Here I am announcing to the world that I ate an entire loaf of banana bread for lunch for I have no shame. It was delicious, and I regret nothing.
There is a great interview of me up at Fiction Writer’s Review; they asked the best questions! If you’re into books and authors, definitely look around that website, it is full of interesting, well-written stuff.
I just heard a cat throw up in the next room, but for now I am going to pretend I didn’t and continue typing… A couple of weeks ago, I was one of five featured authors at a scholarship benefit for the Christamore House in Indianapolis. It was an amazing trip: we raised over a hundred grand and I sold (and signed!) nearly three hundred books. I completely winged a 10 minute speech in front of a crowd of 1000 people–and I happened to be AWESOME. I only found out after that my image was projected to the audience from a GINORMOUS SCREEN above the stage, and I am exceedingly glad I did not know that while doing my thing up there as the self-consciousness of that knowledge would have definitely dampened my gregarious awesomeness. (Seriously, imagine the zits and lines on your face blown up like a bajillion times for an audience big enough that you can’t hold it all at once in your visual field and you will see what I mean.) Anyway, I had a grand time hanging out with the other fabulous authors (Meg Waite Clayton, Michael Koryta, Louis Bayard and Victoria Brown), being shuttled around in a gigantic limousine, cramming hors d’oeuvres in my face at a shameful rate in a room filled with women each wearing jewelry whose cost exceeds my annual income, and generally living someone else’s glamorous life for a couple of days.
I came down rather hard on my return home, as I caught quite an extravagant cold on the plane back, which is only now abating. I’ve extruded a truly stunning amount of coagulated-pea-soup-looking mucus during the interim; I should have saved it all in a massive glass jar and submitted it to the Museum of Modern Art as an “installation.” But, I bet Marina Abramovic already thought of this. (Probably she mixed the mucus with accelerant, drenched her body in it, set herself on fire while chanting L’Internationale, and called the piece “Loins of Judas.”)
Tomorrow I am flying down to Los Angeles for the LA Times Festival of Books, where I will be performing “Loins of Judas.” For now I am off to play a really exciting game called Find The Cat Puke, Hopefully Not By Stepping On It With My Bare Feet.
Elena Mauli Shapiro 