*MISS EMILY* USA BOOK TOUR - PICS

I keep a travel journal when I go on trips, so the idea of re-writing all I wrote there here is not appealing. So, as usual, with pressing writing/book launch matters to deal with I will just do a brief photo-n-captions piece for my US book tour.

Firstly, book launch details. All welcome:

My husband came with me as driver (there was no way I was driving on the other side of the road and working for the week). After a knuckle-gripping start, he got into it. I pulled a muscle in my neck the day we left Ireland so was in constant pain for the first five days, which made things a bit stressful. Still, I managed to thoroughly enjoy my events and meeting the booksellers and audiences. The car remained a bit of a trauma - country roads were OK but those interstates, eek! Speeding rock-bedecked trucks, crazy weavy drivers, a dopey sat-nav...anyway, we survived!

I had various radio and TV interviews along the way but I'll link to them later, if I get the chance. Life is hectic and I am jet-lagged out the wazoo. Crazy broken sleep last night.

Our first stop was Mystic, Connecticut, a pretty maritime village on Mystic River. My event there was a meet-the-author lunch in Bank Square Books where we were warmly welcomed by events manager Elissa, owner Annie Philbrick and her dog, Charlie. We had a delicious, chatty lunch and the participants were enthused and friendly. Very enjoyable.

Bank Square Books window

Pre-lunch signing in Mystic

Author lunch in Bank Square Books, Mystic

While in Mystic we went to the aquarium and fell in love with this fella:

Beautiful beluga whale at Mystic

Penguin-gazing

Ice-cream at the aquarium

The jellyfish were amazing

After two nights in Mystic, we headed north again to Boston, where I had a TV interview with the lovely Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon at The Literati Scene. Then we went on to Cambridge, Massachusetts and my reading/event at Harvard Book Store.

Miss Emily on the counter at Harvard Book Store

Mr Harvard himself in the Yard

Hipster fun-poking in Cambridge

I was thrilled that Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness came to my reading

Cambridge is a gorgeous place: great book shops, great food (we had tdf bagels in Crema Café) and, my favourite shop, Anthropologie, where I had a happy browse before we headed west to Palmer, Mass. My friend Suzanne Strempek-Shea very kindly gave us the use of her house for five days.

Our house for five days in Palmer, Mass.

My first event in Western Mass was at Odyssey Booksop in South Hadley, run by the super-inviting Joan Grenier and her team. That was a great event at which some friends turned up: author of the other Miss Emily, Burleigh Mutén, as well as Stas and Cindy Skarzynski and their friend Michele, who have all been so supportive of me since my first research trip to Amherst.

Joan Grenier, owner of Odyssey Bookshop

Signing at Odyssey

Traditionally, visiting author's sign the bog wall at Odyssey Books.
I put an Emily quote, of course :)

I had a very welcome day off (well, I had one radio interview in the morning) on Thursday so we headed to Toys R Us in Springfield (Juno's dream destination) and then to the museum quadrangle, also in Springfield, which was very good. $46 for the three of us for a variety of museums. (Though we are so used to museums being free in Ireland that the entry fee feels wrong to us).

For all you 'Orange is the New Black' fans, it appears
Pennsatucky's ancestors were from Springfield

Communing with Dr Seuss, who was also from Springfield

Museum fun with Junior

The Lorax, Juno and Little Ponies

Friday saw the start of the Emily Dickinson International Society meeting (a mini-conference) and it was great to reconnect with people I met there last year: Jeff Morgan (ED Museum guide), and authors Susan Snively and Burleigh Mutén. There were wonderful plenaries, most especially from the sublime Marta Werner.

We also went to the Beneski Nat Hist Museum to view birds that Emily mentions in her poetry. And Finbar, Juno and I went to Emily's house and took the two-house tour - it was moving to be in that space with them, to see their reactions to Emily's stuff and world.

