A Mediated Life

Today I have the pleasure of hosting Elisa Lorello, who is on a blog tour to promote her novel, Faking It. Welcome, Elisa!

Thank you, Susan, for hosting me on your blog. Readers, Susan and her husband Stacey were the first two people I met and befriended when I relocated to North Carolina three years ago; that friendship has been invaluable to me ever since. If I can be half the friend that each has been to me, then I’d say I’m in the win column.

I’m currently on a summer blog tour to promote my novel FAKING IT, a romantic comedy that takes place in New York. Thirty-something Andi, a professor of writing and rhetoric, meets Devin, a handsome male escort (“who apparently gets around the lecture circuit more than we do,” remarks Andi’s best friend Maggie), and proposes an unusual arrangement: lessons in what she knows in exchange for lessons in what he knows. And when they become friends (violating the contract that forbids them from doing so), complications ensue. I pitch it as *When Harry Met Sally* meets *Sex and the City*. But, with my rhet-comp colleagues and friends, I could just as easily pitch is as “When Harry Met Sally* meets *Inventing the University*.

FAKING IT is the perfect summer read. It’s witty, fun, yet also poignant at times. And it’s a must-read for anyone who teaches first-year writing, be it as a TA or a tenured professor. At the time that I wrote FAKING IT, I had read Richard Russo’s Straight Man and loved it because I could so easily relate to it. I imagined my readers being other composition teachers and grad students who would get a kick out of the conversations, or find themselves itching to jump in and say, “You could not be more wrong…” The words are just as much a part of the story as the character and setting. And the idea of a bunch of composition teachers actually using an escort’s services was positively hilarious. Besides, what other romantic comedy novel features Peter Elbow?!

It’s hard to believe that this September marks five years since getting my Masters Degree in Professional Writing from UMass-Dartmouth. I had such aspirations of being one of the rhetoric-composition superstars I’d spent those three years learning about, and find it interesting to see the path my life has taken in such a short time.

I wrote FAKING IT just as I completed my degree, and when I read it today I can’t help but laugh at Andi’s idealism as she teaches Devin about these landmark composition essays by Elbow and Bartholomae. That was my idealism, of course, all that stuff still fresh in my mind. I think it’s consistent with her character in many ways—she has a sort of naïve outlook on the world, the product of having grown up so sheltered. And yet, Andi took the career path I had set upon, and she surpassed my own successes. She’s a PhD, a textbook author, a writing program director, and a rising star in her field. As you’ll see in FAKING IT’s sequel, it isn’t long before the next wave of grad students and scholars are citing her. Career-wise, she’s got it all together, and she’s damn good at what she does.

Much of the rhetorical idealism in FAKING IT is also a parody of my own theoretical beliefs. Andi’s staunch opposition to the modes of discourse, for example, was a poke at my own grad school diatribe when, as a TA, I was confounded by what this whole freshman composition thing was really all about. As if this was the worst thing I’d ever have to encounter as a teacher!

But perhaps the happiest accident to come out of FAKING IT was that it is, in fact, a rather rhetorical novel. Andi and Devin are continually engaged in an ongoing dialectic in pursuit of truth, be it the truth of the text, the truth of the circumstance, or of their inner selves. And they expose each other’s truths by means of language to communicate and persuade. I just love the tagline that proceeds the story: “Prostitution is the oldest profession in the world. Rhetoric is the second oldest.” I used to quip this at conferences and even in classes, but the marriage of the two in FAKING IT worked wonderfully. Ultimately, FAKING IT makes you turn inward to what you believe, and for that I’m grateful.

FAKING IT is currently available on Lulu.com. It’s also available on Amazon Kindle for under two dollars (you can also download it to your iPhone or iPod Touch because “there’s an app for that”). Please buy a copy today!