Sad Boy Attends Author Events - Two

In which I recount my meeting with Patricia Lockwood...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

It was a beautiful Tuesday in April, and I was on an Amtrak to Manhattan, yet I still couldn’t shake my ennui. I use the word ennui, because it sounds more glamorous than depressed, which was what I actually was, though I was headed to an event that should have filled me with an irrepressible joy. Riverhead had invited me to an event for Patricia Lockwood, who has a new book coming out this fall, titled, Will There Ever Be Another You. I’ve loved Lockwood since first reading her memoir, Priestdaddy, back in 2017. She has that sort of humor that catches you off guard, that slips through even the darkest moments and makes you actually L O L. I’d wanted to meet her for nearly a decade, had imagined charming her with my own little anecdotes, saying whatever it took to convince her to be my friend. I spent the whole train ride asking myself, “How will I win the heart of Patricia Lockwood?”

I hadn’t even planned on going. I’d answered ‘yes’ to the RSVP, in the same way you add an expensive sweater to your online cart, where you keep it there for weeks, telling yourself you’ll get it until one day you refresh and realize it is no longer in stock. I figured the event would come and go and I would have that sad feeling I always did when I saw my online friends doing something fun without me. Much like Dolly Parton, I was working nine to five, and it didn’t seem feasible for me to get all the way from Philadelphia to Manhattan by the event’s start time of 6:30 PM.

Earlier that morning, I’d had an appointment to get a physical for my new job. After months of dealing with harassment while working at Penn, I’d been offered a position as an administrative assistant at a hospital nearby. The job required that all of their employees get physicals because they worried some Jenny McCarthy wannabe was going to storm the place with various infectious diseases and breathe on every immunocompromised person in the building. To prove my sanity, I scheduled my physical for 7:30 AM, so I could leave early enough to get to my current job, where I still had another week.

Just before entering the building, I’d been catcalled by some stranger lounging on the sidewalk, and it had filled me with so much Pride that I told the woman at the front desk I was once again considering a career in prostitution. She handed me a clipboard and told me to take a seat.

Eventually, I was brought to the back, where I got poked and prodded, and the nurse, in an attempt to make polite conversation, asked how I was. I chuckled and said, “I’m fine, just a little sad. Been debating suicide, but the slow kind, where I smoke cigarettes and bake in tanning beds until I slowly wither away.” The nurse’s eyes widened, and she told me that if I ever felt like hurting myself to please go to the ER. Just behind her was a poster across the wall that said, Embrace Joy, with an obese bluebird caught mid-flight. I laughed, and then I burst into tears. I apologized, embarrassed that this woman hadn’t laughed at my pain, and then I confessed that I had just been going through some things. My shoes squeaked against the tile floors and my nose burned from the alcohol-soaked gauze she’d used to clean my skin. The nurse listened, held my hand, and told me everything would be okay—she said I seemed very sweet and that she hated to see me so sad.

When I left an hour later, I felt so hungover from my tears that I called out of work for the rest of the day. When I got home, I cried again. I hated that I’d made that suicide joke to the nurse, not because it was so revealing but because the joke hadn’t landed. Why were these one-liners so much funnier in Melissa Broder novels? Fiction seemed to be the only way a sad person could function with hilarity. I played the joke over and over in my mind, wondering how I could have made it funny enough that she’d have ignored my pain over my sense of humor.

As I sat on the end of the couch, spiraling, Hank, my new bo, tapped me on the arm and asked, “Didn’t you get invited to that book event tonight?”

“It’s too expensive to go,” I said, wiping my eyes.

Hank unlocked his phone, bought me a ticket, and told me to go get ready. When I tried to argue, told him he couldn’t just spend money on me like that, he said, “You’ve quoted Priestdaddy to me since the day I met you. You have to go. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”

An hour later, I was on the train.

I spent an hour rehearsing various stories, jokes, and anecdotes I could tell Patricia (Trish?) when I finally walked up to meet her, but then I was interrupted by a text reminding me that I had a virtual therapy appointment starting soon. This was the first appointment with my new therapist—the previous two breaking up with me due to my needing ‘someone more attuned’ to my specific needs—and I immediately panicked. Now, not only did I have to come up with a good intro line for Patricia, but I also had to find a way to charm my new therapist, too.

The call started when I was just stepping off the train. I immediately apologized to the new therapist, explaining that I had unintentionally begun living the glamorous life of a book influencer and was on my way to a literary event. She said that was okay, that I could just reschedule, that it was nice to meet me, but just as she was about to hang up, I stopped her and said, “Do you think we’re gonna work out? I know you don’t know me, but my husband and I are separating, and the last two therapists broke up with me, and I’m not sure I can handle more abandonment.”

