Reflecting on A.O. Scott's new book, BETTER LIVING, in the Chicago Tribune

Who doesn't love a good A.O. Scott film review? (Well, I mean, who besides those directors, writers, actors, costume designers, or dialect coaches A.O. Scott might not be loving at that review moment?)

And who didn't love A.O. Scott and David Carr during the era of the New York Times video segment, "The Sweet Spot"?

Last week I had the chance to read Scott's new book, Better Living Through Criticism, for the Chicago Tribune. In what often felt like a very meta experience (critiquing a book about critiquing), I had this to say.

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Rising sea levels, and THIS IS THE STORY OF YOU

In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Bob Kopp, whose web page describes him as a "climate scientist, Earth historian, geobiologist, and energy policy wonk," reported, along with his collaborators at Rutgers, Tufts, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, York, Woods Hole, and Harvard, a sobering rise in sea levels.

Having examined the rising seas over the past 3,000 years, Kopp and his team demonstrated, with 95% probability, that sea levels began to rise at "historic" rates in the 19th century.

It's not that this is new news. Indeed, we've been watching islands disappear, shore lines erode, storms hit with devastating force. We've worried over the future of entire countries. We've read words like these (Nicholas Bakalar) in the New York Times:

A three-foot rise in sea level in Malibu, Calif., for example, would put many houses near Malibu Beach under water. In New York, most of Harlem River Drive and Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive south of 168th Street would be inundated, and Ellis Island would be about half its present size. In Florida, Tampa and Miami would lose large areas of land, and much of the Keys would disappear.

We've been watching our world get remade because we've been remaking our world.

I set out to write This Is the Story of You because I grew up loving the Jersey shore (sand castles, Dippy Don's ice cream, crab hunting, bird sanctuaries). Because I watched, along with every once else, the devastation of Storm Sandy. Because I worry, endlessly, about our planet. As I read the news that we all read, and as I think about the next generation and all the challenges placed before them, I hope, through Story, which takes place in the aftermath of a monster storm on a barrier island, to remind readers of all that is at stake—and of all we still owe to one another.

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Through NEGROLAND Margo Jefferson elevates the memoir form, and leaves me grateful, again

It was Margo Jefferson, the great cultural critic, who first put my name in the New York Times. In a review of another's book, in a closing paragraph, she made mention of something I'd penned in solitude and put forward with innocence and didn't even understand as well as she seemed to.

She looked up and saw me, and I, discovering her snatch of words quite by accident, never felt such gratitude.

When I read earlier this year that Margo had written a memoir called Negroland, I wanted it at once, bought it when I could, and put it on the top of a pile called (in my mind), "the books you'll be allowed to read once you have completed your tour of duty with all known responsibilities."

Yesterday I was done with all known (until next week) responsibilities. I picked up Negroland. I read.

And oh my, oh now: this. Like H is for Hawk, like M Train, like My Life as a Foreign Country, Negroland is the kind of book that elevates not just its readers but the capital M Memoir itself. It's personal—and otherwise. It's I, You, We. It's inquiry, declaration, admission, confusion—the story of the impossible ideals, hurtful expectations, pleasant privileges, and chaotic undertows that have been all bound up with being a member of the black elite. It's a book by an esteemed critic who was "taught to distinguish (her)self through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off" and who then (but always judiciously, always for a higher purpose) allows us in.

In a book of anecdote, history, cultural expose, and yearning, we encounter, on almost every page paragraphs as searing as this:

Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly, and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren't looking.

 And this:

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you. That's your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don't stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.

This year, when my beautiful son goes into bookstores he goes straight (his mother's child) to the memoir shelves. He, like me, views memoir as one of the best chances we have of broadening our vision, breaking down our walls, stepping out of our recklessly limited world view.

I have been taught by Margo Jefferson with her gorgeous Negroland. I have seen a little further. I have hurt a little more. I have been made grateful for both the seeing and the hurting.

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thoughts on dispositional gratitude, from my son and David Brooks

Did you read David Brooks on "The Structure of Gratitude" last week in the New York Times? His thoughts on being grateful, on "the sort of laughter of the heart that comes about after some surprising kindness"? His thoughts on those who seem "thankful practically all of the time"?

