See video of Kathy Patrick discussing the annual Girlfriend Weekend.
Chris Curry
Kathy Patrick washes the hair of Jenny Wingfield, author of The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, in Patrick's hair salon/bookstore, Beauty and the Book.
Chris Curry
Books hand-picked by Kathy Patrick line one-half of Beauty and the Book, which she calls the only combination bookstore and beauty salon in the world.
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Michael "Pollywog" Sager has come to Beauty and Book in Jefferson, Texas, to see Kathy Patrick. President of the 42 Taillights Motorcycle Club in nearby New London, Sager is tall, bald, with a long gray beard, and has iron cross tattoos on both forearms.
He holds a binder filled with pink printer pages, a diary of his daughter's first year of life. Another set of these pages is at a vanity press called iUniverse, being proofread at Sager's expense. His daughter is now 15 months old, and Sager is already working on the second installment of the story of her life.
Sager has driven 90 minutes to meet with Patrick — in her beauty salon — in the hopes that she can help make his book a hit.
"I've been wanting to get a chance to see you and your place for quite a while now," he tells her. "I'm up here just for you."
He has heard that Patrick's book club, The Pulpwood Queens, has helped out-of-print authors go into second rounds of publishing, get options for films, become bestsellers. He has heard that she's a kingmaker. She is gentle with him, but doesn't coddle, revealing her hairdresser's gift of easy conversation. She gives him some advice on self-publishing and shares her own experiences of writing her first book, but doesn't promise him anything other than a cursory read of his work — because Patrick is a busy woman.
Founded 11 years ago, The Pulpwood Queens now has more members than the population of Jefferson — 515 chapters spread all across the world. Six official Pulpwood Queen books have been optioned for movies after their selection by the club.
In 2002, when Patrick announced Dive from Clausen's Pier as the inaugural Good Morning America Read This! pick, saying it was the perfect plot for a book club discussion, the novel shot to No. 9 on the New York Times Bestseller List and No. 1 on Amazon, selling out by 6 p.m. that day. She's spoken at dozens of book festivals and has been approached about a reality TV show. She's working on her own second book, and possibly a play.
Photographs of her with famous authors line one-half of the old mechanic shop in which she now runs "the only combination hair salon/book store in the world." Model Paulina Porizkova poses in a red sparkly tiara with Patrick. There's a picture of Patrick riding horseback with John Berendt, author of Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil. The bathroom door, painted black, is covered in silver signatures from all the authors, famous and not-yet-famous, who have come by the shop.
In one corner is an endcap stocked solely with signed copies of My Reading Life by Pat Conroy, Patrick's favorite living author, who also wrote The Prince of Tides. According to Patrick, Conroy was inspired to write his latest book after a visit to Jefferson a few years ago, where he found fellowship in the bookloving community of Pulpwood Queens (and Timber Guys, as male members are called).
Patrick is also in the process of recording 12 webisodes of a talk show with Random House where she interviews authors such as Conroy and Fannie Flagg. It's this that makes the Pulpwood Queens book club unique — unprecedented access to authors for readers either via Skype at Pulpwood Queen meetings, or during the annual Girlfriend Weekend, a massive gathering of Pulpwood Queens from across the country that culminates in a party called the Great Big Ball of Hair.
So, whatever his talents as an author, motorcycle club president Sager knew exactly what he was doing when he rode over to see Patrick, a small-town woman with big clout in the literary world.
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Kathy Patrick's resume is one of starts and stops, disappointments and triumphs both large and small — all of which have brought her to this corner of Texas.
"I've had to reinvent myself so many times," she says. One of her favorite quotes is "So when life hands you a lemon, forget lemonade, make margaritas."
Whatever stereotype you have of a small-town woman who runs a beauty salon and book club, Patrick wants to break it.
Though she just turned 55, she looks closer to 35, and much younger than the composite image on the cover of her first book, a memoir called The Pulpwood Queen's Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life. She has cropped dark hair and one very hip feather hair extension, and her eyes are powdered in a shade like a peacock's feathers. She admits to being sick of pink, but it's a Pulpwood Queen theme so she tolerates it. In person, she's a far cry from the girl she writes about in the early pages of her book.
Growing up as a shy tomboy in a small Kansas town whose family moved frequently between financial and social strata, she found solace in books such as To Kill A Mockingbird and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. School did not come easy to her, until her fourth-grade teacher, who saw she was struggling, recommended the book Honestly Katie John. It was the first time Patrick realized reading could be enjoyable, and later influenced her focus on literacy education.
