“Without further ado, I’m delighted to introduce one of my all-time favorite authors—I’m still pinching myself that he’s here in my little store. You know him from Blue, Yellow, Green, Purple, and the smash hit Orange, which The New Yorker described as Bridget Jones meets Waiting for Godot The Guardian has said of him, ‘If Jane Austen froze her eggs and one of them was impregnated by both Albert Camus and Tim Robbins, this author would be the brainchild.’ The New York Times calls him ‘Kafka for millennials and way, way funnier.’ An absurdist and a realist, a master of the microscope. No one understands the tragedy, the humor, and the romance in the everyday better than this guy. If you’ve read or seen the part in Orange when Mark stops up the toilet with marmalade, you know what I’m talking about. Boxed sets of the Roy Clarke Rainbow and individual titles are all available here tonight. Please welcome Roy Clarke.”

Roy looked up. Jefferson applauded with the crowd and backed into his seat. His introduction had been rather too swift, Roy thought. He sat up straighter, crossed and uncrossed, then recrossed his legs. Bloody uncomfortable stool. He cleared his throat and looked out at the audience.

At one end of the first row, next to her mother, sat his daughter Shy, her knees squeezed together, eyes on the wooden floorboards, vibrating up and down like she needed the toilet. Next to Shy, Jefferson beamed up at Roy through his beard. Wendy beamed up at Roy from beneath her blond fringe with a sort of pert but docile admiration he didn’t recognize. Roy opened his copy of Orange and thumbed through it in search of the firemen scene. He didn’t know the exact page number, but at some point he’d written a stream of foul words. That was what he looked for.

The firemen were chopping through a burning building with axes. Smoking embers stung their eyes. They could barely breathe. Like drunken fraternity brothers, they shouted out and explained the dirtiest, most disgusting sexual acts they’d ever heard of with cheerful camaraderie. Later on in the scene they did a full analysis of Julia Roberts’s entire acting career, starting with Mystic Pizza, which was their favorite. It was this scene that had won Roy’s writing critical accolades such as, “witty, sexy fun,” and “a man’s book you can take home to Mother.”

“I think I’ll read straight off and get to know you later,” Roy said without looking up. Titters of laughter. A few whoops. A whistle. He’d been told that he always came off sounding “very cool” at his readings, which was odd, because speaking in front of large groups of people made him sweat so much he was required to wear black or navy blue so no one would see.