The Wisdom of the Priestesses of the Bestseller List

I had originally planned to stay in a Tucson a week, although I knew in advance that I might stay longer, as I often do, since I have no fixed schedule on my travels.

During the first dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, my aunt had told me about the upcoming Tucson Festival of Books, which she always enjoyed attending each year, but which she knew she would have to miss this time because of her trip to be with her daughter during the birth of the new baby.

She really talked it up, telling me how much I would enjoy it. Although it meant extending my stay at least five more nights, I rather easily began to contemplate the idea of going, based simply on curiosity and the fact that I tend to take up suggestions like this rather easily, out of almost a spiritual sense of being guided by serendipity along my path.

I told my aunt that it was ironic, since I often described my unorthodox lifestyle as being like "an unpublished author on a phantom book tour." She liked that one.

My aunt gave me the extensive guide to the festival from the local paper. I put it in my backpack and didn't take it out until the night before the opening day of the festival, which was a Saturday. By that time my aunt had already left for Wisconsin.

I figured it was time to do a little recon if I was going to see anything at the festival, which was held on the campus of the University of Arizona. When I cracked open the guide, I was surprised to see that there were over a hundred different authors giving lectures and presentations on various themes of writing at locations all over campus. It was much bigger event than I realized.

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I recognized almost none of the names of authors, outside of a few famous Hollywood actor-authors who were attending. I decided I didn't want to see them, since they would certainly be crowded.

Somewhat randomly I picked out an author from the list---Lisa Genova, who had written a novel that had made the New York Times bestseller list. I'd never heard of her, or her book, but the theme of her 1:00 PM talk, "Mixing Fact and Fiction," somewhat intrigued me.

Around noon on Saturday I drove towards campus and parked in location where I knew I could find a space. When I got to the main mall area, I found it packed and swarming with a huge crowd of people streaming between the many white tents set up outside as temporary book stalls and author-signing booths.  The C-SPAN bookmobile was parked nearby, beside the palm trees in front of the modern languages building where Genova's lecture was to be held.

I had imagined being in a small classroom, but the lecture turned out to be a multi-author panel discussion in a large lecture auditorium. I arrived five minutes beforehand and squeezed into one of the last remaining seats.

Genova was a Ph.D. neurologist from Harvard who had written a previous novel about alzeimer's disease. On the panel she was plugging her latest novel, which was about a boy with autism. The other two authors were both women: Caroline Leavitt, whose book Pictures of You was about a woman who had killed someone in a car accident, and Barbara Shapiro, who latest novel was a young woman painter who is lured into becoming an art forger.

Shapiro's book is based partly on the still-unsolved theft of several famous painters from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. She gave me one of the comments that made an impression on me: It can be hard to write about a crime that hasn't been solved yet, she said. That's something I think about a lot, as it happens.

A couple other mental notes I carried away from the panel discussion. Genova, in responding to a question about how to know when you have done enough research: "You reach a point where you start hearing the same things over and over," she said.

I reminded me of something I'd discovered along the way, that if you're trying to figure out something that happened, say if you're trying to solve a historical crime, you know you're on the right path because the additional facts you pick up start falling into place more easily. Or as I often say, using the language of higher mathematics, the truth converges.

Leavitt emphasized the importance of just plowing through your first draft. That one's fairly universal, and one I'm still working on. I'm running out of excuses.

I got a kick out of Genova talking about her writing habits. She said she has to get out of the house to write---too many distractions there, including laundry and the refrigerator. "I usually write in Starbucks," she said.

"I'm surprised I haven't run into her yet," I thought. But then I haven't been out to Cape Cod lately.