one hundred and seventy-four
martinesque
by manjula martin
that's the amount of dollars i have spent on this email newsletter service in 2024. the last newsletter i sent out was... oh, hi, it was in January, the day my book came out, which was apparently SIX MONTHS ago. hm.
recently a non-writer friend said "what have you been up to lately?" and i said, "oh, still recovering from Book" and she said, "that was like 6 months ago, dude" but what can i say, i'm a slow processor.
this email has been sitting in the draft folder for almost as long, so i'm just gonna click "send". it’s mostly about the experience of promoting my memoir, The Last Fire Season. which you should read or listen to, and also maybe if you’ve read it, you might be so kind as to review it on amazon or goodreads? yes those website are evil but the algo still likes them so we need you to help train it! (hot tip: you don’t have to buy it on amazon to review it there.)
[and if you prefer not to withstand yet another newsletter from yet another author about “My Booook” then scroll down, there are more recent links at the bottom of this letter.]
fyi i was feeling sorta punchy when i wrote this a couple months ago. also just fyi no presidential candidates are mentioned herein. no hot takes here. nor is there mention of the ongoing genocide but that doesn't mean i'm not thinking about it all the time. it just means i’m not sure what to say, anymore.
and now, more numbers!
my book tour, indexed:
events: 20, over about 2 months
events that happened during intense rainstorms: 13. never ever have a book come out in january if you can help it, yeeesh
events or travel plans cancelled or postponed by weather: 4. extreme weather, it’s real!
event partners cancelled due to illness: 2
local tv appearances: 2 (me)
national tv appearances: 1 (the book)
podcasts: oh god who knows
press interviews: same
bestseller lists: 3 (USA Today + a few regional lists = NATIONAL bestseller, baby!)
copies sold: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ more on this below
most people in attendance at an event: 80+ (approx)
least people at an event: 6, 5 of whom i knew personally. it happens. when it happened to me, my partner told me this story about going to see Miranda July in Santa Cruz in the year 2000, and there were like eleven people in the audience, so she invited them all onstage, and they sat on the floor in a circle and talked, and this is the correct way to pivot when no one shows up for your reading.
times my hotel reservation went missing: 1
times i witnessed a truly horrendous car accident when driving to or from an event: 2
mediocre $20 pre-event salads eaten: unknowable multitudes
old friends seen: also multitudes, people are rad
random “fan” emails: i haven’t counted but there have been some of these, which have been lovely and unexpected and truly humbling. if you wrote me a nice email about my book and i never wrote back, i’m sorry, i read it and treasured it and i have it saved in a special folder so i can look at it on bad days.
negative reviews: one (1), which my friend Anna called a "woke-backlash review", thereby introducing that term to my vocabulary. the neg review also happened to be the first one, and it came before pub day, and so i will be forever disproportionally damaged by it, and no i'm not linking.
positive reviews: honestly the rest were all pretty damn good. i especially appreciated these smart ones. i mean, even the bad reviewer dude said the writing was exquisite so that’s kind of amazing.
percentage of press mentions that took the time to note specific moments in the book when i and my partner express dislike of the police and/or fascists: a majority! with few exceptions these mentions seemed to think that not liking fascists and/or the police was a bad thing? haha we're all so screwed
points during the book tour i wailed to my partner, “i don’t want to be PERCEIVED any more!”: 1, what a cliche.
moments when i grumped, “i’m tired of explaining myself! why do people keep asking me questions about my book that could easily be answered by reading the book?!”… nm, let’s move on.
some uncountable things that happened to me on book tour:
a writer i admire gifted me an herbal tea blend that she made
a writer i admire took me birding
a writer i admire said my sentences are excellent (not in that linked article, in real life)
Angela Garbes is my new favorite conversation partner/crush
i got to have a drink with Paul Yamazaki
in Santa Cruz, my hometown, i cried in my car while parked on West Cliff. a time honored tradition; real locals know.
interior, SEA TAC airport, just outside the Sub Pop store: a slender white woman with long blonde hair and an acoustic guitar sings “Wonderwall.” a white man in a shredded American flag tshirt leans against a sign and gazes at her, intent, mouthing the words. she looks a little uncomfortable. i give her $5 and shop around for a bit while keeping tabs on the situation. i do not buy a tshirt with Kurt Cobain’s face wearing bright yellow smiley-face sunglasses for thirty dollars. the musician has it handled, she probably gets this all the time. she’s a pro; she switches to Creedence. an overhead announcement crackles and the creepy fascist dude leaves. i exhale.
whoops i did it again. fascists: i don’t like ‘em!
with a book release, you get two weeks if you’re lucky. two weeks of checking google every morning for your name, and of thinking way too much about yourself and your work. two weeks of feeling lauded and paid attention to if "lucky," above. then the book world moves on. the real world? has bigger problems.
i had more than two weeks. the book did well. i’m proud of it. i don’t know if the book is selling well because i haven’t been asking for numbers lately because what even does that mean. well according to whom? compared to what? i have already made all the money i’m going to make from this thing, which in a way allows me the space to think about other types of success.
so, my non-numeric goals for this book were:
1) for it to resonate with readers i don't know personally, and also for smart people to read it and understand just what i’m trying to do here;
2) to be nominated for an award maybe?; and
3) to do well enough in the magical and unknowable equation of literary publishing (sales + press + popularity contest + critical acclaim + industry perception) that i am able to sell another book and keep doing this.
#1, definitely accomplished, and also by far the best part of it all. #2, not really up to me, publishers do the submitting for these things and oh lord, awards are fraught, but [fingers crossed emoji]. #3, pending the vagaries of The Market but first I have to write a whole 'nother book, i guess? rude.
anyway. let’s talk about OTHER books:
i’ve had the good fortune to have a memoir out at the same time as a lot of brilliant women and nonbinary people, many of whom are thinking about similar issues and working similar themes as i am.
—i reviewed Olivia Laing's new book, which, like mine, is a lot about a garden
—i talked with Emily Raboteau about writing body/climate memoirs and also our gardens, do you sense a theme here
—i read Lauren Markham's lovely new book and you should, too, even though Lauren does not do much gardening in the book (booo!). i love it when i read a peer’s work and it feels like the writer is trying to do similar things as me, although differently executed and of course with different (but not unrelated!) topics. in these books we’re experimenting with form, memory, and the way that chronology works. we’re thinking about our own whiteness and its construction, culpability, and disintegration in the face of history-making events. i suspect that, each in its own way, both our books are the product of an underlying need to tell stories differently, to shape them in ways that are perhaps not perceived as old-school Expert or Journalism because those ways are fake anyway and, well, they’re not working anymore. stay tuned for a Bay Area event with Lauren and I together, this fall at the Mechanics Institute Library, aka the best place left in San Francisco.
—oh, and i was accepted to the Fireline Fellowship! this means i get to watch an old-growth forest recover from wildfire for two years, alongside scientists, and ask them many stupid questions, and then write about it. (if you are an editor who might want me to do that for you… get in touch!)
the flowers, meanwhile, do their thing.
next time i write you, i’ll hopefully be spending less than $100 per newsletter draft, and next time we’ll talk about something that is not My Boooook, i swear. in the meantime…
please stay alive, we need you,
-m.
you're receiving this email because you know me, know my work, or might want to.