Zibby Mag

By Jessica Pearce Rotondi

I moved to New York City when I was twenty-one years old to work in book publishing. I had a tiny “room of my own” in the Flatiron Building to fill with books. I could barely afford to-go coffee, but I’d go to readings in the city almost every night. Uptown to Book Culture on Broadway, downtown to The Strand. I volunteered at the PEN World Voices Festival every May, when authors from around the world descended on the city to read their work in a dozen languages, then mingle at after-parties as raucous as Holly Golightly’s (it’s no accident that Holly’s creator, Truman Capote, was as famous for his parties as he was for his work).

I spent summers playing basketball in the WORD Bookstore league and late August mapping out the big releases of the fall so I wouldn’t miss a single Tuesday night launch. The literary life of New York City felt like the most impossible kind of magic; no matter the season, you could walk into a bookstore and listen to a reading in the company of fellow readers. As children, if we’re lucky, our parents read to us. Most of us are on our own after that. But living in New York in the early 2000s, each bookstore presented a chance to hear a new story, meet a new author, and hear those stories in the author’s voice.

Long before I became an author myself, I heard Joan Didion talk about the art of the essay on the steps of Borough Hall at The Brooklyn Book Festival. I can still see her hands — the same elegant fingers that dangled cigarettes in her iconic Julian Wasser portraits — as she signed my copy of We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live. I was starstruck. The first time I heard Salman Rushdie read aloud in The Strand’s rare book room, I was delighted to discover that he read his characters’ dialogue in character, performing the varied voices as my mother had once done for me. When I was young, every character in every book had my mother’s voice. In New York, every book was imbued with the voice of its author, and I had only to leave the house and go to my local bookstore to hear it.

The literary life of New York City felt like the most impossible kind of magic; no matter the season, you could walk into a bookstore and listen to a reading in the company of fellow readers.

My day job as a book publicist allowed me to talk about books I loved all day long. But at night I’d leave each bookstore with a signed first edition under my arm and a renewed drive to publish my own. In 2019, after a decade of writing, I sold my debut, What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers. I dedicated it to Mom, who had died two years after I moved to New York. I planned an eleven-city book tour for the spring of 2020 so I could take Mom’s story to all the places we never got to go together.

In February 2020, I finished recording the audiobook of What We Inherit in a Manhattan studio. In March, as the first cases of Covid-19 were reported in New York, I attended a reading at Brooklyn’s Books Are Magic with Teddy Wayne and Kate Bolick. The room was so crowded I had to stand in the back by the cookbooks. I couldn’t wait for Kate to join me at The Strand in April for my own launch. A week later, the pandemic shut down New York City.

Shortly thereafter, bookstores across the country shuttered. For weeks, it wasn’t clear if my book could even be printed, let alone distributed. The tour was canceled. Locked down at home, I tried to read myself to sleep, but I was too distracted. Writing is a solitary act. Publishing takes a village. How could I bring a book into the world without my village? With so much death and loss in the world, did books even matter anymore?

As the world turned to Zoom, book tours did, too. I joined an online group of authors whose books were coming out in a world beset by Covid. We called ourselves Lockdown Literature, and our titles included everything from erotica to YA to the future 2020 Booker winner. Bookstores would never have placed us on the same shelf, but we found each other in this terrifying moment, as the shelves seemed to be collapsing all around us.

I joined an online group of authors whose books were coming out in a world beset by Covid. We called ourselves Lockdown Literature, and our titles included everything from erotica to YA to the future 2020 Booker winner.

We read and recommended one another’s books, shouted each other out on social media, and partnered with San Francisco’s The Booksmith to run an online reading series. Many of us appeared on Zibby’s podcast. We couldn’t travel to one another’s cities, but we could attend virtual events across time zones and coasts. I Zoomed into City Lit in Chicago and McNally Jackson in New York City and Vroman’s in Pasadena.

Online, there are no signed copies at the end of the night. No free wine or cheese plate. But as I signed on each evening and saw rows of strangers sitting in their digital boxes, there it was, as powerful as the first time I had attended a book launch: the magic of being read to aloud by an author. I couldn’t imagine a better bedtime story in a pandemic when what I craved most in the world was the sound of other people’s voices and a connection to other people’s stories.

On July 12, 2020, I stood in line outside of Books Are Magic in my neighborhood of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. The city had allowed bookstores to reopen, but protocols meant fewer people could be in the store at once. Normally, a New Yorker would see a line and run in the other direction, but this felt different — a reminder that an island full of people who are always in a rush love bookstores so much that they are willing to wait in line for them.

I couldn’t imagine a better bedtime story in a pandemic, when what I craved most in the world was the sound of other people’s voices and a connection to other people’s stories.

When I finally made it inside, I was sweating and nervous under my mask. After loading down my arms with new releases, I approached the cash register apologetically. “I know my book came out in April and I’m sure you don’t have any copies, but I’d be happy to sign them if you do…” I trailed off.

The clerk led me to the nonfiction section and there, on a real, live bookstore shelf, were five copies of What We Inherit with my name on the cover. It was the first time I had seen my book in a store, three months after pub date, and a decade after I started writing it.

I heard my mother’s voice in my head, the one she reserved for the end of a story, when the protagonist has been through all of the obstacles the author could throw at her and has finally found peace. As I stood in the sun in front of the iconic “Books Are Magic” mural with a tote full of new books on my shoulder, not even my mask could hide my smile.

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Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @JessicaRotondi or visit her at www.JessicaPearceRotondi.com.