I’m sitting on a plane, wearing a mask for the first time in a couple of years. I ended up in a seat way back by the toilets on this Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco airport to the east coast, where I start my tour on Tuesday in Rochester, NY. All these strangers in such close proximity, we do what we can to protect ourselves.

San Francisco Airport is a marvel—silent, well-designed— I saw a coffee kiosk where a robot arm crafted espressos and breves. What really struck me though, arriving from England a few days ago, via a brief stop in New Jersey to drop off my guitar and great big suitcase full of tote bags I screenprinted back in the Norfolk countryside, was the diversity of my fellow travelers. No matter how messed up the current situation, I still love America and what it can mean, please don’t let that beautiful idea die.

I’ve had an intense few weeks finishing, formatting and uploading the files for my new book. Last time, six years ago, when Girl To City came out, I was a little cagey about revealing my self-publishing journey. I felt (maybe correctly) that it created the impression of more legitimacy if people believed a third party had invested/believed in me enough to do the heavy lifting of releasing my work. I never lied about it, just wasn’t super-transparent. I kept the focus on the book.

It’s a different time now. And I’m in a different phase of my life. I feel proud of the huge amount of work and commitment I’ve invested with support only from my husband, friends, family and…you—the people who read my writing or listen to my music. I don’t want the fact I did it all myself to be the main story, I just want people to know how much it means to me to reach this part of the process: publication. I feel a huge sense of relief to have gotten this far with a second book, to have Girl To Country come out in the US this Tuesday September 23 (I had to push the UK edition release to March, one lady can only do so much and I was really losing my grip trying to book UK tour dates for November while revising/editing a 100,000 word manuscript with great help from my editor Paul Slanksy). I feel like I’ve practically chiseled the words out of stone or etched them into printing plates, that’s how many times I’ve gone over them, first to feel like I’d told a story the best I could, and then to format them as well as possible. I’m not great at time management and would happily have paid someone else to do the work in InDesign BUT I was really editing and revising up to the last minute, and even after pressing “send” immediately found one misplaced comma all the way at the end of the book at the front of the Acknowledgements section (I’m sure more will reveal themselves), and also thought of people I should’ve thanked and didn’t. Thank god for our friend Karen Hall in Norfolk who kept dropping everything to drive over to our house and ease me through the tricky aspects of InDesign only an experienced design maven knows- thank you so much Karen!

First copy arrived, an emotional moment holding your actual book in your hands

Add to the drama of book publishing my quest to find a dress to wear as Mother Of The Bride at my daughter’s wedding in Los Angeles next month. I kind of love the dichotomy —preparing for these two epic stages at once. It’s easy to let the pressure for perfection overshadow the occasion: my daughter has found a wonderful partner with a gorgeous family I just spent a fun weekend with on their turf, the beautiful Bay Area. And I wrote a second book. I want my clothing choice for Hazel’s big day to convey my delight at this new step of her life. I’m going to stop piggybacking one on the other here. Hazel’s day is HER day and I’m just…her mom. It’s her story to tell and my part is mostly just the letting go.

I stood in a bookstore the other day looking at the music book/biographies and memoirs section and it struck me that not many artists write a second memoir. There’s Tracey Thorn’s several books –she’s a fabulous writer; Viv Albertine did two, Patti Smith is in a category of her own. She’s always been a poet first. The dearth of second books made me wonder why I thought it was something I needed to do—wasn’t one memoir enough? Remember, no publisher, no one asking me to put myself out there again. As my father said when I was working on Girl To City : “Wait, music isn’t hard enough—now you want to write a book?”

But I think back to when I really got going with writing outside of songwriting, in the mid 2000s. Eric and I had recently gotten together and he hipped me to the memoirs of Dirk Bogarde. Now we all (hopefully) remember Mr. Bogarde as a devastating actor (first as film idol, then in complex roles in sophisticated, challenging films like Death In Venice and The Night Porter), but I was stunned to learn what a fine writer he was. He’d escaped to the French countryside, kind of like Eric and I did, only years before Peter Mayle wrote A Year In Provence, back when not many Brits/ex-pats even imagined the possibility—I believe Eric discovered his writing and found it a comfort when he was making his way in rural France in the nineties. Anyway, Bogarde’s books are so vivid and readable and they didn’t try to tell his whole story all at once, just focus on certain arcs of his life. They beautifully capture their times and places. Maybe they’re lacking in some self-reflection (he completely avoids discussing his sexuality, but that was his choice—you’re the writer and you get to choose), but the man knew how to tell a story.

As I’ve pushed myself to finish my second one I’ve come to understand why people don’t want to write a second memoir. You can only really come of age one time, when you’re young and green and everything is new, right? All your youthful failings are totally excusable – hey you were just getting started and how would you know any better? But heading into middle age and still struggling to get it right? It’s not so easy to talk about. Or you have to find a different lens or a new journey to share. It’s goddamn hard and I’ve wondered what was compelling me to go through some shameful midlife episodes. Three or four years in, I thought “well if I don’t finish I will have wasted that time I spent trying to tell this other story.” I needed to finish, it became a quest almost. “I said I was going to do this, and now I have to see it through.” When it comes down to it, I love to write. People often quote Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” I love Joan Didion less the more I read about her but her brilliance is undeniable. That quote is so perfect, but I don’t think it applies to memoir writing, as much as I’d like it to. She speaks in the present tense—her writing more a kind of reportage than the painful (not harder! Just—pain revisited is double the pain, like watching your kid go through a difficult experience is worse than going through the same difficult experience yourself, I think the same holds true for looking back at your younger self) the particularly fraught work of picking through the past. It’s a different kind of work, excavation (archeology?) rather than forensics.

D’oh I didn’t mean this to be a refutation or examination of anything Joan said or did. I was going to talk about Amazon vs Ingram, ebooks vs print, how I still need to do an audio version, and is it advisable to fulfill orders yourself vs paying someone else to do it for you? All the mechanics, but mostly I just want you to know I have written a second memoir, it’s different from the first. I hope I can write a third, at the same time I don’t know if I have it left in me to go through the process again. It’s too soon to know—I’m in the pre-mourning period, the space right before the book lands. It probably makes sense that I’m on a plane right now. Life is suspended up here in the air, I’m wearing a mask to protect myself, like I’m writing this post to protect my heart from what happens when we (the book) land(s). Worst case: nobody reads, nobody cares. Medium case: a few people read, people respond negatively. Best case: more people read, people relate.

It’ll likely be a combination of all the above. No mask for that. I’m lucky, I always have my songs to fall back on!

Girl To Country: A Memoir in stores and on the road

Tue Sept 23 Rochester NY Bop ShopWed Sept 24 Catskill NY Left Bank CiderThu Sept 25 Hoboken NJ 503 Social ClubFri Sept 26 Rye NY Watershed Literary FestivalSat Sept 27 Minerva NY Barn ConcertSun Sept 28 North Adams MA TouristsWed Oct 1 Kingston NY Oldster EventThu Oct 2 Baltimore MD An Die MusikFri Oct 3 Hightstown NJ Randy Now’s Man CaveSat Oct 4 Fleetwood PA Karen’s HouseFri Oct 17 Berwyn IL Friendly Community CtrSun Oct 19 Nashville TN Dee’s 4 PMTue Oct 21 Cleveland OH TreelawnThu Oct 23 Hamden CT Best VideoFri Oct 24 Kingston NY Chromatic StudiosSat Oct 25 Boston MA Acoustic DenSun Oct 26 Peacedale RI Roots Hoot 4 PM