Since I was little, I wanted to be a mountain climber. I wanted to roam the Alps, or the Sierra Nevada, alone with a backpack, an anorak, an old pair of boots. Growing up in Connecticut, options were limited, but our Boy Scout leader took us on monthly camping trips, even in the winter, and bigger expeditions in the summer. A week backpacking in Alaska. Another in New Mexico. I once tried to rappel from a tree in our backyard. I didn’t have a climbing harness, so I ran a rope through the belt loops on my shorts, which immediately popped and I fell ten feet, got the wind knocked out of me, then got up and tried it again.
But I didn’t just want to be somebody who climbs mountains – I wanted to be a mountain climber, which meant I wanted to look the part. This was pre-internet, the days of mail order. My parents are not outdoorsy people, but they received catalogs from a clothing company in California named Patagonia. Large format, thick paper, beautiful photographs of real people climbing mountains in colorful, expensive clothes. I saved every one of them; on the shelf, they sat next to my Tintin comics, the same height. More than anything, I wanted a “synchilla” sweater. It seemed so multipurpose, so cool, plus it’s what the rich kids wore at school, with the Patagonia logo emblazoned on their chests – and they didn’t know climbing from choir practice! My dad even owned one, but the idea of one for me was ridiculous. A hundred dollar fleece sweatshirt for a growing kid?
There’s no hole in the heart so large that desire can’t fill it. One year, I asked for one for Christmas, the blue fleece, and there it was Christmas morning: a properly sized box to unwrap with a sweater inside, the exact color I wanted – but a much cheaper version from Land’s End. I almost started crying. My father, seeing straight to the problem, said something like, “Wait, here’s what we’ll do – your mother can just cut the label off mine and sew it on yours.” Which prompted a cascade of shameful revelations (I might have run from the room) because in a microsecond, the operating software of mind ran several system updates, about vanity, self-consciousness, self-worth. Why did I want one sweater, but not the other? What made one logo so valuable that I wanted it on my chest, another so inferior, and what did that say about me?
I only started sharing this story a few years ago; I always found it incredibly embarrassing. But I told it during a press interview this week, inadvertently, and it reminded me during the drive home how valuable and arresting I find these little moments, looking back, when I can pinpoint a moment when my mind changed direction. How, after that day, I made a point of not wearing anything with a logo or decal on it. I was becoming more self-conscious, but also more self-aware, more skeptical, more inclined to ask questions about why people behave in certain ways. I’m no longer a stickler about it – honestly, I now own far too many items from Patagonia – but I also don’t look to clothes to be too much of an expression of my individuality. Of course, they are some expression; clothes can call forth great pleasure, offering a way to represent but also insulate that individuality against the elements, against scrutiny. But I look back and see a mind taking a turn, a new direction, perhaps enlarging while also speeding up, and I’m grateful. You climb the mountain because it’s there, but you ask why anyway.
Sidebar: What a week. Everything Now, my new nonfiction book, came out on Tuesday, and it was a little before six in the morning that I received an email saying the New York Times Book Review had already released their review online.
Here’s the thing. The New York Times reviews very few books of the hundreds (thousands?) published each week. It is informally considered, among publishing types, perhaps the most influential spot to see your book discussed. Partly for the esteem and the size of the audience, partly because there’s no way to game it. Either the editors want to review a book or they don’t, and publicists can go to hell.
Also, I have no idea how many of their reviews are, um, raves, but it would appear that we got one. Here is the opening to Alexandra Jacobs’s review:
To write the definitive book about Los Angeles would be impossible. In “Everything Now,” the novelist Rosecrans Baldwin doesn’t try. And in not trying, he may have written the perfect book about Los Angeles.
It was mind-melting.
The book is now available in print, ebook, or audio. I narrated the audiobook myself, which includes a moment in Chapter Five when I may have permanently damaged my audio engineer’s hearing; you’ll know it when you hear it.
Anyway, if you’d like to catch me talking about the book, I’m doing two free online events this week (here’s the summer’s full list). Note the difference in time zones:
Monday, June 21, 7pm Eastern, in conversation with New York Times editor, author, and blogging godfather Choire Sicha, presented by The Strand Bookstore and The New Republic. More information here.
Tuesday, June 22, 7pm Pacific, in conversation with author Geoff Manaugh, presented by Point Reyes Books. More information here.
Also, if you purchased the book, you can enter to win a contest. Sponsored by my publisher and presented by The Morning News, one lucky reader will receive a limited-edition, Everything Now-inspired skateboard deck. (As a lifelong skating enthusiast, this was amazing to see realized.) More information here.
Related: here’s a picture of my friend, novelist Nic Brown, who coordinated a hat and a set of wheels on publication day to pay homage to my book jacket.
Like I said, mind-melting.
My enormous thanks, as ever, for everyone’s support, to everybody who bought the book, especially anyone who have left a rating or review somewhere. If you’re considering doing so, you have my enormous thanks. Believe it or not, good reviews in The New York Times Book Review are incredible, yes, but it’s the personal reviews on Amazon (and elsewhere) that actually sell books.
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now, is now available from Amazon, Bookshop, or your local store. Any books mentioned in this newsletter are on a list at Bookshop.