She thought for a moment, nodding, and then she replied, “I’m not planning on going anywhere. Are you planning on going anywhere?”

“Besides this book event and the afterlife, not really.”

The therapist laughed, and I knew I was in good hands.

I said goodbye and pulled up Apple Maps on my phone, to figure out where the heck I was going.

One of my best friends, Bernie, was also going to this event. I was nervous to see him. He and I hadn’t talked much lately. Back in December, during one of my earlier spirals, I’d gone outside in the middle of the night in the hopes of being murdered by some tweaker over in Kensington, and had sent him a vague, apologetic goodbye text that he immediately recognized as my sorry version of a suicide note. This wasn’t my first attempt at putting myself in danger, of plotting a way to end my life—in fact, it wasn’t even the second or third. He’d been begging me to get help for months. He reached out to my husband, and he reached out to Hank—neither of whom answered—and he kept texting me until another friend nearby found me and brought me to safety. After that, Bernie rightfully set some boundaries, took a step back, protecting himself from what had become a toxic dynamic of my own creation. I didn’t want his concern for me to overshadow whatever fun we could have at this event.

Bernie and I eventually met up at Washington Square Park. He hugged me and we exchanged pleasantries, and then we met up with his husband, Chris, who’d just gotten off the train. The event was ten minutes away, at a place called Chapel Bar. I spent the whole walk over trying to be as normal as possible. The first night Chris and I met, he’d called me out for performing too much, said I tried too hard to be liked—an accurate criticism to a behavior I’ve never been able to shake. I tried to avoid my jokes and canned bits. I tried to ask the kinds of questions that show you’re interested in the people around you, though I was quickly realizing that in the months I’d been swept up in my own mess, I hadn’t even known any of the things that might be happening in Bernie’s life, or Chris’s. When Chapel Bar finally opened, I rushed in like Esmerelda begging for sanctuary in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Chapel Bar was flooded with industry faces I’d only seen on book jackets or Twitter. There were people from Elle, The New York Times, editors and writers, literary influencers, Riverhead staff I’d recognized from years of emails and bookish events. Hydrangeas and an elaborate chandelier hung overhead, tiny lights in the lower center of each stain glass window. Galleys of Patricia’s book were on various tables, near cheese and fruit and half empty glasses. A tangle of legs set the path toward the bar. I got the feeling the rest of the place was as beautiful as what I could see, it’s just that it was lit like the last few episodes of Game of Thrones, so I can only speculate.

When I moved past the line of people waiting to get a picture of their auras, I spotted a tall, pixie-haired woman pushing her glasses up her nose, and realized I was within arm’s reach of Patricia Lockwood. I shifted through the crowd, avoided taking anyone out with the bookbag I hadn’t considered would be a hinderance in such a confined space, and patiently waited for my turn to say hi.

“Oh, hello,” she said, when she saw me. “Hi, I’m Patricia.”

“Hi, I know,” I said. “I’m Hunter, I’m a big fan, and, well,” and then I realized that I hadn’t landed on my opening line. I hadn’t thought of what cool or funny thing to say to endear her to me, and so I did what I always did when I’m nervous and spewed. “I read Priestdaddy for a podcast back in 2017, we all loved it, I think you’re a genius and I actually tweeted you when my stepbrother died back in 2018, referencing the thing you said about the inability to capture people fully through text, and you tweeted back so kindly, and it meant the world, and I am talking so so much, but I am such a big fan.”

She smiled at me, so big, and said, “It’s wonderful to meet you, too.”

“Gosh, you sound just like your audiobook,” I said back, which is, sadly, not even in the top ten dumbest things I’ve ever said out loud. I kept rambling, trying to recover, none of my attempts successful, talking about growing up Pentecostal, how I’d always loved the up-down of Catholicism, that her book was what ignited my love for memoir, and finally, because I always resort to laughing about my tragedies, I said, “It’s so funny. The other day I thought I had nothing left to live for and threw a plastic bag over my head, ready to end it all. Turns out there were cracker crumbs in the bag, and as I choked on the flavor of cream cheese and chives, I thought, this is not how I want to die. I guess the crackers kind of saved my life. And now I’ve lived long enough to meet you! Ain’t the universe just great?”

She laughed. She threw her head back and grabbed my shoulder and let out a sound that I was convinced came, not from pity, but pure enjoyment. It felt like someone, finally, spoke my language. I tried to keep riffing, but the moment had passed, so I quickly hugged her and said, “Anyway, sorry for taking up your time, excited for tonight.”

