On the Lionsgate, Selling Books Under the Plane Trees, and Giving a Book Away — a writer’s diary entry, 8th of August

The eighth of the eighth, and I was up at five loading boxes into the car in the dark like a woman doing something faintly criminal. The atelier opened at nine. It’s not a craft fair, whatever I keep calling it in English, and the word matters to the people who run it. Workshops thrown open, makers standing next to the actual bench they work at, a potter with clay still on her forearms, a man who does something extraordinary with old shutters, a woman binding books by hand at a table she had made herself. And then the six of us, at a trestle in the shade of the plane trees with a good tablecloth and a gazebo we did in fact need, selling words.

Selling your own book to a person’s face is a strange trade and I don’t think I’ll ever be smooth at it. You watch them pick it up. You watch them turn it over and read the back, which takes about nine seconds and feels like a fortnight, and you have to keep talking to somebody else while it happens so as not to be caught watching. Most people put it down. That is simply the arithmetic of a table and it means nothing at all, and I have never once managed to make it mean nothing at all.

But then there was a woman, mid-sixties I’d say, who read the back and didn’t put it down. She stood there with it for a long time. And then she said, in French, is this the one about the quotes, and I said yes, and she said her sister had died in March and she had been given a line at the funeral by a cousin she doesn’t even like, and she has carried it in her purse since. She got it out. Actual purse, actual folded paper. She bought the book and I signed it and neither of us made a fuss and I had to go and be very busy with the boxes for a minute afterwards. That is the entire reason to sit at a table in the heat all day. One of those. Not eleven. One.

The eighth of August is the Lionsgate, if you go in for that, and half the internet does. Sirius coming back up over the horizon before dawn, the sun in Leo, a date people say is good for opening something and good for putting something down. I hold it the way I hold most of this, which is loosely, with one eyebrow slightly raised and my hands doing it anyway. The date does not know what I am up to. But I do rather like a day in the year that has been agreed on for setting a thing down, in the same way I like Sunday for not answering emails. The reason is not the point. The permission is.

So here is what I put down, on the day for putting things down, sitting in a plastic chair between customers with the plane trees going over. The idea that the book is still mine. It isn’t, not once someone has carried it off in a canvas bag and taken it home to a house I will never see. I have been holding on to those pages as though I could keep explaining them forever, and I can’t, and today somebody understood a book of mine by way of a folded piece of paper in a purse that had nothing to do with me. Whatever it becomes in her kitchen is hers now. I gave that over in the chair and I meant it, more or less, which is the most anyone can honestly claim.

Home at eight with fewer books and a sunburnt forearm on the driving side only. The moon is a thin thing now, going down toward the dark of it, and I stood in the lane and looked at what was left of it for a minute before I went in. Waning. Almost gone. Good. Let it.