All the genuine interest in my story has led to a perhaps not-unexpected regression over the weekend, in which I stayed very close to home (truthfully, I barely left the house) and tried to recover some equilibrium. Perhaps the tipping point was my first public presentation of the book, which I managed without recourse to a handkerchief, but which was a little confronting for its lack of boundaries between author and work. This is the soil of the memoirist, I suppose – tilled in private but sown in public.

One of the lovely surprises of the reading was the appearance of one of my favourite English teachers from high school, whom I finally had the pleasure of thanking for being the first teacher to give me a decent mark for an essay about books and writing, and thus encouraging me.

One week until my next reading, at Customs House Library at Circular Quay – for which reservations are required. Details here.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been a little overwhelmed at the level of media interest in my book. Not that I’m complaining for a second, but I had never anticipated how exhausting it would be to talk about myself (which clearly defines me as Gen X rather than Y!), answering similar questions as if they had each been asked for the first time, with one ear on listening and responding thoughtfully to the interviewer, and the other on the overall tone and message of the interview: I don’t want listeners thinking my book is all gloom and doom. Last Friday evening after six radio interviews I collapsed on the couch with a headache and woke up five hours later. I hadn’t been that exhausted mentally since I had written parts of my book.

This week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sarah Macdonald on Radio National’s “Life Matters”. On the program’s website an audio file of my interview is available here for the next four weeks. Although quite intense, the experience was so enjoyable because it was clearly evident that Sarah had read my book closely and had really responded to it. It’s impossible to expect all radio presenters to have read your book – so many are competing for publicity attention every month – but in this case it made the interview feel more like an extension of the writing process than the selling process that inevitably follows publication.

Walking into a bookstore as a first-time published author, looking for evidence of your cherished output on the shelves, is an activity both exciting and a little shameful. Having been encouraged to introduce myself to local booksellers, this week I have learned quickly that no matter how good your publicity campaign is, most people will never have heard of your book. My cheeks flushed with pride when I saw a pile of my books on the front table at Newtown’s largest bookstore, Better Read Than Dead, although I left without any self-introduction. A bit further up the street the book was, to my amazement, actually in the shop window – but the bookseller on duty had no idea what I was talking about when I went inside to thank him. A friend visiting from New York told me a horror story about going into Borders in the middle of Sydney’s CBD to ask for my book, which was nowhere to be seen. The Gen-Y assistant looked it up on the computer. “Oh yeah, we have a box full of them out the back,” he said. “Maybe in a few days we’ll unpack them.” Thus I can be confident of a few lost sales. There are so many variables in the book publishing game – timing, zeitgeist, packaging, sales-force enthusiasm for a title, media-friendliness of author and story, let alone the quality of the book itself – that my complete lack of control over the choices of booksellers is a sort of perverse, if frustrating, relief.

Having tried and failed miserably to embed the simple, powerful trailer for the Sydney Writers’ Festival into this blog post, I retreat to the safety of this link. It can’t be that hard, but I’ve now lost patience. I replayed the video immediately, trying to figure out whether I did so for the music track – whose melody is it? – or for its “reverse-postcard” tour of the world through the pages of a book.

Check out the full festival program here. (Shock disclosure: I’m participating in two events: Thursday 22 May, The Final Journey, with Debra Adelaide, whose novel, The Household Guide to Dying, I’m impatient to read, and Susan Wyndham, whose book on music and neurosurgery, Life in His Hands, has been very well reviewed; and a panel with the stupendously gifted Kate Jennings – author of one of my favourite novels, Moral Hazard, on Friday 23 May, Personal Journeys.)

Not quite sure what to say at the tail end of this most extraordinary first week of life for my little hardback book, other than that I am in a constant state of surprise at the reception it has received so far. The review in today’s Sydney Morning Herald is simply too good to be true; so good in fact that I cannot repeat it here, and will instead endeavour to link to it from the News page of my website in due course. It is extremely satisfying to feel confident that I have been able to construct and tell my story in such a way that it speaks to readers who have never met me.

Tuesday night I was honoured by Australian journalist and commentator Anne Summers, who launched my book, The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, in front of more than 120 people at my local bookshop, Shearer’s on Norton Street, Leichhardt.

Anne spoke with insight and compassion and intelligence. What an impressive public speaker she is. I had wondered what to say other than some important thank-yous, because I felt I’d already written everything I wanted to say in public, in the book. But standing in front of that audience, made up of friends and colleagues from so many different parts of my life, I was physically affected by the level of support for me in that room, and I will never forget it.

UQP informs me that a 1:3 ratio of sales to attendance is typical. Barbara Horgan, Shearer’s owner, had to take books from the window display to satisfy demand, which turned out to be more like 1:1. Thank you to everyone who attended.

The May issue of Australian Vogue contains a feature article written by yours truly. “With Compliments” describes the process of how I came to write The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement. The magazine commissioned the article to coincide with the book’s publication, and I wrote it in New York in February during the city’s coldest spell of the entire season, while the wind howled and the snow fell steadily. Perfect writing weather, actually – after a second New York winter I understand why American novels tend towards the hefty.

Not aware of the early release schedules of the women’s magazines (hey, my calendar told me it was only the first week of April), I picked up a copy of the May issue and saw a reference to my article splashed on the cover: The Long Goodbye: A Journey Through Grief. How exciting! I found the article, its first page beautifully illustrated in black and white. Turning over the page, my chest constricted in shock: there was a photo of me and John, nestling together, and nestled right into the middle of the second page of the feature. No longer was it a stream of words written in solitude; it was out there, in public. Much like the book, really, but in microcosm.

Publicity and a public voice are new to me, so my mixed feelings don’t surprise me. I feel like Bette Davis in All About Eve. “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

My book has been reviewed in the May 2008 edition of marie claire and awarded the prominent red sticker “This Month’s Must-Read”. And with Kylie on the cover, it’s sure to get a few readers.

(T)his sweetly compact and honest memoir is a very readable story … Lloyd’s honesty and simple writing style is deeply compelling. Their all-too-brief period of happiness inevitably makes for a tear-jerker, but the heartbreak is ameliorated by Lloyd’s account of her home renovations, which distract her from her loss. Who would have guessed that fixing a bad case of rising damp could help repair this young widow’s broken spirit?

Thanks to publicist Karen Williams for her sterling efforts, and for the sensitive response to my book by reviewer Kathy Buchanan.

The most powerful ideas are often very simple. I wanted to alert you to one of them: the International PEN Poem Relay currently underway, in parallel with the Olympic torch relay, to protest the lack of freedom of expression in China.

According to the Relay website, there are almost 40 writers currently imprisoned in China. In Australia there are none.

International PEN is a worldwide association of writers with 145 centres in 104 countries. It promotes friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers, fights for freedom of expression, and represents the world conscience of literature.

The International PEN Poem Relay was the brainchild of Chip Rolley, a member and former Vice-President of Sydney PEN (International PEN Centre), who translated into English the poem ‘June’ by imprisoned Chinese poet and journalist Shi Tao. The poem, which has now been translated into more than 60 languages, is relaying around the world until it reaches Beijing to coincide with the Olympics in August.

As a member of the Management Committee of Sydney PEN I invite you to follow the progress of the poem around the world on the interactive map, join the PEN Poem Relay Group on Facebook, or listen to one of the many translations of the poem available on the website. And if you believe in the right to freedom of expression, the freedom to read and to write, consider joining your local PEN chapter. Here’s the link to mine.