The launch, or how do you say ‘sturm und drang’ in Italian

A good friend struggled at her wedding because, as she said, it was still just me in a bridal dress. She had hoped to be transformed for the day into someone else, into The Bride. I thought of that on Sunday at my book launch – when it poured buckets and buckets of rain on our outdoor event but also beforehand when I wanted to be the Author but I was still just me with a published book.

How do you make sense of that wild weather? asks a friend who was at the event.

I am not sure.

I could have yelled Plot Twist if I had been in a different state of mind.

In the moment I thought of the movie, A Room With A View, which first put me on to Florence, the setting for this book being launched. In that movie, a huge storm brews, and the main characters must take shelter in a carriage and scurry back to the city. The clergyman who is with them tries to provide comfort:

The weather was biblical, I say, thinking of the question my friend Erin asked during the interview at the launch, about the religiosity of the book. My son’s girlfriend, who is Vietnamese, tells me that in her culture being rained on is a sign of good luck, of good fortune.

There is a bit of good fortune in the weather: when I washed the tablecloths after the launch I realized the stain in one of them had come out with the rain. That’s something.

Another couple of friends met at the launch for the first time and talked under the tent as they waited for the weather to lighten up – one said she was not going to get her new suede shoes wet if she could help it. Their conversation helped her new acquaintance to realize that an experience he always described as sad was not only that, that something could be really good but still sad at the same time. He is about to go to Portugal and has been reading about saudade, the Portuguese word that describes yearning or longing for something, ‘the presence of absence.’ This morning I was reading a book and the same concept was described, there called sehnsucht, the German word for thoughts and feelings about everything that is unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experience.

Right now, my extended family is facing some profound challenges – someone I love is very unwell and in hospital – and so something that is really good, the book launch, is also still sad.

I decided not to visit the hospital the day before the launch, because I felt like I needed to gather my forces inside so instead I went for a long bike ride in the countryside, and then sat on a patio for dinner. And then on Sunday I gathered my supplies—the gelato, the bookmarks, the stickers, the extra books, the tablecloths, my notes, a couple of chairs—and headed out.

The launch was lovely until the skies opened up – even though all the weather apps and the radar said we would be in the clear. The raincloud that came suddenly stayed directly overhead. I went home cold and wet and with way too many forces still in-gathered, not having had an outlet for them.

The next day when I described how the rain had filled in the gutters and curbs so that the rain was overflowing onto the sidewalk in places, I thought of the real-life event that’s described in Renaissance – L’Alliuvione, the 1966 flood of Florence. One of the characters in the book, a tour guide, explains it to the main character:

 “In the fall of 1966, it rained seventeen inches of rain. It was also weirdly warm that fall so the early snows in the mountains all melted. And then, some engineers decided to let out water on purpose to prevent the dam above Florence from breaking, and all that water hit Florence like a tidal wave. Twenty feet of water and mud and oil.”

“Twenty feet?”

“In some places. It was different in different parts of the city. These signs are at the high-water mark to show how deep it was.”

I looked at the marker above us. It was impossible to imagine the jade-green Arno flooding the streets. “That’s crazy,” I said.

“It was a disaster,” Elora said and began walking again. I followed her as I had all day, listening. “People died. Tons of art was destroyed and there are crazy stories about art being rescued too—a museum director who swam with an original manuscript in his teeth to save it, international students they called mud angels.”

At another point in the book, a storm hits the convent in the middle of the night, wreaking havoc. The main character recalls how once one of her kids had looked up in disgust during a thunderstorm and said, “What is God doing up there?”

That was the question I was asking Sunday, both at the launch and in thinking about my person.

I was reminded of the moment when my main character sees a Pièta, a statue of Mary holding the lifeless body of Jesus. What she says is what I need to hear: “It wasn’t her fault, this mother, and she hadn’t been able to stop it when the Flood hit. What she could do was pick up his lifeless body and hold him. She could grieve.” It made me think of what psychologists call emotional flooding, when you feel like you’re up to your neck with emotions and feelings. That was how I felt at the launch. All the feels, as the kids say.

The next morning I was mad at myself for not being able to simply have a grand time at the book launch, for not being The Author, for just being me with a book out in the world. But maybe Sunday’s weather was a kind of pathetic fallacy. Maybe it was fairly appropriate for a book where the main character suddenly faces her own sorrows and joys.

And there were joys too. People celebrated my book and me well. I loved being surrounded by friends, family and strangers. My husband and my kids pulled together to make the event a wonderful success. I received gifts of olive oil and flowers and a book bag and an olivewood pen. People brought friends. My friend Erin interviewed me beautifully. The location was amazing. I brought flowers from my garden and my little olive tree. I had stickers made for the occasion.

Maybe I need to put one of those stickers on myself. The stickers say: good enough mother. The term comes from a pediatrician who determined that children did not need perfect parents – that good enough parenting was good enough. Maybe that’s what saudade and sehnsucht, remind us of – that the rain will fall, the floods will come, we won’t be the bride in some ideal glory, we will have our loved ones in the backs of our minds and hearts even as we laugh and sign books, but life is both really good and still sad, that that is good enough, that that is good.