Happy Birthday to Harriet

Last week marked the 50^th year since the release of Harriet the Spy, the groundbreaking novel by Louise Fitzhugh.

Here’s an article about it in Publisher’s Weekly: http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-book-news/article/61119-harriet-the-spy-celebrates-50-years-of-sleuthing.html

When I first read Harriet the Spy, I was about nine.  For the first time, I recognized myself in print.  I didn’t look like Harriet (although I appreciated that she chose to wear glasses, a condition foisted on me by virtue of bad eyes), and I lived not in Manhattan but in Berkeley, California, which struck me at the time as woefully pedestrian.    I went to a rather large public school, my father was a surgeon, and no one in my neck of the woods had either nannies or cooks.  I did not have a Sport or a Janie in my life: my best friend was Susan, who I think wanted to be a cartoonist.  (Now I see this as admirable, but at the time, I desperately wanted a friend who planned on blowing up the world.)

Nothing about me looked like Harriet.  And yet, I saw myself in her.  What I saw was a girl who understood what writing was, what it meant, why it mattered.  A girl who valued her interior life more than her social life and had to struggle to make room for the friends she loved a lot.   Someone who thought she didn’t care what other people thought about her but, in fact, did.  Someone who genuinely liked herself, even as she was able to take meticulous note of her flaws.

 

Of course, I tried to spy.  I couldn’t.  Houses in Berkeley were too exposed, and there were no dumbwaiters.  Also, I was shy and terrified of being caught.  In that, I was not like Harriet.  It was a source of profound disappointment.

I tried to like tomato sandwiches.  Ultimately, I had to admit that I liked pizza more.

But I did write everything down.  I looked at people wherever I was, and I wrote about them.  And that was how I found myself, how I finally realized who I was.

I strongly urge everyone who hasn’t already done so to read the book.  It is still wonderful, and you will be a better person for having met Harriet.  She remains a treasure.

Stupid Questions

“Beware,” I told my daughter, “of the question-and-answer session.”

We were sitting in the audience, waiting for the Billy Collins reading to start.  And I knew from experience that a lot of people in the packed auditorium had questions.  Burning Questions.

 

Also, I knew that not all of these questions would be Smart Questions.  In fact, not all of the Questions would be questions at all.  Some of them would be Ways to Show the Writer that the Question-Asker Is Really Smart.

(Okay, so as an adult, I know I’m supposed to say that there’s no such thing as a stupid question.  But at a writer’s talk, that’s not really true.)

During his marvelous reading, Mr. Collins addressed some of my concerns.  “I think the worst question I’m ever asked is, ‘What is your favorite letter?’” he said.  The crowd groaned collectively.

When he finished reading and took several courtly bows, my daughter whispered, “Oh, my God.  I’m so nervous about the questions.”

“Calm down,” I said.  “It’s not as though he doesn’t know they’re coming.”  But I knew what she meant.  Sometimes you cringe, just knowing that other people are going to make fools of themselves.

Some of the first questions were okay.  I think “Which of your own poems is your favorite?” was in there, as well as “Who were your literary influences?”  (Coleridge).  All seemed to be well until a woman on whom Mr. Collins called cleared her throat.  I knew we were doomed.

“Sometimes,” she began, “I tell people you are my imaginary boyfriend.”

The audience laughed.  Collins looked embarrassed.  My daughter was looking into her lap.  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.  “Oh, my God.”

The woman went on to say that she had told her son she was going to a poetry reading and he had said, “Oh, well, then it won’t take very long.  You’ll be back in half an hour.”

More laughter.  More all-body wincing in the seat next to mine.

The woman went on again.  She was trying to say that what she loved about Collins’ poetry was the way it was conversational, accessible.  What she actually said was, “Other poetry seems, like, really deep and complicated.  Yours is just, like, on the surface.  Why is that?”

I’ll bet Billy Collins loves having to explain that he does, in fact, have a Ph.D in English over and over and over again.  And that “accessible” doesn’t mean “on the surface.”

Clearly, though, he’s an old hand at keeping the question session to a minimum.  Which was a relief to everyone.

I should have tried to ask my question—“Can you speak to the difference between free verse and prose?”—but I was too shy.

Ultimately, even after what Collins said during his talk, someone raised his hand and asked, “What is your favorite letter?”

“Oh, ‘L,’ I guess,” he answered, sounding weary.

I think he said ‘L.”  I was too busy squinching my eyes closed and whispering “Oh, my God, oh, my God” to be entirely sure.

Writers Talking

Tonight my daughter and I are going to see Billy Collins speak.  I am very excited.

The first writer I ever heard speak in person was John Updike.  He was marvelous.  He said that when he came to California in the summer, he was always struck by how brown the hills are, so unlike New England’s verdant lushness.  But, he said, Californians needed to relish their state’s own particular beauty and not wish for it to be anything other than what it was.

 

I think about that every year.  Truly.

