Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson Page B

nothing for her at all. Feigning sophisticated sympathy, I turned to The Publisher, pointed in the direction of the ungainly female apparition, and asked, ‘Who on earth is that wretched-looking woman over there?’
    For some reason there seemed to appear a lull in the hubbub around us, as if not only The Man, but everybody, was listening to us.
    And The Publisher said in very clearly demarcated words, each stressed separately, ‘It is my wife.’

‘The idea that the media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that’s about tenth or eleventh on their list. The first purpose of the media is to sell us shit.’ Abbie Hoffman
Duncan McLean
    On the whole, professional writers are a lot of whingeing bastards who wouldn’t last a day in a real job. They get flown around the world for launches and festivals, treated to meals out and free room service, then have the gall to moan that their hotel’s only four-star. They get off with translators, post-grad students and easily impressed publisher’s publicists, then complain because only seventy-three of the seventy-six folk who struggled through the blizzard to attend their in-store reading loved them enough to actually buy the book. Of course I include myself in this miserable roll-call of inadequate no-lifers. Is my writing autobiographical? Yes it fucking is, for once.
    The true mortification of being a writer is having to meet other writers from time to time, and listen to their mundane egotistical rantings. Like the ones I’m going to scratch down now about a typically humiliating day in a promotional tour I was asked to do a couple of years ago. The place: a large college town in the south-western USA. The start time: 7.14am.
    Breakfast TV. Very like you’d imagine (so why waste words?), with the writer sandwiched on the mauve couch between a diet guru (‘Fruits of the Desert weightloss plan – store those nutrients like a cactus’) and the Texoma spelling-bee champ, muttering between her braces, ‘Chrysanthemum, ineradicable, diarrhoea …’
    The host was plump and shiny. An assistant dashed in during the ad breaks to dab his sweat away. His left shoelace was undone and trailing.
    ‘And we’re back,’ he said. ‘Our guest today has written a novel called
Bunker Man
. What’s that all about?’
    ‘Golf,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘Witty repartee in the sand trap.’
    His face brightened. ‘Really?’
    ‘No, but I thought you’d like that more than a psychosexual horror story full of squalid under-age copulation in a concrete bomb-shelter.’
    ‘You’re right,’ he said.
    During the phone-in section of the show there were quite a few callers for the ‘Have you ever seen a fat cactus?’ guru, but only one for me: ‘Dance with the one who brung you,’ said the voice over the monitor.
    ‘Pardon?’ I said.
    ‘You haven’t mentioned this evening’s sponsor once, and we’re paying for free beverages until eleven. Show some gratitude! And there’s not nearly as much golf in your book as we were led to believe’
    ‘Thank you so much,’ said the host, sweating again. ‘Next!’
    ‘Diarrhoea?’
    Next stop was a lunchtime reading and signing at a big chain in a big mall in a big retail park on the edge of town. There was no one there. Not just no audience for me, but no customers at all. And no staff either. Well, there had to be someone somewhere: otherwise, who had pressed
play
on the CD of Boston Pops covers of Billy Joel’s greatest hits?
    Eventually I managed to find a cash-desk, where HI I’M CLEBO (according to his lapel badge) looked astonished when I introduced myself.
    ‘I guess it was Appalachia who booked you, was it?’
    ‘I don’t know. I just got given this list of places to show up to …’
    ‘May I see? Oh … yeah. That is us. What’s the date?’
    ‘The fourteenth.’
    ‘That’s what it says here.’
    ‘I know. That’s why I came today.’
    ‘But this is Appalachia’s day off.’
    ‘Oh.