If It’s Good Enough For George

In the February issue of Vanity Fair, my pal George gives his answers to the famous Proust Questionnaire.  Would you be surprised to learn his most treasured possession is a pen and a piece of paper?  That his hero of fiction is Atticus Finch?  That the thing he’d most like to change about himself would be to read more books?

Not a snarky answer in the bunch.  My George is all grown up.  And I admit he got me in the gut with his answer to “what would you change about your family?” when he said:  I’d make them young again.

He also surprised me.  His favorite writers are Mark Twain (I’d never have guess that one) and Paddy Chayefsky (who I had to Google).  Turns out Paddy is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist; and the only person to have earned 3 solo Academy Awards for Best Screenplay.  Paddy is a much respected and renowned American dramatist.

Paddy Chayefsky.  I love making these kinds of discoveries.

Now, of course, I can’t resist asking you a few questions.  Who knows what I might learn.  And I’ll play if you will.

_________

Favorite Writers and why (I’m limiting myself to 4, because you know this list could be looooooong):

William Styron — what style, not a wasted word in the place, with long flowing complex sentences I could read over and over again.

Joan Didion — particularly for her nonfiction, a structural genius who writes what she wants and doesn’t worry about what she’s not supposed to do.

Mary Karr — raw poetry in prose, most recognizable nonfiction voice in town.

Larry McMurtry — brilliant epic storyteller, creator of unusual and conflicted characters who drive seamless plots.

__________

Best last paragraph of a book:

Jane Smiley’s A THOUSAND ACRES
“And when I remember that world, I remember my dead young self, who left me something, too, which is her canning jar of poisoned sausage and the ability it confers, of remembering what you can’t imagine.  I can’t say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he chose never to remember — the goad of an unthinkable urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness.  This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others.”

___________

Favorite Writer You’ve Seen Speak in Person:  

Dorothy Allison.  Couldn’t take my eyes off of her.  She read a little, but spent most of her time on stage just talking like a real person, seemingly off-the-cuff, not a note in sight, about her writing and reading life.  Her remarks were like listening to a great poet put their everyday life into a regular conversation.  About a year later, I saw her perform her famous (which I didn’t know at the time) monologue, Frog Fucking, at AWP in front of hundreds of people.  It was shocking and hilarious and devastating, and the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.

___________

Your turn ….

The Quiet

I’ve gone quiet.

When I was little, I’d plant myself in a spare bedroom, the barn, the porch, the horse pasture, the library, or even underneath (yes, underneath) the living room coffee table and go quiet.

The best thing about setting foot on my mother’s farm was the nonexistence of noise.  Any noise.  Especially this time of year without the combines or crickets or howling coyotes, without the constant creak of the porch swing.  Even Buddy, her beagle mutt, holed up under the porch.

These holidays have been quiet.  And lovely.  Even with the Christmas crazies, my kids coming and going (which I loved!), even with Nat King Cole, Sinatra and Brenda Lee on the constant radio, even with a crazy puppy romping around the house, finding her big-girl-voice, it’s been damn (good) quiet here.

I’ve been keeping my mouth shut, reading and listening.

In THE HUNGER GAMES series, I discovered a story I would never have read, a story I can’t stop reading.  My 17 yr old niece called me a year ago and said, “Aunt Teri, you’ve got to read this book!!!”  And I said yep, sure, ho hum.  But now.  But now I’m almost finished with the 2nd book in this series, and had to run out like a crazed, obsessed nutcracker and buy the 3rd.  In hardback, full retail.  I couldn’t wait for Amazon.com delivery, that’s what fun these books are.  The great escape.  Team Peeta!

A friend sent me Ann Patchett’s THE GETAWAY CAR, a short e-book about the writing life, which I read in about a day.  Patchett’s memoir led me to her friend Elizabeth McCracken’s AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION.  I listened to it on audio, to McCracken reading her memoir, and it broke my heart and revived it, all at once.  I sat in my car, in the parking lot of Barnes & Noble, listening to the birth scene.  Tried to not-listen to it.  In the holiday rush of some jerk-off wanting my parking space (honk honk honk honk “Come On Lady!”) I crumbled under the pivotal scene.  That book led me to re-read (or rather, listen on audio to) Patchett’s memoir, TRUTH AND BEAUTY, which I read years ago when it first came out.  And then I found all of these articles about how pissed off everybody was about this book and, suddenly, I was pissed off.  At ALL of them.  If you’ve ever had a friend that consumed you, if you’ve ever sacrificed your peace and quiet for someone else’s hell, read (or listen to) this book.  And then google “Ann Patchett Lucy Grealy” and go read the bullshit that came after.  I’m in your corner, Ann Patchett.