Specifically:

These people may have big ambitions, but they have preserved small anticipations. As most people get on in life and earn more status, they often get used to more respect and nicer treatment. But people with dispositional gratitude take nothing for granted. They take a beginner’s thrill at a word of praise, at another’s good performance or at each sunny day. These people are present-minded and hyperresponsive.

This kind of dispositional gratitude is worth dissecting because it induces a mentality that stands in counterbalance to the mainstream threads of our culture.

Brooks concludes: "People with grateful dispositions see their efforts grandly but not themselves. Life doesn’t surpass their dreams but it nicely surpasses their expectations."

I was struck by this column when I first read it. I thought of the most grateful person I know—my son—who  never fails to see the beauty in a day, the goodness in another, the possibility in an hour. Among the countless things I've learned from him is the power of looking for and seeing the good. It's a better way to greet the day. And it gets you going places.

So that my texts and calls from my son are always cast in light. Beautiful day, he'll say, on heading out. Good day at the office, he'll say at day's end. Just talked to a really cool person in the park. Just ran by the river, and it's gorgeous out there.

Beautiful day. Good day. Great day. Gorgeous. My son's messages are bits of magic—interruptions in any darkness or churning I might be feeling at that instant. Wait, I'll think when the phone pings and it's him. It really is a beautiful day. Or, yeah. Every day can be conceived or reconceived into some kind of happy.

Why not do that reconceiving, my son reminds me. Why not reap the rewards of looking for brightness? I don't always get it right; sometimes I wallow. But then a sunshine text comes in, and I think: Yeah. Right. Why not be grateful?

And so this post script. My son knows precisely what he wants to do with his life (the perfect job taps his great strengths in statistics, new media, pop culture, demographics, and trend spotting) and two months ago, he was hired as a contract employee at the perfect company. A six-month job, but glory, he was going to take it, and every day he's been there—happy to stay late, happy to do more, happy to take on more training, happy to do, happy to be around people he respects and people who clearly respect him. My son wasn't going to worry (like his mother tends to worry) that it was just a six-month contract. He was just going to love the days he had. He was going to remind me, when the topic arose, how lucky he was to be where he was. Right now. The future would come. But someday.

Turns out my son didn't have to worry. Turns out he was right all along. The future would come, and earlier this week he was offered a full-time job at this company that he loves.

I have to think his aura of gratitude worked in his favor. I have to keep learning from him.

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Philly is Number 3 on the New York Times "52 Places to Go in 2015" list, and I'm feeling pride

Not as if I haven't been saying that myself (well, sort of), right here, and in the Inquirer, and in my books. But huzzah. This is the New York Times speaking, not just some homegrown booster.

I am taking particular pleasure in this because I have had the privilege of working with some of the people who are making the radical difference. Let's put Brandywine Realty Trust high on that radical difference list, and Brandywine CEO Jerry Sweeney himself, who has quietly and collaboratively helped engineer a renaissance along the Schuylkill River Banks (through the Schuylkill River Development Corporation, which he chairs), in University City, and in the downtown nexus. Let's talk about outdoor artists like Jane Golden and Isaiah Zagar. Let's look at my alma mater and employer, the University of Pennsylvania, which keeps the greening coming.

In naming Philadelphia right after Milan and Cuba on its list, the New York Times, in its January 9, 2015 story, said this:

The making of an urban outdoor oasis.

A series of projects has transformed Philadelphia into a hive of outdoor urban activity. Dilworth Park, formerly a hideous slab of concrete adjoining City Hall, reopened this past autumn as a green, pedestrian-friendly public space with a winter ice-skating rink (and a cafe by the indefatigable chef Jose Garces). Public art installations, mini "parklets" and open-air beer gardens have become common sights. The Delaware River waterfront was reworked for summer 2014 with the Spruce Street Harbor Park (complete with hammocks, lanterns and floating bar) becoming a new fixture, following the renovation of the Race Street Pier, completed in 2011, and offers free yoga classes on a bi-level strip of high-design decking and grass. The city’s other river, the Schuylkill, has its own new boardwalk. To top it off, this spring, Philadelphia will get its first bike share program, making this mostly flat city even more friendly for those on two wheels. Nell McShane Wulfhart

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on history sanitized and simplified for younger readers: let's think about this

In today's New York Times, Alexander Alter writes of the increasing number of "adult" authors who are reconfiguring their history books for the younger, still-book-buying crowd (or for those who buy books for them). She writes:

Inspired by the booming market for young adult novels, a growing number of biographers and historians are retrofitting their works to make them palatable for younger readers. Prominent nonfiction writers like Ms. Hillenbrand, Jon Meacham and Rick Atkinson are now grappling with how to handle unsettling or controversial material in their books as they try to win over this impressionable new audience.

