If you are the kind of person who admires Bill Clinton for his intelligence and his policies and also because he is sexy, and maybe even for his personal policy of having a lot of sex, or for any other reason, you could have braved the elements last Monday night and gone down to Elliott Bay Book Company to pick up a copy of his memoir, My Life, at midnight. It was a nice night, so said elements were mild and mostly human and, in general, homeless. The queue outside Elliott Bay for the book that would, according to Publisher's Weekly, sell 935,000 copies in its first week and break nonfiction sales records (beating handily the sales for Hillary Clinton's memoir), was 130-people strong. Everyone wore sweaters and sandals and expressions of either somnolence or whimsy. One lady brought her dog.
It was an interminable line. And for a mad, midnight bookstore dash, fascinatingly silent. With the exception of my companion starting in about Chelsea Clinton ("She has blossomed, my friend"), no one was talking about the book or the Clintons or the weather or the dog they brought or anything at all. Eventually I was allowed to cut to the front, because I wanted to write about what people were saying and doing as they plunked down $30 to get their hands on the 957-page book that has been called "sloppy," "self-indulgent," "eye-crossingly dull," "tedious," and "turgid" by the New York Times and that, since it spends so much time on tomato-eating contests and dispiriting childhood Easter egg hunts and wonky digressions on Arkansas politics, doesn't get to Clinton's White House days until page 471. (I haven't read the thing.)
You got the sense that everyone else had the sense that they were supposed to be excited. A handful of booksellers, including store owner Peter Aaron, were doing their best to be quick about it all, selling books directly out of the boxes they were shipped in, but customers were unhurried and shy, as if they were ordering muffins: "Hi, three please"; "Yes, um, two please." It was a muted, sandal-wearing, dog-bringing crowd, and they didn't have a whole lot else to say. The longest exchange I overheard was when a woman asked her friend, quietly, "So is J.Lo married to what's-his-name?" and the friend said, "Marc Anthony," whereupon the first lady said, "Is she really pregnant?" and her friend said, "No, I think she's going to have one soon though."
Elliott Bay, which hosted a signing with President Clinton the day after The Stranger went to press, was the only bookstore in the city to open at midnight for My Life. Maybe what's happened is that, after the Quidditch-playing, magic-having British boy, these midnight sales have become a little less eventful. The line that snaked outside Elliott Bay last Monday night looked not unlike a line you'd see at a funeral service or the DMV or the bank.
