Some years ago it was my job to recruit Sunday School teachers and what a miserable job that was. It would be easier to get someone to donate a kidney than to get them to teach a class on Sunday morning, and after a while I noticed that people in my church were avoiding me.  I was getting a little obsessive, I guess, and could not have a conversation with anyone without asking them to teach, and it was at that moment of revelation that I turned to my husband and said, You’re going to have to teach three classes.
 
I had a similar revelation a few days ago when I was talking to a friend and invited her to have coffee and she hesitated and then said, “You know, I’ve already bought five copies of your book.” I assured her that I really did just want to chat, and I promised not to mention The Fiction Class,  and I did keep my promise, sort of, but the fact is that for a first-time author, events and book clubs and readings are so important. I need sales!
 
Which brings me to an event that is taking place tonight (July 10) at the Bedford Library in NY about which I am very excited because it involves one of my students, Lynn Biederman. (We are going to have a bunch of these, so don’t worry if you’ve missed this one.) Lynn , and her co-author Michelle Baldini, wrote a wonderful and funny and honest YA novel titled Unraveling and it is being published by Delacourte and got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which is a big deal.
 
Lynn was in my Beginning Fiction class some years ago (though even then she seemed rather advanced to me). I have watched with awe as she has navigated the shoals of publishing with a tremendous amount of grace, and what has made it particularly fun is that I was in such a daze when my own book came out, that I missed half of it. So I am getting to relive some of my own publishing moments, but without all the anxiety. For example, I had completely forgotten the excitement of getting that e-mail from amazon saying that The Fiction Class had shipped. And the terror of knowing that it was official that my book would be in strangers’ hands.
 
Another thing that makes reading Lynn’s novel, Unraveling, so much fun for me is that she covers much of the same territory I do in my novel, but from a completely different perspective. Whereas my protagonist, Arabella, is a grown woman, dealing with a difficult elderly mother, Lynn’s protagonist, fifteen-year-old Amanda Himmelfarb, is grappling with a different type of difficult mother, the domineering woman she refers to as Captain, along with such  other issues  as her perfect little sister, Malady, and the all-consuming issue of how to get a boyfriend.
 
So tonight, to get back to our event, Lynn and I will be talking about how our own relationship with our mothers affected our writing, and how being student and teacher and friend has affected our lives, and how wonderful it is that Bedford Library is hosting this event. And if anyone out there would like to arrange an event or a book club meeting or teach Sunday School, for that matter, be in touch.