And these slimmed-down, simplified and sometimes sanitized editions of popular nonfiction titles are fast becoming a vibrant, growing and lucrative niche.

I wonder about the wisdom of this—about the felt need to take well-written and absorbing histories and make them less than (for sanitized and simplified sound like less than to me) for younger readers. Let's first acknowledge what many young readers are capable of, which is to say, books rich with moral dilemma and emboldened by ideas. Let's next acknowledge what young readers need, which is to say the facts of then and now. 

You can already get that sort of thing in novels written for younger readers. Certainly Patricia McCormick is not writing down, making it easy, simplifying when she writes about the sex trade or the Cambodian war. Certainly Ruta Sepetys didn't make Siberia comfortable in Between Shades of Gray. Certainly M. T. Anderson didn't set out to make Octavian Nothing easy, simple, sterile. Certainly, Marilyn Nelson, publishing Carver, a life in verse for young adults, didn't think to herself, let me make this easy. She wrote each page smart, each page full of innuendo and terms to look up and mysteries, like this:

A Charmed Life

Here breathes a solitary pilgrim sustained by dew

and the kindness of strangers. An astonished Midas

surrounded by the exponentially multiplying miracles: my

Yucca and Cactus in the Chicago World Exposition;

friends of the spirit; teachers. Ah, the bleak horizons of joy.

Light every morning dawns through the trees. Surely

this is worth more than one life.

And certainly I, writing novels for young adults, am not setting history down in burnished, skip-over-it slices. Not when I write about the Spanish Civil War (Small Damages) or the shadowy blockade of the Berlin Wall (Going Over) or Centennial Philadelphia (Dangerous Neighbors) or 1871 Philadelphia (Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent) or Florence during the 1966 flood (One Thing Stolen). I am working to put a younger reader into the heart of it all. And sometimes that's not pretty. Sometimes that hurts. But that is history for you.

That's life.

YA writers have been writing sophisticated historical novels for a long time now. Why, then, suggest that those same YA readers need to be written down to when it comes to pure nonfiction? To the big stories. The telling moments. The individual against the state, the home versus the political, the science versus the dream, the big stuff that shapes who we became. Nonfiction for young adults, like novels for young adults, should be alive and deep and somehow true. It should respect the capabilities of younger readers.

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Spend time alone, and do not look away

Time spent alone writing the novel provided a different kind of instruction. “I learned not to look away at the moment when I should be paying the most attention,” he said. “The closer I got to the heart of a scene, to the really difficult material to write, the emotionally challenging stuff or the exchange in which the conflict is made most explicit, the more I’d look for a way out of writing it. This was out of fear, obviously, because you don’t want to run up against your limitations in craft, intelligence or heart. It’s much easier to duck the really vital material, but it kills what you’re writing to do so, kills it instantly.”

—Matthew Thomas, author of WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, in an email interview with the New York Times

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Scenes across the Berlin Wall, and a story about female graffiti artists, with thanks to Paul Steege

There is no sound in this video shot across the Berlin Wall in 1971. There doesn't have to be. The faces here say it all, the blown kisses, the raised binoculars, the East Germans who do not wish to leave the friends they spot in the West across the many walls, the many divisions.

This is chilling, heartbreaking, telling, historic, and I have my friend Paul Steege, writer and historian at Villanova University, to thank for sharing it with me.

Paul also sent along a link to this Julia Baird New York Times story about the rise of female graffiti artists around the world, which ran earlier this week. The story is fascinating, end to end, and begins like this:

For decades it was thought that the reason street art was almost exclusively male was because men were more comfortable with peril; many sought it. After all, street art is notoriously dangerous, exhilarating and risky.

