I wonder if Portia will be on TV talk shows and radio programs and if someone will make a movie out of her book. A part of me deep down worries she might lose interest in me once she becomes famous, but I try my best to kill that part and just be happy for my wife.
Over the next six months Portia takes trips to New York City, each one requiring her to buy a new designer outfit, heels, and a handbag, plus get her hair and nails done. While I love seeing her doing what she wants—not to mention that she looks amazingly hot when done up—I also worry about the fact that I can’t provide her with any of these things, like her first husband did. I start to feel a little irrelevant.
Portia does lunches with her agent and editor and many people from her publishing house, which they pay for, and a few times they even pay for her to stay overnight in a hotel, which sort of blows this Catholic elementary school teacher’s mind.
Each time, Portia returns home glowing and raving about how smart and classy her editor Nancy is, and how her agent gets her work and wants the next book as soon as she can write it. She once again starts spending all of her time alone in her office, and I begin to see what our life is going to look like over the next decade or so.
I eat most of my dinners alone with Tommy while Portia works, sometimes twelve hours a day, writing the new book, editing Love May Fail, working on her new website, endlessly chitchatting with other writers and readers on social media sites. And when we do spend time together, she asks me over and over again if I think Mr. Vernon will read her novel, to the point where I actually tell her she can’t ask me that anymore.
But I have to admit that I have never seen anyone more full of joy and hope than Portia as she awaits the publication of her book. Her ecstasy rivals the memory of my first heroin hit, which worries me more than I let on. Such highs always come with even worse lows, in my experience. The ex-junkie in me waits for the yang to follow the yin, so to speak, as the dutiful husband in me tries his best to wear a smile and be supportive.
Mr. Yang sends his first calling card when Portia’s book is slapped with a dreadful neon-green cover that I pretend to love, because her publisher doesn’t offer to change it. Her agent says the bright color will “pop on the shelf,” but Portia hates it and insists it’s going to hurt her sales, although she does her best to feign enthusiasm in her e-mails to her editor and manages to maintain a positive attitude. But then the authors to whom Portia’s publisher mails advance review copies, hoping to get supportive quotes for the cover, fail to respond. Even though Portia’s agent tells her that it’s hard for first-time authors to get what he calls “blurbs,” it doesn’t help—especially since Portia easily finds hundreds of first-time novels covered in the flattering words of more established authors.
Mr. Yang officially shows up about six weeks before the publication of Portia’s novel in the form of something called a Kirkus review. Even though her agent calls her and says that Kirkus is notoriously snarky—that one negative review means nothing in the grand scheme of a publication—Portia cries when she reads it, which makes me want to find the anonymous author of the review and beat the snot out of him. It’s not so much what the reviewer writes that pisses me off, but the high and mighty tone in which he trashes Portia’s first book as “a painfully sentimental look at a more than slightly nauseating (and highly improbable) friendship between a wooden cliché of a teacher and the most annoying student you are likely to encounter on the printed page.” The on-the-printed-page part really annoys me—where the fuck else would you encounter the main character of a novel? You’d think a reviewer of books would be able to write better. And I wonder why no one reviews the reviews. A reviewer who carelessly belittles the best effort of an artist—talk about cliché.
“It’s bullshit,” I tell Portia. “Your book is beautiful.”
“I don’t know if I can handle this,” she says. “How public this is. I didn’t realize how awful it is to be reviewed like this. I spent so much time on this book. It’s the best thing that ever came out of me.”
“And this reviewer is an asshole. Probably someone who wants to publish a book and can’t. I’m sure there will be better reviews.”
But there aren’t.
In fact, the reviews get worse.
It seems like every week some publication reviews Portia’s book with enough venom to kill twenty men.
Publishers Weekly calls Love May Fail “ridiculous,” and then ends by writing, “Just cut the first two words from the title and you will have your review.”
And then all of the advance-copy reader reviews begin popping up on the Internet via various websites and blogs, and those are even uglier. I keep telling Portia not to read them. She’s losing weight, not sleeping, drinking too much, and seems to be suffering more pain than I thought a book publication was capable of inflicting.
She gets a few nice blog reviews, which I find by googling. I print those out, highlight the most positive parts—“This book gave me so much hope,” and “I can’t wait for a sequel!!!” and “A read that made me want to be a better person,” and even “This novel saved my life”—and hang them up on the refrigerator, but she doesn’t seem to care, even as the collection grows.
The Philadelphia Inquirer gives her a little hometown love the week before the official publication date, calling Love May Fail“a charming look at love and faith . . . not to be missed,” but it feels a little after the fact, maybe even unconvincing, like praise from one’s own mother.