More Tales from the Book Tour . . .

When I wrote THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS I deliberately kept myself out of the book and tried to let my characters speak for themselves. But when the book was published and I hit the road to promote it, I discovered, as many first-time authors do, that I was the book's public face.

At first this prospect seemed exciting. My first taste of fame came at a signing in a small town in coastal Maine. The event began quietly. I signed a few books, chatted with a few tourists who'd heard me on the radio. One apologized that she wouldn't be reading my book until she returned to Ohio. She didn't want to know more than she had to about the lobsters she was planning to devour during her vacation.

A few minutes later there was a commotion at the door and two busloads of camp kids streamed into the store, an army of teenyboppers in uniform -- green shorts, grey T-shirts, and gigantic sneakers. Their beleaguered counselors had unleashed them for a furious few minutes of souvenir shopping. For the store it was a minor retail opportunity combined with a major crowd control problem.

The campers swarmed over the lobster key chains, lobster fridge magnets, lobster bumper stickers, and lobster mugs, yet seemed unsatisfied. Then one of them saw me, sitting in the corner at my table, stacked with things with big red lobster claws on them. He tugged his comrade's arm and marched over, trailing a platoon of curious boys and girls. After preliminary greetings the interrogation began.

"Are you the author?"

"Yes," I responded.

A round of frowns, then recognition.

"So, you wrote this book?"

"That's right," I confirmed.

"Cool!"

"I've never met anyone who wrote a book before."

"Was it hard?"

"Yes," I nodded, emphatically.

The kids buzzed, attracting more campers like bees to the hive. Soon I was surrounded by admirers, three and four rows deep. I was glowing. A girl in the front row fumbled in her pockets, her gaze locked on the book.

"Um, how much does it cost?"

It had already occurred to me that THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS would make an excellent gift for her parents back home, a memoir of Maine that outclassed any key chain.

"Well, it's about twenty-five dollars," I said.

She looked hopeful, and squinted into her hand. Some of the other kids began digging in their pockets. The girl announced the results of her investigation.

"I have six quarters."

A chorus of similar calculations erupted from the crowd, all measured in coins. I think we were all a little crestfallen.

One of the campers noticed the stack of promotional postcards on the table. I'd had several thousand of them printed up, at a cost of a few hundred dollars to myself. An image of the book cover was on the front and lobster factoids on the back.

"Are these free?"

I had to acknowledge that they were. The campers dealt themselves cards as though at a casino, and when the pile was gone they turned to go, the author forgotten. As an afterthought, the girl with the quarters thrust her postcard at me.

"Hey, can you autograph this?"

As one, the crowd of children rotated in place and stared. Flickers of delight crossed their faces, and a couple of eleven-year-old girls started bouncing up and down on their big sneakers.

"Yeah, me too!"

Jason Giambi, eat your heart out.

"Autograph mine!"

"Oh, no, me, me, me! Me first!"

The crowd pressed in, the campers in back reaching over the shoulders of the ones in front, all shoving their postcards at me for signature.

Autographed cards clutched in hand, the kids trickled back aboard their busses in clumps, most of them without having made a purchase. I had run out of postcards, had sold no books, and had robbed the shop of dozens of trinkets worth of income. But what did it matter? I felt like a rock star. I was savoring my newfound celebrity when two very attractive high-school girls walked past my table.

"Are you the author?" one of them drawled, drop-jawed with awe.

I puffed out my chest and smiled.

"That's right!"

For a heartbeat longer the girls kept up the charade. Then they collapsed into a heap of giggles and dashed for the door. Still pumped with pride, I required a few seconds for it to click: they'd witnessed my encounter with the camp kids. These two high-school girls were making fun of me.

A word of advice to aspiring writers: getting your name on the cover of a book with a big red claw on it is not the quickest path to universal respect. This shouldn't have surprised me. During the previous two years I'd learned to cringe when asked what I did for a living. Especially in conversation with members the hip thirty-something set to which I supposedly belonged, the answer -- that I was writing book about lobsters -- earned me the sort of polite smile reserved for lunatics.

But once the book was published and I began traveling throughout New England on tour, I was astonished at the number of people who showed up to hear me talk about lobsters. (Maybe they wanted to see a lunatic in person?) At first only a handful of people appeared for my book talks, but then fifty or sixty, and later seventy or eighty people would attend. There were a few lonely days when only a spattering of heroic stragglers stopped by, but on the worst occasion I still succeeding in talking four hot college kids into buying the book on strength of the sex scenes it contained. When I was back home between trips, the bulky trainer at my gym even became interested when he learned that male lobsters had more than one penis.

He wasn't alone. When a camera crew from CBS News touched down on Little Cranberry Island and Bruce Fernald took us lobstering aboard the Double Trouble, the female correspondent compared my book to a Harlequin romance, then steered the conversation toward the male lobster's double endowment.

"Yup," Bruce declared, "it's enough to make a man jealous." He hefted a large male up to the camera. "They've got two, and they're always hard."

The Associated Press interviewed me and then sent a report over the newswires asking, "Who would have thought lobsters were such passionate lovers?" USA Today noted that females lobsters lacked a vagina. US News & World Report reported that they got PMS. The Bob and Sheri Show called me to talk about lobster dating. In an NPR studio in Washington D.C., the august radio host Diane Rehm nearly fell out of her chair -- with delight, I believe -- when I described how female lobsters seduced males into submission by urinating in their faces. (Treat yourself to some fun; you can listen to the interview online, here.)

I suppose if there is an explanation for why THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS spent twelve weeks on the New England bestseller list and became a worldwide science bestseller, it's not really that I achieved much notoriety on my book tour (camp kids excluded). It's that Mother Nature, when coaxed from her shell, revealed facts stranger than fiction.