Lip Service is back and we got press!  Check out MiamiARTzine.com and read about how Lip Service has become the hottest, smartest, most honest literary event in South Florida.


I’m so proud of Lip Service.  Really, I think it’s great.  Eight stories, eight minutes each by all different kinds of people with a story.


Come to the next Lip Service and see what I’m talking about.  Saturday, Sept. 26, 2009.  @ Books & Books in Coral Gables.

1.  Write another one.

2.  Hire a publicist, if you can afford it and if you’re publishing house doesn’t hire one for you.  If your publishing house hires one, be on top of him or her.  It’s up to you to make sure you are their focus.  If you hire your own, make sure he or she has friends in key places, like on the Oprah show or Good Morning America.

3.  Create a website for yourself and your book and keep it current by writing a blog, like this one.  Also read other blogs and comment on other blogs and make blog friends.

4.  Keep a mailing list.

5.   Create post cards and buttons and e-postcards and mail them out for all book-buying occasions.

6.  Send yourself on a book tour.  Know people where ever you go and have people in those places organize and invite their friends.  Call your friends on the phone and invite them personally to all your events.

7.  Do a virtual book tour.  Ask bloggers to blog about your book and host book-giveaway contests. 

8.  Get on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Friendster, Shelfari, Booksprouts…  

9.  Carry books wherever you go.  Sell them one for $15, two for $20.

10.  Believe in your book. 

Celebrity Parents Magazine wrote a story about me.  I’m a celebrity.  :)

BOOK REVIEW:  MY MISERABLE, LONELY, LESBIAN PREGNANCY (Cleis Press)

It’s her second attempt. She knows the routine. She’s purchased the sperm box for $320 with her bank card. She’s singing all the way to the clinic. Her partner of six years, unfortunately, has left her six months ago. Fine, she’ll do it alone. Then one day it happens–on the pregnancy test stick, two hot pink lines. This is it. 

There’s nothing Andrea Askowitz wants more than to become a mother, and her no-holds-barred account of that journey, My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is the funniest memoir in years, not to mention so upbeat and heartwarming you want to give it to every woman friend you know, pregnant or not. Bursting with laugh-out-loud humor, enriched by the author’s deeply touching vulnerability, Askowitz’s book utterly belies its title–it has very little misery or loneliness in it. Andrea is surrounded by a delightful cast of big-hearted women who accompany her on her mission toward motherhood. 

What a refreshing new voice! The humor is just salty enough, the language crisp, with a nice, honest bite. Askowitz has the expert timing of a stand-up comic but the honesty and sensitivity of a good Jewish girl who has dreamed her whole life of becoming a mother and is not going to let being a lesbian stand in her way. Her single-minded quest is so studded with revelatory, witty delights that the book is a page-turner simply because one funny scene follows right on the heels of another–her diary entries are energetic, bluntly honest and in their own whiny, bitchy way, dang near fearless.

 From confronting her liberal but disapproving parents to facing the possibility that she could have two uteruses, her provocative diary entries leave you constantly wiping your eyes from laughter and tears. Accompanied by her hauntingly attractive ex-lover and her gloriously faithful, straight best friend, Askowitz bravely takes you along for the whole confusing, challenging ride of creating another human being, sharing it all with you right up to the minute-by-minute last contractions of the emotionally pitch-perfect ending.–Nick DiMartino

 Shelf Talker: A hilarious and heartwarming memoir of a woman’s challenging journey through a long-desired pregnancy.

My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy has gotten tons of reviews and all have been flattering, except two.  This review appeared on Amazon.  I met this guy last weekend at a gay and lesbian book fair.  Scott Pomfret is clearly brilliant and so you gotta read his book:  Since My Last Confession.     

