I just realized I haven’t sent a newsletter since December. I’ve been living in my writing cave—I was overcome with a book idea (confession: it’s not the book I was supposed to be writing) (maybe more about this some other time) and I’ve been living in a dreamworld while I cranked it out. I’m so jazzed about it; I’m working on revisions now but I hope to share it with my agent soon. We’ll see, fingers crossed.
What I really wanted to update SOMEONE about is my chickens, and since YOU did me the (perhaps now regrettable) kindness of subscribing to my newsletter, I’m afraid you’re going to be subjected to this unsolicited content.
Scroll past all the feathers if you want, like, actual book/writing news.
Chicken politics
Before you start reading, be warned, I’m about to tell you all about my chickens, and there’s not going to be any point to the story.
So the fact is that I, like many Americans, became a chicken owner during the pandemic, only 30% against my will. (Dad, I’m looking at you here.)
For 18 years, I lived in New York City; instead, for the last 4.5 years, I’ve had chickens. I have approximately the same amount of ambient drama in my neighborhood now as I did then. (8 million people versus 9 or so chickens, fluctuating around accidental hatchings and predator victories.)
Right now, the main drama is Philip. Philip is absurd—ontologically, sartorially, spiritually. I will offer you photographic proof after I’ve had a chance to make my case. Philip is a second rooster. Which, if you have chickens, you know is Not a Thing You Should Have.
Philip hatched accidentally last summer, and now he’s constantly pursuing his dad’s hens. His dad doesn’t like it (huhn!) and drives him out of the flock. Which is for the best, because when he’s with the flock, he bullies my poor sweet hens.
Every night, I have to rescue Philip and put him back in the coop by hand; he walks around in endless circles in the woods, yearning after the hens, forgetting to eat and drink water, blithely unconcerned about the fox that comes screaming through the forest at 2 every morning. He has, I assume, a 15-minute long-term memory. Every night, I go out into the woods at dusk to save his life and he goes frolicking off through the poison ivy and raspberry brambles, leading me on a wild goose absurd chicken chase. Every night I shout at him, “That’s it, you jerk! Tonight is the night I let you get eaten!”
I never mean it, it turns out. But he has caused me minor injury and mosquito bites.
(Why we irresponsibly accidentally hatched chicks and landed ourselves in this predicament: I am the main caretaker of the chickens in my house. Last summer, when I was away on book tour, my husband was filling in for me. He would check the nesting boxes, where the chickens are supposed to usually lay eggs. He did not know that three of those wily cluckers had gotten broody and were hiding a stash of eggs in the corner of the coop that was completely concealed from line of sight. By the time I got home from tour, the hens were two weeks deep into a three-week hatching cycle, and so I let the two eggs they had gotten by us hatch, hoping against hope we’d get two hens. Alas, statistics bore out, and we got a hen and a rooster.)
Philip is named after his mother, Phyllis (full name, obviously, Phyllis Diller, for obvious reasons.)
Phyllis is not SUPPOSED to look like that, exactly. She is a breed called a Silver Frizzle, which sounded great when I got her as a one-day-old fluff ball. But as it turns out, her feathers fall out and break really easily compared to the other hens’. And she’s, erm, a favorite of our very large rooster, so she’s… always looking a little worse for the wear. I’ve tried putting a jean skirt saddle on her to protect her feathers, but she hated it so much she screamed bloody murder and rolled on the ground until it came off. So… now she looks a little bit like a walking roaster.
I say my rooster is large. I mean, this guy is an absolute beast.
(This is Twosty. My 6yo named him. Standing ovation to anyone who can guess what my 6yo named our late, great first rooster, who was eaten by a fox in 2022. Twosty has it in for me, personally, because he thinks I’m trying to mate with his hens, apparently. He attacks me whenever he gets the chance. He doesn’t feel this way about any other humans; it’s a head-scratcher, since I’m the primary caretaker and giver of treats. He’s magnificent, if not lovable. We have not been attacked by a predator in the two years we’ve had him, because the predators, of whom there are many—you should see who comes by at night, sniffing the trail cam we put in front of the coop—are terrified.)
When Philip, my absurd second rooster, and his sister hatched, we weren’t sure which hen was his biological mother, because there were three hens who were broody at once and co-tended the chicks. But then as his baby down started to be replaced by adult feathers, the answer became obvious. Observe the floof:
Philip is, as I mentioned, absurd. Phyllis’s breed has no comb; Twosty’s comb is, as you have seen, robust. Philip got all that Twosty shag, but instead of standing proudly like a mohawk, it lies horizontally like a unibrow, flopping in his eyes so he’s constantly tripping because he can’t see where he’s going. If you look closely at his tail and his under-wings, you’ll see bare flesh and broken quills from the dumb brittleness of his feathers.
Of course what really makes him absurd is not his appearance but the fact that he pursues copulation around the clock, forgetting to eat or drink water. Did we know this about chickens before we decided to domesticate them and eat their eggs? I don’t know. But their sexual politics make the murderous wrens nesting in our porch hanging basket look downright wholesome.
Real farmers, of which I am apparently not one, would just eat Philip, thereby putting everyone out of their misery. Does anyone have advice about revising my personality on this vector? (Btw: my 6yo is devoutly against eating Philip, so please be advised that however persuasive you may be, you’re still going up against his opinion.)
FWIW, Philip’s sister, Philomena (see what we did there?), is not absurd. She is perfectly lovely and looks like a normal chicken and lays an egg every day. (Isn’t she a pretty gal?)
So why am I sharing all this with you? Was there a lesson to be learned?
Well, there are lots of lessons to be learned from being a chicken owner, but few of them are particularly heart-warming.
I’m just sharing them because I guess I love them and I want other people to know about how ridiculous they are.
There. I warned you there was no point to this segment.
Actual book/writing news
Of course there has been much news since I last updated you in December. Oops. Some of it has already come and gone. A lot of you have come out to see me on the road, and I’m so grateful. A recent tour highlight was doing an event at the public library in the town I grew up in, Canton, CT. There in the audience were my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Cora Mutch, and my first grade teacher, Mr. Tim LeGeyt, who between them taught me to read. I hadn’t seen either of them in 35 years. I was so excited to be able to show them where I had thanked them both in the acknowledgments of Stella six years ago.
(They are brother and sister, btw, which somehow makes this picture even more precious to me.)
And in publishing news, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia has a gorgeous new cover for paperback:
(I loved the hardcover cover so much—I also love this cover, too, though! Lucky me. I work in publishing so I know how rare it is for authors to like *any* of their covers, never mind *all.*)
The image in the background is the city of Bova, the real-life neighbor to the imaginary town of Santa Chionia. The art department actually showed me this cover (alongside the Escher cover we used) as an option for the hardcover. I asked if they could use that one for the hardcover and this one for the paperback—dream come true to get to use both.
And also, for my British and Australian friends, I’m thrilled to announce that The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is finally going to be available to you in a Vintage edition as of July 15! (Or, to speak to you in your own language, “15 July.”)
More about the new book I wasn’t supposed to be writing but then wrote
I’m sorry, I can’t tell you more. I have to see what my agent thinks of it. But I do just want to say—I remembered, doing this, why I write. It’s because I love writing and I had something I really wanted to say. Even if my agent thinks this book shouldn’t go anywhere, I am still glad I wrote it.
That’s it for now.
I hope you’re well. I hope you are safe. I hope the people you care about are well and safe. I hope your daily work brings you a sense of purpose and hope. I hope your spring is full of azaleas, or whatever the equivalent burst of color and joy in your part of the world is.
Juliet