Yesterday perfectly described the ups-and-downs of book touring and even of living as a fiction writer.

Friday, because my wife and I have twins, I’d dropped her and our 8-month-olds at my parents-in-law’s house in South Carolina. Sad leaving my family—the boys, especially; I won’t see them for weeks. They’re so little: I’m kind of scared they’ll forget me. Here’s the double cuteness I’m jeopardizing my relationship with:

Friday, I saw the dream of capitalism fulfilled. I read at Google’s New York office.

If every company were as profitable as Google is, we’d be the happiest nation in the history of the world. (Truth is, we’re not even the happiest in our world. The new Division I Champion of happiness is Denmark.)

But I urge you all: go to see a Google office. It’s the workplace as fantasyland. All their employees eat lunch for free, five days a week, in two cafeterias; both cafeterias are manned by a guest celebrity chef, and both offer even entry-level day-laborers the joy of all-you-can-eat celebrity shrimp or celebrity steak or celebrity vegan surprise—(let me repeat) for free!

What’s more, throughout the office, every hundred yards or so (the space is huge), snack islands give bottled water away—and nuts and cereal and granola-bars and gum and breath mints—plus a lot of other things I didn’t have time to sneak into my pocket on the way out. Of course, being hyper-profitable buys one a kind of generosity turbo charge; a sense of everyone’s racing together toward perfection; the wind whipping a pretty color onto the whole world’s cheeks. It’s nice. I wonder how many companies have ever gotten the chance to be so munificent?

Anyway, another perk Google affords its employees (along with the Razor kick-scooters that people use to get around, and the indoor basketball court, etc.): free books. Once every week or so, the company invites authors to give readings. Then, it gives every employee who shows up a free copy of whatever the author’s hawking. On Friday, I was that author, selling my wares.

1) I’m writing the first hunk of this entry on a plane to do the Craig Ferguson show on CBS. I’m nervous, and the best way to convey the sharp flavor of the anxiety is to start now—when I don’t know whether I’ll bomb or not—and finish up by telling you how it went.

I have two things working against me: I woke up at 5 AM NewYork time, to give my wife another few hours of sleep while I cared for of our baby twins. (Turn to uxorious in your dictionary; you’ll see my baggy-eyed likeness, weeping (depending on the edition)).  And now I’m flying a six-hour economy class to LA, on which the screams of two red-headed babies (a touch of home) keeps me from sleep. They’re sitting right behind me. So I’ll be too tired for the show—not quick enough for Craig’s celebrity-grade banter. The other handicap: my book isn’t really meant to be funny. I wish those babies behind me would shut the hell up. I mean, I tried to sprinkle moments of dark comedy into my novel. But More Than It Hurts You is about a child in terrible jeopardy, about corporate greed, the modern mania for attention, loss of privacy, the maddening even-handedness of media coverage, about a family’s dangers from within and without — all the threads and fears of contemporary life. Including, too, race and gender. I don’t regret making the book about serious things (just look at the current political landscape to see how important those last two subjects still are). But it might make for awkward late-night comedy material. Where are those red-head kids’ parents, already?

This is the first post on our new blog,  “Booked” — where I’ll be sending updates on my 22-city book tour.  Think of it as your behind-the-scenes look at the least exciting of all the performance arts:public readings!

A book tour is a mixed bag: part Spinal Tap, part—well, I guess there is no other part. So it’s just a bag. I don’t mean, or have any right, to complain; there’s nothing more pompous than an author whining about having to go on tour.  But if I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times: Put the writer’s name first, the puppet show after.

Of Jews and Love Matches

I started my tour three weeks before my book comes out – excellent planning! – and at one of the most stressful events there is: the Jewish Book fair try-out. Run by a generous woman from Long Island named Carolyn Hessel, the tryout has been called a combination of speed-dating and “The Gong Show.”  I, and about seventy other writers, got two minutes each to pitch our books to hundreds of Jewish Community Center representatives from around the country. (If they like you, you're picked to go on a Jewish book tour.)  We all gathered in a large auditorium in Los Angeles’s “American Jewish University”—who knew such a place existed? And what does that do Brandeis’s confidence? 

 Darin Strauss hits the road for in support of his new novel, "More Than It Hurts You." A calendar: