The launch of a book into the world is sort of like giving birth – there’s lots of screaming and crying and you hope it doesn’t come out ass first.
I was fortunate. My baby weighed in at 263 pages and was born virtually pain-free on June 1st, swaddled in an incredibly flattering People Magazine review that made it, in my eyes, the cutest baby on the block. This is gonna be a breeze, I thought. An easy birth, a beautiful baby – I am one lucky mutha.
Then a friend suggested I put a Google news alert on my name and the title of the book…and I discovered what so many parents of bouncing baby books have before me: there are some people who think your baby is fat and ugly, and will sure as hell relish telling you so.
Most reviews of WHERE’S MY WAND? have been extremely gratifying, and I consider myself terribly lucky; but it only takes one comment like “Tenth-rate Sedaris” or a one-star review by some guy on Amazon to make me rank book writing as a career choice on par with manual turkey insemination. I try to comfort myself by imagining the homes (soon to be featured in an episode of Hoarders) and lives (creepy, desperate, medicated) of the people who write such unkind remarks; but ultimately I’m reminded that whether these people are toothless hillbillies or snotty literati, they’re entitled to their opinions.
Even if those opinions occasionally SUCK.