Writing can be lonely business. No one can write your book for you (unless you’re a celebrity or pseudo-celebrity and can hire a ghost writer). Nope, it’s just you. You have to wage your own battle with words and ideas…and wrestle them all to the ground.
What a great ride the book tour for Blood Work was…nearly 3 months on the road. Lots of adventures, lots of stories to tell, and I met so many great new friends along the way.
I’m returning with great memories of book signings, NPR interviews, CSPAN Book TV, and lots of great print reviews for the book (The Economist, Boston Globe, starred review Publisher’s Weekly, etc).
But honestly, it feels so good to be home.
I’m getting a chance to catch up on errands, long dinners with friends and family, and the myriad other tasks that I left undone while I was away.
But still, as they say, you’re only as good as your next book. And so I dive headlong into the process. And strangely, I feel gleeful about it. Probably because I understand the process better than I did last time around. And most definitely because I know I can do it now.
It’s hard to call two weeks in Paris “work” – but it was. For Blood Work, I needed to have a look at a stash of 400-year-old documents in the Archives of the French Academy of Sciences. The picture to the left will give you a sense of why I left the library with more than a little dust on me.
My archival sleuth work was critical to my research for the book. It was in the French Academy of Sciences that Claude Perrault performed blood transfusion experiments. To his frustration and relief, these transfusions were failures – unlike the public ones that his nemesis Denis did not long after on the banks of the Seine.
The original Academy of Sciences was on the rue Vivienne, which eventually became the prime site of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France until it moved to its current, enormous location on the Quai de Tolbiac.
I just got back from a few weeks in Paris to do some research for Blood Work. While I was there, I had a constant companion: “Spring,” my young daughter’s favorite duck.
We picked the cute little rubber duckie up in Rome last winter. Spring found her way into my travel bag on this most recent trip to the French capitol. She visited the libraries, but she also tagged along with a friend who was traveling with me. Oh the places she went. And oh, the delight my daughter had in seeing the fun her duck had.
As someone who works in early history, I often get asked where I find my books and information.
Things have changed dramatically since my grad school days when you had to pay a reference librarian to run an online database search. To my delight, I’ve been finding more and more early texts online through specialized collections. But this doesn’t replace the thrill of the hunt in person. And I don’t think that I could go too long without getting dusty in the archives…
Still, for online databases, my first stops are always:
1. Historical Abstracts
2. History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
3. Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliography
4. Cambridge Histories
It’s a rough life…but someone has to do it! Over the holidays, I had to go to Rome for research on the book. I brought my husband and daughter with me. Hey, with all of the amazing trattorie, I needed some dinner company! We explored the city together a bit and made some amazing memories. More on that another time.
I spent the bulk of my days in the Biblioteca Casanatensa. The library was founded by Cardinal Girolamo Casanate in the late 17th century, with the purpose of serving public readers. However, the soaring ceilings, the detailed frescoes, and wealth of the collections do make me wonder just who would have had access to this magnificent library.
Now, I’m no newbie to pouring over old – very old – books. I’m actually something of a junkie in that regard. But there is something so humbling about being cloistered away in reading rooms that are older than the 350 year-old books. Each book has its own story, each folio its own identity.
I’ve had many people ask me why a girl from the cornfields of Illinois would have a passion – no, obsession – for life in 17th century France. The first part of the answer is easy, actually. My paternal grandmother’s family was French; she was truly my kindred spirit. Une âme soeur, a sister soul, as they say in French.
The second part of the answer – the part specifically about the 17th century – is less obvious. It has everything to do with searching for a king who eluded me for years.
When I was just thirteen years old, I had a chance to travel to Paris with a school group. As so many tourists do, we took the train from the French capitol out to Versailles. Due to an unfortunate snafu, we were not able to enter the palace. Instead, we had to content ourselves with touring the gardens only. But, if you’ve ever been to Versailles, you know that the gardens alone are worth the trip.