Misery Can Be Fun!, October 1, 2008   By  Scott D. Pomfret - See all my reviews    A sure testament to a writer’s talent is her ability to draw and hold a reader for whom the subject matter is congenitally unfamiliar. Andrea Askowitz has lots of talent: her comic tale of the hormonal trainwreck that was her Left Coast pregnancy without a partner kept me – a homosexual, non-Jewish man from the East Coast with no intention of raising children — in stitches from start to finish. Never has schadenfreude been so sweet.  After breaking up with her girlfriend of five years, Askowitz decides to try pregnancy alone. She goes to the sperm bank, sifts through donors, falls in love with her OB/GYN, becomes deeply depressed, disses her brother, obsesses over everything that could go wrong, self-diagnoses non-existent cancer, gets “fat,” learns what “doula” and a thousand other strange words mean, and ultimately gives birth to a child. Some of the fun along the way is certainly born of her self-absorption and misery and malcontentedness, but Askowitz is looking for witness as much as laughs. She imagines a party in which she invites her closest friends, insists they wear black and listen to her recite her top ten complaints about her life. “Thank you for coming,” she writes. “Do not have fun.”  Askowitz writes in a manner so immediate that the emotional surges, flashes of envy and of fury, and instant judgments as to people’s worth are visceral. I didn’t like those people Askowitz didn’t like, and for those who complained about Askowitz’s uncensored mouth, I stood by her in saying, Get used to it! I even winced when her nether parts ripped from stem to stern during birth.  A selection of some of Askowitz’s choice humor:  * Days before Askowitz gives birth, “Nurse Jones … shoves her fingers into my vagina like she’s digging for a pickle at the bottom of the jar. I say, `That hurts!’ and she looks at me like, Girl, this is nothing. If you can’t handle this, you’re in big trouble [when the baby comes].  * Askowitz keels over on the sidewalk with pregnancy-induced dry heaves. A neighbor passes. Explaining why she did not stop, the neighbor says, “I thought you were praying.”  * When her would-be sperm donor proves to be shooting blanks, Askowitz bemoans her fate: “I was a lesbian with male fertility problems.”  * Askowitzs friend says, “think of your body not as the athlete’s body it used to be, but as a life creator.” Askowitz’s reaction: “I take that to mean I’m fat.”  The sheer crankiness of at least eight of her nine months pregnancy proves a perfect foil to the almost speechless (well, not quite, this is Askowitz after all: she does get in a few gripes about the grape-sized hemorrhoids that result from her child’s birth) awe with which Askowitz regards the miracle of her newborn child. “I have a crush like no other I’ve ever experienced. It’s one-sided, pure and egoless. … ” Hell, after reading this memoir, I was ready to go get knocked up myself.

  We had a successful show at the hot lesbian bar, Novaks, even with Melissa Etheridge stealing half our audience.  The bar was packed for a pre-concert happy hour and then all these perfectly smart-looking lesbians walked out of the place.  I have nothing against Come to My Window, but I was like, “Wait a second.  Don’t you want to hear My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy?”  Most said no thank you, but 50 people stayed and the show was awesome.

 Danielle from Left Bank Books can organize the hell out of a night. She got local playwrite, Kyle Kratky and poet Julie Dill and we performed outside under a blue sky and setting sun.  Perfect.  

 I just found this on the web.  An advertisement, except that picture was taken at the event, so it was really an aftertisement. 

 

Below are some of the great women of St. Louis.  This is what they do at a reading:  READ.  

I got home on Sunday from ten days of Misery Loves Company.  I took My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy  to Michigan, Missouri, and Illinois and I gotta say, I like the Midwest.  I also gotta say that life on the road is a lot more fun without a 4-year-old.  I missed Tashi like crazy, but my days were so much easier, not having to worry about where to find a swing set.    

First stop was the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest 2008).  There were 3,500 women playing hackysack, topless.

 I didn’t play because I’m not that good at hackysack.  Of course, not all the women there played hackysack.  Just like not all the women were lesbians.  It’s true, I met two straight women.  One who called herself pomosexual.  That’s post-modern sexual.  I don’t quite know what that meant.  I’m thinking it’s something like taking a concept of sexuality she had from the past and reframing it to make something new.  I’m sorry I didn’t ask what her new sexuality is like.   MichFest is like New York City to me, only strictly feminine and sometimes naked.  There is so much going on, so many ideas and modes of expression, it exhausts me.  And then there are music stages, drum circles, anal sex workshops, breast casting, volleyball, campfires, the femme parade, the butch parade, sweat-lodges, and hackysack.