We went to see a great movie this week:  THE DESCENDANTS.  A quiet little story where nobody is who you think they are, a story I wish I could write.  I ran back to the store and bought the paperback, retail $13 flippin’ 50, by Kaui Hart Hemmings.  What a discovery, this writer I’ve never heard of.  Can’t wait to read her book, her book with the story I’ve already seen.  There’s an interview section in the back:  “In a way, I’m writing all day,” she says.  “Reading other people’s novels is my work.”  Reading is a great thing, “because in a way you’re engaging in this strange, silent, conversation.”

On Audible.com. I found an old (really old) recording of Mary Karr’s THE LIAR’S CLUB.  It’s abridged, and the sound quality is awful, but who cares.  It’s spectacular, in the way that only the Texas of Mary Karr is spectacular.

I’m feeling quiet in this new year.  Like I want nothing more than to hole up in my dining room (aka my office) and shut it all the hell out.

_________

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You’ll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.     —Frank McCourt

Don't let this quietly sleeping, long-legged angel fool you. She dreaming up her next adventure.

Top Reads of 2011

For the first time in years, I am all over this holiday season.  I’ve decorated my house, found a gorgeous new wreath for front door, and hung the stockings.  We’ve watched the first half of It’s A Wonderful Life.  The tree has been up for almost 48 hours and the puppy has not knocked it down or eaten the ornaments or been electrocuted by the lights.

As this year winds itself down, I’m taking a look back at my top reading pleasures of 2011.  Here they are, in no particular order:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________

In making my list I made some discoveries:

1.  I’m growing up.  My preferences have become less highbrow (what I’m supposed to read) and more about what I enjoy.

2.  I read far fewer books in 2011 than I thought I did.  I spent more time engrossed in author interviews and great, long essays.

3.  I tend to read and re-read my favorite authors.  I need to give the lesser-knowns more of a chance.

4.  I don’t like fiction as much as I used to.  In fact, I’m reading a National Book Award winner now and I feel manipulated.

5.  The memoir is not dead.  In fact, it’s barely got it’s sea legs.  Peoples’ real lives, and how they choose to make them into art, are endlessly fascinating.

What did you discover about your reading self?  Have any favorite books to share?

FTF

Shhhh.  This blog is still on holiday, but I have to thank those of you who gathered up to send me this.

God knows I love fountain pens, and if you could feel this one — this one! — in your hand and see the ink on the page …. pure writerly pleasure, that’s what it is.  My scribbles don’t look so scribbly.  Y’all are spoiling me.

_______________

I’ve always felt my real teachers are other writers (all of you included), and I spent Friday and Satruday with a couple of favorites:  Joan Didion and Mary Karr.

Since I just read Didion’s BLUE NIGHTS, I watched her latest Charlie Rose interview.  I also fired up her clip with Charlie from 15 years ago, in 1996.  Watching the 2 back-to-back taught me much … and broke my heart.  If you’re feeling your inner student, you can find her master class here, along with a montage of other Writers On Writing.

If you’re working on a memoir and feeling sassy, or even if you just need to shore up your courage (and who doesn’t?), here’s the Mary Karr interview.

The two lines I needed to hear most today?

1.  After saying she threw away the first 2,000 pages (two thousand!) of her last memoir, LIT, the interviewer asked her why.  Her simple answer:  It was boring!

2.  Her advice to newer writers:  Never show your work to anyone unit you think it’s finished.

And now … I’m off to work toward FTF.

____________

* Comments for this post have been turned off.  Enjoy the rest of 2011.

If We Took A Holiday

Mid November and it's still Fall.

This blog is officially on holiday.

Why so early?  I’m trading blogging for jogging (yes, it’s true, I’m already up to 2 miles without toppling over), and I’ll be spending any and all writing time with my manuscript.

Happy holidays everyone!  I’ll see y’all in the New Year.

