Update on My Mother

I haven’t written about my mother lately, because I haven’t wanted to bore anyone with my own frustration and unhappiness.  But in the spirit of full disclosure, and for anyone who is wondering, here’s an update.

At 93, she remains at home, with 24-hour care.  I took her car away about 18 months ago when I had the feeling that she might be failing, and that is the one thing she has not forgotten.  She has been telling people that she is quite sure I hoodwinked her doctor into diagnosing her with moderate to severe dementia, that I am after her money, that I cannot be trusted.  (“I know her,” she said, shaking her head, refusing my ex-husband’s best efforts to defend me.)

 

She makes sure to remind me on a regular basis that I hurt her terribly by not dedicating PRETTIEST DOLL (Clarion, 2012) to her.  On once being reminded of the fact that I dedicated my first book (NATALIE SPITZER’S TURTLES, Albert Whitman, 1992) to her, she said, “I don’t care about that.  I want to tell you how I feel.”

I have tried to manage my own reactions to her by reminding myself of this statement.  My mother is no longer interested in lawyerly argumentation, a clear and evidential presentation of the facts.  (Actually, she was never much interested in facts, but she knew how to pretend that she was.)  She wants everyone to know how she feels, and how she feels is terrible, awful, as miserable as anyone has ever felt before.  It does no good to remind her that she has no physical pain of any kind, that she lives in her beautiful apartment with big windows overlooking lush oaks and willows, that she is free and able to take walks alone whenever she chooses, that she has two nice ladies who cook and clean and watch Maury Povitch reruns with her all day long and at deafening volume.  (“Gina, do you like Maury?  I love him!”)  My mother is mad and sad, and she wants that made clear.

Of course, she is also terrified, but this is something that she will never tell anyone, ever.  I am not sure she knows it herself. 

I struggle with whether to believe that my mother’s often-voiced disdain for and distrust of me is a symptom of her disease, or what she has thought of me all along.  Friends, doctors, and social workers have given me their conflicting views on this.  It’s hard to sort it all out.

My brother remains adversarial to me.  He and I had only the most marginal relationship for much of my adulthood, but I always held out hope that the boy who was my best friend during the first seven years of my life would re-appear.  Sadly, I don’t think that will ever happen. 

I was talking with a friend yesterday about how it feels to know that the only two surviving members of my family of origin don’t like me.  Basically, it is terrible.  But this is not a pity party.  I don't feel sorry for myself.  I am so lucky in almost every other way.

This is a picture that sits on my desk: my mother with my kids when they were babies.  It reminds me that we had so many good times together:

When my kids call my mother on the phone, she tells me, "They're magnificent.  Just magnificent."

They are.  

And I'm glad she still remembers that.

How To Name the Butler (and Everybody Else)

Naming characters is one of my favorite chores as a writer.

 

When I wrote stories as a kid, I was heavily influenced by my father, who was passionate about Charles Dickens.  I thought characters in books were supposed to have funny names.  This explains the title of my first novel (written when I was ten), Mrs. Wimpimple’s Trip around the World.  And I remember a short story I wrote around this time, featuring a butler named Smedley.

As I got older, I realized that funny names were best left to other writers.  I began to learn how to analyze fiction, and came to believe that characters’ names were supposed to mean something.  (I remember lots of conversations in high school about the significance of  "Hester Prynne" and "Arthur Dimmesdale.")  But the more I read, the more I realized that this wasn’t always true.  Sometimes characters were named Mary, and it wasn’t a heavy-handed reference to Christ’s mother.  It was just a name.

Writing as an adult, I realized that every action a writer takes (as a writer) is significant.  While characters' names may not be weighted with heavy symbolic meaning, they are chosen for a reason.  So, for example, in my novel The Hard Kind of Promise, Sarah is the girl who is interested in clothes and dancing and boys, and Marjorie is the girl who wants to direct science fiction movies and says things like, “I’m a little gassy” in front of the popular girls.

This is not to say that every "Marjorie" is socially awkward.  In fact, the two girls I’ve known named Marjorie were quite popular and socially adept.  But “Sarah” is a rather common name these days, and was therefore well suited to a girl who wanted to conform to social norms; “Marjorie” is old-fashioned and relatively unique, as was the “Marjorie” in my novel. 

Similarly, in Prettiest Doll, I needed a name for my protagonist that served several purposes and came up with “Olivia Jane.”  Olivia calls herself Liv, which I liked because it sounds strong, and Olivia is tough.  But Olivia’s mother (Janie) calls her Olivia Jane.  I wanted to make the point that Janie lives through her daughter and sees herself when she looks at her, and this was one of several ways I tried to accomplish this.

Right now, I’m working on my first fantasy novel.  I’ve assigned old-fashioned names to the characters that live in the small town where the story begins: April, Sebastian, Penelope.  I want the novel to have the feel of the classic fantasies I read as a kid, such as The Chronicles of Narnia and Five Children and It.  Of course, I decided to make up names for the characters that live on the enchanted island where much of the novel takes place: Philian, Zoolie.  This, as countless readers and writers of fantasy know, enhances one’s sense that the new world is unfamiliar and perhaps magical.

