Mr. Barlow was right, as usual—the little English teacher had predicted that a book about Two Dykes, One Who Talks would appeal to the reading audience. Readers who’d never been to the comedy club had heard about the Gallows Lounge shooting. And before the Gallows went bankrupt—before the comedy club’s holdings were taken and disposed of, for the benefit of creditors—Grace had the foresight to buy the film archives of Nora and Em’s onstage performances. It was Grace who had the idea of licensing the rights to these crudely filmed performances to Em’s foreign publishers.

Grace was right, too—the novel would be a breakout book for Emily MacPherson, a literary bestseller. Come Hang Yourself was translated into more than thirty languages; those cheaply made films of Nora and Em onstage were used for publicity purposes worldwide. The management at the Gallows had been born cheap, Nora said; the film archives of the onstage performances were barely better than home movies, shot by student interns. Em could remember when the management complained about the upgrade from the eight- to the sixteen-millimeter format—eight millimeter was the standard format for home movies, and the cheapest. All the footage was in black and white; the camera was handheld and the sound erratic. The management at the Gallows told the performers that their work was being filmed to preserve the history of their onstage artistry, or some such crap, but Nora said it sounded like a lawyer’s idea. In case the comedy club got sued, there would be a crude record that the offense was the performer’s fault—as no one knew better than Nora, who was always ad-libbing.

Until Come Hang Yourself was published, Em had never seen so much of herself onstage. Nora had viewed only one of their earliest performances at the Gallows—this was way back in 1973. “Amateurville,” Nora labeled the cinematography. Nora and Em were thirty-eight. This was the skit about Em at the dinner party with Simone. Nora called Simone a slut, because Simone had sucked the sleeve of Em’s blouse at a previous dinner party. This time, Simone hooked pinky fingers with Em under the dinner table. Em stabbed Simone’s arm with a salad fork.