Tara McCarthy: Read It in Spite of Yourself!

You might remember that post this summer where I mentioned the website for the Sparks Sisters, the fictional conjoined twin pop sensations who star in Tara McCarthy’s novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart. Well, now Tara’s come along to tell Beatrice readers a little more about her book and about a problem she didn’t anticipate having in getting people to read it. It just goes to show Oscar Wilde was right: The only thing worse that being talked about really is not being talked about.

Some of you may remember me. I wrote a book—Been There, Haven’t Done That: A Virgin’s Memoir—back in 1997. I was on the Howard Stern show; Leno made jokes about me; People magazine put me on their top ten worst books of the year. Radio interviews, print publicity, local news crews in my very own apartment . . . Ah yes, I had it all! But I was naive, unprepared, easily flustered…I thought maybe it was a bit overmuch. I remember crying a lot and wishing that the book hadn’t gotten quite so much attention.

So I toiled away in isolation for years, hid from public life and wrote two bad half-novels and then one complete one that I felt was worthy of publication. Love Will Tear Us Apart was released last month and the media who’d once critiqued every aspect of my non-sex life (“She wants to know why she’s still a virgin? Look at her!”) couldn’t have cared less.

Like most first-time novelists, I now spend a good portion of my days marveling over the near-complete lack of publicity I’ve managed to scare up with this book. In addition, I bemoan that my fifteen minutes were used up by a sensational memoir that lacked artfulness and literary merit. I’m saddened that my novel—so much more interesting than the memoir to talk about, as far as I’m concerned—is struggling now to be “a sleeper hit” or “word of mouth sensation”… if it’s lucky.

I went about it all wrong this time out, not realizing that there was a way to go about it all wrong. I was so spoiled by my first experience of publishing that I just assumed that publicity would come my way. I thought I was handing the powers that be any number of good angles: I envisioned feature stories in Entertainment Weekly(“Born Again Virgin”) about how my writing, and sex life, had matured; I pictured photos of me and my husband running alongside stories about how we met because of my novel; I thought men’s magazines would be put my book on lists of “Books Your Girlfriend Reads That You Might Actually Like”; I thought music magazines would get a kick out of some of the songs on the website I created for my lead characters. I honestly thought a novel about a pair of Britney-inspired conjoined twin pop stars couldn’t go wrong. But a disturbing trend became obvious in reviews almost immediately: The very idea of the book was working against it, even for people who wound up liking it.

The Stamford Advocate: “How bad does [this book] sound? Just … terrible. Like a train wreck. And obviously you’ve got to watch train wrecks… It’s a really smart book, surprisingly so. The conjoined twin bit gives it some shock value, sure, but … well, just read it. Trust me, you’ll like it..”

Largeheartedboy: ” When I picked up this novel, I assumed the fare would be light, considering the subject matter is Siamese twin pop stars and the indie rock journalist assigned to cover them. Tara McCarthy weaves the twins and the writer’s relationship into a gripping read that is anything but bubblegum-flavored fiction, and is one of my favorite debut novels of the year.”

Speed-reading Book Nerd Reviews: “I have to say that when I first got the book and looked at the back of it, I was pretty taken aback by the subject matter. Siamese twin versions of Britney Spears, what? … I am happy to say that within a few pages, all of my fears were calmed. This book is awesome. . . . I pretty much put it down only when I absolutely had to.”

Fresh Fiction: “My initial reaction to this plot was complete skepticism—why would anyone want to read about conjoined twins with preposterous names like Flora and Fauna who also just happen to be a popular singing sensation in the vein of Britney and Christina? The freak show actually helped draw me into the story, much like a reality TV show..”

The good news is that a few folks liked the book enough to say so. The bad news is that it seems like people aren’t just ambivalent about my novel, they actively don’t want to read it. “Read it in spite of yourself!” does not a great publicity campaign make, and it’s certainly not something that I or my publishing house could have predicted. All I can do now is remind myself that all that media attention that the virgin memoir got didn’t translate into amazing sales, so the inverse might be true for this book. Still, some publicity would be nice. Maybe a spot on a different kind of People list: Top Ten Worst Sounding Books of the Year?

1 November 2005 | uncategorized |