Some days I would rather get my bikini line waxed in the window of Dunelm than walk into another bookshop.
Not that bookshops aren’t wonderful places. Of course they are. Bookshops are seething with joy and knowledge and comfort and diversion. They are hideously beautiful to look at, full of like-minded people and ripe with the excitement of discovery. But that, you see, is the problem. Like a stranger holding your childhood toy in one hand and a claw hammer in the other, bookshops have the power to break your heart into tiny shards and then throw the splinters in your eyes.
This week, I watched American Fiction at my local independent cinema. I was with my friend Miranda – also an author – and as well as an audible gasp at the scene where Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright, is offered a $750,000 (£600,000) advance for a book he has written under a pseudonym (I’d classify a $750,000 book advance as science fiction rather than comedy), we also shared a wincing moment of delight at the sight of Monk storming around a bookshop, looking for his own books, complaining about how they had been classified, moving an armload of them to the front of the store and haranguing a shop assistant.
How many times have I, shamefaced, slid up to a twentysomething salesperson in cargo trousers and asked, trying to keep my voice level, if they have any books by, ah, Nell Frizzell? How often have I tried to wrestle my face into something like neutral calm as they click through page after page after page on their computer, as though searching for a hagfish deep in the trenches of the Pacific Ocean? How many times have I shuffled, burning with despair, behind a shop manager as we weave through everything from gender studies to biography, fiction and some section called “new thinking” as they occasionally drop to their knees muttering “Frizzle, Frizzle, hmmmm, Michael Frayn … Stephen Fry … ummmm. Not here, sorry … let’s try floor three”?
To my unending ignominy, how many times have I picked my way through a chain outlet, pushing my books to the front of the display table, or turning them to face out on the shelf, while silently praying that I’m not being caught on CCTV? I’ve done it on holiday, and on my birthday; I’ve even asked a family of tourists to take my photo, beside my book, with my camera, in the Trafalgar Square branch of Waterstones. Worst of all are the days when I don’t dare to walk into a bookshop at all, because the crushing disappointment if it didn’t have a single copy of any of my books would be too much for my withered little ego to handle.
And yet, the very day after watching American Fiction, I found myself behind the counter of a small, independent bookshop, being asked if I could recommend a book for a new mother, the owner having popped out for a minute and left me to stand guard. I could see my most recent book on the shelf behind the customer – full of reassuring stories and written with just this sort of reader in mind. But somehow the idea of recommending my own book, out loud, while posing as a shop assistant, made me cringe inwardly. I took her over to the shelf and sort of passed my hand past the book, like a magician trying to direct your gaze at a rabbit, while chatting about insomnia and breastfeeding and fungal nail infections.
She told me about her son’s nursery. I told her about the time someone committed the hate crime of giving my three-year-old a recorder. We were getting on. Then she asked me my name. With my fingers still hovering beside the large, pale pink letters spelling out NELL FRIZZELL, I panicked.
“Um, it’s … Oh, look!” I said, leaping about a foot to the left: “How about The Republic of Motherhood by Liz Berry?”
And then, like someone who has just quietly remembered that they are on fire, I walked out of sight and began to roll around on the floor.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
