I fixed the dryer. Let me say this a few other ways in case you didn’t get it. I FIXED the dryer. I fixed the DRYER. I – as in ME – fixed the dryer. It was a thrilling moment in a month that also saw the republication of my first book, “The Body Tourist,” and the publication of my new book, a collection of 20 years’ worth of my Chattanooga Times Free Press columns, called “Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs.” I’d be hard-pressed to say which I felt prouder of, the books or the dryer.
The books required a fanatical level of patience to bring to fruition. I had to first get the rights to “The Body Tourist” back from the original publisher, who went under two years after publishing my book but continued to collect royalties for three more years. This required a few menacing letters from a lawyer at the Authors Guild, plus a number of personal entreaties from me that she “do the right thing” so we could both move on with our lives.
After several months of this, she gave me my rights back and threw in two unexpected gifts: the book’s original setup files and my back royalties. All that was left for me to do was get a Ph.D. in self-publishing with Amazon in a dead language, then get a second Ph.D. in graphic design using only the portion of my brain not actively engaged in screaming and throwing things, then follow cryptic instructions on how to get my files together with my newly designed book cover, and upload.
Fixing the dryer on the other hand – with its unknowable system of electrical wires and magnets and motherboards and LEDs – required just one trip to Google. For “Why does my dryer keep stopping,” there was a veritable tome of answers, the simplest of which suggested the exhaust vent might be blocked. I conjectured that the exhaust vent was somewhere near the dryer itself, only outside, and so, clad in pajamas and socks and rocking my new Ph.D. in dead languages, I traipsed outside, located the vent and saw, with rising glee, that it did in fact appear to be blocked. No sooner had I clawed out a thick blanket of dog hair, dead skin cells and lint than the vent exhaled a whoosh of hot, fresh air, after which I went back inside and announced to my husband, who did not know the dryer was broken, that I had fixed the dryer.
A few days after I got my books uploaded to Amazon and the screaming and throwing things had ceased, a friend texted with bad news. There was a typo in the subtitle of “The Body Tourist.” It read: “A Memoir of Hunger and and the Search for Home.” Screaming and throwing things resumed.