As I’ve said in other places, getting published is like being visible and invisible at the same time. Today, March 1st, 2014, is the absolutely, positively official launch date of my memoir, Catholic by Choice. It’s been a long road. We’ll see where it takes me. I keep in mind the same invisible visibility of any book, and I remember a passage in the memoir where I talk about being a new author:
Then my first book, The Glass Children, was accepted by a university press. When it came out, I expected the traffic in Manhattan to stop, people reading my book on every street corner, millions staying home from work to savor every line. Congratulations would pour in, and the telephone would start ringing constantly as a grateful and astonished world beat a path to my door.
As it was, the book was reviewed twice, then disappeared from the face of the earth. Like many other less-than-best-selling authors, I wanted to put the cover on milk cartons: “Have You Seen This Book?”
Looking back, I can smile. That book was poetry, and as we all know, nobody reads poetry. (More about that later. I, too, can’t stand it.) Still, I was hoping for more than just a brief eddy in the stream. With this book, I’m also hoping for more but for different reasons. This book is not autobiography; it’s about something larger — good news that I want to share. A memoir worth reading is not about the person who wrote it.