In the early 80s, I saw John Irving speak at the College of Marin.  He read from an as-yet-unpublished novel that would become The Cider House Rules.  He seemed a little taken aback by the rousing welcome he was given by the crowd, which included many women, one of whom raised her hand and asked, “Do you drive a Volvo?”  At this, he recoiled visibly.  I was embarrassed for the woman, who thought she was being funny.

Lorrie Moore was shy and self-protective.  I heard her speak just as Birds of America was published.  She said only one of the stories was based on actual events in her life, but she wouldn’t tell us which story it was.  At the time, I was pretty sure I knew: I had read “People Like That Are the Only People Here” in The New Yorker and thought that no one—not even Lorrie Moore—could imagine something so harrowing out of thin air.

I’ve seen Annie Lamott speak several times.  She is known as the sort of writer women flock to hear.  She’s the best friend we all wish we had.  (Actually, my best friend is the best best friend there is.  We went to see Annie Lamott together once or twice.  Afterwards, we always said we wished we could invite her out for hot chocolate.  The way everyone else in the audience wanted to.)

Patricia Polacco writes children’s picture books.  She speaks at over 300 schools a year, a feat I find almost unimaginable.  I was mesmerized by her.  She has a rare gift: the ability to speak to children and adults at once.  She personifies the distinction between a writer who gives talks and a true storyteller.

 

The funniest writer I’ve ever heard speak is Elinor Lipman.  She makes her own writing sound screamingly funny when she reads it.  For years after I heard her the first time, I imagined her reading whatever I was writing.  If it sounded funny, I left it alone; if it didn’t, I revised.

David Sedaris is a marvel in the meet-and-greet department.  My daughter and I saw him at a small indie bookstore that was jammed to the rafters with fans.  After his wonderful reading, he stayed to sign books, and I think he engaged personally with every single person in the room.  He had a sweet conversation with my daughter about Australia (where she was headed in a couple of weeks), and then asked me my name. When I told him, he went on for a bit about how he likes to sign books with some reference to the person's name, but mine reminded him too much of "vagina."  We had a good laugh.  He ended up drawing me an owl that is thinking "I love black people!"  

There have been other writers over the years—too many to mention—but these are the ones who stand out.  Always, I remind myself how difficult it is for someone to stand in front of an audience and read what she has created, what she has thought important.  It is first and foremost an act of bravery.  I know from experience.

If Billy Collins reads “The Lanyard,” I will bawl like a baby.

*

Addendum: He did read "The Lanyard."  I didn't cry (but only because my daughter would have been annoyed).  

You're Not the Boss of Me

One of the things I love about being a writer is the fact that I make major work decisions alone.  I decide what I am going to write about.  I don’t have a boss sending me memos with subject lines like “Suggestions for Next Project.”

Given this, it’s easy to forget that other people besides me are involved in the production of books.

For the past few months, I’ve been writing a middle-grade fantasy novel.  This is something entirely new for me, a self-imposed challenge I was anxious to take up.  I found myself uninspired by the things that usually interest me: contemporary kids, real-life problems, small lives examined and laid bare.  Fantasy—a genre I enjoyed as a kid—beckoned.

So far, I’ve been enjoying the work.  I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary fantasy and writing every day.

Recently I learned that the story I’m writing belongs to a sub-genre of fiction called “portal fantasy,” which means that characters are able to pass from the real world into the fantasy world.  Think Narnia.  Think Oz.  As a child, I was enchanted with the notion that there were secret doorways allowing entry to a hidden world.

I also learned that publishers aren’t buying portal fantasy.  I learned this from a post called “Portal Fantasies and Cycles of Desire,” featured on the weblog MAKING LIGHT, written by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, both editors of fantasy and science fiction at Tor Books.  Here’s the post:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/014433.html

This makes me fucking bananas.  (Sorry.  I try not to swear on this blog, because I know sometimes children read it.  But come on.  I mean, come on.)

Never mind the fact that so many of the best fantasy novels of all time involve passage into another world.  (ALICE IN WONDERLAND?  Hello-o-o?)  Never mind that the most transformative children’s book of the last several decades focuses on a character who learns that he is a wizard living in a muggle world.  Never mind that, as my friend Molly Joss, publishing industry analyst and author of several non-fiction books (www.thejossgroup.com) asks rhetorically, “In fact, isn't reading fiction, all fiction, falling through a portal into another world?”

I think the Nielsen Haydens have it right, and in time, the tides will shift, and publishers will want to buy portal fiction again.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep writing. And not because my fabulous agent, Jennifer Laughran, read forty pages and said she liked it and to keep going.

I’m going to soldier on because if I were to give up, then I’d be allowing somebody else to tell me what I can and cannot write.  I’d be trying to write to the market, which I think doesn’t make for very good books, and which I also think is odious on principle.

I write what interests me, what excites me, what makes for the kind of story I like to read.   I think that means I suck at marketing myself.  (And as an aside, if I hear one more writer talk about “branding” herself, I’m going to gouge out my eyes with a fork.)    But I’m okay with that.

I’d love to hear from other writers, editors, people who buy books, and children who read them.  What do you think about all this?

