the beauty question (reflections after reading Rebecca Mead on Middlemarch)

I have made light of it, of course. I have said, within the past week, even: If only I were beautiful, Then. I wouldn't feel so unsettled as I sit before a camera, filming essays about memoir I've given my whole heart and head to. If only I were beautiful, Then. That driver wouldn't have cut me off; it was my turn after all. If only I were beautiful, Then. She would have never dared. If only I were beautiful, I'd be something.

No self-respecting woman is supposed to say such things, think such things, wallow so ungraciously. I know that. But the thoughts come unbidden, and there they are. Mucking around with me.

How easy it is to cast blame on those things I cannot control. How undignified not to stand up to the superficial me, not to embrace all my good fortune first and only. But there it is. I am.

Earlier this week, while reading the intensely intelligent memoir, My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, I found myself all caught up in the beauty question again. Mead is pondering George Eliot's appearance—the images she finds as she conducts her deep research into the life and mind of this complicated writer. Eliot did not, it seems, impress others as a beauty. She was possessed of a large nose and jowly facade. She was not svelte. She was not to be found in the fashion pages.

But, Mead writes, something happened when Eliot spoke. Something that contested the physical facts of her matter:

... a first impression of her hideousness, [Henry James] said, soon gave way to something else entirely. "Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her," he continued. "Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking."

Sara Jane Lippincott, Mead tells us, first found Eliot to be "exceedingly plain, with her aggressive jaw and her evasive blue yes.... Neither nose, nor mouth, nor chin were to my liking; but, as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable."

Mead ends that paragraph with, "Ivan Turgenev, a friend of Eliot's, said that she made him understand that it was possible to fall in love with a woman who was not pretty."

Mead's entire book deserves your time. Mead's deft examination of how Eliot's biography shaped her fiction. Mead's brilliant assertion of the power books have to help us read our own lives. Mead's never-intrusive insertion of her personal journey as a repeated Middlemarch reader.

And, finally, Mead's lesson—Eliot's lesson—that, in a world of static images, Facebook portraits, video essays, beauty is not a closed one thing. Beauty moves.

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In the wake of the Jennifer Weiner profile, thoughts on....

It occurs to me, on a nearly minute by minute basis, that I don't know enough. My general sense of geography is poor (until this very morning, for example, I thought Pittsburgh was slightly more north than south within the Pennsylvania borders. Wrong.). Despite having married a Salvadoran man and raised a son who speaks some gorgeous-sounding Spanish, I never learned a second language, save for the rudiments of high school and college French. Don't ask me to add fractions with varying denominators on the fly. Don't ask me, as a contractor did, just yesterday, about the use of the superlative.

Hey. You're a writer. You should know this.

Wrong.

Most of the time, don't ask me.

I spend the majority of my life writing very specific reports and stories for highly specialized industries, and that gets me precisely nowhere at a cocktail party. And when I do have time for myself, I'm reading books that many people haven't heard of, books outside the mega-blockbuster mainstream. Otherwise, I'm writing them.

Useless.

But every week I try to make room for the New York Times and at least two articles and all the reviews in The New Yorker. I watch CNN at the gym. I read Philadelphia Inquirer stories. I read local paper headlines while waiting for the train. It may take me many weeks to get caught up, but I try, and yesterday afternoon, after the whole world had already read the 6,800-word Rebecca Mead profile of Jennifer Weiner in The New Yorker, I sat down and discovered it myself. I read it through, with startling speed.

There was so much about the story that I loved—Mead's careful read of Weiner's work, the depictions of my Philadelphia (I may not know much, but I do know how to claim things that aren't actually mine), the courage of Weiner to consistently say what she thinks. Weiner does an excellent job of keeping people talking, debating, engaging. She has far more basic bravery than I do, far more wit, far more savvy, far more style. Further, Mead wrote with intimacy and care. She paid attention. She did not summarily judge. She elucidated. She was both charmed and measured.

So now the buzz is all about the Jennifer Weiner profile in The New Yorker. It's about whether it was deserved, whether her politics are really just self promotion, whether the only way up, in a career, is by climbing over others.

