When I was nineteen, slightly older than Katniss Everdeen
in The Hunger Games (and worse at archery), I was invited
to leave my home and journey to a faraway land to prepare for a
new chapter in my life. The faraway land was not the Capitol
but Minneapolis, Minnesota. The new chapter was not a pubescent
deathmatch—I had just been through that in high school—but a professional arena where every day contestants young and
old are ground up and forgotten, driven to alcoholism, and sent
back to graduate school. I was going to be a published author.
My publisher had decided that I needed “media training.”

I arrived at MSP Airport with scant television experience. In
grade school I had been on a Nickelodeon “Big Help” public
service ad raking leaves and was given 0.2 seconds of screen
time; as an infant I had failed out of auditions for a diaper commercial.
(I could still end up in an adult diaper commercial.)
The publisher was betting that this track record would change,
because I was young enough and likable enough to do talk
shows. I had to be ready. Being on television talk shows is a coup
for any author. Most of the time if you see an author on TV, you
are watching BookTV on CSPAN, and the only other person
watching is my father.

An editor met me at the  …