Independent spirit
Author Jenny Lawson of TheBloggess.com set to open bookstore
Despite success as a serial bestselling author, Jenny Lawson still suffers with mental health issues so severe she’s sometimes unable to leave the house or even get out of bed. But as long as she’s struggled with depression and anxiety disorder — topics she’s written about extensively and humorously — she’s also always found a safe haven, a sanctuary, in the quiet aisles of well-stocked bookstores.
Now she’s building her own refuge, one she hopes to share with book lovers everywhere, as she and her husband, Victor, prepare to open Nowhere Bookshop deep in the heart of Alamo Heights in San Antonio sometime after the first of the year.
Lawson, 45, is the irreverent voice behind the popular blog TheBloggess.com (which carries the tagline, “Like Mother Theresa, Only Better”) and author of three New York Times bestsellers, two collections of essays and an adult coloring book.
She hopes the bookstore, which also will house a coffee, beer and wine bar, will help calm the battles in her head between what she calls “my sane self and my crazy self.” She also looks forward to working with her husband on the project.
“Victor and I met in a bookstore, and we’ve always wanted to open a business together,” she said over coffee one recent afternoon. “So this was the only idea that was a hook for me.”
The name Nowhere Bookshop comes from the fact that whenever Victor calls her and she’s not at home, she’s usually at a bookstore.
“So he’ll say, ‘Where are you?’ and I’ll say, ‘Nowhere.’ ” She believes that whenever someone is reading a book, they’re technically in a place that doesn’t exist, so they’re nowhere.
When Nowhere Bookshop opens, it will sell new and back-catalog books, making it one of only a handful of independent bookstores in San Antonio.
“This is definitely a passion project for the both of us,” said Victor, who describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur.”
“The experience of going to a place where everyone around you loves and cares for books is ultimately why (we’re opening the shop),” he said.
Despite the seemingly unrelenting march of Amazon.com, bookstores are undergoing something of a renaissance,
according to the American Booksellers Association. The industry trade group said that between 2009 and 2018, the number of independent booksellers in the United States rose 50 percent, from 1,651 stores to 2,470.
Lawson — who lived in Houston before moving to San Marcos, and then San Antonio with Victor and their 15-year-old daughter Hailey — grew up in Wall, outside of San Angelo. She stood out as the only “goth” girl in her high school.
“This was a place where kids drove tractors to school,” she said.
Terrified of leaving the house due to what she now realizes was her undiagnosed anxiety disorder, she had little contact with anyone outside her family. Her parents chalked up her oddness to a “nervous stomach” and assumed she’d grow out of it. Besides, she was a straight-A student, so why should they worry?
Even if they did, there was no money to get her treatment.
“Dad was a professional taxidermist and mom was a lunch lady,” she said. “We didn’t go to the dentist, and my sister and I wore plastic bread bags on our feet in winter.”
She was a student at Angelo State University living at home and commuting when she and Victor met. He pushed her to get out more and, in 1996, they got married and moved to Houston.
In the early years, Victor was mostly baffled but also frustrated by his wife’s erratic mood swings. He wanted somehow to fix her, but didn’t know how. Eventually, he realized there’s nothing to fix. This is the woman he married.
“He used to get frustrated with me. Now he gets frustrated with my mental illness,” she said.
Victor has also learned to celebrate her creativity and charming quirkiness that’s perhaps best exemplified by the menagerie of taxidermy animals that live with them.
“He used to dig his feet in against them,” she said. “Now he sends me photos of taxidermied animals and says, ‘Do you want this?’ ”
Despite her degree in journalism from Arizona State University, Lawson began working in the human resources department at a nearby hospital.
“I’d written for the college newspaper, but I was never a good journalist,” she said. “I had a hard time removing myself from the story. But I was always writing. I wrote letters to friends.
It was how I communicated when I couldn’t leave the house.”
No one familiar with Lawson’s quirky writing would be surprised that life in HR wasn’t a good fit. Then one day she read an article in the Houston Chronicle that said a woman couldn’t be both a writer and a good mother.