Voice

My favorite aspect of writing is creating voice.  I like for each of my characters to have a distinctive way of thinking and speaking.

 

Creating children’s and teenagers’ voices is especially challenging because their vocabularies are necessarily limited.  Little kids don’t know a lot of words; teenagers often speak inartfully (“Like, um, yeah.”) and profanely.  (There are only so many times you can use “bitch” and “asshole” in a young-adult novel.)  Somehow, you have to give the impression of child-speak or teen-speak without relying too heavily on the words children and teens actually use when they are sitting at your dining room table telling you why peas are disgusting and why, by the way, you should buy better snacks and you don’t know anything.

Another part of this is conveying character through voice.  The way a character speaks is the best way for a writer to tell readers something about her.  Is anybody watching this season’s “The Amazing Race”?  You know those two brothers, Jet and Cord?   Their preferred exclamation is, “Good gravy!”  What does this tell us?  That they are polite (at least on camera), that they are unafraid—proud, even—of being different, that they keep their cool under intense pressure.  All this from just two words.  (I should say that while Jet and Cord seem like lovely young men, they would be terrible characters in a book.  I have no idea which one is which.  Real people can be similar to each other, but characters have to be distinct and well differentiated.)

My favorite writers use voice to good effect.  Mona Simpson (ANYWHERE BUT HERE) comes to mind.  Also Philip Roth and Jennifer Egan.  Nicholson Baker’s THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY is an adult book about a nine-year-old girl, written in the third person.  Baker gets nine-year-old girls so well that he actually disappears. You forget the book is written by a middle-age man.

 

It’s not just that Baker gets nine-year-old girls.  He gets this particular nine-year-old girl.  Nory is kind to a classmate who is bullied, she worries about aphids that are eaten by ladybugs, she is suspicious of kids who “tell stories a certain way.”  She is at once like all other nine-year-olds and different from all other nine-year-olds: her very own particular self.  It is an achievement.  (I recommend the book if you love language and character, not so much if you are a fan of plots.  Not much happens.)

I am working on a book right now that takes place in Missouri.  People in Missouri speak differently from people in California.  I want to get it just right without beating readers over the head with it.  Not easy, but that’s the fun part of being a writer.  (The not-fun part is sitting in front of the computer for two days trying to figure out whether Danny should like Cap’n Crunch or Fruit Loops.)

It doesn’t sound like much, but if you like reading about believable, authentic characters who, somewhere along the line, turn into believable, authentic people, it’s a big deal.

Like, um, yeah.

Genius

I am reading Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist, and finding it wonderfully entertaining. Every night I look forward to getting into bed and diving in. It is like having a conversation with a funny, damaged, massively literate friend.


Nicholson Baker is a remarkable writer. I am certainly not the first person to say so, but I may be one of the first people to have recognized it. He was in a creative writing class I took in college. (I attended a women’s college, Bryn Mawr, which has a cooperative relationship with Haverford College, where Baker went.) I noticed him on the first day of the semester. He was very tall and very handsome, and I had never seen him before (which was noteworthy in and of itself: the two colleges were quite small and “tall and handsome” [at the same time] was a rare and highly visible attribute among Haverford men).

The class was taught by Christopher Davis, who told us that each of us would be required to submit eight pages (I think) of fiction, which would then be critiqued in class. I set confidently to work and produced a short story called “Summer on Goose Island.” Just writing the name fills me with horror. It was the story of a Tragic marriage, with lots of fog-swept sand dunes and execrable dialogue. I was rightly eviscerated in class for its many flaws, none of which I remember, as I threw the story away immediately on returning to my dorm room.

What I do remember, though, was being handed Nicholson Baker’s writing sample. It was twenty-six pages long and I thought, Oh, good Lord. I imagined that it was going to be an obvious attempt at suck-up-ery, that this Nicholson Baker, whoever he was, thought that twenty-six pages was his sure-fire route to an ‘A’.

I don’t remember what he wrote. I just remember that on page six, I looked up and said to my boyfriend, Oh, my God.

I don’t recall how the story was critiqued. I think Christopher Davis knew that he was in the presence of greatness. Nobody said much, except another Haverford student who made an ass out of himself by saying that the story “took too long to get going.” (There is one of these in every writers’ critique group I have ever been in.) Nicholson Baker didn’t say a word. He nodded and made a few notes.

After class, I went over to him and babbled something about how he was a genius. He smiled politely and said, “Thanks very much.” In that instant, I knew that Nicholson Baker was destined to travel in circles different from those I would inhabit. He was already a grownup, albeit with talents and sensibilities very few grownups possess. I knew that I wanted to be a writer; I knew that I was probably good enough to become one. But I also knew that I would never approach the deft, sure-handed brilliance that Nicholson Baker effortlessly commanded at the age of twenty.

It’s okay. I’ve accepted it.

Some people are just that good. And what I learned by being in class with Nicholson Baker is that most of us are not. Most of us have to work really, really hard and be very, very lucky.

And isn’t that just the greatest name for a writer? How did his parents know?