I skittered to the bar, to be with Bernie and Chris. They looked so handsome, so happy, and I felt myself splitting open with joy to be next to them. I wanted to be normal again, so I could have this all the time. We ordered a round of drinks, and they pointed out all of the people they recognized from other bookish events they’d attended. There was a small group of gossipy gays who kept giving them dagger eyes, and I offered to confront them, but Bernie just laughed and said it was fine. The conversation hit a lull, and we all split off and mingled, in the way you’re supposed to do.

I hadn’t considered that people might ask about my life at this party. Only a few days before, I’d been back in my hometown for a book event for my friend Annie B. Jones, and I had expected those invasive questions, since most everyone there had known me for more than a decade. I’d mentally prepared myself for their line of questioning. But here, with people who only knew me from the internet, I hadn’t thought it a concern. (It might seem obvious that I could just not divulge the goings on of my life to every single person I interact with, but that is a thought I hadn’t actually considered until typing this sentence.) As I made my way around the room, I bumped into internet friends I had known almost as long as I’d been on Bookstagram. These people had been privy to every wedding anniversary post, every move update, every moment where I had broadcasted my hopes and dreams to the world. They weren’t being invasive; they were just talking to me as friends.

“How’s the husband?” I was asked, four times in a row.

“He’s good…” I answered. “He and I won’t be husband’s for long.”

“I’m so sorry,” people said, the standard response.

And because I didn’t want anyone to worry, because I was embarrassed to be seen as a failure of some kind, because I thought it was immediately transparent that I was not okay, I responded with, “I’m doing great, though. I have a new boyfriend, Hank, who’s just lovely, and we went to St. Croix recently, and I got to fly first class, which I’ve never done before, and did you know they give you actual glass for your drinks, and that they have special snacks that they don’t give you when you’re on the back of the plane?”

Each person smiled and nodded, an alarmed look in their eyes.

Why was it so awkward to talk about your life, when it was falling apart?

People continued to float around me, and I tried to remind myself that this didn’t have to be a moment where I tried to entertain everyone, that this event wasn’t about me at all, and that if I really wanted to have a good time, I just needed to take a deep breath and exist in the moment. I found the line of people waiting for their aura photographs to be taken. It seemed a safe place to be, like a time out corner, a place for me to reflect on my behavior, learn my lesson and shut up.

When it was finally my turn, I went into the confessional booth and sat on a purple velvet bench, where the photographer instructed me to place my fingers on these little sensors and for me to sit perfectly still while he captured my image. As I waited, I was reminded of Omen IV: The Awakening, where the antichrist was now a girl, because, well, feminism, and when she gets a photograph of her aura, it’s revealed that the bright red flame surrounding her indicates that she is pure evil. When the photographer handed me the photograph, I was cast in a glow of white and blue. He told me to go over to the table where someone would interpret my aura for me. I immediately realized I didn’t want my aura interpreted. I was afraid of what my aura might say about me.

Once everyone had mingled and had their auras read and been plied with a reasonable amount of booze, Patricia Lockwood took to the stage, in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry. Patricia spoke beautifully about this new book, which was inspired by her experience with long Covid, and which had clearly taken multiple threads from her real life. She’d done the same with her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, a book formatted almost like a literary Twitter thread, lots of funny one-liners and observations that are slowly disrupted by a real-life tragedy. Both books, in some ways, felt like spiritual sequels to the memoir, even if all of them were only connected by Lockwood’s own mind. When Fry asked if Lockwood saw this book as fiction or memoir, Lockwood clarified that she would call it fiction, as it gave her the liberty to make things up.

I wondered what Lockwood’s experience was, between writing memoir and fiction. While Priestdaddy was written in the style of a traditional memoir, the harder moments are kept afloat by her sharp wit, those hysterical one-liners—the book even won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her debut novel, while funny, feels much more vulnerable, especially in the second half, and the jokes give way to the harsh realities of this narrator’s experience. When I considered the eight years I spent working on my own memoir, I often saw it as a form of time travel, the work itself, a time machine. It didn’t always work, I wasn’t always transported back to the moments I most wanted to relive—but there were some days when I would describe the right detail, a certain smell or sound, and would be catapulted to the past, and could stay there for as long as the sentences made their way onto the page. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about how hard it was to look at the more difficult moments of my life so directly. I’d made plenty of jokes in my own memoir, because it felt like wearing protective glasses while staring up at a solar eclipse. I wondered if humor was the protection needed to dip back into your old life. Then, considering her fiction—and also considering my own—I wondered if the imagined parts had the same effect, that it gave you enough distance, made it feel safe enough, to look directly at the hardest things you could go through and write truthfully and with vulnerability without feeling like you were being flayed alive.