 I have too much going on in my head to deal with this much excitement.  Took me two days to acclimate and still I woke up looking like this: CRAZY TIRED.

 I wasn’t just crazy tired because my pillow was a jacket or because one of my tent mates was a giant spider, I was crazy tired because of all the hackysack.  Here’s a view of the spider taken from inside the tent.  She’s on the outside.

Here’s Jeanne, my other tent mate. 

 But there is beauty at MichFest.  The women there are the type of women who hug for a long time.  I told Victoria about the long huggers and she said, “We need more of that.” This is why I love Victoria. She’s right, but still, it took some getting used to.

I’d meet a woman, connect on some profound level and then we’d embrace.  My problem was I never knew when the hug was over.  For me, a hug was complete, I mean I was always fully satisfied, about twenty seconds too soon.  I’d pull back a little, maybe move my head slightly or slide back one foot, but my hugging partner never picked up on my cues.  

Those cues are subtle, I know, but before MichFest, I assumed these cues were universal.  Or at least universally American.  I can’t speak for other cultures.  But I was wrong. 

I met this wonderful deaf woman.  She was standing at the People Called Womyn Bookstore tent with her nose in a book when I said, “You’ve got to check out My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnacy.  It’s so funny.”  She ignored me.

I had said the same thing to about twenty women who were browsing books and about ten of those women actually bought My Mis. I did admit to all the women I spoke to that I was the author, and then I told them that I wasn’t the only one who thought it was funny.  I told them they could ask my mother.

Somehow, and I can’t remember how, it became clear to me that the woman ignoring me was deaf.  And then we started talking in my notebook.  Here’s our conversation:  

  

It was such a nice conversation especially for me at MichFest with all the noise.  It went on for a few pages in my notebook; so quiet.  And then we hugged for a very long time.

I wrote to Jen Graves of The Stranger.  No one’s gonna bad-mouth me or any of my children.  Here’s what I wrote: 

Dear Jen,

I read the review you did of my book in The Stranger.  I realize you hated it.  But listen, I’ll be in Seattle, June 24th and I want you to come to Bailey Coy at 7 p.m.

I know you think I’m a whiny baby, and shit, I agree.  That was part of my point.  I complained so much, I couldn’t stand myself.  I know I had support from friends and family and later a nanny.  I was not hiding any of that.  I even wrote about how I own real estate because of family investments. The back cover of the book says that I have everything I’ve always wanted, including money.  So I disagree with your claim that I was being deceitful.  I may be a brat and a crybaby, but if I am anything to the extreme, I am honest.

Also, I was depressed while I was pregnant.  And depression crosses all social lines.  Depression hurts if you have nothing and if you have everything.  So when my dream of getting pregnant came true, it came with anxiety and anti-social feelings and fear and dread.  And I couldn’t shake those feelings even while I knew I was the luckiest woman in the world.  So I wrote about it.

The cool thing for me was that the more miserable I felt, the funnier it seemed to other people and that’s why I kept writing and sharing my stories, which eventually became my book.   God knows I’m not the first to have a baby.  And I’m not the first to have one alone.  I’m just one of us telling her story about it.   So while some of your criticisms are valid, I’m afraid you missed my point.

I’d love to meet you in Seattle.

Love,Andrea 

Did I tell her!  And she wrote me back.  Here’s what she said:

I’ll try my best to get there, and if I do I’ll certainly introduce myself.  Thanks for reading, and writing me.

Best,Jen

I can’t wait to meet her tonight.  I’ll be reading with  Jo Miller and Deborah McCarroll.  It’s going to be a great show and I think I’ll be making a new friend.

My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregancy got some negative press, check it out the stranger.