“Now we will have our musical interlude,” Kathy Hepinstall said halfway through her reading from her first novel, The House of Gentle Men, Tuesday night at BookPeople. I had hoped she would duck behind a screen, exchange her jeans for a formal gown, and entrance the audience with a dramatic a cappella aria interpreting the passage she had just read. Instead, she played a tape of Liz Forster, an L.A. musician friend of hers, interpreting the passage she had just read. With the lights dimmed and the mood thoroughly arty, I felt somewhat remiss for not sitting Indian-style and burning a candle. At the very least, I should have raised high a cigarette lighter and occasionally let out loud whoops of glee after the author uttered passages particularly to my liking.
And Hepinstall probably would have welcomed that. This young firebrand of an author, who lives in Austin, has attacked the task of getting her fine, lyrical first novel published with a vigor usually reserved for childbirth. After she finished reading, she responded to questions about how she recently propelled the book to the No. 1 position on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list with her typical mix of aplomb and self-effacing humor. She worked in advertising for five years in L.A., she pointed out, and she has lots of friends there. Besides, she said, one week The House of Gentle Men was No. 1 on the list and the next week it wasn’t on the list at all. The moral? Have lots of friends. Have supplies of loyal friends. She has also sent “little replicas” of her book to authors whose novels have been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club asking them to kiss the replica “for good luck,” and on Saturday, February 26, she staged a “nonviolent read-in” in front of BookPeople with various people sitting on beanbags and blankets reading her novel. “Some of them didn’t even want to be paid. Ah, the youth,” she told me. She has called herself a “shameless shill.”
Later, after the reading, a friend who attended the reading with me seemed somewhat dumbfounded. She had just sent her first novel to her agent earlier in the week and the thought of doing all that other stuff that Hepinstall seemed to relish had her flummoxed. “Isn’t that why we’re writers?” she asked, because we’re content spending large amounts of time alone and don’t want to go out and sell ourselves? Why can’t writers just be the retiring types they’re thought to be and leave the selling to the publisher? Because the rules have changed, we both acknowledged, as she offered a cautionary tale: An author she knows received rave reviews for his first book but he didn’t realize what goes into selling one’s own work and now his agent can’t sell his second novel. He didn’t create buzz. It sounds like a perfectly maudlin plot for a silent film: A young artist unfairly trapped, innocently, even preternaturally, unaware of how to work the system, and now damned to oblivion until some guardian angel appears! Meanwhile, my friend commented on the long road ahead of herself as she begins the process of publishing her first novel. “Maybe when the book comes out you can give me [Hepinstall’s] number,” she said.
Events
Austin writer Sharon Kahn will be at BookPeople on Tuesday, March 28, at 7pm with her second mystery, Never Nosh a Matzo Ball: A Ruby, the Rabbi’s Wife, Mystery. The same date at 7:30pm at Barnes & Noble Arboretum, Christopher Reich will read from and sign his thriller, The Runner.
This article appears in March 24 • 2000.