Dirty Sugar Cookies virtual tour stop

In the years to come, Ayun Halliday may well add the first Nobel prize for book promotion to her laurels as the publisher of the East Village Inky, her zine; as the author of No Touch Monkey, Job Hopper, The Big Rumpus, and as Bust's Mother Superior. As readers of the New York Times will know, books about food are, you know, white hot, and as it happens, she wrote one, called Dirty Sugar Cookies. the Nobel Prize buzz comes from an as far as I know brand new innovation-- the virtual book tour-- in the month of June, Ayun will be making appearances at a different blog every day. We talked a bit about food, and a bit about the tour:

GC: I enjoyed the book, though it was more of a bildungsroman than I expected. For whatever reason, I'd expected some sort of intervention in the mommyhood kulturkampf on behalf of raffish, bohemian, wise parenting. Instead, the book is more of a bio through food. What’s up with that?

DSC: That's the perfect description, bildungsroman, except possibly for the part about how "the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist, who is then accommodated into society".I'm quoting Wikipedia, as you no doubt surmised. I had to look it up because I'd forgotten what it means.

 GC: I was familiar with your earlier work, thanks to my partner, who reads your column in Bust, and gives Big Rumpus as a default shower gift. Especially given current fraughtness in re motherhood and lots of interest in cooking books, I was expecting more of on an explicit connection between your lives as a mother and as a cook. Did you deliberately opt out of that whole kerfuffle?

 DSC: Well, despite what some of my self-appointed critics on Amazon might say to the contrary, when writing about kids and mothers other than just me and mine I strive to accentuate the universals of the experience, rather than try to divide us into the opposing teams getting so much play in the media. We mothers need to watch each others' backs. Frustration, irritability and stress come with the territory when you're raising little kids, and I think that explains why so many moms lash out in chat rooms, blog comments and other non-face-to-face public forums. The longer I spend in these trenches the less I want to foment any sort of us vs. them or me vs. youa ttitude among my fellow mothers. Nor do I enjoy being on the butt end of such judgments, though my hide's thickened to the point where I think "Oh well, maybe it'll sell some books."

As far as an explicit connection between my life as a mother and the pleasure I take in cooking, I feel like it's in there to such a degree that there's a danger readers will think I'm harshing out on my finicky daughter. I hope she doesn't feel that way when she eventually reads it! (Because every fucking word is true, okay?) Showing the full extent of her pickiness is an admission that I'm in no position to pass public judgment about how another family is feeding their young. I even go so far as to say that it's kind of a blessing in disguise that she turned out the way she currently is with regard to food, because if she'd been a "good" eater, I'd have been insufferable, certain that it was all due to my excellent example and stewardship! As it is, I'm so riddled with contradictions, that I'm sure I'd come off as a big old honkin' hypocrite the second I took someone to task for feeding their kids an all-vegetarian diet, or feeding their kids factory-farmed meat, ortaking their kids to McDonalds, or forbidding them any junk food at all... Besides, as any parent can tell you, with regard to children's diet, the inmates often run the asylum. I have seen tofu mommies thwarted by the contents of pinatas. I have seen grade school vegetarians lusting after 99 cent hot dogs. The ways we parents fail despite our best intentions.

Finally ... this is a book about me and food. Just because I have kids doesn't mean I am obliged, or want to remind myself on every printed page!

 GC: And that would be the difference between you and Dr. Laura. From time to time, there have been mutterings in this space about the uneasy relation between blogging selves and publishing selves. How do you see the relationship between your blog, Dirty Sugar Cookies, and the book also known as Dirty Sugar Cookies?

DSC: The recipes weren't in the first few drafts of the book, but once we started putting them in, I couldn't stomach the thought of putting on the brakes, just because the manuscript was due at the printer. Before I started the blog, I treated my computer as a typewriter vested with the power to erase. Email was as tech savvy as I got. I've forgotten how to drive a car, I've never owned a microwave oven,  I don't get any television reception and I'm 41 years old so I'm kind of far down the list of people you'd expect to start a blog, but I enjoyed the learning process. I suspect it's  much less involved than learning how to play the accordion, which is another thing I <i>really</i> want to learn how to do. I'm still pretty pokey and have to preview each post several dozen times to make it come out looking vaguely like the wonderful arrangement of photos and font colors in my head. When I learned that my book was coming out the same week that my husband's play, Pig Farm, was opening for previews, I realized that a traditional book tour would have to be delayed, because one of the children's parents needed to be physically and mentally available to them for the month of June. So, I hatched the idea of doing a virtual tour, and who better to host the majority of the 30 stops than food bloggers? Naturally, I respect that these are labors of love, and anybody who agreed to participate would be doing me a huge favor, not the other way around. There's a reasonable chance that somebody who writes a parenting blog might have a passing familiarity with me or my work, because I write Bust's Mother Superior column and magazines like Hip Mama and BrainChild have been very supportive of my zine and The Big Rumpus, which chronicles my first four years as a mother. There was no such assurance that the food bloggers I was about to approach would know or more importantly, care about my work. I could well imagine that it might seem kind of uppity of me, appearing out of nowhere with such an outlandish request. Being able to direct potential hosts to a food blog of my own, albeit a fledgling one, seemed a reasonable way to let them check out the kind of flavor they could expect to find in the book I'd be sending those who agreed to participate.  I devoted a lot of time to reading people's archives in hope that my initial approach would seem respectful and appropriate. It's a fine line between feeling flattered that you've been singled out by someone who admires what you've created and feeling pissed off that some chiseler you've neverheard of is emailing you out of the blue, putting the bite on you forsome free publicity.

GC: How is the virtual tour going? Will we see more of these in the future?

 DSC:It's exhausting, fun, seemingly good for sales and, yeah, I do think it's the wave of the future. Personally, I'm going to rest up for a month and then beam myself right back into the blogosphere come August, when The Big Rumpus will be published in the UK, with a new cover and a new and improved title Mamalamadingdong. I'm not sure that the form's suited to every kind of book, but I'm pleased that publishers and publicists will be forced to acknowledge the value of small idiosyncratic forums that aren't pitching to the mainstream. In fact,they're much more likely to get the word out about a small, idiosyncratic writer who's not pitching to the mainstream, (not that I would know anyone who fits that description, mind you.) The questions my blog tours hosts have posed in their interviews are unfailingly interesting...I find their take on the book much more imaginative than the legit press's frequent declaration that I'm some kooky mix of Erma
Bombeck and David Sedaris. (The physical resemblance is quite pronounced, but...) As far as the future of blog tours, I think in order for them to be successful, the authors, not the publicists, should do the heavy lifting  because folks who spend a lot of time and energy on their internet creations don't take kindly to anything that smacks of spam. 

GC: Dang! I may have referred to you as the LES Bombeck at some point, but I actually think Peg Bracken is a much better reference point than Erma Bombeck, but that might be because of the Hilary Knight illustrations in Peg Bracken’s I Hate To Cook Book. Also, Sedaris? Does he have a monopoly on funny? That reminds me of the era when lummoxes would introduce every anecdote with the plug that it was like an episode of Seinfeld. In any case, good luck on the tour, and we'll look forward to Motley Crue-style songs about how hard life is on the virtual road. 

Comments

[la_depressionada]

as i've said before elsewhere, this girl and her ilk(y) destroyed my neighborhood turning it into a sort of diaper room for the kiddie parents and kiddie kiddies -- but what i do not know about white upper middle (pretending not be be) motherhood would fill the kiddie section at the ottendorfer.

but even these relentlessly self-promoting mediocrities are not bothering me today. good news via the internets: heretofore, it shall be called the
astor disaster.

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