this is an unprecedented turnout much like just really to your credit jason i think people are used to reading you and excited to meet you and of course many many many people here already know you the friends of the my public library is very thrilled to have jason here tonight jason grew up in belmont went to the wynn brooks school went to china and then we have a very big contingent from when brook here in i can't even list everyone but there if you went to one record your kids went to rim but you have a lot of old friends to see tonight then chan are eight months old then the belmont hill school and in addition many of you know his mother marilyn gay who was a beloved teacher all single that one teacher out tonight because this is her son who was here tonight and it's really exciting for us to have you here jason's pieces appear four times a week and the wall street journal has also written for g q rolling stone outside magazine the new york observer and vogue now in little victories perfect rules for imperfect living brings back that trademark which brings that craig mark with to an irreverent anti advice book little victories is a moving and also brilliantly funny book about the little victories that make up our everyday lives i got an advance copy i read it last week and i loved it so i think you guys will too and we may already be sold out in terms of books but there are books for sale in the back  is here from the book rack in arlington books are for sale at the end of the talk and jason will sign books at the end the books are twenty five dollars each and michael donate ten percent of the proceeds tonight to back to the friends of the library so we appreciate that thank you thank you so much welcome to my mother's book reading if you've been extorted to come here threatened menaced by my mom if you over one one it's an incredible privilege to be back here in belmont something i didn't necessarily think i would say when i left belmont in nineteen eighty eight to go to the university of wisconsin but there's nothing like the passage of time to make you appreciate a place and there's certainly nothing like having children of one's own to understand what brought your parents to a place like that and i have very young children i mean truly they're so young i will go anywhere to support this book anything that's not this could be a truck stop on route nine i will go and speak there if i don't have to go and feed those children but i've been back with these children and especially my oldest and you see immediately what my mom and my dad loved about being here and why they were drawn to it so many years ago when homes cost league field also a softball field where i had my nose broken by a fly ball and of course belmont center i've read this in the paper but they have alcohol there now which was probably a good thing that didn't happen when i was in high school but you know everything about writing a book of this nature feels personal because you're sort of putting yourself out there and you're a little embarrassed whether or not people will want to know these stories and whether or not you're over sharing and i'm very grateful to my family in particular my mother for being so supportive and encouraging throughout and you know it's it's really been a wonderful journey to go back and think about a lot of stuff and so that's want to talk a little bit about you know doing this book for the first time this book just came out last tuesday this is my first book it took me a while to write i've always wanted to write a book but this is all new to me so every part of this you know this ritual signing a book do anything i'm so grateful for just that anyone would show up anyone would take an interest in the book anyone would tell a friend about it i'm so appreciative of it i've been asking advice from everyone i know i live in brooklyn new york my apartment would fit neatly into that piano twice and but brooklyn is it reeks of authors it's just authors everywhere there are lots and lots of people in the writing business and there's a guy in my neighborhood i like to call the cynical author guy you know you know i'm talking about sort of grizzly guy hangs out in harvard square to you know sun glasses and he said to me he said you know you're going now this is your first book jason i said you know has your first book right i want to get ready for something you're go out and you're going to talk about your book and you're going to go out on these readings you go to libraries and bookstores and so a little bit of both since you're going to go to a library and you're going to get up to the microphone to get a look out and no one will be there so i want to do something here because i'm going to see heaven was when i got back this is what we call selfie mom knows all about th not to do because i'm going on the internet and i'm reading internet reviews i'm actually going on there and seeing what people have to say about the book now you know there are two schools of thought of this one piece one kind of person wants to know everything there is to know and the other person is i'm just wrote the book and whatever people's journey through it is i want to know i want to know so i'm going on to these websites are some very nice reviews on amazon there's very nice reviews today people magazine there's a very nice set of reviews on this website called good reads and and good reads i don't know if any of you who are part of that community just incredible community readers i didn't know much about it before i wrote this and i so i joined and i'm going through the reviews a few days ago and i'm scrolling down and there's a review from this person this person and then i get to watch it and it's from maryland gay the belmont massachusetts my mother so this is maryland massachusetts and she's reviewed little victories her son's first book and she has given it four now don't get me wrong i'm not an ungrateful person you know i have if you were to give this book four stars i will take it i will take it every day and twice on sunday