High Tide in Tucson

Although Kingsolver loves adventure, her three-week cross-country book tour is less adventurous and more a hectic swirl of airports, bookstores, radio stations in basements, and trying not to spill coffee on the one nice jacket she brought with her. She spends most of the tour wishing she were at home.

Kingsolver is annoyed that TV shows and radio pieces only give her very small snippets of time in which to explain her book: It is impossible to condense a literary novel into one or two sentences. In general, Kingsolver dislikes that authors have to sell themselves in person rather than through their writing. She wonders what the literary world would be like if authors had always had to be charming in front of a live audience. What if Leo Tolstoy had needed to promote War and Peace on TV? When out for drinks one night, an agent tells her about an “untourable” author. Without going into specifics, the agent implies that some people are just not suited for book tours because of their irresponsible antics, their unreliability, or other idiosyncrasies.

On the second to last stop of the tour, Kingsolver is set to celebrate in the Rainbow Room, a famous bar in New York City’s Rockefeller Center.