with me: Philly is haunted too. Most of my memories of Sabina are set in Philadelphia, from years of visiting her there. It’s also where she was murdered. And where my whole family gathered to grieve that summer. I can feel the weight of all of those memories settling onto my shoulders the moment I step into the 30^th Street Station, every time.  

But lately I’ve been trying to remind myself that before it became the place where she was killed, Philadelphia was the hometown that Sabina loved. She wrote a song called “City of Sisterly Love,” all about how much she loved Philly—we listened to it and danced and cried at the bar before the huge outdoor celebration we had in place of a regular funeral. We drank champagne straight from the bottle and forced each other to dance, because that’s what she would have done if she’d been there. (In another intractable association, James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing” is now forever funeral music to me.)

So at my event at Head House Books, where I was in conversation with the brilliant Athena Dixon, I read a short section about one of my most cherished Philadelphia memories—a lazy, peaceful adolescent summer Sabina and I spent there together. I even told the audience that I was doing this on purpose, healing my relationship with the city. And I felt it starting to work, both during the event and after when I had a lovely meal and drinks with some Philly writer friends. We sat outside, under a sky that looked for a moment like it was about to crack open into pouring rain but instead turned into a dramatic pink and purple sunset.

Last week, before Philly, I had two events: One in Providence, at Riffraff, where I was in conversation with the wonderful Courtney Denelle. The bar space at Riffraff gave me the most excellent coffeeshop reading vibes, like from another era. I loved it, and the crowd was great, and if you’re in the area you should go there. (I’m also currently reading Attachments, by Riffraff co-owner Lucas Mann, and it’s everything I look for in an essay collection: formally varied and interesting, intellectually ambitious, emotionally vulnerable. Highly recommend!)

The next day I came back to New York for an event at Book Club Bar, which was special and cool for a few reasons:

1: It would have felt weird and wrong to go through this whole book release season for First Love, a book mostly set in the East Village, with a photo of an East Village fire escape on the cover, without ever doing an event in the East Village. So this was a necessary homecoming.

2: The format was different from your usual book event, where one author reads and is then interviewed by a moderator. This was a joint event for First Love and the rerelease of Chloé Caldwell’s cult classic novella Women. Chloé and I hatched the plan to do an event together after trading advance copies of our books at AWP earlier this year, and rather than one of us serving as moderator for the other, we just got up there and chatted about some of the many parallels between these two very different but oddly similar books: biphobia both internal and external, the fine line between love and codependence, how friends are the ones who will be there for you when shit really hits the wall, the Buzzcocks. It was really fun and I would like to do more events like this.

3: One of my very best friends in the world FLEW ALL THE WAY FROM TEXAS TO SURPRISE ME AT THE EVENT! I was genuinely stunned into stammering disbelief and glee. I have rarely felt more loved. One of my other very best friends in the world was in on the secret, as was my husband, and we all went out to the bar I used to work at after the reading, and stayed out later than I have in literal years because I was just having too much fun to go home, even after a packed travel-event-travel-event week. I kept thinking, See, this is why I wrote a book about how much I love my friends. (Reminder: Grand gestures are not just for romance.)

I have a few more events in the works for the coming months (and will list them here as they’re finalized), but that’s a wrap for the official First Love book tour! I am exhausted and grateful. What a cool thing to get to do for a living.

Tonight I’m switching seats to moderate the launch of my friend Cory Leadbeater’s beautiful memoir about grief and striving and art and his time working for Joan Didion, The Uptown Local, at Word in Jersey City.

And then next up I’m heading to Virginia for the Randolph College MFA residency, where I’m looking forward to the luxury of unpacking my suitcase all the way and staying in one place for more than a night or two.

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Lastly, a request… If you’ve read and liked First Love, please consider taking a moment to leave a review on Amazon. I know Amazon is the devil, but they (and their algorithm) do still sell a lot of books! They use the number of written reviews in combination with the overall star rating to determine which books to recommend to customers, so these really do not need to be super-in depth—even just a sentence about the book can help it find its next readers. Thank you <3