Bettering Your Life Through Gimlets and Cream

So, this is funny. I got nominated for a Books for a Better Life award. This is an award for SELF HELP books. The money raised through the award ceremony goes to MS Research, so that's fantastic, a wonderful cause, etc.... But self help? ME?

Anyway, we had a good time, and I saw, bizarrely, three people I'd known from my dead-end government job days. More bizarrely, they were actually three people I LIKED.

I was nominated in the "Inspirational Memoir," along with Brooke Shields, Jeannette Walls, Cindi Broaddus and.... Joan Didion. And I totally Nadered Joan's ass! At least that's my theory. Because instead of The Year of Magical Thinking, the award was won by Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle. Which is supposed to be very good.

Oh - and Books For a Better Life thinks my name is Julie Powell Little. Which is kind of cute. I might starting using it.

PS That Nader joke isn't mine. Wish I could claim it, but it was originally cracked by my publicist, Michelle, who is much more brilliant than I am.

Progressing Apace

So here I am in London. So far it's been quite nice.

The first night I got drunk in the schmancy lounge of my schmancy hotel. Jake Gyllenhaal smiled at me, and Matt Dillon talked to me about something I can't remember while eating a miniature bin of Haagen-Dazs ice cream. (He was eating the ice cream. I was sticking with martinis, which might be why I can't remember what he was talking about.) David Strathairn was supposedly somewhere about, but I never saw him.

Then I went to Bath and had a fabulous time with Hannah and James and dyed a blue streak in my - to match my language, I suppose.

Tonight I'm going to schmancy book launch party. Heath Ledger is supposed to be there. Though if you were Heath Ledger, ,would you go to my book launch party? I'd much rather it were David Strathairn rumored to be there. Ah well.

People in London like me, in part, I think, because they don't know Julia Child from adam. Nobody thinks I'm making her spin around in her grave, which is sort of relief.

Oh, and I forgot my toiletries. I just brushed my hair, blue streak and all, with a toothbrush. It was clean. Kind of.

London...

... I'm going there. Tomorrow. Going to be there for a week, promoting the book for its UK release. Mostly just interviews and things, but there are two possible events for my legions of UK fans to attend (Anthony Stewart Head, I'm talking to YOU....)

First and foremost, In Bath, Secession Books, the bookstore owned my immortalized-in-print crazy-ass wonderful friend Hannah and her lovely husband James, is holding an evening get-together on Monday, Feb. 20. It's upstairs at the Raven's club, (Queen Street; see www.theravenofbath.co.uk for further information about the venue) at 6:15 p.m. There will be food, drink and Me! so come come.... (Anthony.....)

I'm also having a lunch event at Books for Cooks on Feb. 21st, at 4 Blenheim Crescent, Notting Hill, W11 1NN. It starts at 11:30 a.m., and again, food + me. Not sure what the price for this event is, sadly....

Anyway, hope to see somebody, anybody, Anthony, there.....

What the the ball-n-chain's been up to...

Check out http://www.themorningnews.org/

He's so crazy...