Someone alerted me to the title of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir the other day by informing me that my former senator had stolen my book’s title. I doubt that she “stole” it, though considering Hillary’s Estonian connections, including the now legendary drinking session with John McCain, who recently was in Tallinn, and had every chance to, say, bring a copy of My Estonia 3: What Happened? back with him to Hillary, along with that dossier, it’s very possible that she was inspired by my work.
I have written three personal memoirs called My Estonia. Each one of them is a fictional autobiography of a young American college graduate who meets an Estonian woman in Helsinki, Finland, and decides to settle in Estonia, across the gulf from the Finnish capital. It’s been 15 years this summer since those events that changed my life, and so one can say that I have been an expatriate since that time, though I have lived in the US in between a few times, and I did a semester in Denmark in ‘01. In fact, I was in Copenhagen when the Twin Towers fell. I drank a lot that fall, and I wrote a lot, and that’s sort of how my life started to run organically as I became a writer.
Each one of the My Estonia books had a different working title. The first was called Are You Permitted to Live?, and the Estonian version is called Minu Eesti 1: Kas lubate elada? which means the same thing, though for the English version we called it My Estonia 1: Passport Forgery, Meat Jelly Eaters, and Other Stories. The second book had as a working title, What Do You Want? And in Estonian it was called Minu Eesti 2: Mida sa tahad? In English we called it, My Estonia 2: Berry Junkies, Nordic Elves, and Real Estate Fever. The working title of the third book was What Happened? In Estonian we called it Minu Eesti 3: Mis juhtus? In English, for the first time, we retained the same title: My Estonia 3: What Happened?
I envisioned that book as a sort of fictional memoir, a nostalgic look back at recent years, something along the lines of A Moveable Feast, yet with only just a few years’ hindsight. I thought of it as a kind of gag. A memoir by a guy in his thirties. The title also addressed some troubles I had with the police about four years ago this past August. So many people had been asking me what had happened that night, and so I figured the book could answer that question. I played with other working titles for the book, but What Happened? stuck and after some intense debate over whether or not to keep the question mark on the book cover, we decided to keep it as is, and it was published in summer 2015.
I never had great ambitions for these books, though I did give them my best. It seems that many people connected to Estonia have bought them. Some are just tourists who stop in overnight and find them in the bookstores, or beside their beds in their hotels. Others receive them as gifts from friends. Someone recently sent me a photo of Toto singer Bobby Kimball reading a copy of What Happened? When asked why he was reading the book, the “Africa” singer replied: “I wanted to find out what happened?” I am sure people who buy Hillary’s book will be reading for the same reason.
