Gawker Reading Crash: Bonnie Fuller on the Upper West Side
Bonnie Fuller — she's just like us! She has a kid!
Yesterday was the official on-sale date for Bonnie Fuller's new and expansively titled book, The Joys of Much Too Much: Go for the Big Life — The Great Career, The Perfect Guy, and Everything Else You've Ever Wanted. To mark the occasion, she also gave her first reading, at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble. Knowing that Andrew Krucoff could certainly use some guidance on finding the great career and everything else he's ever wanted — if not, granted, the perfect guy — we set him further uptown then he's been in years to check out the proceedings. After the jump, his disconcertingly sentimental report.
It's possible that people at Bonnie Fuller's The Joys of Much Too Much reading and signing at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble last night somehow got lost on their way to a New School night class on The Experience of Spectacle in Contemporary Society. Because the crowd was about the same as what you'd except to see at that continuing-education class: Small and comprised mostly of kooky, old West Side Jewish couples and single women ranging from undergrads who want to break into journalism but still have dates on Friday night to older never-had-a-career women who would whisper "that's so true" to each other whenever Bonnie would articulate a nugget of wisdom extracted from life's jaws.
They listened to the reading respectfully, but, really, they just wanted to ask questions about celebrity gossip. (Oh, and also: Bon's a Virgo, like many women in publishing. I think that's the secret to success we were all waiting to be revealed.)
Bonnie awkwardly spoke of "silencing your inner loser" and "embracing the chaos" to deliver a message she felt was often missing in a world filled with negative attitudes towards women reinforced by the media. (It was at this moment I thought my chair would spontaneously dissolve into opium dust.) She was inspired by her daughters and wrote the book for them.
This is where my hard shell cracked. Her husband arrived mid-reading with the kids and it all started to look so human to me. Suddenly, a new light was cast on Bonnie's stories of growing up in Toronto as a geeky Jewish girl who sewed her own hippie dresses and walked around in clunky shoes. She just wanted to be a local reporter. How evil could this mother of four really be? Not very by my account; she even mocked Jann Wenner.
One of her daughters leaned over mommy's shoulder as books were signed and maybe it's because Pesach is upon us, but I had warm fuzzy feelings for Bonnie and the Fuller family in general. I didn't even mind when an elderly lady approached me and asked if I was Bonnie's husband. But that might just be because he has a job.