We have arrived

(At Dollywood)

Welcome back to the final episode in my Book tour/ College tour/ Roadtrip to Dollywood. When I last posted, I had just arrived in DC after a few days in NYC. I’ve now made it to the land of Dolly.

Last week, I was so busy recapping my NYC book party that I forgot to mention that we happened to be in New York during a historic sports weekend. Right across the street from our place, a guy had set up a projector and had turned an empty lot into a watch party. We cheered on the victory with an impromptu bunch of neighbors. The next day, I went over to Emma Straub’s fabled bookstore Books Are Magic to look for my own book (something I did obsessively in both NYC and DC) and managed to score the last New York Books shirt in the store.

While I was walking back from Books Are Magic, another cool thing happened. I spotted a little crowd of people assembled on a corner. I soon realized they were canvassers being addressed by no other than Brad Lander, the former mayoral candidate who just won his Congressional primary. As a fellow nerd, I favored Lander in the mayoral race, and loved it when Mamdani and Lander teamed up to campaign together (I wrote about their ranked-choice candidacies here). So of course I stopped to listen. I had just purchased my book so that I could leave a gift copy for our HomeExchange hosts (don’t worry, I also gave them wine). I promise that I did not orchestrate what happened next, although maybe I vision-boarded it into existence: After he’d wrapped up his speech, Lander made eye contact with me, looked at the book I was holding, and said, “Dad Brain! Sounds like I need to read THAT!” I said, “I wrote it!” We chatted for a few minutes and I ended up giving him the copy I was holding. He could not have been kinder. It was bizarrely fortuitous that of all the New Yorkers I could have encountered on the street, it just happened to be the candidate with the best Big Dad Energy in the race.

HomeExchange came in clutch for this trip. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a website where you can accumulate points for letting people stay in your home, and then use those points to stay in other people’s homes. No money exchanged. The catch is that it can be hard to find open HomeExchanges that match your travel dates. You often have to ask multiple hosts before you get a place. We lucked out in an epic way on this trip: We stayed in not one but four HomeExchanges. Our NYC HomeExchange in Park Slope, turned out to be a three-story house with a back garden, owned by two artists with exquisite taste. If you followed my stay at the Godmother’s cottage, you know that I am not to be trusted in nice places. I had to navigate the space with impeccable care. While packing up and getting ready to head out of town, we discovered that one of their cats had pooped on their spotless white couch. We used as much laundry spray as we possibly could, but hopefully they didn’t think it was one of us.

Speaking of politics, after NYC we headed to Washington, DC. Once again, HomeExchange came through: we scored a brick row house right on Capitol Hill, within easy storming distance. Soon after arriving in DC, I got news. Jerusalem Demsas, who was set to moderate the discussion at my Politics & Prose bookstore event that night, was feeling sick. Matthew Yglesias had agreed to take the reins instead. Although I was sad that I wouldn’t get to meet Jerusalem in person after loving her work at The Argument, I am a long-time Yglesias reader, too. My husband and I have very little overlap in our online media consumption (he follows sports, airplane crashes, and geopolitics; I follow genderslop, academic gossip, and inside-baseball politics); Matt is one of the very few pundits that we both follow. Since the reading was scheduled for that very evening, I doubted that Matt would not have time to look at the book, but figured we’d still have a good chat.

Before that, though, a black car rolled up to the HomeExchange to take me to the TV studio where PBS News Hour was filming. I had my hair and makeup done rapid-fire (the hairstylist also lint-rolled my dress, correctly guessing that I owned several cats) and had a lovely chat with William Brangham, who hosts their science show. I’m definitely not comfortable on TV (in the clip, I am as stiff as though I’m attending a diplomat’s funeral) but he was incredibly nice, and has good taste in music, too. He’s a TV on the Radio fan!

After the PBS filming, it was time to head over to Politics & Prose. My husband and I got there early and went a few doors down to Hillary Clinton’s pedophile basement, Comet Ping Pong, for a drink. Standing at the bar, none other than Matt Yglesias! He was in a suit, which made me immediately regret my sequins-and-jeans outfit combo. Matt had ordered a pizza, which sadly didn’t arrive until it was already time to head back to the bookstore, so he had to moderate our conversation without dinner.

Remember how I said I didn’t think Matt would have time to read my book? Not only had he read it, he had prepared a whole bunch of incredibly astute and interesting questions that he asked with zero notes. The thing about really smart people is that they are often extremely curious, which makes them fun conversationalists. Here’s the video. There were some friendly faces in the crowd, too: A grad school buddy, my husband’s awesome aunts, and even Sheehan Fisher and Danny Singley (pictured below), two of the men’s perinatal mental health specialists featured in the book’s mental health chapter. I signed a bunch of books, ate a late-night pizza back at Comet, and collapsed into bed.

The next day, I had two more events on the docket. A few days before, I’d gotten a surprise email from a policy researcher at the non-partisan Niskanen Center who asked if I’d come chat with their staff about family leave policy while I was in DC. This is like asking a snake to pick out their favorite mouse: yes, of course! I walked over to their office and had a lovely breakfast meeting with a roundtable of their staffers, talking about parental leave, baby bonuses, family-friendly housing, and other policy fixes that might make parents’ lives easier. I ate a croissant and got crumbs all over myself.

My next stop was the palatial Metropolitan Club, a private club whose members have included Henry Kissinger, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ulysses S. Grant. They hosted me in their wood-paneled library, which included rows of books written by Metropolitan Club members. I got to meet a number of sweet gentlemen who had many questions about “grandfather brain,” and they even hosted me for lunch afterwards (salmon caesar salad and iced tea). You are not allowed to have phones in the club, so sadly I could not take pictures, but trust me that it was fancy.

One good thing about the way we sequenced this trip is that each day was slightly less stressful than the day before. I was 100% stressed about the NYC party, because it seemed like lots of different things could go wrong. I was 90% stressed about the PBS taping, 80% stressed about the DC bookstore event, and 70% stressed about the Metropolitan Club event. After the Metropolitan Club, I still had a few radio interviews, but those were dramatically less stressful than the live events. I was down to 50% stress by the time we left DC.

Outside our Capitol Hill place in my new Father Figure hat; Brad Wilcox; UVA

After DC, we took the train to Charlottesville so my daughter could check out the University of Virginia. My husband went there, so he gave us a tour, but unlike the other information-packed college tours we had on this trip, his tour was more like “here’s where I played frisbee golf” and “this is the frat house where I lost a lot of brain cells.” I got to visit with a few UVA faculty: psychologist Jim coan, who is working on his own book, and W. Bradford Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies. Wilcox is an advocate for marriage and family formation with a politically conservative bent. We had breakfast together and argued about politics the whole time, but he still picked up the check! We ended up agreeing that we both care a lot about families, and that there is common ground to be identified.

Father’s Day happened while we were in Charlottesville, which meant that lots of podcast clips and interviews came out over the weekend, and I was glued to my phone. Ironically, the actual dad in the family, my husband, got short shrift. My only present to him was a book that he already owned (you can probably guess the title).

From Charlottesville, we spent a night at yet another HomeExchange in Roanoke, this one with wild turkeys and deer roaming around, and then drove all the way to Tennessee, where we will finally enter the gates of Dollywood tomorrow. I should clarify that I’m not a rabid Dolly fan or anything, although I like her fine. My grandmother was named Dolly, and my sister (who is a rabid Dolly fan) named her daughter Dolly, and it seemed like a good place for a family vacation. We’re all here: My dad, my sister and her family, and my two brothers and their families. No one really cares that I just published a book. I will be eating fried pickles and sleeping as much as possible.

For this week’s music rec, there’s only one choice.