My friend Kevin Sessums has been on one for his heart-rending memoir, "Mississippi Sissy." On his blog, he captures the ineffable exhaustion of book tours, and the guilt-inducing selfishness they provoke, and the numbing isolation they conjure. One snippet rings as true as Kevin's book:
I thought it would be easy doing a round trip in one day because it was Boston. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I am exhausted and frustrated and close to tears. I sold three books tonight at the store. I paid for this trip myself. My Amazon number is for shit. I feel like I’ve sort of reached my limit in sales - I pray I’m wrong about that - and I’m just treading marketing water now. I hate to sound so down but that’s the way I’m feeling. I live a pretty solitary life but this life-on-the-road has taken the loneliness I often feel and encased it with a meta-loneliness that is becoming increasingly difficult to cope with on a night like this.