Hello from the other side
I must've posted a thousand times
I’ve slipped the surly bonds of my home state for the first time in 20 months to touch the face of a hotel room, praise be. I’m in NYC for my one (1) in-person book event TONIGHT for BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY. Which, while exciting and the escape is such a relief, it’s all still a lot after a pub week that was also … a lot. I’ve mostly been curled up in my hotel room like a wounded animal but the kind of wounded animal that has food and coffee brought to it. And I’m sleeping every chance I get. I’m a chonky urbane bear, essentially.
Speaking of a lot, I also have a lot of feelings about what putting this book out into the world has been like, what it has felt like, what it has me thinking about in terms of my future, and what I will and won’t write next. But I’m not going to get into that now because I’m still very much in it. It’s like when you’re in the dead middle of some big mind-bending thing like a breakup or quitting your job and you just know you shouldn’t go right out and cut your hair or, you know, write about your feelings on the internet.
So, for now, I’m just going to focus on the task at hand. After an unnervingly silent lead-up to the launch of BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY I was fortunate to get all sorts of coverage for this book from all sorts of different places. I want to make the larger point that all of this coverage — all of it — mattered. I don’t know the numbers or metrics of course but I’d bet that a 3-slide post of quotes from the book by an Instagram account with 6000 followers (but the right, specific, interested and engaged followers) had more of an impact on getting this book in front of people than an excerpt or original piece running in even a major publication. Promoting a book is like that now. Arbitrary. Illogical. Relentless. Anyway!
💥 An excerpt from BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY in The New York Times
Can a Good-Enough Marriage Make for a Great Divorce?
• This is not the title in the book. This essay is adapted from a brief piece called “Nuts and Bolts”. The title that we used for this piece did actually come from me, though (usually the editor writes the headline). I had the title on ice, for an op-ed I was going to write to promote the book, but frankly I could never get traction on what I actually wanted to write. And, also, I think I generally felt burnt out writing anything above and beyond THE 300 PAGES I HAD ALREADY WRITTEN OH MY GOD. Anyway, obviously it’s a provocative title and has triggered a lot of comments which I will absolutely never read.
💥 The NYT Parenting newsletter
Jessica Grosse, a columnist for NYT Parenting included the above piece, along with additional context, in her weekly NYT Parenting newsletter — even making the title of my book the title of the newsletter! I’m grateful to her for highlighting my work. I can’t link to the actual newsletter but you can subscribe to future issues here.
💥 My conversation with Laura Benanti hosted by Book Soup
The pandemic continues to absolutely torpedo book tours and although it sucks to do fewer events the upside is that some of them are recorded! I’m so grateful to Book Soup and the absolutely wonderful Laura Benanti for our conversation! We cover a lot of deeply personal ground, including miscarriage, but also had so many laughs. I love her. I love Book Soup. If you had told me back when I was just a young dirt bag living in LA, browsing in that store and barely able to afford to buy a single book, that this night would one day happen I’d be like good one, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Watch here.
💥 An excerpt from BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY on LitHub
How to Be Married, in 16 Simple and Completely F*cking Unrealistic Steps
This is another case of the title not being the same title as what’s in the book but I STAND BY IT haha (but I did not write it). The title of the piece in the book is “And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?”
💥 A longer interview on VPR’s Vermont Edition with Mikaela Lefrak
Author Kimberly Harrington on marriage, divorce and her complicated relationship with Vermont
I cannot even begin to tell you how much I miss the excellent audio quality (plus obviously the actual experience!) of in-person interviews. I’ve been trying to do my best by creating a little recording booth in my closet but the quality still pretty much sucks. That all aside, I really enjoyed this longer-form chat with one of the new co-hosts of Vermont Edition! This interview also contains a brief reading from one of my favorite essays, “Life is Better on Weed” — it’s a brief snippet I haven’t read or excerpted anywhere else.
💥 Review of BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY on Shelf Awareness
“Though each piece is decidedly personal, the collection feels universal, encouraging all readers — partnered or not, happily or less so — to reexamine the common narratives around marriage and divorce.
If that all sounds a bit heavy, trust Harrington to supply the biting humor she is known for while avoiding any hint of malice toward her former husband, noting that he approved every page. These choices support Harrington's argument that divorce need not be a tragedy, ultimately answering her own question: "Could we want the best for each other even when that 'best' wasn't each other?"
An amicable divorce is not unusual, so why this book? Perhaps because of the couple's unconventional decision to separate formally while continuing to live and parent together, maintaining the family structure for themselves and their children. Harrington navigates the quirks of this arrangement but never gets bogged down in the minutiae of her experience. Instead, she chooses to focus on those questions that weigh on everyone: How did I get here? What do I still have to discover? When is good enough not good enough?”
💥 Mother Tongue magazine
This new magazine has been one of my favorite recent-ish discoveries, be sure to follow them on Instagram so you get word of their next issue! I’m grateful to them for working with me to narrow in on quotes that they found compelling and resulted in getting likes (and follows) from lots of their followers, including Gwyneth Paltrow or as I like to think of that moment — THE CONSCIOUS UNCOUPLING EAGLE HAS LANDED 💀😂
💥 I forgot I made a Spotify playlist.
I put this together after I was done editing BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY, including the songs I had listened to over and over as I was doing my final passes. I can’t actually edit-edit (i.e. solve things with words and/or my brain) while listening to music with lyrics but I loved listening to this playlist when I was doing more mindless tasks like looking for repetitive phrasing throughout the manuscript or confirming details and fact checking, for example. It’s mostly very ‘80s/very early ‘90s and I hope you like it. I find it pairs well with a couple of beers on a Friday afternoon when you might be veering wildly between wanting to celebrate being alive but also staring off into the middle distance wondering what the point of literally anything is haha *cry*
💥 Returning to normal life
Most of all, more than all of this, I’m looking forward to thinking about anything other than this book. I actually got excited the other day when I decided the first thing I’m going to do when I return home is to spend some significant time perusing the shampoo aisle, updating and expanding my family’s pathetic shampoo selection. Because caring about our shampoo choices, like so much else about my life over the past two years, has completely fallen by the wayside. I can’t wait to do all kinds of extra boring mindless shit while listening to the new Adele “not a divorce album”. Ok Adele.
You can buy BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY here (and, yes, I/we know that the Bookshop link is broken. I do not know why the Bookshop link is broken or why they’re not carrying the paperback. I have given up on trying to understand it.) BETTER YET you can buy a SIGNED (or unsigned!) copy of BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY directly from my favorite local bookstore here! You can find my copywriting and creative direction work here. You can find my writing-writing work here. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Instagram. The only place you will find me in real life is TONIGHT at Powerhouse Arena, in conversation with Emily Flake! You can register here. This is my LAST event for BUT YOU SEEMED SO HAPPY 💀