Sorry I'm Late - I work in a London bookshop now

Welcome to the sequel to Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

My parents have just arrived back in the US after spending ten days in Japan. I spoke to my mother last night.

“Did you like any of the food?”

“No,” she said.

“Did you eat any sushi?”

“The raw fish? No. I liked…the Japanese salad dressing.”

“What was wrong with the rest of the food?”

“So many things were the most disgusting texture.”

I knew my dad felt the opposite – the more “disgusting” something was, the more he wanted to try it. He loved to eat jellyfish tentacles in Chinese restaurants and the eyeballs of the whole fish during family banquets to try to impress and disgust us, his children and wife, in equal measure. My mother refuses to eat beans in chilli or cheese on a salad – I knew she’d struggle with the new flavours of Japan.

“But wasn’t the ramen good?” I asked.

“It was,” she conceded.

She also talked about how clean Japan was, how beautiful it was, how kind everyone was. She also mentioned how many rules there were, everywhere.

“I found myself bowing all over the place.”

My mother also mentioned that their tour guide, Miko, told them that Japanese people rarely say, “I love you,” to each other or to their family because “it’s too embarrassing.”

***

I used to have such intense social anxiety that I could not talk to a stranger on the street, even if I desperately wanted to. Even if they, say, had walked by and half their backpack was unzipped, and I wanted to shout, “hey! Your backpack is unzipped!” and they would surely want to have this information and be grateful to me – I felt that it would be too embarrassing for me to initiate this interaction.

Maybe you read my book, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes and you know that I spent a year doing insane, hard, and wonderful experiments to overcome my introversion. The book came out a few years ago and I wanted a place to write some updates about what happened after that year.

Well…Covid happened. So after essentially being out most nights – doing improv, going to networking events, talking to strangers ­– I was suddenly in lockdown, with everyone else. In London, where I live, there were entire months where it was illegal to leave our houses other than to get food, medicine or go for our one allotted daily walk.

While cooped up at home in London, I thought so much about my interviews with the psychologist Nicholas Epley during this time. He’s one of the “extrovert mentors” I interview in the book and it is no exaggeration to say that my conversation with him, documented in the book, completely changed my life, even to this day.

He had told me that introverts and extroverts alike BOTH actually enjoy encounters with strangers – like exchanging pleasantries in line for coffee or stopping to talk to someone next to us on the train – even though that actually sounds so painfully awkward for many people. But after a year of forcing myself to do this, I had to say that Epley’s research made sense to me. As he explains it, these small encounters give us a hit of dopamine and they are also the connections that can help us form a community.

During the worst parts of the pandemic, I would leave my house once a day to go get coffee at my local café – because they sold bread, they were allowed to stay open as they were considered “essential.” Even while wearing a mask, going into that café and ordering a coffee and a pastry and a loaf of bread on very cold days, was the highlight of my day. Why? Because I loved chatting to the baristas there. They were funny and warm and they always remembered me. It was exactly the kind of interactions Nicholas Epley studied.

Later, when things were mostly back to normal, I kept walking past a small gorgeous bookshop every day. I always peered through the windows and would see a woman with dark hair sitting by the till and lots of customers browsing the bookshelves. I rarely went in, but for months, I would walk by and think, “I wish I worked there.”

I wanted to be surrounded by books and book-y people and candles and coffee and soft music. I wanted to chat with people who lived in our area. I wanted to be part of a community.

Basically, I wanted to live inside Stars Hollow and this seemed like the closest way. (There’s even a diner right next door with a rude barista! More Michelle vibes than Luke, though. This man who serves me coffee seems to actively hate me but the coffee there is the best in the neighbourhood, so I keep coming back.)

This is all to say that…I work in that bookshop in London now. It’s two days a week and I love it. The biggest part of my job is talking to strangers all day: customers coming in looking for the perfect book to buy their girlfriend or for the next read that’s going to change their life or the right novel that will transform their holiday into something magical. Everyone who comes in lives nearby so it feels very cosy.

During my interview, I asked the owner what it was really like to work in a bookshop. She paused and I thought she was going to say something cynical or practical but…instead she said, “It’s enchanting.”

I am Kathleen Kelly in You Got Mail now.

Me now. (Both of them.)

Anyway. This is my first newsletter. I’m going to write about the joys of working in a bookshop, and I’m also going to share updates from my latest extrovert-ing adventures here.

I am also working on a new book – think of it as a sequel to Sorry I’m Late – and I will be sharing a few snippets from it here, too. Please subscribe for free (or paid!) if you would like to keep in touch (most posts will originally be free but they will be paywalled a month after publication).

Oh! And I love you even though it’s embarrassing.

And it really is embarrassing.

And find the next installment from the Little London Bookshop here: