This month’s newsletter is a dispatch from my newly empty nest, which I’ve fled in an attempt to distract myself. Plus upcoming events, a non-recipe recipe for scallop crudo, and, as usual, Wally, this time on a different beach.
dispatches from the empty nest
At the beginning of the summer, I was busy promoting TWO NIGHTS IN LIBSON, then I came home to my kids’ high school graduation, after which they both left for adventures—one didn’t come back for 8 weeks—and me, I promptly tore my calf muscle, an injury nicknamed tennis leg, whose primary risk factors are (1) being older than 40, and (2) playing tennis. I’m older than 40, and not just by a year or two. I was playing tennis.
My main activity this summer was moping. For so long, my main companions were my children, and my life revolved around the rhythms of school years and school days, of grocery shopping and cooking dinner, homework and ballgames and report cards, the relentless march of parenting. But the needle just screeched off that record, and now I feel unmoored, aimless, and a little irrelevant.
When Sam was maybe four years old, he asked, “What are people for?” That’s a tough question. At the time, my main role in life was to be a parent, which provides a certain clarity of purpose, at least through the very personal lens of nuclear family, as well as the very wide lens of propagation of species. Now, though, it’s no longer so obvious how to answer: What is Chris Pavone for?
dispatches from Martha’s Vineyard
After back-to-back weekends of college drop-offs in Southern California and central Massachusetts, and a week on Long Island, I went to a conference in Minneapolis, then back to a couple of nights on LI and one in NYC, and next week I’m heading to Paris and briefly London and then home again and then back to SoCal and back to Mass. I’m a nomad.
Right now I’m at the only place I’ll be staying put for two weeks at a time this fall, a friend’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, where I’ve never before been. This island is breathtaking—the wildness, the sea everywhere, the light, the picture-perfect towns, the hush falling on a summer community that’s slipping into the off-season. And this house, this is my favorite I’ve ever been in, anywhere. A perfect place in every way.
We arrived to the Vineyard the day after Ron DeSantis’s deplorable and immoral stunt of exploiting extremely vulnerable people for the repugnant benefit of antagonizing his political foes. This made me at once ashamed to be here on a frivolous vacation, and angry at the depths to which American politics have sunk, but also proud of everyday people who respond to villainy with compassion. Every attempt by these vile characters to own the libs makes me more and more honored to be one.
But I’m also more and more dismayed about the future of this country. One political party has made its sole mission to defeat the other; one half of America seems to want nothing except to triumph over the other half. This doesn’t seem like a sustainable way to peaceably coexist, and I’m becoming worried about what it will mean to not peaceably coexist. During the first five decades of my life, it never occurred to me that I’d need to worry about having military-aged sons.
dispatches from the long tail of the tour
Book promotion doesn’t come to a hard stop so much as it slowly recedes from being an everyday activity. LISBON has been on bookshelves for four months now; there it is atop a bookshelf at charming little Edgartown Books. (I LOVE that there’s a separate section for Stephen King—on another floor!) But even after all this time, just yesterday I had back-to-back interviews with a journalist in Lisbon and an NPR station in Idaho (I was in a real time-zone sandwich there), and there are still events in the near future. Please come say hello. If I haven’t yet made it clear, I need cheering up:
- Monday 10/3 at 3:00: Waterstones Piccadilly, London, just signing inventory.
- Thursday 10/6 at 5:00: Shelter Island NY Public Library.
- Saturday 10/8 at noon: Morristown NJ Book Festival.
- Friday 10/21 at noon: Six Bridges Festival, Little Rock AR.
- Saturday 10/22 at 11:00 a.m.: Harrison NY Public Library’s Meet the Authors.
- Wednesday 10/26 at 6:30 p.m.: Book the Writer (NYC in-person tickets are sold out, but Zoom is still available).
- Thursday 11/3 at 5:00 p.m.: The River Club, NYC.
dispatches from a Vineyard kitchen
The kitchen garden is bursting with early-fall ripeness, and I plucked tomatoes, snipped herbs, decapitated a head of lettuce, then whisked a vinaigrette; this is what a garden salad is. There were a handful of uncooked scallops in the fridge, leftover from dinner because they hadn’t fit in the pan, and I sliced these, not too thin, then drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil, topped with minced chives and torn parsley and coarse sea salt. We ate on the long table on the front porch, in the shade, with an old friend.