i am grateful for four star review but this is my mother  talking about and i thought the whole point of this even if my mother was one of the great literary critics of my mother is a very good literary critic she's been a teacher whole life she's read just a stack of books on her bedside table my whole childhood you know the book was above average really for star material isn't your mom supposed to give you you know like the charity star and so i really began to panic because as i said little victories is a book about my family there are intimate details about my upbringing my childhood my wife my children my father my mother everyone in our family had i done something to offend mom my mind raced and put a bad taste in her mouth you know i see her and i talk to her a good deal but rye and i wanted to call my brother and tell my brother that mom had given me four out of five stars but i knew exactly what my brother would say which was that's the best thing i ever so i went back about this and then i went to my editor and i said i have to tell you something you know my mother gave my book four out of five stars that my editor looked at me and said that's the best thing i ever heard and so finally i got in touch with mom and and very trying to say i asked mom i said mom the review you know it's four out of five stars and i should add there was a other panic that i had another panic that i had was what if the fourth star had been the charity star but i said to my mom i said you know i'm just trying to clarify something you know respectfully you know you know why did you give my book four out of five stars there was a pause and she texted right back and she said i thought i gave you four out of four let me go and change it right now yeah yeah at the end of the evening  just quickly i wanted to say what this book is about if you're wondering why all these lunatics are here and you know this book began as a silly idea frankly i want to write sort of a spoof of it vice book i wanted to write a rule book basically for people who can't follow rules i have a long life of you know perfectly good imperfection and i want to write you know a biased book for people who don't like advice books and you know this is the truth i don't really believe that life satisfaction we hear all the time that you know the most important things in life or these seismic events whether it's you know going to college or having a family or buying a home or climbing mount everest or swimming from all the chairs that underwood pond i mean underwood pool all over it all the way around being able to do that and get your certification which i failed to do doing all those things and the truth  it is that it's oftentimes the little things you know we were told to not sweat the small stuff and i truly believe that so if you can have those kinds of things you know if i can remember to plug my cellphone  before i go to bed if i can get the children out the door without either one of them crying if i can get the children out the door without me cry those are little victories but then something happened along the way as many of you know in this room my father got sick you know my father who had been you know a mentor to so many people in his life was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and all of our lives but especially his in my mother's changed dramatically and his life and our life really did become about little victories and there are a great many people in this room to whom i  great deal of gratitude to for really being there for both my mother and father and giving him these these things which were you know oftentimes as simple as companionship a conversation a walk around the block when he felt you know to walk around the block these were small things these are monday in life events but they became incredibly meaningful to all of us and you know dad fought very hard until the end of the benefit from great care but you know the doctors and the nurses and everyone they also understood that what this was about was especially toward the end giving my dad those little victories a little joy little happiness a little humor that had a sense of humor until the very end which is really beautiful you know this isn't just a business trip for me to come here and talk about a book this is very personal we grew up here but because my family has the deepest of deep roots here and this community has been here for my family repeatedly and so thank you so much for that i got a little heavy there for a second but i but i  truly truly am grateful for it i do want to read a little bit from the book if it's art for you we're not going to shut down by the fire department ok so i just want to start with the first part of the book which begins in belmont this was not long ago i was back home and belmont massachusetts in the house i grew up in sitting in the same kitchen i'd sat in my entire childhood and adolescence eating i have no idea what i was eating probably peanut butter random refrigerator finds dipped in peanut butter it was late close to two o'clock in the morning my mother was asleep my father was asleep i had just come from work if you can call what i do work because i had been about fifteen minutes away covering the red sox and the world series as a sports columnist which is about as stupid a lucky a job as you can have the kind of job that makes you think one day a stern faced man will appear at the door and say there's been a terrible mistake you're supposed to be managing a karaoke bar for dogs in the morning i had to fly back to new york city and i knew that upon waking i would bigger with my dad about what time we needed to leave the house to get to logan airport this was always our comical argument our version of abbott and costello with no traffic i believe that we can get from our house to logan in about a half an hour thirty minutes advance time was reasonable my father preferred to leave in  in the darkness the kitchen looks so small let me be the ten thousandth person to point out to you that the house you grew up in does