The Closet's All Yours

In yesterday's manifesto, it completely slipped my mind that the original reason for this particular blog was to encourage the Singles of the world to buy my book. If you have already bought it for yourself, and loved it, it is time to buy a copy for a friend for Christmas.

So far it comes in two languages, Canadian and American, and you get get it in stores both secular and religious. Reader Shiraz tells me that you can find it in a bookstore run by the Paulines in Manhattan on a little street with a shop of sequinned dresses and a psychic's lair. You can also get it from Indigo, Borders and over the internet. My favourite bookshop is Crux Books at the University of Toronto; they have been tremendously supportive. I gave my best reading so far there (see photo).

Seraphic Singles (Canada/UK/Ireland) or The Closet's All Mine (USA) was written in Boston and Toronto long before I had any idea whatsoever that I'd end up here, in 324 year old house just outside Edinburgh with a cute husband and a mostly dead pot of basil. After almost ten years of being Single (dating but still Single), I had decided that I might be Single forever, and perhaps that might not be so bad.

So I wrote blogposts almost every day about being Single, and about my and my friends' attempts to win boyfriends, and our slavish recourse to advice books like The Rules, and our struggles as religious women in a world where people honestly think you can't get a boyfriend unless you put out. (So not true.)

Eventually I began dating a very nice German post-doctoral student at the Catholic parish that serves Harvard University, and so I wrote about that, too. And finally I copied and pasted a whole year's worth of blogs, fixed the spelling, and sent it off to publishers. And, behold, one of them said "Okay, if you cut it down" and a different publisher said "We'll buy the American rights" and another one said something similarly encouraging in Polish.

My Canadian publisher said I should take the book out of chronological order and organize it by theme, so that's what I did, although I preserved chronological order as much as possible, to keep its narrative shape. The themes include how to enjoy living alone, the great challenge of staying chaste, what men are like, dating, the loneliness of being Single, the role of children in a Single lady's life, and why we want to get married anyway.

Everyone should buy it to spread the message of Seraphic Singledom to the four corners of the earth. Also, the more copies that sell, the more attractive I look to my publisher, and then he might offer me another contract and I could write you all another book. The more I ponder the publishing world, the more I am convinced that the most important people in it are the readers.

Picture an author as an eenie-weenie monster, hamster-sized with big googley eyes on stalks. Its limbs are practically vestigal; it can only wave them about weakly, like a baby. Then picture a reader coming along and feeding the author-monster a cookie. The cookie represents a book sale. Now with every cookie the author-monster perks up a teenie tiny bit. At first it is unnoticeable, but after the 200th cookie, there is a perceptible change. The monster begins to grow and grow and look better and better and more and more attractive until, hey presto, it looks exactly like a 300 foot J.K. Rowling and stands on a mountain top while all about it publishers fall on their faces in homage. Readers marvel and sigh at the monster's might, but actually it derived entirely from them, which is to say, you. Thank you to all who have fed me the magic cookie.

Here are some lovely reviews:

Book Shop Customers (scroll down a bit after landing)
Amazon.com (Seraphic) and Amazon.com (Closet)
Amazon.ca
Amazon.co.uk
Indigo

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