How do you like reading on the iPad2? they asked

The iPad2 was my husband's gift to me—marketed weeks upon weeks in advance.  "I don't need that," I kept saying.  "It feels indulgent."  But we run a communications business here, we need to know what is up, what can be done, what hasn't been done yet, and besides, he had to talk me into a Blackberry, too, and you don't now find me going out too often without that.  Also besides, I've been saying for a long, miserable time that I need to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in a quiet place, a room or two away, reading and writing.

And so, the iPad2, which arrived a week ago, and which I have put to minimal, but interested use.  I am a New York Times subscriber, for example, and so, by downloading the New York Times app, I can now sit with this glass tablet on my lap in the dark making no disturbing rustling noises while I read the reviews of such great books as Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name.  I find it easier to read this way—my arms don't hurt, my eyes don't squint, and I can turn off the lamp beside my husband while he watches shows about fish, food, and war (sometimes he's lucky and all three things appear on one show at once).  I'm reading my hometown paper this way as well, and when my subscription to the paper version of The New Yorker runs out, I may go iPad with that as well, though I don't know.  I'm rather fond of my stacks of New Yorker stories, torn fresh from the bindings.  Vanity Fair?  Maybe.

I also, as readers of this blog know, downloaded Tina Fey's Bossypants and iPad2'ed it—the perfect book for this medium.  As much as I loved Bossypants, I don't plan to ever teach it, do not need my scribbled marginalia as a guide to my first readerly reactions.  I know that some sort of marginalia can be achieved via the iPad2, don't get me wrong.  I'm just not interested in going there at this moment and rather suspect I'll never be.  There's an art to making notes in books, and I like pen to paper.  I also like, however, the extras the expanded iBook version of Bossypants afforded—more photos, an audio chapter, pretty cool flipping and bookmarking technology.  I've just downloaded Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as a guide to Croatia for my next iPad2 readings.  I want to take Egan to Ithaca over Easter weekend and Croatia to Croatia, some time in June.  I think of these books as traveling companions.

Finally, I've downloaded the PDF app that will allow me to iPad2-read my own manuscripts-in-progress.  I've got two books I'm working on—a novel, nearly complete, and a memoir.  I've worked to give myself enormous distance on the novel and reading it again on a new technology, following a final set of revisions, will, I think (I hope), allow me to see this book as a stranger might.  That, at least, is what I'm going for.

My friend Karen, always so far ahead in matters of technology, does many things with her iPad that I don't know how to do—watch Netflix movies while exercising, say, or reading student papers.  She's the real expert on this (as she is on most things).  I'll become a smarter iPad2 user in time, I hope.  But for now, to answer your questions:

I really like my iPad2.

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Lauren Wein, An Editor Among Us

To visit an editor is to walk into a realm—into small offices made labyrinthine by the architecture of stacked books and scrambled manuscripts, posted notes to self, cardboard cutouts, events long gone but living on in the fade of aging posters.  I have been lucky in my travels, blessed to enter in, and time and again, I have been made grateful for those who spend their days leaning their imaginations and hearts against and into the work that they've acquired.  Editors, the best of them, make books better.  They allow books to live.

We hear from authors far more than we hear from editors.  We conjecture about editors' lives more than they know, more than they likely wish we would.  But in recent days, Lauren Wein, an editor at Grove/Atlantic who worked with her team to bring Francisco Goldman's remarkable Say Her Name to light, let us in on her relationship to this book and with this writer in a beautiful essay published in this special editors' forum at The Front Table. 

It's no ordinary retelling, Wein's essay.  It is a reflection that begins with the line "Francisco Goldman is an unlikely Hades" and that yields, over its quiet coursing, insights not just into the novel that Wein helped edit but into the transformative nature of editing itself.  We come to know the book and its author in Wein's essay; we also, magically, come to know Wein, who in August 2005 traveled to San Miguel de Allende (where the above photograph was taken two years later, when I journeyed there myself) to attend Goldman's wedding to Aura, the young woman, sadly no longer alive, who stands at the heart of Say Her Name.  "I traveled there with a colleague, Amy Hundley, and my six-month old daughter," Wein writes, continuing:

I sobbed through much of the nearly 12-hour journey. As a new mother, I was still finding my footing. I could not believe I’d been entrusted with this new life, and what was I doing taking her so far from our comfort zone?


But those days in San Miguel, that wedding, were among the best moments I’ve ever shared with my daughter. It proved to be an empowering journey in every sense—away from home, family, work, caregivers, she and I learned each other’s rhythms, learned to trust one another. We survived, we transcended, we fell in love. Frank and Aura were people who inspired others to leave their comfort zone—they led by example, they dared you to take risks that enabled you to become more than you were before.