not resemble the house you visit as an adult its scale is lost its proportions change the artifacts of your childhood have been rearranged or sometimes vanished all together the old couch the one with the funny buttons on the back where did that couch go new discoveries reveal exotic details about your parents there's truffle oil in the cabinet when did mom and dad start liking truffle oil it's like opening a door and finding a koala bear pawing around in the garage i go up stairs to my room which had been my room for more than two decades and really was never fully mine because for most of my childhood i shared it with my younger brother and a series of uncooperative cats privacy existed only in my thoughts i knew this room to be the room where i became myself or had fantasies of future selves i never what i wanted to happen but never did it this was the room i wanted to be a larry bird the room i wanted to be jim rice the room i wanted to be sting yeah i want to be sting don't make fun of me it was the room where homework was done or homework was not done were girls were called in the fathers of girls were hung up on if the girls are here i was me this was the room where i learned i'd been rejected from a college and another college and another one things improved i left this room and snuck into a school thank you sleepy admissions department at university of wisconsin and i found a job in experience love and heartbreak and finally met the woman i would marry bessie i'd gotten sick with cancer and recovered to the point that i'd forgotten it ever happened i've been blessed to get work to let me fly around the world and meet people i'd always dreamed of meeting and a handful of people i didn't want to meet again i've been lucky enough to go to super bowls summer winter olympics world cups and the snooty pants golf masters if you're not impressed by any of that in florida i once saw a bird on top of a mouse on top of a cap on top of a  i sat awake in that room and all that back story rushed over me i'd been so happy and so unhappy in moments here but in the moment i mostly felt extremely fortunate to have lived here in this house in this town with these this family and these parents and i try to think of all the things that influence me along the way sometimes it's easier just to think that life's path is just chance fluke of randomness and yet it's not really random at all not when you think about who you are and what you wanted to be and all the miles that have taken place in between and i thought about all the people who had imparted advice to me good advice bad advice inside and outside my family i've had plenty of mentors mentors i sought mentors i didn't good bosses jerk bosses great coaches ambivalent coaches you think you're on your own out there but you really are not nobody figures this out alone i have my own children now as i write this my son jesse is three years old or soon to be three years old my daughter josie is a happy hungry newborn the first thing they teach you about parenting is that it's a surrender of control that's not true the first thing they teach is to take that diaper immediately out of the house and bury it in the trash as quickly as possible but the second thing they teach you is it's about the surrender of control and this gives parenting a kind of breathless feeling frightening exhilarating especially if you're someone who thrives on scheduling arrangement abandoning those expectations can be the greatest liberation of your life like nothing else parenting makes you realize sharply that you are now in the position of the advice giver your the role model example whether you're ready or not it goes without saying that the best examples and this is what my dad was like the best examples are the examples quietly set but that's not always easy convenient realistic and we're all prone to lapses in embarrassing behavior and tantrums of our own especially if it's between four and six thirty pm on the mass pike we are not always our best selves and yet here we are at the wheel assigned with the task of shaping a real life human or humans and with that is a slightly nauseatingly rush comes in appreciation of all the advice that you've received before especially from your own parents like you they were perfect but they probably did the best they could i didn't know it at the time none of us did but a few months after this visit dad would get sick our lives would change all our energy with dedicated to improving what time he had left a science teacher my father was full of wonderment about the world he was the kind of person who could explain an hour as take an hour to explain the northern lights or a toaster oven for the coming year life would not be about the big play the grand gesture the long term scheme the focus would be upon creating greater smaller perfect moments the moments we all pursue that bring us temporary relief and happiness little victories well what about your mom you have a question now is your chance the kids are good there is a course in the back right least that's right yeah no it was that was a really important part of my upbringing in fact there are some characters from that place here my friend wilson kerr from somerset st his lovely wife linda and i believe rosalie kerr is hiding in the back there right there so that's on you thank you sir you're just saying that because i suck up to the patriots right yeah i'm not the only national sports writer who actually believe that they didn't deflate the football question is are you considering where you  was well if this night has proven anything i just do what mommy  was happening you know we were you know still smarting from you know dad passing away and the irony was not lost on us dad was the biggest patriots fan and he was obsessed i mean he never watched the fourth quarter because he always furiously shut it off having a panic attack  but he was obsessed with the patriots and all of a sudden there was a controversy my dad was a physics teacher of forty years and all the sudden there was this confluence