All About Lulu: A Novel

All About Lulu: A Novel

All About Lulu: A Novel

All About Lulu: A Novel

Paperback(Tenth Anniversary Edition)

$16.95 
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Overview

The tenth anniversary edition of a book that is "still as audaciously brilliant as it was on first read, plumbing the depths of the cruel rhapsody of obsessive love, the pain of feeling different, and the deep pleasure of finally figuring out who you really are, and who you want to be (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World)

Weakness has always been a concern for William Miller: growing up vegetarian in a family of bodybuilders will do that to a person. But William is further weakened by the death of his mother, the arrival of a new step-mother, and his irrepressible crush on his new step-sister, Lulu. As Lulu faces down her own challenges, William watches his life shift into tumult and despair. Once Lulu departs for college, Will goes into the world to find himself—discovering Western philosophy, a cruel dating world, enduring friendship, and, ultimately, his true calling. Emboldened by his turn as a late-night radio personality, Will rescues himself from the self-image of weakness he’d long wished to escape. This debut novel explores the fundamental difference between where we come from—and the endless possibilities of where we may go.

Now with an author's introduction and a foreword by J. Ryan Stadal.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781593762087
Publisher: Catapult
Publication date: 03/13/2018
Edition description: Tenth Anniversary Edition
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Evison is the author All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, This Is Your Life Harriet Chance!, and Lawn Boy. He's written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Salon. He lives in Seattle with his family.

Read an Excerpt

Jell-O Shots, Hot Dog Cakes, and Enduring Gratitude


When All About Lulu was originally published by Soft Skull in the spring of 2008, I was a thirty-nine-year-old marginally employed landscaper with a checkered and fabulously unfocused employment history which included (but was not limited to) caregiver, landscaper, gas-meter-checker, bartender, rotten tomato sorter, auto detailer, purveyor of sausages, and telemarketer of sunglasses. I had seven previous novels under my belt before Lulu, all of which were conspicuously unpublished. Some of them were actually pretty good. Most of them were not.

My wife, Lauren, was pregnant with our first child at the time of Lulu’s release. We were broke as hell and eating a lot of Swanson’s pot pies and spaghetti, as we worried about providing for our future. I wasn’t exactly on any kind of career track. My mom, god love her, longsuffering provider, single mother of five, was bestowing fifty dollar Safeway gift cards on us twice a month. I wasn’t a terrible person, but my prospects were not bright.

Soft Skull was run out of a single room in Brooklyn in those days, and Richard Nash, the editor who saw what twenty-odd other editors in New York did not see in All About Lulu, wore a lot of hats. Richard was Soft Skull. He was a mad, irrepressible genius with a theater background. A pure, indefatigable spirit with a Gaelic charisma and lilt of speech that left you spellbound, and always made you believe in whatever it was he was talking about. And Richard Nash was almost as broke as me. He was also every bit as passionate and dogged and batshit crazy. He believed fiercely in the books he championed. He never stopped pushing to get them recognized; to booksellers, reviewers, mavens, as well as random people in line at bodegas and subway stations. What Richard lacked in resources he made for up in passion, presence, savvy and elbow grease. Having grown up in punk bands in early 80s Seattle, I totally connected with Richard’s DIY approach to publishing; it allowed me to be myself, which was pretty much the goal.

I spent my entire advance and half of my savings on the first book tour, which was a humble and depraved traveling circus that me and my buddies Brooksie and Justina operated out of my ’76 Dodge motorhome. Think burnt orange shag interior. Three farting men. Bad ventilation. We made two hundred Jell-O shots at every stop, from Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Bakersfield and back. The goal was to get somebody drunk enough to eat the hot dog cakes we baked nightly. Somebody always did.

Along that tour I got to meet some of my first champions; in Portland, Gerry Donaghy from Powells, and in LA, Carolyn Kellogg, back then a blogger of books at Pinky’s Paperhaus, now the book editor of the LA Times. After writing in a vacuum for twenty years, launching All About Lulu was a revelation. Up until that moment, my life as an artist had been entirely insular. I didn’t know any other writers, and very few readers, for that matter. I just plodded along in isolation, having very little facility, and few opportunities to discuss books, mine or anyone else’s. Then, overnight, all of that changed. Every night I met new independent booksellers who stole my heart with their love and commitment to books, even little indie books written by marginally employed landscapers, published out of small, cluttered rooms in Brooklyn by mad Irishmen.

It’s not hyperbole to say that booksellers, and book bloggers, and readers changed my life, or that Soft Skull delivered me to my destiny as an “author,” which is way fucking better than telemarketing sunglasses or checking gas meters, let me tell you. For twenty years I had been writing novels that nobody was reading—not even my mom. Then suddenly, owing to good fortune and the enthusiastic advocacy of an incredibly dynamic and passionate species of mostly underpaid and underappreciated souls, I was connecting with thousands of readers.
By the time Owen was born, I’d earned out my tiny advance for Lulu and received what was for us, at the time, a life changing royalty check. That was followed by another check six months later. By 2009 we were able to ditch the Swanson’s pot pies. The Evisons moved to the upmarket Marie Callender’s version (bigger, better, triple the price!). FYI, the key to not burning the crust isn’t tinfoil around the edges, the key is to thaw them out a bit beforehand (#authorprotip). The first bite will still burn the fuck out of your mouth, though. That’s just science.

All of this to say that I was humbled by the unlikely success of All About Lulu in 2008, which set the wheels in motion for my life as an author after seven false starts, a shit-ton of rejection, and dozens of uninspired jobs (along with a handful of inspired but low paying ones). I’m equally humbled that a decade later people are still discovering All About Lulu and finding it relevant. The publication of this book, my first novel to not fall stillborn into the obscurity of drawer, basement, or total oblivion, provided me with the greatest opportunity I’ve ever had as a writer: to be read, to finally connect with somebody at the other end, to know that in some small way I was bringing laughter and recognition and comfort into their lives. Ten years, three kids, and five novels on, I’m still counting my blessings every day for this opportunity. So, thank you Soft Skull, thank you bookseller, and blogger, and dear reader for making my dreams come true.


Johnny Evison, Sequim, Washington 2018

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