It is, of course, usually illegal; many street artists work at night, in wigs or masks, wearing shoes made for running. One night, when the Australian artist Vexta, who is now based in Brooklyn, was painting neon-splattered, psychedelic images in an abandoned building with friends, the police arrived. She jumped through a hole in the wall, rolled under a shutter door and ran down the street to hail a cab. No one would pick her up, since she was smeared with dirt and paint.

 Ada, I think, as I read. Ada (Going Over). She might have been Vexta. She might still be.

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Important words about memoir, brought to you by Jesmyn Ward.

For any of those who might need just a bit more proof that it pays to, as I say "soften your stance" when approaching memoir, I offer these words from Jesmyn Ward, whose new memoir, Men We Reaped, is high on my reading list (but not read yet).

The story of Ward's memoir is featured in yesterday's New York Times in a piece by Laura Tillman. I excerpt from the middle of the story. I admire and applaud Ward's desire to find the larger story, for it is the larger story, always, that lies at the heart of memoir. She waited to write until she understood. She waited until she could identify meaning.

From the story:

“Men We Reaped,” to be published on Tuesday by Bloomsbury, is as much an existential detective story as it is a personal history, as Ms. Ward searches for a unifying reason that her brother, Joshua, her cousin C. J. and friends Roger, Demond and Ronald — all young black men — died within a four-year period. 

She writes first about Roger Eric Daniels III, who died of a heart attack at 23 while using cocaine.

“They picking us off, one by one,” a friend tells Ms. Ward in the book, as they watch the hearse leave Mr. Daniels’s home. 

Who, she wonders, are “they”? 

“Was there a larger story that I was missing as all these deaths accumulated, as those I loved died?”

“Men We Reaped” is that larger story. With a novelist’s skill, Ms. Ward mines her memories of the men, like the girlhood crush she had on Ronald, or the night she enlisted a friend to wake her sister, who was dating C. J., to break the news of his death. What she finds are threads of the past that linger in the collective present, specifically the role that the South’s legacy of racism has played in how these young men lived and died.

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George Saunders on the power of kindness

A beloved student sent this our way late last night—a NYT link to the convocation address that George Saunders made to the Class of 2013 at Syracuse University. I loved hearing from my student. And I loved every word of this address.

Especially this, below. Saunders is talking about the importance of being kind. A soft subject? Think about it. How hard is kindness, daily? How difficult to consistently transcend your own self, your own needs, your own Look at Me, so that you can look at other people? So that you can listen?

It's hard. But Saunders says:

One thing in our favor:  some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age.  It might be a simple matter of attrition:  as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really.  We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality.  We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be.  We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now).  Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving.  I think this is true.  The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”

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"You might as well be a mensch": Messages from My Father/Calvin Trillin

Yesterday was a celebration of my father on his birthday—a surprise cake among his many friends at his church, a lunch at his favorite, cafe, a somewhat disorderly assemblage of preferred foods from the Farmers' Market, organized into sub-specialty themes (here we have our cheeses and crackers, here our apple fritters, here our quiche, here our pecan pie), tickets to an upcoming high school production of Grease.

None of it being close to enough to honor the man who has always done so much for his wife (whose grave he still visits daily, even in blasts of winter cold), his three children and his three children's children. Kep Kephart has been a stealth benefactor, a man who has given without the slightest expectation a quid pro quo. Where there has been need, he has stepped in. Where there was college to pay for, he did. Where there were little TVs or kitchen pots that might have helped ease the lonesomeness of first studio apartments on Camac Street, say, little TVs and kitchen pots materialized. Where a trip away was precisely the cure for the tedium of too much stuck in a rut, a check arrived in the mail."Your father is a very good man," I was told, time and again, as I planned his surprise moment at the church. "We don't know what we'd do without him."

I was thinking about Kep Kephart, a Penn grad, devoted Presbyterian, retired businessman, and active consultant, while I was reading about Abe Trillin, the Jewish grocer of Kansas City, in Calvin Trillin's memoir Messages from My Father. Trillin's slender memoir never pronounces its guiding questions, its framing themes. Rather, it begins with a declaration—"The man was stubborn."—and proceeds to limn the life of a father who may not have made a strong first impression, with his "unprepossessing name," his "prominent nose," and his "negligible chin," but whose manners, values, and behaviors were of presidential caliber and consequence.

