the first review.
deep breath.
okay. remember how i promised that i wasn’t going to read ANY REVIEWS of “the art of asking”? i meant it. and i’ve held to it so far. and when i say no reviews, i mean none. no newspapers, no google alert, no music blogs, no amazon reviews, no nothing. nada. not unless it has been screened and approved by my book doula, Jamy Ian Swiss, who is standing at the door of my iron lung like a vicious nurse, allowing only safe particles to enter.
however, i can’t ignore my twitter feed. i refuse.
i sent the writer ksenia anske my book in advance because she’s going to be my special chat-n-cry-guest at the seattle show of the concert-book-tour. (ticket info HERE, btw, there are still a few left.)
i’ve never met ksenia. i know her through twitter, because one day she made a joke to me about borscht, and it never ended. we now joke about borscht once a day. i could tell just from her twitter that we were kindred souls. she got her copy of “the art of asking” in the mail and started live-tweeting her experience of reading the book. i couldn’t ignore it. especially the parts where she cried and peed and pumped her twitter-fist in solidarity. she emailed me her review. i read it. the world didn’t end. but i am not actually going to follow this link and read what anyone else on Goodreads has to say about my book.
and please don’t tell me.
and when you get the book itself, feel free to tell me what you love about it. what you didn’t love about it. i can handle talking directly to people. but i can’t spend another year of my life getting caught in the yo-yo strings of critics making attacks on my character and basically using this book as a reason to tear me to pieces. that was 2012. and i had to write a whole book about it as therapy to get the fuck over it, and it just barely worked.
if i read my reviews, i’d have to write a whole nother book to recover. and then i’d be stuck on a book-therapy treadmill.
so let it go, amanda.
ALSO, BREAKING: CHICAGO and MINNEAPOLIS stops of the book tour are completely SOLD OUT. you can still get tickets for DC, PHILLY, NYC, AUSTIN, DENVER, SF, LA, SEATTLE, PORTLAND and last but not least, BOSTON, book-drop night. where the night is gearing up to be historically epic with guests laurie penny, neil gaiman, and amy cuddy, and hopefully, CAKE. all tickets: http://amandapalmer.net/shows/
there are still a HANDFUL of signed copies…pre-order those from various indie bookstores in the US by following this link: bit.ly/blog100914