Incensed, she sent an email to the paper arguing she could do both and adding that she’d prove it by blogging for them. “So they hired me.”
For the next several years, she was one of the Chronicle’s mommy bloggers, writing mostly about the challenges of raising Hailey and developing her distinctive voice, launching her identity as The Bloggess.
Her idiosyncratic opinions often include an amount of swearing. An early post succinctly argued that the f-word makes everything funnier (“My dog died. My f-ing dog died. See?” it read).
She quickly developed a large and enthusiastic following, becoming, according to the New York Times, “somewhat of a patron saint of misfits.”
“I’d wonder why Jesus wasn’t a zombie since he came back from the dead,” she said. “And for every angry comment, I’d get 200 people saying, ‘I’ve wondered that, too.’ ”
Although the heyday of blogs has passed, Lawson still get hundreds, occasionally thousands of comments per post. When she recently announced the sale of preopening Nowhere Bookstore merchandise — T-shirts, mugs, bags and the like — thousands of orders poured in. Things got so crazy PayPal froze her business account, assuming something illegal was going on.
One reason for this loyalty is that, soon after starting The Bloggess, Lawson began writing about her struggles with mental health issues with her usual searing honesty.
“I’d been writing about myself, but I was putting up a facade,” she said. “Something was missing. So I started writing about it. And the response was immediate.”
She received letters from people who’d been planning their suicide but decided not to after reading something she’d written
“And it wasn’t necessarily because of what I wrote that moved people,” she said. “It was the responses I’d get from other people going through the same kind of thing,” she said. “So they’d tell themselves, ‘Maybe I should give myself the benefit of the doubt that the world would not be better without me.’ ”
She also started getting help for her herself, which included seeing a therapist, taking medications and using mental health tools. She learned a lot.
“I learned that depression lies,” she said. “When I’m in a depression, I’m 100 percent convinced that I’ll never amount to anything. So I have to remind myself that I will eventually come out of this.”
After moving to San Antonio for Victor’s job, she decided to take a year off to finish a book of essays she’d been writing on and off for almost a decade. That book became “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir),” which debuted No. 1 on the nonfiction bestseller lists at both the Washington Post (“meandering, though never boring”) and New York Times (“she blends surprising honesty with acerbic wit”).
Her follow-up, “Furiously Happy,” took three years to write and delved deeper into her mental health struggles. It, too, was a bestseller.
And now she starts a new chapter.
Nowhere Bookshop is still in the planning stages. “It’s so much slower finding a contractor and getting permits than I imagined,” Lawson said.
Other than a “Coming Soon” sign in the window, there’s little to indicate that a new independent bookstore will be located there. But she has a vivid image of what she wants.
In addition to the sales floor, there’ll be a workshop area for readings and for community groups to meet.
“You’ve got a knitting club that wants to meet here? Sure, come on in,” Lawson said. “I’ll even bring you some books on knitting.”
The shop will also tempt book lovers to linger with a coffee, wine and beer bar, something Amazon.com has yet to figure out how to do.
“I can see someone working remotely, drinking coffee until 4 p.m. and then relaxing over a glass of wine,” said Elizabeth Jordan, who’ll be the store’s general manager. Jordan worked at the highly regarded BookPeople bookstore in Austin for 17 years, most recently as CEO.
She’d been looking for a way to return to San Antonio. “This is a project I really want to be part of.”
For now, Lawson is faced with dozens and dozens of decisions to make. Custom-made bookshelves, or cheap ones from Ikea? How many restrooms? Where will the exits be? Where should she put the chairs during readings?
“For someone like me with anxiety disorder, opening a bookstore sure seems like a terrible idea,” she said, laughing. So she calms herself by imagining that she’s walking through her completed and open bookstore, and it’s exactly what she wants: quiet but busy, filled with people who are together, although technically alone.
It’s enough hopefully to silence those battling voices in her head for a long while.