The Book Party

I am at the Neue gallery in cocktail attire, hob-nobbing with the literary elite of the Upper East Side. Well, sort of. By hob-nobbing I mean sitting at a desk attempting to sell Gerald Stern's new book of essays, by “literary elite” I mean a very particular club of New York-based Jewish-American poets who were best known in the 1960s. Mr. Stern is throwing a launch party here at the gallery tonight. I have met the man already, in one of those totally cliché accidentally-meeting-a-famous-person gaffy exchanges; I was reading his book here at my little table and he, unrecognizable from the cover picture, snuck up behind me and asked 'how is it?' before introducing himself as 'Jerry.'

I've made friends with the catering team. They keep lingering by my area on the edge of the party just long enough for me to snatch a salmon pinwheel...or four. A Hector Elizondo-esque gallery manager circles, hawk-like, protective but somehow redundant. I keep thinking I'll see personalities I recognize – Joan Didion, perhaps? Woody Allen? – but typical to the restrictions of 'writer celebrity,' I can't pin a single face down. I may have read some of these people in English classes (it's actually becoming more likely that a lot of folks here helped publish people I read in English classes) but now these men – if these men are those men – walk with canes. They impudently wear their hats inside and bray their Brooklyn drawls out to this austere Austrian stronghold, defying an elitism they have always embodied for me.

For these men (and women, but fewer women) are writers, sitting on comfortable success and comparative acclaim...whoops, G. Stern has come my way to insist I'm sitting on his man purse. I am not. His friends nearby wink in a kind of apology, the matter is laughed off.

Hector Elizondo – his name is Tom in real life – asks if I've gotten a chance to see upstairs yet. I motion to the books, as if they need constant tending. H tells me there are three Klimt, when I get a chance. He seems proud.

I got this gig through my friend Darcy, who is one of those fabulous born and bred New Yorker types who calls me three or four times a year for some really excellent reason: dinner with her family at a LES inoteca, birthday trip to Mohonk Mountain, brother's film premiere launch party at Silvercup. Darce is in charge of The List, because a pushy woman noticed that she was dressed more “weather appropriate” than me and so oughta take the door. It's true, my feathers stick out: when people say cocktail attire I assume the bright lime Diane von Furstenberg wrap-dress from 2000 and my junior green Jackie O coat. D and me wink at one another across the marble lobby. Luckily I don't feel out of place because I wasn't really invited to this party; also, I am ridiculous.

Last week my mom saw Zadie Smith speak at Politics and Prose, and allegedly my favorite teach REMEMBERED me. Quote: “Of course I know Brittany, she's brilliant!” I am bragging this out to you now when clearly Zadie Smith is from England where brilliant doesn't always mean brilliant and of course if a mother asks if you remember her daughter in a book-signing line there is but one clear response, obvi...still. Still! Still, I think! Another sign, for those who mark their lives in signs: Monday I was at the Strand book-shopping with a buddy and a man, a stranger, actually did a double take and said, “I thought you WERE Zadie Smith!” This is a theatrical-seeming coincidence, no? She's not that well-known. Not everyone knows what she looks like. Buddy huffed the stranger's remark off as petty racism – which is what well-meaning caucasian friends sometimes do whenever a person of color is said to look like another person of color , teehee – but I dreamt big for a moment. Maybe I could be Zadie Smith. Maybe I am her. What if I just borrowed her vision one day and slipped into her life and fabulous headwear? Back at the party, I think I see Anne Meara! It is not Anne Meara after all.

People are spilling out of the gallery. The reading is over. This morning I went to brunch with a poet/librarian, and we spoke about the books on our nightstands and that harping rhetorical, “is it possible to really delve into/give your soul to two things at once? Let alone, like, four?” I thought about the renaissance people I know, the janes and jacks of many trades. I thought about discipline. I thought about choice. I thought about which way is “taking it easy on yourself,” vs. which way is “selling out.” I thought about the pragmatics of having only just enough time on the earth, and presumably just enough activity, energy, to squeeze into this big countdown.

This party is the Book World, or a country in it. This party is Eileen Fisher and chunky jewelry and booties and a few patent eccentrics. The reading at the gallery for two hundred of your nearest and dearest is a worthwhile success marker for many writers, maybe most. So dramatic hypothetical: were this the particular life the one I wanted, decided to pursue, I would inevitably find myself at more events like this. Down the road. As opposed to other kinds of parties, for there are as many kinds of parties as there are guests. This one is in a fancy gallery and it's clear we won't be staying too late or speaking too loud. In a very superficial and very reductive sense, in a certain equation of my future this party would be something I'd need to get used to, or become something I'd want.

I drink champagne.

The problem with the scary question (DEARGODWHATDOIDOWITHMYLIFE) when you have a lot of “options” (read:flights of fancy, ardent delusions, overconfidence, earnestness at least) is that there's no point. Asking the question itself is a means of dillydallying; in all the time I spend sighing to you about where will I go Rhett what will I do, I might have written a chapbook OR gone on thirty auditions. A lot of the jacks and janes I know – whose gumption I so admire – are fantastic, talented people, but a little too content with their crappy service jobs. Myself included. And I do believe the world is changing. The goals for the art-maker or the philosopher are no longer tied to money, if they ever were. But there is also such freedom and some romance in this. It seems we have borrowed more time with which to decide on or juggle various projects, and the stakes not being as dire as “make money with this!” WE are free to put our art on the back-burner, or perfect it over years, or tell people we're doing it when we're not howsoever we choose. No one is waiting. We are making no one wait. Yet I think there will come a point when you start dreaming of your own stuffy book party. I think it happened to the men of Gerald Stern's generation. I do not think it's the same as “selling out,” but by 'it' I mean lingering on but one bliss...if you are the kind of person who wants to move and shake. Strike that, reverse it: I do not quite believe that the answer to the scary question is as simple as “you can't do everything, pick one.” Quentin Tarantino is also a successful dude rancher, after all. But I do think some of our serious, semi-delusional energy might be thrown harder behind the things we want to achieve. Take yourself seriously. Do not talk about the work; do the work.

Hector, seeing me scribble, glances over at one point and asks me if I'm a writer. Usually I hem and haw at this question, or give people information they didn't ask for: I am a / and a / and a/, or trying to be. Today I say 'yes,' and while it clicks it also hurts – a selection is an edit after all – but Hector just smiles. He says, “well, you're in the right place.”

Hmm. Maybe I am.