The contempt Abe feels "for people who felt the need to pump up their own importance" was encapsulated in a term; "that sort of person was "big k'nocker" (a phrase that would have fit nicely in with the recent New York Times story about parental boasting "A Truce in the Bragging Wars"). The fun he had with simple things—silly phrases, songs, marching tunes—seemed more important, looking back, than anything money might buy. His tenderness in letting an employee go, his admirable work ethic, his decision to be remembered, most of all, by his choice of yellow-tinted ties—all this gentleness, all this manliness, all this fatherliness. Calvin Trillin may have inherited his father's stubbornness, but he noticed, and absorbed, the bigger lessons his father taught.

Perhaps for Abe, and therefore Calvin, it all came down to a single phrase: "You might as well be a mensch." I hadn't seen the phrase before (the word, of course, but not the phrase), but I think I'd like to make use of it now—to seed my thoughts with its power. Here's Calvin in his trademark simply meaningful prose, parsing the line for the rest of us:

Even the words to live by that I have always associated most strongly with him—"You might as well be a mensch."—lack grandiosity. The German word Mensch, which means person or human being, can take on in Yiddish the meaning of a real human being—a person who always does the right thing in matters large or small, a person who would not only put himself at serious risk for a friend but also leave a borrowed apartment in better shape than he found it. My father clearly meant for me to be a mensch. It has always interested me, though, that he did not say, "You must always be a mensch," or "The honor of this family demands that you be a mensch" but "You might as well be a mensch," as if he had given some consideration to the alternatives.

I take mensch to mean a sweep of things, and also these essential things: Remember others. Acknowledge others. Be happy for what they achieve. Listen more than you talk, if you can. Don't make too much of your own glory.

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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maybe fame is, after all is said and done, boring

This is the tree that lives just outside my window, and this is yesterday.  I've done nothing to amplify or affect the color of the leaves.  They are just like this, for now.

Sometimes I think about how my life could be bigger, my reach broader, my impact more lasting.  Sometimes I wish.  Sometimes I measure myself against impossible standards, or against something somebody said.  And then the light will change, and I'm reminded of how empty and meaningless that kind of questing is.

Today that light was these words about fame from Jack Gilbert, quoted in the New York Times obituary written by Bruce Weber. 

In 1962, Mr. Gilbert was a poetry star. He had won the Yale prize, and the editor Gordon Lish had devoted an entire issue of the literary journal Genesis West to him. Theodore Roethke, Stephen Spender and Stanley Kunitz praised him in print. He was in demand as a reader. But it didn’t take. 

“I enjoyed those six months of being famous,” he recalled in the Paris Review interview. “Fame is a lot of fun, but it’s not interesting. I loved being noticed and praised, even the banquets. But they didn’t have anything that I wanted. After about six months, I found it boring. There were so many things to do, to live. I didn’t want to be praised all the time — I liked the idea, but I didn’t invest much in it.”

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can you tell the truth? (The Night of the Gun)

My respect for David Carr, the New York Times reporter, bestselling author, and (with A.O. Scott) Times video celeb, has been reported here.  What you've not seen on this blog is talk about Carr's reportorial memoir, The Night of the Gun.  By his own admission, Carr was a substance abuser of the very first order—a "maniac" who went from handling whiskey and cocaine (barely) to not handling crack to smacking women he loved with an open hand to raising twins while failing at rehab to carrying a gun he doesn't remember, or didn't remember until he started tracking down his own past. 

Like the scrupulous Times reporter he miraculously became, Carr sought out and interviewed those whose lives intersected his during his wilderness years.  He weighed his idea of things against police records and the recall of old friends.  He sorted, sifted, and spun in an attempt to understand not just who he was, but who he is, and how the was and the is somehow survive inside the same knocked-about skin.

It's fascinating reading, memoir painstakingly stitched. It has a lot to say not just about Carr's life, but about what truth is and what to do with all the stuff we can't rightly remember.  Here's an early paragraph that wisely captures one of my pet peeves (we shall read more about this in Handling the Truth)—memoirs filled with dialogue from hazy childhood days.