That's not where the story left me; indeed, it left me thinking this: Unless we are highly calculating or infinitely talented, we end up writing what we are capable of writing—what our coagulated talents, experiences, childhoods, internal rhythms lead us to write. I may have once been asked to write a fantasy and tried very very hard (because, Lord, there was money in fantasy), but, baby, my book was another word for disaster. Ask my agent how many times I have tried to write a novel "for adults," and then ask her about the outcome: Too dark. Too static. Un-urgent. I'm not funny, and I could never write funny. I don't shop much, so don't look for brand names in my books. I am really good at parsing the plots on Law and Order SVU, but put me in the dark at the theater with some Tom Clancy film, and I'm the one turning to the good-looking son, saying, Huh? What just happened there?

I write books obsessed with landscapes both exterior and interior because that is who I am, that is what I know, that is the way words congeal in my head, those are the stories I can follow. I seek redemption on the page because I seek it in my own life. My characters are flawed because I sure as hell am. My characters seek, because I discover something that feels true inside that tempo. My stories are historical or scientific or somehow medical or full of old songs, because basically I'm just a good, old researcher at heart.

I write what I can write.

I write it the best I can.

I read the books that, for strange and personal reasons, speak to me.

That's all I'm doing out here.

I suspect it's what most of us are doing. Writing what is in us. Reading what we find we love. Telling the world of our little successes and finds along the way because if we don't talk about it, the work disappears. Our work. Their work. Literature, however you define it.

If we all agree to write the best books we can, if we all agree to set aside presumptive judgments, if we all agree that every novelistic label is in someway a ghetto-ization of the work (YA or crossover, fantasy or fantastical, literary or pink, realistic or comedic), if we all recognize that we are not the only dreaming, hoping writers in the world, maybe literature will become that place where winning never has to occur at the expense of others. Maybe we'll just look at another's very different work and say, Wow. I could never do that. And be grateful that somebody can.

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Writing by the Numbers/Twin Stories

On October 19th, The New Yorker published a piece by Rebecca Mead called "The Gossip Mill." Subtitled, "Alloy, the teen-entertainment factory," the piece revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations of the company that packages approximately 30 teen-oriented books each year, while also scouring the what if? horizon for new TV and feature film projects. Alloy is indeed a factory. Its products are designed to sell, built to please, crafted with an insider's understanding of what teens really want, and want right now. The Gossip Girl series is the brainchild of Alloy. So is The Luxe and The Clique. With concepts brewed in team meetings, plots crafted by committee, and authors hired to see the big concepts through, teens, apparently, are getting their own very special brand of berries.

As one who struggles along here on her own, writing from her heart, I read the story with more than a modicum of interest, wondering how I would fare in a write-by-numbers scenario. Not well, most likely, since I've yet to use (as I've already stated here) so much as an outline, and since one sentence inevitably (if painfully) leads me to the next sentence, as opposed to, say, a hyper-imposed yellow sticky or rules sheet.

Mid-way through the article, however, I was stopped in my tracks by these words. "Shandler says, 'More serious, angsty literature is where girls are right now. Morbid, dead-girl lit.' Alloy's next offering in this genre is a book called 'Wish,' which is to be published by Scholastic in January. The heroine of 'Wish,' Olivia Larsen, is a withdrawn 17-year-old in San Francisco whose outgoing twin sister, Violet, has recently died...."

Um, I thought. Hmm. Dangerous Neighbors, my historical novel, is about twin sisters, one of whom has died. It's serious, too, it's literature, and there's a fair amount of angst, but I would like not to think of it as morbid. Still, could I, in my five years of non-committee isolation with this book, my fifteen drafts, my word-by-word finding my way, my nose-too-buried-to-parse-out-the-leading-indicators, have inadvertently hit on some pop trend? Was that trend already augured by Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry another book about twin sisters, one of whom also dies?

Could I, in other words, be onto something?

An entire year will pass before my book is out on shelves. I'll just have to wait to see what is what by then. I'll spend the time curled up with this adult novel I'm writing, immune to the trends in that genre, too, never knowing, day by day, just where I'm going.

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