Today marks the end of official publicity for my The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement. At almost four months since publication, that’s a media marathon for a first-time author, so I’m not complaining. It is a relief, however, to know I don’t have to keep returning to my own Ground Zero in public. Outside the covers of my book, I mean.
I ended my tour of publicity this morning. Not with a whimper, but with the bang of commercial television: a six-minute slot with Kerrie-Anne Kennerley on her national morning program. In Canberra to host the first of three lectures in Sydney PEN’s Voices: 3 Writers series at the National Library, I switched on the TV at 9.00 this morning, still in my PJs, to watch. (The Friday show is pre-recorded on a Wednesday. Thus I knew already I’d be on second, immediately following a conversation with a horse to celebrate the animals’ generic birthday on 1 August, and before the advertorial for some sort of mop.) But instead of K-A’s beaming visage in front of my eyes, all I saw was a smiling Ellen DeGeneres. I turned to my hotel room’s TV guide for clarification and discovered that down Canberra way, K-A doesn’t beam into living rooms until midday. There’s a joke in there somewhere about the sun never going down on the Channel 9 empire, or K-A never going down on … but I’m too tired, after driving to Canberra and back, to find it.