of physics and his favorite sports and they were arguing about the i feel like this is this is your life that's bobby brown and my seventh grade english teacher at ten or a middle school and who had an incredible influence on me and you know if you don't mind my assessments of the junior high school basketball game which she sent to her friend ron ron would write back to me these i've seen ron quite a bit because he's had a lot of sporting events he's written back some quite critical assessments of my seventh grade basketball stories but i could not believe this is ron borgia's who's written for the globe in the herald and you know everyone known all around new england and you know it is one of the great joys of my life that i was able to learn from this sports writer who is again you know he did it with all the giants and he was a giant of self and to see him that's it's just a it's a really cool thing and but none of this and certainly my passion for writing would have begun with you so this is your life to  sport baseball i love tennis because i grew up with it you know dad was the coach at rindge and latin for forty one years you know i have all these memories of watching breakfast at wimbledon and the u s open with him in the stasi and borg and connors you know there's a shorthand to it it's like some people learn piano or they learn a second language i learn tennis i was fluent in an early age and when i got back to sports writing one of the real pleasures of it was to be able to get around it and it came back really quickly and it was a real joy to be able to share that with that and i brought him down to meet people here and there and it got t s open for the first time but you know the truth of it is i love all of it and that's not some sort of political answer the fact of the matter is that one of the great things about sports and you know i believe that they are games you know i believe that they are not things to be taken seriously i don't think parents should be tackling each other out in front of the hockey rink you know i had all that nonsense i don't think should be happening at any level and we all are accustomed that of picking up a sports page and it feels like a crime blotter or feels like you know it's just a and what i always love about sporting events is that almost every day if you do this you get to see one of the best days of somebody's life it doesn't matter if you're covering game seven of the world series or the little league world series or a horror show or a wrestling match maybe not a pro wrestling match but you always see one of the great days of someone's life and there are a lot of people who do what i do for a living who have much more serious responsibilities who don't get to have th kind of experience so i'm grateful for that all the time liberals so you know i started at the and then they hired me right from there now after that i worked i did a little bit for the citizen and i think in that they might be able to find the clips if they dig deep under the cap and and then i went to high school and i did my high school newspaper and after that i went to college and i did not do a damn thing college but when i got school i went to martha's vineyard  and got a job as a reporter there worked there for about four and a half years and that was really school for me you know it was i had to learn everything a to z and you know the best thing about working in a place like that is it's such a small community and anyone who's been there in the off season knows it's a really small community you get to you get a real first hand experience with what it means to be responsible about reporting and getting your facts straight and spelling everybody's name right because there aren't there are just abstractions on a page and they're not just on a website there was no website when i was starting out and you're going to run into these people you run into in the supermarket in the street at the games and so they would give it to you and i learned at a very early age just to try to get it history as possible try to be fair as possible and so that was really really helpful from there was the boston phoenix which is no longer then i went to the new york observer which was a paper that i really wanted to work for i was lucky enough to work there for a few years and then i went to q magazine and then from there the journal i did some magazines in between but it's it's a little bit of a quirky path and you know for people who have you know children grandchildren who are interested in newspapers and magazines now that route is almost evaporated which is crazy you know small town newspapers were very lucky to have a few left but i sometimes worry because it's there's such great laboratories for young writers and give so many opportunities to people and i don't think it's the same i don't think you know on the web i think it's great i think it's you know democratized writing and people can really get their name out there in a way that ought to wait for anything but i do feel like everyone can benefit from some two diligent editing along the way he's my own children we're going to not pee on the couch right now we're starting there and and but but but i will tell you and what you said is really the essence of parenting it's the most important question right you know how will you be the guide and you know i wish i had a real clear answer for you what's funny and i've already seen happen my wife is a teacher my wife is a teacher she teaches at the school down the street it's been a great bonding thing for both my mother and my father before she's wonderful up around children her job as a health teacher so she's teaching everything from the birds and the bees to second graders don't put your boogers underneath the desk you know like all kinds of stuff  true and and she there's a way of being around children and talking to children that i have yet to master that my wife knows very well and it's really amazing to witness in person when i say go to bed to the children they look at me like i'm a