Not Your Mother’s Book Tour

In my world, a typical book signing involves sitting behind a small publisher’s table at the annual AWP Conference book fair. Along with dozens of other poets throughout the day, I peer at passersby like a shelter dog whose time has run out. If I’m lucky, someone might stop to say hello, taking a complimentary butterscotch disc as they shuffle away without my book. “Got just one carry-on bag this year,” they’ll say. “You know how it is.”

The book signing I attended this week was different. In fact, it wasn’t really about books—or signing them—at all.

Jenn McAllister, otherwise known as Jennxpenn, is a nineteen-year-old YouTube sensation who started making videos about her teenage life several years ago. My twelve-year-old daughter, Lydia, and her friends follow Jenn and other millennial vloggers, like Super Woman, Taylor Oakley, and Miranda Sings, on their four-inch screens every day. So when Lydia and her friend Emma heard that Jenn was coming to the Chicago area for a signing, we had no choice but to take a ninety-minute road trip—on a school night—to see Jenn in real-life retina display.

While the celebrities of my middle school years (Simon LeBon, Ricky Schroeder) hung out on magazine pages taped inside lockers, today’s stars manage Twitter and Instagram accounts that catalogue their daily thoughts. When I was twelve, Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire during the production of a Pepsi commercial. Some of my classmates came to school crying: it was the most personal celebrity connection they’d made. When kids meet their heroes today, they entertain the illusion that they’re already fast friends. After all, they watch them apply makeup in their rooms.

The object of this night’s devotion, Jennxpenn, would come to Anderson’s Books in Naperville for a signing. Books would already be reserved (we had called just in time to receive numbers 258 and 259, near the end of the 300ish cut-off), and fans would stand in line for a couple of hours for approximately seven seconds of contact: a quick picture and a hug. The book, Really Professional Internet Person (the teenager’s, um, memoir), would be handed out by bookstore employees after the meeting, pre-signed.

When we arrived an hour early, the store was giggling and gangling with girls searching madly for outlets with which to charge their phones while still holding their places in line. We filed in to receive our blue numbered slips, which then told us where to stand in line again for the meeting. The line wound through the aisles, and with every turn, I knocked a book or two off a shelf with my hip. Somehow, Lydia and Emma found ways to Instagram through the most tedious part of the process, bouncing with nervous energy as they clamped their homemade cards under their arms.

As the doorway began to fill with bodies, a bedraggled employee threw up her hands. “If you’re over number two hundred, leave the store!” she yelled. “And don’t come back before eight!”

So we wandered Main Street with dozens of other middle-aged moms and tween girls: Starbucks, the Apple Store, Sephora with its hundreds of smudged and dented try-me lipsticks. Lydia flounced powder from huge brushes across her forehead and cheeks.

“I need to look good for Jenn,” she said.

Emma bought a tube of mascara and eyeliner for Jenn.

“Everyone knows she loves eyeliner,” she said.

When we returned at eight, several guests who had already met the star wandered toward the exit, dazed and crying.

“Crying?” I asked the girls.

“Yeah, some people really get into it,” Lydia said.

Finally, it was time for Lydia and Emma’s subgroup to approach the Throne of Jennxpenn.

“Mom. I’m so nervous. What do I do? Do I give her the card? I don’t want to give her the card. Can you give her the card? No one else brought a card.”

“Look.” I pointed to a box. “She has a bunch of cards from fans in there.”

Lydia looked at the box, terrified. She held her stomach.

“Mom, you’ll take my picture, right? Right, Mom? Mom, right?”

I readied my phone. Lydia stepped up, held out her card, and fell into the young blond woman’s embrace. Or, perhaps, it was the other way around, for Lydia was taller than her hero.

I snapped a shot before I realized it was already Emma’s turn. Then it was over. They picked up their books and looked at each other, smiling, embarrassed. Tears pooled in their eyes.

“Did you hear how she said, ‘how are you?’” Emma said. “The way she said it, like, ‘how are you’ was so amazing. She’s so nice!”

“Yeah,” Lydia said. “I just love her.”

We got in the car, where they began to post pictures and devour their books.

It’s easy to dismiss pop culture, especially the pop culture of tween suburban girls who clamor for S’mores Frappuccinos and matching friendship necklaces from Claire’s. But the hands and feet of Christ can enter our lives in mysterious ways. For some of those crying girls that night, a hug from someone they felt they knew—even the same hug given three hundred times—could have been the affirmation they needed to know they could get through that night, that week, this life.

The next day, for the first time (I’m not always what you would call a “helicopter mom”), I looked up Jennxpenn on YouTube. The first video I watched chronicled her getting her wisdom teeth pulled, complete with her drug-induced babbling before and after the procedure. Then I watched a “truth or dare,” in which she refused to offer details about her dating life but ate a spoonful of mustard. Finally, I watched her catalogue the “things I hate,” including the horrors of accidentally texting a winky face, ripping the fringe off notebook paper, and opening an exploding can of soda.

In other words, an average American kid. With an above-average video-camera, hairstyle, and public relations crew. This wasn’t War and Peace. But maybe that’s okay.

Because in her book, which I swiped from my daughter’s bed strewn with Starburst wrappers, she shares her experience with panic attacks in middle school, getting her period, losing friends, struggling with body image, and navigating her parents’ divorce. And that’s in just the first few pages. It’s not great literature, but it’s fun, honest, and warm. I suddenly understood why the girls flock to her for just a moment to hug her and feel loved, understood.

The typical YouTube book tour isn’t my world, but like it or not, I’m a part of it. I’m raising a daughter who’s watching, liking, commenting. Carefully choosing her emoticons. Finding a way to grow up.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections Second Sky (Cascade Poiema Series), A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her book How to Read a Poem, an instructional guide based on Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry,” was recently released by T.S. Poetry Press. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Books & Culture, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, and the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare. Tania was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. She tutors high school students and edits for Every Day Poems and Relief.

Picture above provided by the author.