You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark Read Free Book Online Page A

wishes that their Amazon ranking never rises above a thousand. I want to be that person, but it’s hard. The truth is that I am always a bit jealous
when a writer friend’s book does better than mine. Which happens a lot, since you ask.
    Sometimes, though, I try to do the right thing. I’ll give you an example: A couple of years ago, I was attending the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance convention in Orlando. About fifteen of us author-types were doing what amounted to speed dating. We’d already speed eaten a couple of tiny ham and cheese on yeast roll thingies before being told to work the crowd, spending exactly ten minutes at each table, charming and chatting up bookstore owners from across the Southeast.
    All the other authors were familiar to me. We’d traveled in the same circles more than once. It wasn’t, as they say, my first trip to the rodeo.
    But there was a shy, quiet fellow at our authors’ table. As we wolfed our minisubs and got ready to rumble, I decided it was my Christian duty to make this man feel welcome. I dragged him into the table conversation but he barely made eye contact. Poor lil fella, I thought. He’s so overwhelmed by all of us big shots. Clearly, he was a book-convention virgin.
    Is it enough to say that I talked the poor man’s ears off, sharing my sorta-vast knowledge of all things regional book tour? Is it enough to say that he listened quietly and politely even, at one point smiling a tiny bit?
    Is it enough to say that all of a sudden, the chairman of the convention walked up and began to talk to the poor soul, earnestly
complimenting him on his Pulitzer and his National Book Award?
    Oh, I thought, now realizing that on top of everything else, I’d been talking to him with a big mustardy bread crumb affixed to my bottom lip. Just let me take my impossibly dumb ass and lumber across the room to charm the book buyers, who by now were all atwitter about having such a distinguished guest in their midst. Him, not me; pay attention.
    I’m not being small when I say I can’t recall the man’s name. They say the mind forgets truly intense pain.
    Since that awful day, I’ve chatted up a few famous author-types including David Sedaris and the late John Updike. And, no, I didn’t ask Updike to detail my car or mistake Sedaris for a hungry drifter and offer to buy him a Hardee’s Thickburger, which, let’s be honest, he really looks like he could use, bless his precious nicotine-ravaged heart.
    I did give Sedaris an advance copy of my book and asked him if he would consider, pretty please, writing a tiny blurb. It would mean so much, I stammered. And by so much, I was already thinking ahead to how, if I sold enough books, we might finally be able to afford to close in a porch off our bedroom and make it into a huge walk-in closet because, as I told “Dave,” we have virtually no closet space in our ninety-year-old fixer-upper and I know how gay men can sympathize with something as heart wrenching as an abysmal lack of sufficient closet space.

    He listened to this with an air of amused detachment, as though, in his mind, he was already back at his French villa with his lovah, Hugh, sipping Turkish coffee and pondering his next seven-figure advance.
    Yes, just a couple of words from Sedaris and my life could change forever.
    When I finally shut up, he, as nicely as any human could ever do it, looked me in the eye and said “No.” David Sedaris explained that, basically, he got requests like mine all the time and he only writes blurbs for two authors a year, and then only for people he knows personally.
    “But I’m in your genre! You might even like it! I will pay you whatever you want. Do you want the shiny hairs?!” It was humbling to realize that, food chain-wise, it was my turn to be the woman with the listing Bumpit and the man with the shiny black pants.
    And then, just as quickly as he’d appeared, David Sedaris was ushered away to his next book-tour stop and I