Stock is really running low of The Sicilian Inheritance but you can still find at at Barnes and Noble and Amazon AND we are now about to go into a third printing. But grab it now for you and your book clubs and let me know if you want me to Zoom in and make delicious cocktails while answering all of your questions about THE BOOK OF THE SUMMER.
This week I made one of my Internet friendships come alive in REAL LIFE. Real freaking life people. One of the few things social media is good for is connecting with people that you wouldn’t normally see on a daily basis. I love getting to talk to readers and fellow authors.
In fact, some of my relationships with fellow authors only exist online even though I now think of them as friends.
About a year ago I had to start gathering blurbs for The Sicilian Inheritance.
Blurb gathering is a terrible process where you essentially have to prostrate yourself before other authors and hope they deem you worthy of blurbing your book. It can be embarrassing and soul crushing.
But in this case I made a friends. I LOVE Joanna Rakoff’s writing. Her book My Salinger Year is a favorite and I just love how she writes about women. So I reached out on Instagram and asked if she would blurb Sicilian. AND SHE SAID YES. And then we became Internet friends for the past year and it has been wonderful. But this week Joanna was coming to Philly (the greatest city on Earth) and she asked if I wanted to hang. The answer was a resounding fuck yes AND I had extra tickets to go hear Margaret Atwood speak at Penn with Emily Wilson.
MARGARET FUCKING ATWOOD.
“I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about #tradwives!” I said to Nick.
“Do you think Margaret Atwood knows about #tradwives?” my always skeptical husband shot back.
“She is Margaret Atwood. She knows about everything,” I replied and huffed away.
And I was RIGHT. Margaret Atwood has thoughts on #tradwives and it came up right at the end of her talk.
Emily Wilson the moderator asked her about her thoughts on feminism and gender. Oh, I also want to note that Margaret Atwood is hilarious. Like she made me snort laugh a dozen times and she is also a woman without a filter (much like myself) who does not flinch at telling stories about drunken publishers coming up with crazy ideas for books.
Atwood started out by talking about how all of this goes in cycles and she directly correlated what is happening now with #tradwives to what we saw happen to women after WW2 when the government wanted the Rosie Riveters to quit working and get back into their houses.
We are now seeing the exact same thing!!!!
I adored what she said.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Over the Influence to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.