I read some of the classics of the genre, debunked and not.  After reading four pages of continuous ten-year-old dialogue magically recalled by someone who was in the throes of alcohol withdrawal at the time, I wondered how he did it.  No I didn't.  I knew he made it up.  It was easy and defendable, really, sublimating and eliding the past in service of a larger Emotional Truth.  Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history—the facts of what happened—is both immutable and mostly unknowable.  Can I somehow remember enough to type my way to an unvarnished recitation of what happened to me?  No chance.

A note for the curious:  I use Lana Roosiparg's gorgeous face as my photo of the day for no other reason than that it is a singular, and therefore, true one.  Lana is one of the four talented and lovely people recently featured in my husband's art.  This is an outtake from the photo shoot that yielded those hallucinatory worlds.

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Sarah Hepola on lighting ourselves on fire

This morning I did that thing that relaxes me most of all—tapped into my iPad, read from the New York Times, watched the weekly A.O. Scott and David Carr Times video.  (Have you watched them?  Do you like them?  How can I explain my addiction to this reliably circumlocutory conversation?)

Tucked into the Magazine was an essay on Cat Marnell by Sarah Hepola.  Hepola, among other things, selects and sometimes writes those often controversial, lightning-rodesque personal essays for Salon.com.  Years ago, when the internet had not yet become so prone to anonymous nastiness and viral cat fights, I wrote for Salon—occasional essays and reviews.  I shared a community there with its early founders and creators and co-writers—Kate Moses, Susan Straight, Camille Peri, others.  I stopped when the stakes grew too high, when I could no longer see the value add of putting one's life up for grab by the increasingly ridiculing masses.  I have watched friend after friend get burned in that forum.  Insta-fame, yes.  The costs:  high.

Hepola's entire piece on Marnell and Marnell's own unfiltered confessions makes for fascinating reading.  But it is this penultimate paragraph that should, I think, be required reading for us all.  I share this as memoirist and as a teacher of memoir and, also, (does this make it better or worse?) a writer about the making of memoir—how it gets done, what happens when it does (the themes not just here on my blog but in my forthcoming book, Handling the Truth). 

Here is Hepola:  

I worry about anyone who is lighting themselves on fire for our enjoyment. I worry about the bloggers and viral stars who have burned up so much of themselves for the prize of a few thousand followers. Our attention span is so short these days. One minute you’re a meteorite lighting up Google Trends, the next minute you fall back to earth, another piece of ugly, busted-up coal.

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Let's talk about the label-ization of books (and Kristin Cashore)

The other day I pondered my own capabilities as an interviewee and concluded that I still need a bit of work.

A lot of work?  Yes, indeed.  A lot of work.

In this New York Times By the Book interview, Kristin Cashore, author of the esteemed Graceling (which I read and loved) and Fire (and, now, Bitterblue) shows us how a real interviewee chooses words rightly.  For Cashore's unwillingness to cop to easy answers or generalizations, for her range of knowing and wisdom, I respect the whole conversation.  I especially respect Cashore's response to the question, What makes a great young adult book — as opposed to a great book for full-fledged adults? Her answer:

The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don’t entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it’s impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it. Age and experience aren’t always among the most relevant factors.

Perhaps I celebrate this response because I hold this opinion this myself—and have often tried to express it, with varying degrees of eloquence, in interviews and on panels.  Just as I have fretted over the labeling of individuals, the attaching of classifications or lower-case nouns (oh, he's a manic depressive, oh, she's a workaholic), I do not cotton to the label-ization of books, to distinctions between young adult books and adult books, say, or to the assignment of fixed and self-limiting categories.  

What adult, for example, should not read Thanhha Lai's Inside Out & Back Again, and what teen should not read the never-officially-stamped-or-stickered To Kill a Mockingbird? Why should the first thing one is told about Julianna Baggot's Pure be that it is a dystopian novel, as opposed to an intelligent and artful and imaginative novel? Shouldn't the readership of Vaddey Ratner's astonishing, forthcoming "adult" novel about a child growing up in the Cambodian killing fields, In the Shadow of the Banyan, be both teens and adults? Doesn't Ilie Ruby's forthcoming The Salt God's Daughter have much to offer any age, and can't we talk about its gentle mysticism, its magic as poetry as opposed to brand or tag?

