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I sent a gamely cheerful email blast to my contacts asking them to kindly preorder copies.
I plastered my website and social feeds with graphics of the cover art.
I retweeted, with genuine glee, every photo of a galley copy spotted in the wild.
I understand how weve arrived at this point.
For a long time, I felt like I was letting everyone down, she added.
The memoir centers on Dancygers childhood and the impact of her parents struggles with heroin addiction.
But while doing press, interviewers would pose policy questions.
When planning the essays shed pitch, Dancyger considered trying for a big, timely op-ed.
But she ultimately decided that being a commentator wouldve felt disingenuous and more importantly was irrelevant to the book.
I wanted to be talking to the people who are affected and to my own community.
I felt a similar expectation to educate.
Literary figures who were ripe for cancellation.
But they were also subjects I found intellectually dull, creatively deadening, and artistically demoralizing.
If I proved myself nimble enough to chase the ambulance, they would know to call my number.
That we should cancel Joan Didion?
None of this is to say that the promotional essay is all schlock and mirrors.
The writers I spoke to for this piece all developed ways to approach the task that felt authentic.
Setting limits can help ensure that a writer isnt pushed into mining their work in uncomfortable ways.
The balance is one Im still figuring out.
Besides, how much difference does a media hit like this really make to a books fate?
Its my sneaking suspicion that it does very little, Bell said.
(That sound you just heard was a thousand publicists screaming.)