 

Making up names is a lot of fun. 

But someday, I want to write a book about a butler named Smedley.

The Five Stages of Watching Really Bad Reality TV Shows and What It Has To Do With Being a Writer (With Apologies to Elizabeth Kubler Ross)

I hereby admit that I have watched a fair amount of bad reality TV.  I watch while I am exercising.  Really.

Over the years, I have seen shows about drug addicts and alcoholics, young women who drink bleach and eat deodorant, people who hoard, people who discuss their peculiar sexual predilections, people who speak to the dead, people who cook, people who make clothes, little girls who compete in beauty pageants, little girls who compete in dance competitions, little girls who compete in cheerleading competitions, people who sell real estate, people who hunt ducks, people who rehab their houses, people who try successfully and unsuccessfully to lose weight.  And housewives who yell at each other.  In different cities.

Of course, I am embarrassed about this.  Of course, I want you to know that I never watch anything with Kardashians in it.  And I want to assure you that I also watch “Downton Abbey” and “Girls” and “Southland.”  Lest you think that all I do is watch TV, I want to add that I read voraciously and run and write and just generally have an actual life.

I was thinking about all this recently, and it occurred to me that there has been a certain emotional pattern to my reality-TV-watching career.

Boredom: I was doing kickbacks and there was nothing else to watch except “The View.”

Incredulity: How can you drink bleach and live?  How can there be a dead cat in your living room and you don’t know it?  How can you not be embarrassed to be yelling at your close friend because she said you aren’t really Italian?

Fascination: The mothers.  I can’t get enough of the mothers of little girls and the things they say, without any trace of irony or embarrassment.  I used to be the mother of a little girl, and I never said things like, “She’s so clumsy” or “Why can’t you be like her?”  I didn’t even think things like that, but if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have said them on national television.

Compassion: Some of the people who endure terrible anguish and embarrassment in front of millions of people captured my heart.  Like Ruby, a morbidly obese woman from Georgia who allowed cameras to follow her as she attempted to lose weight and deal with her (erstwhile) private demons.  Her show was cancelled, so I don’t know what became of her.  She had such a sweet and joyous soul.  I hope she is all right.

Empathy: Ultimately, I have started to feel that reality TV’s greatest “contribution” to the culture may be the way it encourages us to see that we aren’t all that different from each other.  The mothers of little girls on dance teams are about as obnoxious a group of women as I can imagine, but they all love their daughters and believe they are doing right by them, just as I would like to believe that I have done right by my daughter.  I don’t get hoarding At All, but I do get feeling so bad about the loss of a loved one that you lose your way.  The wealthy Orange County housewives may overdo the Botox and dress like hookers, but they’re really just trying to find a little happiness.  What’s not to understand about that?

Empathy is important to writers: it allows you to imagine what someone else’s life is like.  You can’t really be a good writer without it.  Maybe John Updike and Saul Bellow didn’t need reality TV to create believable characters, and maybe I don’t, either, but if “Duck Dynasty” is on and I’m doing crunches, then I’m going to watch it and not be embarrassed.  Really.

On Riding a Bike

Since I tore a ligament in my foot (which is really just another way of saying I sprained my ankle, but a torn ligament sounds so much more sports-injury-y), I’ve been riding my bike for exercise.

Every morning, I get up and go for a ride.  I ride through my own neighborhood, then walk my bike along a very short dirt path under a railway trestle and ride in another neighborhood for about an hour and a half. 

It’s a good work-out, but I don’t like doing it nearly as much as I like to run.

Today, as I rode, I tried to figure out why this is.  I remembered living in Berkeley when I was nine.  Every day after school, I would retrieve my three-geared bike from the garage (which I remember feeling at the time was an arduous procedure) and go for an afternoon ride.  I would pack a snack in my bike pack (a thrilling accessory purchased with my own money) and ride to the end of a court right above and behind the Claremont Hotel.  There, I would ride down a narrow dirt path to a cement staircase that rose high into the Berkeley Hills.  I would sit at the base of the stairs and eat my snack and watch the workers behind the hotel load food and ice into the kitchen.  And listen to the eucalyptus trees groan in an eerie, magical way as their trunks rubbed against each other.

Back then, I didn’t ride my bike for exercise.  I rode because I loved the intentionality and the power involved in getting myself somewhere on my own.  Riding back home, I took the descending hill at full speed, out of the saddle.  I didn’t use my brakes, and I didn’t wear a helmet.  I felt completely invincible.

Now when I ride, I wear a helmet.  (Of course I wear a helmet: I’d be a moron if I didn’t.)  I track my miles on an app.  I use my brakes liberally.  I worry about hitting one of those hard little eucalyptus gumnuts that litter the roads after a storm and losing my balance and ending up unconscious in the middle of the street. I futz around with one of twenty-one speeds.  I buy special bike-riding clothes.  I stop at stop signs.