Certainly, I know how hard this would make things for booksellers and librarians.  I know that commerce requires labels, depends on it.  But wouldn't it be lovely if readers talking to readers dropped the labels and distinctions?  If we said, among ourselves, You must read this book because it is, quite simply, a great book, and because it will transport you. 

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slowly extricating myself from The Busy Trap

This beautiful young man is my nephew, a child growing up on the outskirts of London.  He is buoyant, instantly generous, loving, and a fine host at his own party.  I like how he smiles.  I like how he plays, how he relaxes with the hour.  I like how his job, right now, is happiness.

I thought of this happy kid as I read the New York Times Op/Ed piece (penned by Tim Kreider) on busyness, and its many bedevil-ments.  "If you live in American in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are," Kreider begins.  "It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: 'Busy!' 'So busy.' 'Crazy busy.'  It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint.  And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: 'That's a good problem to have,' or 'Better than the opposite.'"

Kreider was, of course, aiming his pen at me.  (Hey, as a memoirist/narcissist it's a conclusion I'm bound to draw.)  Crazy busy was my theme song.  Overwhelmed was my word du every jour.  I'd like to, but I can't.  Yes, folks.  That was me.  A lot of it was circumstance, pressures and responsibilities I had not actively chosen for myself.  But much of it stemmed from choices I had made—to endlessly shore up family finances, to write (again), to volunteer (some more), to chase spider webs at midnight that no one but yours truly can see.

Not long ago, I declared my desire for a lesser life—one less crammed with to-do lists, less amenable to busy boasts.  I wanted to, needed to, sleep more.  I wanted to live more.  I wanted to have more time away from the computer, more time in gardens, more time with books, more time to experiment in the kitchen.  I wanted, frankly, more time for walks with my son, more time to scheme up art projects with my husband, more time alone.  I bought close to three dozen books—recent classics I had missed—and set out to read them.  I made time for walks with long-time friends.  I sat and looked at photographs—not in a hurry, and for no applicable reason.

And when client work arrived, as client work must and will arrive, I didn't promise a next-day delivery.  I did the work, best as I could, same high standards in place.  But I didn't do it in a breathless rush when the rest of my timezone was sleeping.

I'm liking me better this way, but I know how hard it will be to avoid relapsing into BusyNess.  I am keeping Kreider's article close, therefore, for when I'm tempted to fall off the wagon.  I share this Kreider paragraph, with the hope that you'll read the whole:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

And then there's just one more thing.... My dear friend Katrina Kenison is featured in this equally important New York Times story (this one written by Alina Tugend), "Redefining Success and Celebrating the Ordinary."  I felt like one very lonesome mother a decade ago, when writing toward these themes in Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World.  It is extraordinarily heartwarming and hope-inducing to see Ordinary elevated to its rightful place of loveliness.  It is equally wonderful to read my friend Becca's words on her ordinary yesterday. Becca, who is the farthest thing imaginable from average.

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Making Funny Count (And Avoiding the Nasties)

There are humorists whose words are assaults—funny, perhaps, but mostly acidic, pointed, seething. Anger lies at the core of such humor. A hint of retaliation.  A hope, perhaps, that by glossing a story with the ha-ha funnies no one will notice what the tale is really about, or how deep the damage runs. 

There are humorists, conversely, whose jests come at the expense, mostly, of themselves.  Childhood was funny to them; childhood was a boon.  They grew up awkward or they grew up confused, and anyone who happens to stand in their wit's way has (it's clear) been tenderly assessed.  They will be getting ice cream later.

I prefer Humorist Type 2, and Haven Kimmel is a star among them.  Consistently funny, highly literary, surprisingly facile in her rhythms and subject matters.  For those looking for something to do on this hot-across-the-country day, I recommend her deservedly famous memoir, A Girl Named Zippy.  You'll forget that you are sitting alone by the window fan, your lemonade glass empty.  You'll stop praying for a breeze.

A passage to get you started lies below.  Before I get to that, though, I feel that I must say this:  I love the little girl above, whom I snapped one day at an event.  The only thing she has in common with Haven's description below is that she is, obviously, a dear, dear thing.

