I never expected to be featured alongside Colleen Hoover, but sure enough, it has happened.
The organizer of our neighborhood book group, reading Hoover’s It Ends With Us, also waved around a copy of Best of Balancing Act at our monthly conflab this week.
Maybe that will start the magic, and voila! Some literary giant poking around Amazon will discover my book of local newspaper columns and before long, I’ll be right there with Colleen Hoover on the book table at Target or Costco.
Meanwhile, our Beechwold book group this week pondered what has catapulted this originally self-published author to the New York Times best seller list, where she has held 6 of the 10 top spots, and why she sold more books last year than Dr. Seuss.
Having read only this one selection, I can say two things. First, she knows how to tell a story. And when all is said and done, most of us love a good story, especially when following it does not require us to sketch out a timeline or family tree as we go. Life is already complicated enough without that.
The other thing I can say is that Colleen Hoover apparently never test-drove the recipe for the chocolate chip cookies that Lily, the narrator, said were the best in the world. Her teen-age boyfriend Atlas made them extra crunchy by flipping them over in the oven after the first five minutes.
Hoping to bring a book-authentic treat to the meeting, I tried the Atlas method, which has taken the Internet by a storm. I can report first-hand that it is completely impossible to flip a gooey cookie after five minutes and completely impossible to do it without burning yourself even after eight.
I will not go so far as to say you’ll get more balance in your life by reading my book than Colleen Hoover’s. But you will definitely get more balance if you don’t try the cookies. I didn’t take a survey, but I suspect at this meeting another bottle of wine or dish of mixed nuts would have done just as well.
For me, it was another reminder – and I seem to need a lot – that a reliable ingredient for life balance is keeping it simple.
