Read This Post! (Even though it's a tad long.)

Tuesday night, Dan and I went to a book discussion and signing of rising author Stephen Markley’s first published work, a memoir, titled Publish This Book The Unbelievable True Story of How I Wrote, Sold, and Published This Very Book. (Yeah, a book discussion; we’re pretty cultured. I even ordered a decaf skim latte when we went out afterwards and if you can order a coffee using three words that aren’t actually coffee, you’re probably smarter than most people you know.)

I describe Markley, 26, as rising because, though this is the first book he's published and it’s not exactly flying off shelves, I’ve no doubt that everyone will know this guy’s name within the next five years or so. But, while I have no doubt about this, sitting where I am in my naivete-stuffed easy chair regarding the icky world of publishing and book-selling, Markley does have doubts, having gotten some of that ick on his face along the way. In fact, Markley seemed so discouraged by the process that, had I not stayed up Tuesday night after the signing getting utterly inspired by the first 50 pages of his book, I might have lit my desk on fire the next morning.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or behind. Time can feel a bit convoluted when talking about Publish This Book, a story which recounts Markley’s experience trying to get the very book he is writing about trying to get it published, published. You follow? From what I can tell from Markley’s explanation at the reading and the first 50 pages, this quest serves as the spine of the near 500-page memoir which explores where the writer’s burn comes from to be a “real” writer and in a broader sense speaks to the nebulous nature of the period in life when you are no longer a college student but not quite a “real” adult. (Also, there’s whatever is in the other 450 pages.)

While I obviously haven’t yet formed an opinion on the whole work, I can tell you that I’ve been laughing my ass off and totally blown away by Markley’s writing. (For you detail sticklers, my ass was off before the rest of me went flying.) The funny is so funny. And smart, too (though the dick jokes are ample. The guy writes dirtier than me...I’m quite smitten.). The following is an excerpt of the excerpt Markley read Tuesday night:

Let me stop this scintillating narrative right here to explain that I don’t like taking notes or recording the people I interview or really even listening to what any of my idiot friends have to say, so just consider all dialogue in this book to be an approximate representation of what was actually stated---the gist---and I apologize profusely if I slander anyone by wildly misrepresenting what he or she said. For instance, if my friend Kdoe actually said to me, “Steve, I think your book idea is intriguing but a bit unwieldy,” yet I quote him as saying, “Steve, I hate Chinese people,” I would certainly say I’m sorry, but that’s the way the kitten bathes and shaves, so sue me (actually, I’m told by my lawyers that a lawsuit is a strong possibility, and by “lawyers” I mean, “this guy Phil, who’s planning on going to law school”).

I mean, right? Funny shit. This is actually one of the footnotes from the memoir as Markley is an avid footnoter (footernote?), employing them throughout the book for hilarious jokes and digressions. (Others utilize and perhaps overuse the parenthetical aside.) (Way too much.) (And overusing something way too much is redundant.) (And screws with the flow of things.) (Which is why Markley said he uses footnotes, in fact.)

When he started off the reading by asking the book store manager if it was okay that he use profanity, I had a sense that I’d like the guy. And then when he read a passage where, in an instance in which he admits to not “quoting as faithfully as I should” he recalls a conversation in which his ex-girlfriend says, “why don’t you just relax and let me strip you naked, so I can shove your enormous, throbbing manlove inside me...” I knew I was going home with the book. Actually, as my laugh was the only one to pierce the silence at this particular part, I felt like I was watching the Ghost of Book Tour Future as I’m fairly certain (unless I change my sinful ways) that my future will in some capacity have me making cock jokes to a near-silent nine-person audience.

Despite the laughs, however, Markley’s description of his experience so far as a published author did, at times, make me want to vomit quietly into my purse. Now that he has done it, that is, gotten his first book published and embarked on a book tour, he admits to being slightly discouraged that he’s not the rich and famous guy he expected to immediately become upon achieving such a feat. It’s a reality he’s come to accept and he laughs at the current state of things. Having quit his job writing for Cars.com (though he still works as a freelance columnist for RedEye, a Chicago commuter paper), he is currently unemployed and has everything he owns in the backseat of his car which he has been driving from city to city (Tuesday Portsmouth, Wednesday Boston and NYC today). This isn’t the part that stressed me out. (I’ve heard many of my favorite authors recount similar disappointments regarding the misguided belief that getting your work published will solve all your struggles with money, validation, hookers, etc. (This is why I keep an index card with the following quote, pulled from Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life---and I think she was quoting 1993 Oscar darling Cool Runnings when she said it---, taped above my desk: “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”) Nope, all Markley’s talk about the hard work and rejection involved with, what he calls, “the existential dilemma of struggling to publish” didn’t phase me.

