Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave/Patty Chang Anker: Reflections

Photo Caption: National Book Awards, 1998, Reading at the New School. Left to right: Patty Chang Anker, my publicist; Amy Rennert, my agent; me with bangs; Louise Brockett, WW Norton publicist; Alane Salierno Mason, my editor.

My friends, gather round and listen well. I have a prediction to make:

{Patty Chang Anker is set to become America's next sweetheart.}

Yes, that's her, up there, on one of the most sacred nights of my publishing life—another century, another me. That's Patty as publicist, a UPenn graduate, before she was a mom. That's Patty before she, to use her word, changed. Let her explain:

Maybe it was forty and realizing that it wasn't just days but decades slipping by in the same worn paths that somehow grew narrower with each foray. Maybe it was the sense among friends that as we got older we were becoming more like ourselves, but not in a good way. I love you, but didn't we have the same conversation last week? Maybe it was the hypocrisy of stuffing my children into snowsuits and shin guards and helmets and sending them out into the fray while I cheered from a bench. Maybe it was a combination of all that and a last-gasp, premenopausal burst of hormones.

Whatever it was, after a lifetime of living nowhere near the edge, I had had enough. I started diving in.

Literally, Patty dove in. To the local pool. To de-cluttering her home. To public speaking. To biking. To surfing a frigid lake in winter. She went from supporting books to writing her own. And what a wonderful—and helpful—book it is. Endearing came to mind several times. Funny. Companionable. Sincere.

Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave (Riverhead, October 2013) is precisely what its title promises, which is to say a journey away from fear and toward joy. It's Patty taking on the Greek Chorus that has both ransacked and italicized her thoughts. One part of her brain is telling her she can't swim. One part is leaving her on the sidelines. One part is encouraging her to talk out of both sides of her mouth as she cheers her two children toward things she has never done herself.

And then, hidden at first, more bold and ballsy in time, are all those other parts of her brain that say, Timidity is for the birds. Life is to be lived.

Patty introduces us to a world of helpful souls as she soldiers on—the expert de-clutterer, the teachers who believe, the friends who encourage her to swim, the toastmasters and psychologists and one writer/surfer dude. She made me smile time and again, not just because I know Patty—have known her for years now, have watched her evolve, have chuckled at her blog and her Facebook posts—but because every darned thing she writes is so quintessential in its own right that I know there'll be tens of thousands, no doubt more, smiling with her soon.

Patty has worked for a long time to become this more whole version of herself, and she has worked a long time to become this author. In a few short months, she's going to have so many friends/admirers/dudes in her life that she won't know what to do. I picture her, rock starish, being lifted up by hands and hearts set free, above a sea of lights.

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The Grief of Others/Leah Hager Cohen: Reflections

There are so many ways to tell a story.  That much is obvious, so fatefully true.  Authors have to decide—over and again, they decide—whose story they are writing, how much to keep on the page, where knowing must cede to suggesting, how time will be cordoned off and bent, how perfectly or imperfectly the tale will end, how many hearts will break.

Yesterday afternoon and early this morning I have been reading Leah Hager Cohen's new novel The Grief of Others (Riverhead).  I have been thinking about structure, detail, illusion, and the lived life that allows this kind of realist fiction to be written.  I have felt, as I always feel when reading any of Cohen's books, a great affinity for this author who puts so much of her heart and seeing into the books she writes.

Grief is jammed with sensual beauty, long, tumbling passages of spectacularly specific insight into not just the who of Cohen's characters—a husband and wife, their two children, a young man, a young woman, and a big loving dog—but the what of their lives.  Ricky, the wife and mother, is a "quant"—a financial engineer.  Husband John, employed by a college, is a stagecrafter, the sort of man who had seduced his wife by giving her access to the magic of theater: "how you'd mix perlite (the tiny white balls in potting soil) with paint in order to bring texture to an interior surface; how you'd spray a little paint on the artificial flora, in order to pull it into the world of the show; how, for a big backdrop, you'd spray fixative on charcoal, then tint it and build up a few layers of paint to give it the depth and richness of an oil painting." Both lose their third child just fifty-seven hours after he is born.

A prologue and five discrete book parts take us into this year of grief, and the trust and distrust that entombs it.  Will Ricky and John's marriage (already unstable, despite much that is beautiful) survive?  What will happen to the ten-year-old daughter, a thoughtful truant, who keeps reenacting the funeral that never was?  What about Paul, the thirteen year old son, mired in middle school bullying?  And what about Jess, John's daughter from another relationship, who shows up with worries all her own?

Cohen builds these characters—their relationships, their failures, their needs—attentively, gracefully, with great knowing.  There's not even the hint of the fraudulent about this fiction.  This is no straightforward tale, but one of deep dives and time bends, and I found it deeply moving.

You will also, I am sure, find Leah Hager Cohen's blog a work of beauty.  I go there from time to time when I am in search of a quiet dwelling place—of words from a deeply thoughtful author who writes not just about her books and their journeys into the world, but about real life as a daughter, girlfriend, and mom.

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