In the next few months I’m scheduled to talk about my new book 61 times. If all goes well, that number, which includes bookstore readings, talks at other venues, and radio appearances, will go up precipitously. I hope this strikes you as a little weird. I’m a writer, not a talker. I’m a pretty good writer, and I think I’ve written a very good book. And while I’ve become a competent talker, I'd prefer to show up at a bookstore, hold up my book and say, “Okay, here it is.” But the state of the market is such that writing is not enough. If one wants to find readers, one must go out and grab them. So that is what I’m doing. I’m grabbing.

When I was writing novels, grabbing posed only the usual problems. It’s costly to run around the country, takes time away from writing, and presents hurdles for intimate relationships. And because I’m not yet the sort of writer who reliably (or ever) shows up on best seller lists, grabbing often involves ego-busting situations in which I show up to grab and no one shows up to be grabbed. Still, in the past, it’s been enough to sign books, schmooze booksellers, and generally to develop the reputation as someone who is willing to go the extra miles to grab. Publishers, agents, booksellers like to know that you stand behind your product, that you’re fully in the game, that you have both feet in the frying pan.

But grabbing in the case of my new book, which is a memoir, means that 61 times I will be speaking to audiences about the most intimate details of my life: my relationship with my crazy mother and my absent father; the sometimes grim but nevertheless hilarious circumstances of my childhood; and the events of the last several weeks of my father’s life. Writing a book about my life was a difficult, complicated, but ultimately enormously rewarding project. Talking about the book, about myself, and answering questions from strangers, is, to put mildly, bizarre; a little creepy, even.

To be clear, I’m not complaining. I took the advance check. I signed the contract. And I’m glad to have the audiences. I wrote the book, I told the stories, I put it all out there. If people describe my dad, as one reviewer did, as “an impossible person,” well, I have no cause to object. If an interviewer asks me what it was like to grow up with a suicidal mother, I have to answer, and I will.

All I’m saying is, it’s weird.

The first of many live events was in Los Angeles. On Sunday I went to a fancy high rise on Wilshire Boulevard to speak to a group from Sinai Temple. It was a mixed crowd, probably thirty in all, of extremely friendly, smart, enthusiastic readers. Some were oldish, some less oldish. Some had read the book, some not. When I started to speak, they interrupted with comments and questions. I like it that way. Much better to have a dialogue than give a speech, as far as I’m concerned. At times I felt like a pastor in church (I associate this with Black churches, but as I really know very little about church, it might well be a characteristic of all sorts of churches) where the congregants talk back during the sermon. It was pretty exciting, actually.

When I finished my spiel, one of the older men—call him Sam, though I don’t think that was his name—who’d been rather vocal during the talk, and who had read the book, told me that he had various problems with the story. He said, in essence, I didn’t really have anything to whine about because my dad hadn’t been all that bad a father, and that he had been justified in leaving my mother, who was driving him crazy.

My face flushed red (or it felt like it did, anyway) and I started to sweat. How am I supposed to respond? As writer? As son? As person who was there? Should I get mad? Should I tell him he has no business having an opinion about my life? The good news is the others in the audience had contrary views and a discussion started about me, about my family, about justifications and conduct and who was right and who was wrong. Some took my mother’s side; some took my father’s.

Seriously weird.

I’ll get used to it, I suppose. Or I won't.