It was the process of selling his book that so unnerved me. He likened it to hawking a toaster. His memoir, two years of his life, his love and mind and time poured into it; a toaster. He said that he’s found that about sixty percent of the process since having his memoir published has been trying to sell it. Ugh. At one point he described a conversation he had with an author whose latest work has brought him much popularity and the monetary perks that come with it. (Totally forgot who the writer was...my bad.) When Markley asked him how this latest book was different than others the writer had previously published, which hadn’t been nearly as successful, the writer said that not only was he going all out with his publicity tour for this latest work but he has also been sticking to the canned answers he and his publicist had come up with and literally saying the same thing at every book discussion or interview he attends. And the book is selling. That story was a depressing head-shaker for me.

It was, in fact, Markley’s off-the-cuff reflections and candidness that made this book discussion unlike any I had attended and also what ultimately got me to buy the book. (Plus, the dick jokes.) Because there were so few of us there (and three of the nine were writers), it allowed for a really intimate and open conversation about the frustrations and heartbreaks that come with, as Markley put it, trying to make money from creativity. “How many writers have gotten 700 rejection letters and then just quit and died?” he joked, expressing his irritation at the less-than-reassuring sentiment commonly offered the young writer that John Grisham, Stephen King, or any other famous author had a stack of rejection letters before their work caught on. And when the mother of a teenager who attended the reading with her parents, asked on her daughter's behalf for advice for young writers, he responded, “Develop a very manageable drinking problem.” He was actually speaking here to the importance of networking (as he’s had many enlightening conversations over cocktails even after some of these very readings) and not to the importance of finding a suitable numbing agent, but I’m sure in 20 years that teen won’t remember it quite that way.

For all his jokes and demeanor as a sports-loving everyman, Markley is not the the frat boy one might initially take him to be. His real love is fiction and after meeting upon rejection for his first novel which he wrote during college, he took the next year to drive around the country and pen a memoir of that experience. The guy is clearly intelligent and clearly passionate about writing. (This, combined with the fact that he’s attractive, had us figuring that the aforementioned teenager probably wanted to kill herself when her parents were asking for pointers for her fantasy fiction writing career.) And it’s obvious (and also mentioned in his book) that he was seen as something of a writing prodigy, particularly in his college years. So to balance out his vast talent (according to Markley, even his publisher expected that he would be “the next big thing” or the next Dave Eggers), apparently God is making him sweat it out.

And while he acknowledges that this is just the way it goes, he’s honest about his yen for the kind of validation that comes with having his work received on a massive scale and the compensation that comes with it. (Am I making him sound like a douche? Because I’m pretty sure he’s not. He’s just honest about his ambition and doesn’t seem to do the false modesty thing, which I respect.) He even said during the discussion that he doesn’t dig self-publishing because the point, for him, is to get that validation from others. I completely understand this position and would be lying if I said I don’t want that for my work (and by “my work” I’m copping out on saying “myself”) but I simply can’t live a life of stalking that kind of validation without prescription drugs, so I had to evaluate and broaden my goals a long time ago. This isn’t to say that I don’t want to achieve what Markley refers to as the literary trifecta: New York Times Best-Seller, movie adaptation, and, of course, Oprah. (But then we all know that I would develop a weight problem, amass giant debt and leave Dan for a woman---The Oprah trifecta?---if it meant face time with my O.)

Still, Markley’s drive is something to be admired. I feel glad to have gotten the chance to have such an easy question and answer period with the guy. Apparently, he also enjoyed it because the status on his Publish This Book Facebook page after the reading was, “Had one of my favorite discussion/signings yet at Riverrun Bookstore in Portsmouth tonight... None of them wanted to drink afterward, though, so hotel room and eating chicken ceaser pita off my stomach it is!”

Markley had mentioned during the reading that if anyone wanted to grab a drink after he’d be into it and I felt a pang of regret about not heading out for a beer with him as I’m sure it would have been a fun, interesting time. Weird though. It might have been weird. I’m a little hazy on the rules of etiquette in that scenario. (Do I bring up the threesome or is that really more Dan’s role?)

Drinks or no, it was a cool experience and, as a memoir lover, I’m psyched to dig further into one of the freshest, funniest books I’ve come across in a while. (I needed a break from all the poverty and incest anyway.) Indeed, I feel like I’ve come across a writer who is likely to become a favorite. (This, after one tenth...hopefully the other 450 pages don’t suck.) At the start of the book signing, with so few people in attendance, I felt the sort of panicked edginess that comes over me when I want something to go well for someone and am worried that it won’t. (Codependent much?) But by the discussion’s end I understood that Stephen Markley doesn’t need me worrying about him and, with the writing career that I'm betting he'll have, he's got nothing to worry about either. (Except for maybe the creepy fandom of a horny married lady.)