If I get lonesome or bored, remember I've got these ragamuffins for entertainment.

Joan’s Voice

I read Joan Didion’s latest book in one day, pretty much in one sitting.  Once I started there was no way to stop.  Very much like THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING in form, the rhythms and repetitions in this new release will make you feel like you’ve fallen into a gently swirling eddy.  An interesting analogy considering she’s writing about grief and loss.

I’ve always been bothered by critics who dislike her voice, her stance as an outsider looking in on her experience.  They complain there’s not enough of her in the story, that she’s too remote and cold and distant; that, for an essayist, she doesn’t give nearly enough.  I would argue this slight remoteness of voice is what draws me into the narrative.  It’s magnetic.  I believe her.  I trust her.  I’m invested in what she has to say because I feel the friction in her voice.  In her last 2 books, for example, she’s writing about her grief and emotions and failings and pains without falling into a soupy mush of sentimentality.  And at the same time I can feel her resistance to revealing so much about herself.  This tension is what makes it work.

Many a memoir writer could take a lesson from Joan Didion.

What did I like most about BLUE NIGHTS?  It’s rumination on guilt-infused grief.  Many reviewers have focused on the constant repetition and the narrative shift: that the story opens with Quintana at its center, but ends with Joan’s contemplation of her own aging.  I see something completely different.  This is, simply, a story of mothers and daughters.  It opens with Joan’s focus on her maternal guilt; her worry that she was never a good enough mother, that somehow, in putting her career first, she left Quintana too often alone and uncared for.  It ends with Quintana’s guilt that she, in her early death, will leave her frail and aging mother alone and uncared for.  And time runs out before either of them has the chance to get it right.

I’ve read as much press as I can find on BLUE NIGHTS.  Here are the only 2 not to miss:

 

From The Washington Post

Nathan Heller’s article in The New York Times Magazine.  Heller doesn’t merely review the book, choosing instead to discuss the paradoxes in Joan’s writing style.  “To readers who admire her work, she is a journalist of rare candor and style, a writer who unflinchingly peels back the smooth surface of public narrative and the skin of her own psyche, opening both to scrutiny and giving magazine writing a lambent glamour in the process. In the eyes of less enthusiastic readers, she’s a histrionic prose artist, striking poses of stylish despair in precious, incantatory sentences and drawing ominous conclusions from a Ouija board of ironic detail.” 

And NPR’s Fresh Air interview with Joan Didion.  I encourage you to listen.  Listen to this voice for yourself.  You won’t be disappointed.

(If you don’t have time for either, there’s a very good short interview here, at The Washington Post.)

Hair Flammable, Light Fire

This is me at 10 years old. Before I knew bad things could happen to 10 year olds.

11/11/11.  Or, all those 1’s equal 6.  Here’s my 6.

1.  PENN STATE.  The Wall Street Journal published the grand jury presentment in its entirety.  If you haven’t, you need to read it.  By the end, you will have zero empathy for any adult involved.  So many people knew this was going on.  For years.  And we continue to wonder why kids don’t tell.  Every adult who knew Sandusky was abusing kids and didn’t go directly to the police should be treated as (alleged) criminals.

2.  THE GRAD STUDENT.  Let’s take the graduate assistant witness. As Maureen Dowd said in her column, “It would appear to be the rare case of a pedophile caught in the act, and you’d think a graduate student would know enough to stop the rape and call the police.”  This grad student was no kid; he was 28 years old, a grown man.  Did he stop the crime?  No.  Did he contact police?  No.  He called his dad for advice, then went home.

3.  TWEET TWEET.  That any of us give a rat’s ass what Ashton Kutcher is tweeting — and that it’s news — is just one more nail in my coffin of hating the very idea of Twitter.  I know, I know, some of you will tell me there are benefits, and I’m sure there are, but anytime you give us humans a tool to communicate this quickly and publicly (i.e., before thinking) not enough good can come of it to justify it’s existence.

4.  WORD PLAY.  Do you ever hear the word “twitter” and think “fritter”?

5.  THE THINKERS.  Somebody sent me, via e-mail, this thing called “The Lawyers Party.”  At first I thought it was a mistake; then, one of those too-circulated internet jokes.  But no.  You can find it here at the American Thinker.  Apparently all that’s wrong with America is that there are too many lawyers.  That George W. Bush was not a lawyer, and that Barack Obama is a lawyer explains everything.  I don’t know about you, but I’m so glad that’s cleared up!  Now, about the economy, jobs, healthcare, …..