It’s more fun the other way, the way it was when I was nine.  But I’m not nine anymore.  I don’t know how to go back to that other way.

Why I've Never Seen STAR WARS

I have never seen Star Wars.  Or any of the sequels.  Or prequels.

I realize that this makes me something of an oddity.

First off, let me say that I’m sure Star Wars is an excellent movie.  Please don’t write to tell me that I’m crazy or un-American or a bad mother.  I am unquestionably certain that any movie that manages to burrow its way into the popular culture with the tenacity of Star Wars has much to recommend it.

 

I know a few things.  I know about Princess Leia and the hair, about all the robots.  I know James Earl Jones was the “voice” of Darth Vader.  I mix up Yoda and Jabba the Hutt.

In order to explain why I’ve never seen Star Wars, I’m going to have to write for a second about Ronald Reagan.  This is the first (and probably the last) time I will ever do this on my blog.

 

Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was promptly dubbed “Star Wars” in the press, a fact that apparently irritated him. His Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was more sanguine, telling colleagues, “Why not? It's a good movie. Besides, the good guys won."

Here’s the thing.  I don’t believe in good guys.

The movies I like to see, the books I like to read, are about real people, who sometimes do good things and sometimes do bad things.  Some of my favorite characters in literature (Soames Forstye, from John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy trilogies) and cinema (Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey in American Beauty) do some very, very bad things.  I still find them lovable.  Why?  Because I get them.  And why is that?  Because I do bad things.  So does Tracy, my best friend of many years, who is as close to being a saint as it is possible for a human being to be.  So does everyone.  People are complicated.  Anytime I read about people who aren’t, I get bored.

Here’s another thing.  Winning.

If you’re one of the good guys in Star Wars, then presumably, you’re trying to win something.  Since I haven’t seen the movies, I can only surmise just what that something is.  Perhaps you are killing bad guys, or saving the world, or maybe even saving the Universe.  That’s wonderful.  I applaud you.

My life, as a person who is sometimes a good guy and sometimes a not-so-good guy, doesn’t look like that.  The challenges of my days include being a good girlfriend to my partner, being a good mother to my adult children, trying to take care of my Alzheimer’s-afflcted mother who thinks I’m after her money, making sure I run every day, making sure I write.  Each evening, the way I know I’ve won is if 1) the people I love still love me back, 2) my Achilles tendons aren’t throbbing, and 3) I’ve got at least two more pages of whatever manuscript I’m working on safely stowed away on my computer.

I don’t know from saving the Universe.  And when I'm reading books or watching movies, I want to learn about people whose challenges, while not identical, bear some sort of resemblance to mine.  Similarly, I'm more attracted to stories in which "winning" is more private--and possibly more ephemeral--than is an intergalactic journey to rid the world of evil.

Just in case you think I’ve never even tried to like a movie about good guys winning, I will let it be known that early in our relationship, Robert took me to see 300, and after ten minutes, I rested my head against the wall of the Orinda Theater and fell asleep.  I snored So Loudly that he had to wake me up, for fear I would distract the other moviegoers.

If I were going to have given the good-guys-winning genre a fair shot, I probably should have started with Star Wars.  But I already had a 30-year record of not watching it under my belt, and I just couldn't convince myself to break it.

On Writing and Pound Cake

Today, I’ve been struggling with the middle-grade novel I’m working on.  And then I remembered the pound cake.

This morning, I decided I was craving pound cake and I would expire if I didn’t get some.  But since I don’t eat wheat, it’s not as simple as driving up to the store and pulling an Entenmann’s off the shelves.

Still.   I had everything I needed: the best gluten-free flour on the planet (Gluten-Free Klippy’s: http://glutenfreeklippys.com), eggs, butter, milk, vanilla.  After a walk on the beach, I set about gratifying my obsession.

 

Within an hour and a half, I was pulling a beautiful—if decidedly homemade-looking—pound cake out of my oven.  This is what it looked like:

Okay, I can’t show you what it looked like, because I can’t figure out how to get the picture off of my phone.  But take my word for it: it was beautiful, with a lovely, buttery, brown top.  My kitchen smelled delectable.

The recipe’s final instruction was “Cool ten minutes; remove from pan.”

I couldn’t cool ten minutes.

I couldn’t cool two.

As it turned out, cooling ten minutes may have been the most important instruction of all.

Suffice it to say, the pound cake was not ready to leave the safety of its womb-like loaf pan.  It ended up in pieces all over the kitchen floor.  I didn’t cry, but only because I was too hungry (which somehow reminds me of when I asked my Lamaze instructor if I would pass out while I was in labor, and she said, “No, you’ll be in too much pain.”)

I didn’t cry, but I was disappointed.

Several hours later, here I sit, stewing over this manuscript, worrying that I haven’t described something properly, or that I haven’t created enough tension on page 67.

And then I remembered the pound cake.

And suddenly, I knew with epiphanic certainty that the best thing I could do for this manuscript is to let it cool.  

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?