Read Online God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jill Conner Browne
Tags: Fiction
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the deepest depths of the despair pool by his defection. Here she’d spent all this time and tons of real money on this guy, wishing and hoping and somehow believing that one fine day soon, he would turn into a decent human being; everything would be perfect, and they would go away together and live in a meadow. We’ve seen this a million times, done it ourselves at least half a million. This is known as believing in Permanent Potential: This person would be perfect if only . . . and could be in the blink of an eye with scarcely any effort on his part. But it will never happen, even if you wait forever and he lives to be a hundred and four.
What happened in real life was that he married the other woman with whom he’d been “having space,” and after a while, the Diva got to feeling better and emerged with her self-esteem unscathed and, even more important, well aware of how good-looking she is. And so it came to pass that she was out of town, minding her own business, when she rounded a corner and ran slap-dab, full-frontal, into a seedy-looking, middle-aged guy with a stringy ponytail and a holey T-shirt. Of course, it was
him
. She, on the other hand, was looking her very best, which was extremely good. It was plain to see he wouldn’t have to fight for his space with anybody in the foreseeable future—everyone would certainly give him a wide berth. This was even better than having had him maimed and/or killed: She had just left him alone and he went off and got icky! Don’t you just love a happy ending?
7
I’ll Get You, My Pretty
A s a writer, one is called upon frequently to appear on radio and television programs around the country. This helps sell books, which for a writer is just about as good as it gets. More times than one likes, however, one comes to the crushing realization that one’s interviewer has not read one’s book. Indeed, quite often, the interviewer has not even read the press kit or the liner notes on one’s book. The interviewer is, as they like to say, winging it, or as we, the writer, likes to say, completely screwing up something as simple as a sack lunch. I mean, we know you don’t have time to read every word we ever wrote, as precious as they are to us personally: You’re overworked as it is and they don’t give you a time slot at work for “reading.” But please, it will be less painful for all of us if you can at least give the book a cursory glance before we go on the air. Or just tell us ahead of time that you haven’t read it, so we can provide you with a list of questions to which we know the answers.
I personally had one such interviewer who kept asking me, regarding
SPQBOL,
to give him details about the revenge stuff. He said he understood that we talked a lot about getting revenge in the book. Well, since there is not one single solitary word about revenge in the whole entire book—I can’t recall even the word itself being used—I just blabbered about something completely unrelated that in fact had the distinct advantage of actually appearing in the book, which it is my purpose to promote. This suggested something to me, though: that there is a group out there who wants to hear about revenge. Now, the truth is that we like to keep everybody happily in line so there’s no need for anything like that, but if we find that the pushing has indeed come to shoving, well, we like to think we’re pretty resourceful and can acquit ourselves handsomely, if need be. So here, I got your revenge right here.
My friend Janet Mayer, who is a completely grown-up woman married to Jim Johnston, who claims to be completely grown up even though he is a man, showed up at this churchy kind of function swathed to her chin in turtlenecks and scarves, all in a stouthearted effort to conceal the fact that she was completely covered up in hickeys—passion marks, love bites, or whatever your high-school crowd called them—she had a whole big bunch of them all over her neck. She
What happened in real life was that he married the other woman with whom he’d been “having space,” and after a while, the Diva got to feeling better and emerged with her self-esteem unscathed and, even more important, well aware of how good-looking she is. And so it came to pass that she was out of town, minding her own business, when she rounded a corner and ran slap-dab, full-frontal, into a seedy-looking, middle-aged guy with a stringy ponytail and a holey T-shirt. Of course, it was
him
. She, on the other hand, was looking her very best, which was extremely good. It was plain to see he wouldn’t have to fight for his space with anybody in the foreseeable future—everyone would certainly give him a wide berth. This was even better than having had him maimed and/or killed: She had just left him alone and he went off and got icky! Don’t you just love a happy ending?
7
I’ll Get You, My Pretty
A s a writer, one is called upon frequently to appear on radio and television programs around the country. This helps sell books, which for a writer is just about as good as it gets. More times than one likes, however, one comes to the crushing realization that one’s interviewer has not read one’s book. Indeed, quite often, the interviewer has not even read the press kit or the liner notes on one’s book. The interviewer is, as they like to say, winging it, or as we, the writer, likes to say, completely screwing up something as simple as a sack lunch. I mean, we know you don’t have time to read every word we ever wrote, as precious as they are to us personally: You’re overworked as it is and they don’t give you a time slot at work for “reading.” But please, it will be less painful for all of us if you can at least give the book a cursory glance before we go on the air. Or just tell us ahead of time that you haven’t read it, so we can provide you with a list of questions to which we know the answers.
I personally had one such interviewer who kept asking me, regarding
SPQBOL,
to give him details about the revenge stuff. He said he understood that we talked a lot about getting revenge in the book. Well, since there is not one single solitary word about revenge in the whole entire book—I can’t recall even the word itself being used—I just blabbered about something completely unrelated that in fact had the distinct advantage of actually appearing in the book, which it is my purpose to promote. This suggested something to me, though: that there is a group out there who wants to hear about revenge. Now, the truth is that we like to keep everybody happily in line so there’s no need for anything like that, but if we find that the pushing has indeed come to shoving, well, we like to think we’re pretty resourceful and can acquit ourselves handsomely, if need be. So here, I got your revenge right here.
My friend Janet Mayer, who is a completely grown-up woman married to Jim Johnston, who claims to be completely grown up even though he is a man, showed up at this churchy kind of function swathed to her chin in turtlenecks and scarves, all in a stouthearted effort to conceal the fact that she was completely covered up in hickeys—passion marks, love bites, or whatever your high-school crowd called them—she had a whole big bunch of them all over her neck. She
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