6.  THOSE 53 SECONDS.  When I watch the Rick Perry debate video, the one where he’s stuck for those 53 seconds, I get no joy.  None.  The rising elation, the almost-snickering, on the faces of all the other candidates as Perry stands there blanked-out, makes me cringe.  These people want to help us?  They want to be the leaders of our country.

Is your hair on fire this week?

Beauty Queen

JoJo is 5 months old this week.  Time for me to start Cesar Millan’s next book on hell-raising puppy-training…

My JoJo is a hoss of a baby girl, all muscles and giant feet.  And she’s pretty sure her real name is Beauty Queen, since that’s how I call her for mealtimes.  “Here Beauty Queen!  Are you hungry?”

Well duh, she must think.  I’m a lab.  I’m always hungry!

Did anyone see this bit the other day about a black lab puppy riding (and surviving) atop of a moving train?  Her new family has named her Boxy.

Or how about this video of the Golden Retriever welcoming her military mom home from Afghanistan?  Beautiful, for sure.

Women In White Plaster

On Friday night we went to a reading at Gallery House, a co-op spot for artists.  (I’ll be reading there in January and was on a recognizance mission.)  The gallery is on a side street in downtown Palo Alto, a street lined with quaint little restaurants and wine bars and kitschy shops and a used bookstore.  The bookstore is, sadly and of course, going out of business.

We only stayed for the first 2 hours of the event — hard chairs and no moving air being cited — but we did hear a few fabulous readings.  Andrew Tilin led off with his new book.  As much as I didn’t think I had any interest in this topic, by the time he was finished I was sold.  It’s about doping in sports, yes.  But it’s also about trying to recapture youth in our youth-obsessed culture, and about what it means to be an aging man in today’s culture of Steroids and Viagra.  Perform perform perform.

The next 2 readers were women:  Thea Sullivan and Jacqueline Berger.  Poets.  One had published a few books and the other was, like me, published in a few good journals but with no book in hand.  Yet.  They read beautifully, and their poems were both funny and heartbreaking and real.  I could have listened to them twice as long —- and I rarely say that about a poetry reading, so you know they were particularly good.

And then there was the guest artist.  A photographer.  He set up 4 large framed photographs on easels behind him and, for the next many minutes, just about bored me to tears.  I felt for him, poor guy, having to following the brilliant raconteurs before him.  He opened with “the origin of photography” and I thought, Oh dear god, he’s only got 7 minutes to talk.  Sure enough, by the time he got to himself and his work — his beautiful work — his time had long been up.

But here’s the deal folks.  None of this mattered one whit.  I didn’t buy a single book at this reading, but guess what I did open my checkbook for?  The photographer had barely finished speaking when I leaned over to my husband and said, I have to have the photo on the far right.  I can’t explain it, but I know I have to have it.  And then I barreled my way through the crowd before anybody could beat me to it.

It’s not some grand panorama of nature.  It’s not of real people.  It’s not  fantastical in color or boldness.  It was taken in — are you ready? — a plaster factory.  Funny what grabs you.

Now this gorgeous photo graces the top of my bookshelf.  And you know what?  It looks like it belongs, like it’s always been there.

Sometimes You Gotta Dance

Writers.  My people.  You know how most of the time we’re all by our lonesome, waiting with a bulldozer’s patience for our best ideas to flow through and out, all smooth-like?  How accustomed we are to the time alone, thinking, stewing, churning so we can get exactly what’s driving us insane sparkling in our imaginations onto paper?

And you know how, sometimes, we writers get the rare chance to stand up and read those best ideas?  Out loud, in front of other humans, on the spot-lit stage, like the shiny-happy-people?

Well, come January, I will be shiny and happy.  While nothing terrifies me more than a quiet audience, hands in laps, waiting for me to speak words into a microphone, I’m honored to have been invited to read at an upcoming literary and art showing.  I’ll do you proud.

Maybe I’ll watch this video a few times to get up my courage.  I figure I’m the horse in her stall, though I deeply long to be the ostrich towards the end.  Who do you long to be?