toad sitting in a field when my wife says it they run down the road i mean they they they they they they they bug you they respond to her so my earliest instruction is don't pee on the couch and listen to huge the non sporting part you know i wish i knew more of them it's a huge paper i think there are twelve hundred people on staff in the building even it's extraordinary and when you consider the global bureau and things like that along the way i got a chance to meet a great many of them especially you know i'll just tell you an example you know a couple years ago we had the winter olympics in sochi russia now the journal has a twelve person bureau in moscow so all of a sudden twelve people come down who are american raised to speak fluent russian who can just take your around the countryside tell you everything you want to know i mean just extra i've never met smart people like i'm like the baron but magazines you know i've worked at both the magazines are full of like a lot class thing you know i don't have a strong opinion about i think if it works for you great and i know a lot of people had really valuable education i needed it i just happen to get it at a small town newspaper poorly i played very bad youth basketball over there i played very poor baseball over there i never learned to skate properly when i went up to belmont hill i ran very right there was a little bit of a thread from the journal column that i've been writing about rules i've been writing these thanksgiving columns about thanksgiving touch football which for whatever reason people that they're funny they're just a little guide so like what it's like to blow your family at thanksgiving and people share in and around the holidays and so that sort of took on a little bit of a life and i started having a conversation with the people about you know maybe modifying that somehow into a book but i knew i didn't want to do like a collection like stuff a bunch of columns into a book and i want to do something all new and i also want to do something that wasn't exclusively sports you know there's sports stuff in here but it's certainly not a book for you know a sports fan can read it but it's not i would categorize it all as a sports book i mean the humor book you know and i think that people to know the real ones of the next book i'll get to the well you're very nice that you know recording a book which was a i've never done this before and you have to go into a studio and you sit there and you just read it and there's somebody there who is incredibly disciplined and patient and will tell you when you sort of mumbled and point out points where your voice didn't go correctly or you mispronounced something and you sit in this took  three and a half days to read it and by the end of it i have never been so happy i wrote a short book and then you know there are people who write nine hundred page books and they must just end up maclane i mean and you know this one can imagine having to read nine hundred pages ye the writing the book i'm glad you asked me this question because now used to so well it's done you know i didn't have i got a life where i could sort of like take time off it's like i had a you know my wife was pregnant i had a one and a half year old home and i couldn't be like i'm going to vermont for three months or you know like that was wasn't happening so it was a real grind putting the baby to sleep making sure my wife was alright and then going i had this little office around the corner and writing sometimes from like nine o'clock at night to in the morning for months and months straight and yeah that's not great the one thing that i  someone asked me to work with my hands or i can barely change a tire you know the idea of like disciplining myself to study something brilliant like medicine or law or discipline myself to become a business this is the only thing i could do if this didn't work out i'd be sleeping in my backyard so you know as there's still time there's still time and yeah yeah ye so i think my mom you know was very encouraging of you know my reading and writing because you know she can tell you better than i if that was the thing that i was pretty good at compared to other stuff you know i really struggled i mean i truly i mean cs and d s and math and science and things like that  and so writing was you know the the saving grace for me i condemn a play so i've always thought my mom was in my corner that way a funny thing and mom will probably remember this but my father you know i was a sports kid you can't grow up  but but there was a period time i don't know if you remember this mom or dad would take this is in the grand tradition of whatever your parents say you can do is what you become dad was taking the sports action art of the globe and telling me to read the other parts of the paper first because i need to learn about the world and politics and science and then i could have the sports section as dessert so obviously that worked great at you are going to serve me papers to racket we can just go over and work on was what was that experience like it was completely bonkers i mean you know like i didn't want to i had no aspirations to doing television and a few years ago i went in to take a meeting because a friend of mine was helping to produce that show i thought i was going to come on to just give them funny ideas and i thought they give me a couple hundred bucks a week to like give funny ideas i when i when i was meeting they told me  goofy show it regis and then after a week or so they said would you have a being on it and i thought they meant like come on it like once like and i was it and then it became a thing and i was doing it five days a week it was really surreal i'm really happy i did it it gave me a real respect for people i was one of those people who always sort of made fun of people on television because i just thought it was goofy is really hard and then you see somebody like regis and there was a young lady who was on the show named katie nolan who's you know going on to doing great stuff