Patricia Henley's Book Tour Disaster Story

"My tour for In the River Sweet (2002) was a prolonged disaster. I visited 19 cities in five weeks. The best events, of course, were on college campuses where my esteemed friends and colleagues had arranged for audiences to be present. But, for starters, the book was a Border's Original Voices selection, yet I was not booked into a single Border's. Instead, I was sent to Barnes & Noble stores. In my editor's words: "Barnes & Noble did not get behind the book." I'd find waist-high stacks of The Lovely Bones and two or three copies of my novel.

But the capstone was my Boston experience. My escort was a hapless woman who confided a bit too much of her own real-life disasters as we headed to a feminist bookstore in Cambridge. She decided to park in a muffler shop parking lot, after hours, even though a sign gave explicit instructions not to park there. Towing threatened. We scuttled around the corner to the bookstore where a sandwich board about my reading/signing was up on the sidewalk. One glance into the bookstore made me long to return to the hotel and watch TV and order room service. The shelves were awry, and there were no books. We were met by a clerk/volunteer who told us that the store was going out of business, was, in fact, out of business. But the show must go on. We were given a tour of the defunct bookstore. Then the wait. One man came in off the street. I read to him, the clerk, and my escort. Good, feeble, cheer all around. When we went out to the blustery street, her car was up on the business end of a tow truck. We begged the guy to let it down. He resisted. She offered him money. He waited. She fiddled with her purse and looked up expectantly to me. I gave her $20 and the tow truck driver was satisfied with that. He let the car down and we drove off into the night . . ."


Patricia Henley's first novel, Hummingbird House, was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award and the New Yorker Fiction Prize (2000). Her second novel, In the River Sweet, was named a Best Fall Book by the St. Louis Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has also published three collections of stories (Friday Night at Silver Star, The Secret of Cartwheels, and Worship of the Common Heart). Friday Night at Silver Star won the 1985 Montana Arts Council First Book Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Short Stories, Love Stories for the Rest of Us, and Circle of Women. Patricia has taught in the MFA Program at Purdue University for twenty-two years.