That shouldn’t be a hard question. I spent more than two years writing THE TRUTH ABOUT PARALLEL LINES. It was in my head all the time. I could hear the characters’ voices, I could see what they were wearing, I knew why they were doing what they were doing, even when they themselves didn’t know.
But when asked what my book is about, I fumble. I stammer and stutter. I might even giggle stupidly. I don’t finish my sentences, shrugging as my voice trails off . “It’s about a girl.” “It’s about relationships. And family.” “It’s sort of a coming of age story, that then keeps going.” Ugh. There’s a reason I’m not in marketing.
A while back, a colleague who I didn’t know very well had heard that I was writing a book and asked me what it was about. When it became apparent that I didn’t have a good answer, he asked me to name another author whose books were similar to mine. “Hmm, let me think. I don’t know, maybe Jonathan Tropper?” (He wrote This Is Where I Leave You — another book I love! – and Plan B and The Book of Joe. But I figured it was a fairly obscure reference. I mean, who are you going to compare yourself to, particularly when you are barely halfway through your first novel?) The colleague then said that he’d grown up with Jonathan Tropper, that he was his brother’s best friend, that he’d read all of his books. Ugh. So much for obscurity.
That was a long time ago. I have since finished the book, published it and gotten a fair amount of feedback. I have had to identify “peer books” and I have thought about “subgenres” and “keywords” and “target audiences”, things I didn’t think about at all while I was writing. I still don’t have a snappy answer to the question “what’s your book about?” But at the end of the day, humbly and with all due respect, I suppose I would describe myself as a female, slightly less funny, Jonathan Tropper.