We tried a variety of hairstyles in those early years.  The really short haircut (the Pixie, as it was then called) was my favorite, and coincidentally, the most hideous.  Many large predatory birds believed I was asking for a date.  I especially liked that style because I imagined it excused me from any form of personal hygiene, which I detested.  I was so opposed to bathing that I used to have a little laughing reaction every time a certain man in town walked by and said hello to me and I had to respond with "Hi, Gene."

After a year as a Pixie, my sister decided what my hair needed was "weight."  Melinda executed all the haircutting ideas in our house and, in fact, cut off the tip of my earlobe one summer afternoon because she was distracted by As the World Turns.

The weight we added to my hair made me look like a fuzzy bush, a bush gone vague.....

Note:  After posting this earlier today, I read this beautiful Alessandra Stanley tribute to Nora Ephron.  It includes these lines, much smarter than my own, about the power of being funny without cruelty:

It’s hard to be funny without malice, and discontent is so often the flint for humor. Nora turned dross to gold and didn’t hold on to rancor. She suffered fools. That fundamental good humor was a high octane fuel that let her produce five times as much as anyone else and still find the time — effortlessly — to host a dinner, show up at a protégé’s book party, or make a photo album to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday.

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The Lifeboat/Charlotte Rogan: Reflections

By now you know the story of Charlotte Rogan.  Princeton educated, a mother of triplets, the wife of a lawyer, a quiet writer in the quiet hours, Rogan had written several novels and tucked them away before she finally, "practically on a whim," according to the New York Times story, sent what would become The Lifeboat to an agent.  The rest is history.  After twenty-five years of writing in near secret, Rogan has become an overnight success.

I read The Lifeboat yesterday.  I remain in the thrall of its intelligence.  There's not a sloppy sentence in this book, nor an excess line.  Grace, its heroine (?), is masterfully complex, and so are the issues that unwind across these pages.  It is 1914.  A ship has gone down in the Atlantic.  A crowded lifeboat is cast about on open seas.  Easy rescue doesn't come.  Survival is at stake—but whose, and at what cost, and what will the civilized say about the surviving later, in a court of law?  Who is sane, who is acting, what is true, and what are the options if there is no land in sight and water is short and dangerous factions have formed?  Is it possible not to choose a side?  Can we ever adequately explain, even to ourselves, the choices we make in extreme, inhuman moments? 

Rogan further complicates her story by further complicating Grace, the young woman, recently married, who is on trial with two others when the book begins.  Grace has, in some ways, bludgeoned her way into the high society she craves.  She has gained her husband at the expense of another woman.  She may have gained this seat on the lifeboat at the expense of something else.  Is she a good person?  Do we root for her?  Are any of us untainted?

Psychologically taut, finely paced, quietly but masterfully suspenseful, The Lifeboat, despite its setting on the high seas, never leaks from itself, never goes off on a stray tangent.  It's a remarkable debut, as focused a novel as I have read in a long time.   

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It's Called Living (and I plan to do more of it)

It has been six years since your last novel was published, and I gather you weren’t writing for some of that time. What were you doing? Jack Daniel’s and the “Today” show?
Living, it’s called living. You might call it wasting time, but I just call it living. Going bird hunting, reading books, watching the Red Sox, doing things with my wife that we wouldn’t have time to do if I was writing a book. There’s a whole lot to do once you can get out from under the yoke of working.

— excerpted from "Richard Ford Is a Man Who Actually Listens," Andrew Goldman interview, New York Times

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I love knowing famous people (and the power of young adult fiction)

Okay, so.  Yes.  I'm behind.  I'm behind on everything.  I'm behind on the dusting, the laundry, the reading, the friendships, the blogging, the book writing, (not the taxes, though), (not the Easter presents), (not the clients), and so and therefore and thus, I didn't see this New York Times conversation on the power of young adult fiction until today.  Even though it was posted March 28th. 

That's how behind I am.

It doesn't matter.  I can still sing and shout a little here.  Because check out the teen blogger who has entered the conversation.  Her name is Emma Allison.  She's from Canada.  Her blog is called Booking Through 365.  And just days ago, she reviewed Dangerous Neighbors.

I love knowing famous people.

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