Juju, Emily and 'pink milk'

Items atop Emily's grave, West Cemetery

West Cemetery

Jonnie Guerra, who moderated Susan Snively's and my event

Juno with Emily's house behind

Susan and I signing after our event, which went off well

Susan reading from The Heart Has Many Doors, her wonderful novel about Emily's love affair with Judge Otis Lord

Kate Wellspring, curator at Beneski Museum shares Emily-related birds with the EDIS group

The meeting was brilliant and my event with Susan Snively on Saturday (which I was very nervous about) went well - a typically warm Western Mass reception to us and our fictions. (Though many people had traveled from other States, as well as France, Japan, the UK etc.)

There is a certain terror in standing in front of Dickinson scholars reading a fictionalised life of our beloved Emily. But they were welcoming, laughed at the right bits and asked good questions. Inevitably someone asked 'Why bother?' but I think I managed to explain my rationale and, anyway, I sort of agree with her. Why do we do these things, indeed?

While I was conferencing, Juno and Daddy went to swim in Puffer's Pond

Last pic: Huge thanks to Finbar for putting up with my neck-and nervousness-related whinging and for driving us all over.

There is a ton more I could say, but let it suffice to thank my PR team in Penguin, Emma and Meredith, for all their work, also my agent Gráinne, and all the lovely people who hosted readings, events, lunches and interviews along the way. It was a total blast to work with you all on this tour. I had a great time!

'The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.' Emily Dickinson

MAYUMI AND THE SEA OF HAPPINESS - REVIEW

I came to the novel Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness via Twitter, which happens more and more these days. I commented on the lovely cover and an on-the-ball PR person offered me a copy to read. I get sent a lot of books, many of them not that interesting, but the premise for this one captivated me: 41 year old librarian has an illicit affair with a 17 year old boy on an island that is probably Martha's Vineyard.

Firstly, I used to work in a library and I adore them; secondly I'm always fascinated by forbidden love; thirdly my friend lives on the Vineyard, on and off, and I'm intrigued by the place. And fourthly, I love both Nabokov's Lolita and Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal, so I was interested to see how author Jennifer Tseng would handle the younger lover scenario in this, her début novel.

Well, Tseng does the cross-generational relationship absolutely beautifully. Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is an accomplished novel of obsession, aloneness, fulfilment and loss; it is also about motherhood, friendship and generosity. And best of all, it is screamingly funny a lot of the time.

Tseng, who has published two award winning poetry collections and is a librarian on the Vineyard, was raised in California by a Chinese immigrant engineer father and a first generation German American microbiologist mother. Her second novel Woo will be based on her father's life. Her début clearly draws in part from her own life and Mayumi, though a literary creation, has all the contrariness of any flesh and blood, perimenopusal woman who is aching with loneliness.

Tseng has managed, like Nabokov, to make a sympathetic, hilarious narrator of Mayumi because her voice is at once self-deprecating, intelligent and contradictory. There is a gorgeous honesty to her and you can't help but love her and follow her into the inexplicable obsession with the unnamed young man. His beauty is what draws her to him initially, and the sex scenes are delicately done, but she soon has a kind of maternal interest in his well-being and is fascinated with every aspect of his - and his mother Violet's - life.

Mayumi is a woman 'distracted by ideas', as the young man points out. She is also slightly unhinged by lust. The balance for her is keeping the affair secret while staying sane living with a neglectful, gnome-carving husband and being the best mother to her daughter Maria. The mother-daughter relationship is delightful and utterly believable - their mutual love sings from the pages.

All of this is woven through with literary references galore - Melville, Shakespeare, Nabokov; as well as lush descriptions of the food the lovers share in their secret woodland cottage: orange infused chocolate, bundt cake, pork ramen (Mayumi is part Japanese). The life of the library and the island both loom large and add richness and depth to Mayumi's comings and goings. Water, sand, woods, snow, heat, cold - everything is sensually and wonderfully described.

If I have niggles they are few, this was a book I would sneak away to read more of - always an excellent sign. The book did feel overly long to me - I would have welcomed more scenes between the lovers and less ruminating from Mayumi. It's a small gripe - the novel is stunning and the dénouement perfect. If you like your narrators wordy, nerdy, funny and lovable, and your sex scenes uncompromising, this is the book for you. You can buy it here.