Patricia Lockwood was unaware of this epiphany, as her conversation with Naomi Fry came to a close, but I made a mental note that if I ever did get a book published, I would thank her in my acknowledgements, for unintentionally providing me with this nugget. The crowd around me erupted in applause and then Patricia slid off her stool and went back to socializing.

I eventually bumped into her while reaching for a slice of cheese, and she stopped talking to a writer from the New York Times and sat at the stool next to me, giving me her undivided attention. Suddenly, the artifice, the performance I always gave fell away. I took a deep breath and explained to her why I loved her work. I quoted the opening line of No One Is Talking About This and said how the structure reminded me of the opening paragraph of chapter nine in Priestdaddy, ‘The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place’. “I can quote most of your work,” I said, “But I also brought the books for reference, just in case.”

“Would you like me to sign them?” she asked.

“Are you sure?” I asked, and she slipped a pen from between her breasts with a flourish and waited for me to dig them out of my backpack. As she signed, I averted my eyes—this weird inclination I always have to give writers their privacy, even while inscribing.

“Thank God you didn’t die,” she said, as she handed the books back to me. “Or you wouldn’t have been here for all this!”

“If only I’d had dissociative identity disorder instead of depression,” I said. “I’ve always dreamed of having a fun mental illness. I used to do a great impersonation of Little Edie.”

“Do it, do it,” Patricia said. “Let’s hear the impression of Little Edie.”

“Well, they didn’t know, did they? They didn’t know they were dealing with a staunch character,” I began, launching into Little Edie’s famous monologue. Patricia howled and handed me her nametag and said, “Do me!”

“Mom,” I said, smoothing her nametag against my shirt, “I’m not touching the cum, don’t make me touch it.”

“That’s so good!” She clapped her hands together. “That’s exactly how it was.”

I had impressed Patricia Lockwood.

Realizing I was hogging the guest of honor, I thanked her again for her time and for signing my books and returned to Bernie and Chris. We eventually found ourselves in a circle with an industry friend who had all the fun gossip, and we all sipped our drinks and giggled and looked around like we were all in on some big secret, though it was nothing juicy enough to warrant such concern. This was the sort of life I had dreamed of. I had always wanted to have friends who read books and loved them as much as I did, queer friends who understood the parts of my experience that straight people didn’t get. I had always dreamed of attending literary events and listening to literary gossip and being part of the ‘New York’ crowd, even though that very sentence sounds so country bumpkin. Every time my brain breaks, or I make a bad decision, I grow terrified that I will have ruined my life irrevocably, that the people I love will abandon me and that I will have nothing else left to live for. But none of that came to be.

Before the night ended, Patricia Lockwood made her way over to us at the bar. I think we were blocking her way to her husband, but she talked with us anyway, and then someone with a camera asked if they could get a picture. I was thrilled to have this moment documented, me with Patricia Lockwood and my best friend. We all stood up a little straighter, adjusting ourselves and fixing our smiles, and then I felt Chris’s arm on my shoulder, pulling me in, like a friend. It seems so insignificant, except for the fact that this was so unusual for him; we weren’t chummy, or touchy, we weren’t affectionate at all. We’d fallen into a friendship through our connection with Bernie, and so I never expected any real tenderness from Chris. The cameraman took our picture and Chris’s arm was still on my shoulder, and I grabbed his hand, not cool enough to let the moment go without blatantly acknowledging it.

The event cleared out, we waved goodbye to Patricia and everyone headed home. I walked back to the station—getting lost, as I always do—but feeling so grateful that I had survived long enough to experience this night. Sometimes, when my whale of sadness swallows me whole, when I’m in its stomach and see no way out, I forget that there is still life to be lived, joy to be had. The sadness didn’t disappear—even now, it still ebbs and flows—but this night was a reminder that there is still more left, both in the things I had always wanted—meeting one of my favorite writers, experiencing the literary world—and in the things I hadn’t even thought to hope for, like a genuine moment of friendship with Chris.

As I sat in my seat on the train back home, I felt the gratitude of what life, God, the universe—whoever was responsible—had given me on this day, which made me feel able to push myself through. The train started and I unzipped my bookbag to see what Patricia Lockwood had signed. The inscription for No One Is Talking About This was a kind, if generic, response. But the inscription of Priestdaddy was a poem, almost, a reminder, and what might become the mantra I used for the rest of my life. At the upper right corner, in pink felt tip, she wrote:

Hunter,

Breath

Those

Crackers.

Patricia Lockwood.