Over One Million Books Sold

Plus chocolate pie and Curtis Sittenfeld

Since I published my last newsletter, Books Are Magic II: The Squeakquel has been going full blast. The Peter Straub Reading Room (that’s what the plaque on the wall in the garden of the store says) now has two red benches in it. It was Thanksgiving.

The Peter Straub Reading Room and its Head Horticulturist.

I was worried about Thanksgiving. Not because my father was a chef—lol—or had even carved a turkey in a decade. (He did have lots and lots of knives, but he preferred to use them to open packages or to impress small children.) He was entertainment! He was comedy! He was interested, and interesting, and I missed him a lot this week. Mike and I have always loved having lots of people over for Thanksgiving, and my dad was always happy to talk to whoever was next to him. The pleasure that I get out of everyone I know who is twenty years younger than me, forty years younger than me—that’s my dad all over. So, Thanksgiving was both sad and lovely, and now I understand why holidays make people feel so blue.

The one thing that my children wanted for Thanksgiving was a chocolate pie, and so I needed to make a chocolate pie. I’ve made several different fancy chocolate tarts in my day, but that’s not what I wanted to make. I wanted a slice of chocolate cream pie that you would get in a diner, and I stumbled onto this recipe by The Pioneer Woman, of all people. You know what The Pioneer Woman makes me think about? Curtis Sittenfeld’s story, The Prairie Wife. ALSO, did you know that Curtis has a novel coming out this spring called Romantic Comedy? Do you know that a Curtis Sittenfeld book called Romantic Comedy is my dream come true? The book is funny and sexy and I could tell how much she enjoyed writing it, and Jesus Christ, that feels good right now, PLEASURE. You can go ahead and preorder that now. The pie was also all pleasure, truly perfection, and you can find that recipe right here, but please, read Curtis’s story first, it’ll make it even more delicious.

(Insert imaginary photograph of my chocolate pie here. I did not take one, and I just finished the last piece. It was still a little bit jiggly on Thanksgiving, but after a few days in the fridge? Genuinely the best pie I’ve ever made. (Fruit pies need not apply, sorry.))

The other thing that happened this week is that I went to check on my Penguin Random House Author Portal, which is the place I go rather than going to The Bad Place. It’s full of DATA and NUMBERS and sometimes it is exciting and mostly it’s not, but this week, I had crossed a very, very big milestone.

What this photograph of my filthy computer screen is telling you is that I have sold 1,000,863 books, total, in the last eleven years. The part of my brain that I would really like to be able to turn off immediately screams But some of my friends have sold millions of copies of a single book, this isn’t such a big deal. This is me trying to pay attention to the part of my brain that says holy fuck, that’s over a million books. It is a big deal. I just rewatched some of the Taylor Swift documentary and I have to say, I think that Tay Tay and I could sit and drink a bottle of wine and talk about ambition and productivity and being good for, oh, a hundred hours. Especially with This Time Tomorrow, especially now. The pandemic has totally scrambled how I feel about work and art and writing and, oh, you know, capitalism, but none of that changes how important this book is to me, and how much I want it to get into the hands of as many people as possible. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel this way about another book. If you haven’t bought a copy yet, you can get a copy from Books Are Magic for every person on your holiday gift list. I will sign and personalize them all very, very happily. A million books, in this economy? When most books sell less than five thousand copies? When I’m trying to screw my head back on to write another book, because that’s what gives me the most pleasure, the job that I enjoy the most? I am grateful to everyone who has ever read one of my books, and to everyone who has then bought ANOTHER one. How incredible! How truly mind-glowingly wonderful. Obviously I wish I could tell my dad, but in my head, I can hear—and see— his response as clear as day. As clear as the mustache on the face of a man wearing a sweater AND a sports jacket while riding shotgun in a racecar at Disney World in the late 1980s.