Wein ends her essay with lines from a poem.  I won't share them here, for it is my hope that you'll go and read the entire essay itself—that you will, on this day, grow in your appreciation for the hearts and minds of the editors among us.

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Memoir Fetish (welcoming these new titles to my memoir library)

My appetite for books is insatiable, always, and when I teach, buying and reading memoir is a seamless compulsion.  Every student is on her own course.  Every young writer must be guided to just the right books at the right time.  To a memoir library already teeming, I this week add the following titles:

Devotion, Dani Shapiro

Mentor: A Memoir, Tom Grimes

How to Live:  Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, Sarah Bakewell (yes, this is a biography, but it is a biography of one of our most iconic early memoirists)

History of a Suicide, Jill Bialosky

The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (I need a new copy)

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf

House of Prayer No. 2:  A Writer's Journey Home, Mark Richard

Townie:  A Memoir, Andre Dubus III

Duke of Deception:  Memories of My Father, Geoffrey Wolff (hugely ashamed that I have not read this before)

Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman (classified as a novel, much like Dave Eggers classified his own memoirish story as a novel; my reflections on this book were posted two days ago)

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Say Her Name/Francisco Goldman: Reflections

I was in Guanajuato once, three years ago.  I walked its streets, silver veined and gold.  I slid through its callejones, tilted forward down its hills, hid inside its theater, got lost, for the sake of my camera,  did not go to visit the dead, by which I mean, I did not visit the mummies in the mummy museum for I did not wish to imagine that brand of eternal.

Who can bear it, staring so wide-eyedly at the end?

People who lose people they love are forever staring in, on the end.  People who lose people far too soon—a wife, say, a brilliant and beautiful wife on the verge of her own greatness and, perhaps, of motherhood, a woman who had walked the streets of Guanajuato beside you—can only wonder, What if?  What if today she were?  What if tomorrow she'd still be?  What if our child had been born?  What if she had finished her story?  What if I'd had more of we?

What if?

Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight....

Those words above are Francisco Goldman's words.  Found toward the end of a book he calls a novel—a story inspired by, required by, the premature death of his young wife, Aura, who wanted to surf a wave but was ruined by a wave, hammered against the floor of the sea.  Say Her Name (due out from Grove/Atlantic in April) is 350 pristine pages of reckoning with the impossible.  It is the story of a man's irresistible love for his wife, the story of a fractured heart, the waking to the daily blare:  Aura is not here.

Goldman calls this a novel, and I respect his choice.  It doesn't matter, though, not this time, whatever the book is called, for Say Her Name is a staggering collage of back and forth, the living and the dead, the alive and whole, the just barely breathing.  It is heart, all heart, on the page.  It is brilliantly structured, a love affair, a tragedy, a work of fine emotional suspense.  Last week, in my memoir class, a student asked a question about time, about how to hold the dispersion of many years inside a tight fist, how to locate her themes in a succession of anecdotals.  How do you take, in other words (not her words now, but my words), the glimmers and the shadows, the big things and the small things, the imagined, the actual, the not fully known, the never-to-be-reckoned with and make them a coherent, non-linear whole?

The answer to that question lies here, in Say Her Name.

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Truth or Fiction: Does it Matter When the Lines Get Blurred?

It may be entirely fuddy duddyish of me, but I continue to ponder the matter of truth on the page—the need, as I see it, to get as close as possible to the what-actually-was when endeavoring in the minefields of memoir or literary nonfiction.  Yes, it is true:  What we remember shifts and slides during the very act of remembering.  Yes, it is also true, as Ander Monson writes in "Voir Dire," that, "The unreliability, the misrememberings, the act of telling in starts and stops, the ****ups, the pockmarked surface of the I:  that's where all the good stuff is, the fair and foul, that which is rent, that which is whole, that which engages the whole reader.  Let us linger there, not rush past it."  The only interesting life, on the page, is the shaped life, the contemplated one, the one sifted for meaning and insight.  But don't we have an obligation, nonetheless, to get it all as right as we can get it—to not deliberately work beyond the ken of what we believe happened?

Having been deeply moved by "The Wave," Francisco Goldman's Personal History story in this week's issue of The New Yorker, I went on to find this audio recording of an interview conducted with Goldman in The New Yorker offices.  Goldman is talking about both the essay and the novel, Say Her Name, that Grove is releasing this April.  Both pieces—the essay and the fiction—were inspired by the tragic death of Goldman's young wife.  Just why Goldman chose to call the long work a novel and the short piece an essay is hugely instructive, and, I think, honors both his wife and the respective forms.  You can find his commentary specific to that matter starting nearly 7:45 minutes into the conversation.

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