Notes from a book tour

Ten cities in three weeks taught me that a reading is never really about the book. It is about the room: who came, what they brought with them, what they needed to hear.

In one small library a woman waited until everyone had left to tell me that the mother in my novel was her mother. I have thought about that conversation every day since.

Readers bring their own stories into every question they ask. The best evenings were the ones where I stopped answering and started listening.

I came home tired and full, with a notebook of other people's sentences, and the strong feeling that the next book has already begun somewhere in those pages.