UK Book Tour: Note to Self

Note to self: Don’t try and launch a book amidst a global pandemic.

My adventure began on Monday February 17th when I flew to London, accompanied by my newly-purchased media clothes. Having not done much media, I had desperately inhaled a day of training with my Callanish friend Pamela Post, a veteran journalist and media aficionado, two days before I left—no stripes and no black clothing for TV, no dangly earrings or rustling sleeves for radio she told me, among many other pearls of wisdom.

One month later, I returned to Vancouver, with the media clothes still in my suitcase and with just a handful of newspaper interviews, two reviews, and two out of six book events under my belt.

On March 5, UK Publication Day (Canongate), we had a wonderful party thanks to my family in London. We drank champagne and ate a cake which my sister Kate had procured specially for the occasion. It was created in the shape of the book with the bird images from the cover and the words Radical Acts of Love beautifully embossed in icing.

On March 6, we went on a mission to find my book in a London bookshop. Waterstones in Putney was our first (and last) stop that rainy afternoon. Imagining teetering towers of my book on the front table in the New Non-Fiction section was clearly a figment. The clerk directed us to the one copy of Radical Acts, turned sideways, in the biography section, next to a book about some Russian Oligarch. With our fantasy bubble burst, we humbly left the bookstore pushing our umbrellas into the wet and windy afternoon. Walking back along the Thames we paused momentarily to watch the cormorants dive into the dark murky water.

Things picked up for a couple of weeks—there were books on the bookshelves, interviews with the Sunday Post and Daily Express, a serial planned for the Daily Mirror, and requests made for a 1000-word article for the New Statesman and a 1200-word piece for a feature in the Daily Telegraph. The piece de resistance was the promise of a slot on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour with Jane Garvie.

In the end, there was a lovely review in the Times and a not-quite-so-lovely one in the Guardian, and an interview in the Sunday Post. The remainder of the media dissolved, understandably, beneath the coverage of COVID-19. I spoke at two wonderful book events: a couple of days in the Lake District at the Words by the Water Festival, and an evening in Biggar, Scotland, hosted by the award-winning Atkinson-Pryce bookstore. One of the greatest highlights of the trip was being surprised by three women from my Edinburgh Royal Infirmary nursing class of ‘83 whom I had not seen, or connected with, for 39 years. They had tracked me down and come to the book event to find me. The Glasgow, Edinburgh and London events planned for the following week, with my dear friend Jackie Kay, the Makar (Scottish Poet Laureate), were cancelled one by one.

On March 18, we made a mad dash to grab an earlier flight than planned because our prime minister was calling all Canadians to come home. British Airways gouged us for a one-way flight for the cost of a small condo, but we knew we were the lucky ones.

In my present jet-lagged state, a few days after my return, and into the fourteen days of quarantine at home, my mind and heart thinks mostly about all the people who can’t get home, all the people who suddenly have no income, all those in hospital with the virus, and all those alone at home, and all my brave friends on the front lines of healthcare who are already getting tired, and all my dear ones at Callanish who are immune-compromised and searching for reassurance that they will still get the cancer treatments and care they need, as the COVID-19 virus surge hits Vancouver.

I trust this book will make its own way in the world and I hope it can be of some help right now for people who have much anxiety about illness and death. I feel lucky to have had so much incredible support from my agent Jason Bartholomew, my editor at Canongate Hannah Knowles, and my publicist Lucy Zhou. They did their absolute best, in unprecedented circumstances, to help my book find its feet and for that I am truly grateful.

Publication Day in Canada is today, March 24th, while the viral pandemic escalates all around us.