Change

This morning, driving home from spin class, I heard “Beauty and the Beast” on the radio and I didn’t cry.

Here’s why this is noteworthy to me:

When my son was in the fourth grade, he played the Beast in a school production.  He got the part mainly because he was tall and also because the director loved him.  He did not get the part because of his voice.  (The director told me, “He sings in the key of H.”)  Still, when it came time to sing the big song, he pulled it off.  And for years, every time I heard that song on the radio, I burst into tears.  Not because it’s THAT kind of song—even though it is—but because it reminded me of the boy he was:

Here we are at about that time: me rockin' the Howard Stern look, him being his wonderful self.

 

Last night I talked to my son on the phone.  He is crazy-busy with a new job and with helping his girlfriend start her business.  We talked about his nana, who has dementia and didn’t recognize him at dinner a few nights ago.  And about his grandpa, who is dying with supreme dignity in New York.  He has become a person whose advice I seek, a man I look up to.  I carry the little boy he was in my heart, but it’s not who takes my call once every two weeks.  And somehow, after many years, this has become okay with me.

Next week, my daughter and her boyfriend are going to Ireland, and I’m almost completely okay with it.

They are going to be hiking through tiny towns without phone access.  It will be raining.  They won’t have much access to the Internet.  I’m fine, except at three o’clock in the morning, when I’m not fine about anything.

When my kids were young, I couldn’t imagine that they would ever be able to cross the street by themselves, or drive a car, or drink alcohol, or talk to strangers.  And now, they live independent lives and I go to sleep every night not knowing where they are or what they’re doing.  And somehow, we’re all getting by.

I know this doesn’t sound like a big deal to a lot of people.  But maybe a few parents will appreciate knowing what I wish I’d known ten years ago: that one day, the hurt of their leaving will fade; that you will always miss them, but not as desperately as before; that gradually, your life will take on new contours, shift to a different shape, and you will be able to rejoice in it.

You won’t forget the way it used to be.  But remembering won’t make you cry as much.

Rage and Fear and Weariness

In this blog, I try to write about subjects that affect or relate, directly or indirectly, to my life as a writer of books for children.

But today I feel compelled to write about something I always swore I wouldn’t touch. 

Two days ago, yet another gunman with serious mental-health problems walked into yet another public space and started shooting.  By the time he was finished, he and twelve other people were dead, and many more were injured.

I am weary and heartsick.  And furious.  And terrified.  Most of us are, aren’t we?  I’m sure I’m not writing anything inflammatory or controversial here.  Aren’t we all just bloody tired of this?

When I read the victims’ names in a news account yesterday, I noticed that many of them were in their fifties.  It took me aback.  Perhaps, post-Columbine and -Sandy Hook, I have now come to expect that children will always be among the murdered.

As the day went on, I found myself thinking about the middle-aged dead, how they went to work as usual, undoubtedly preoccupied with the minutiae of an unremarkable day, without the slightest inkling that they would never see their families again.  But something else was bothering me, something at the edge of my conscious thought.  At first I thought it was some degree of over-identification I might be feeling with the victims, many of whom were close to me in age.  But that wasn’t it.

It took me a while to figure it out.  It took me thinking of my own adult children to realize what was bothering me so much.

All those middle-age dead people are somebody’s babies.  Tonight, somebody’s elderly mother is remembering something no one else does: sleepless hours in a rocking chair in the middle of the night, rainy days re-reading The Cat in the Hat aloud until she thought her eyeballs would pop out of her head, hours spent pitching balls and braiding hair and correcting spelling and lying on the grass, pointing out the cloud that looked like Abraham Lincoln.  Her heart is blown apart as surely as if someone had fired a gun into her chest.  She will never again be able to laugh deeply or take a joyful breath.

I wish this would stop happening.  I wish everyone—gun owners and non-owners, Republicans and Democrats, hunters and vegetarians—would get together and figure out a way for the world to right itself. 

Because this isn’t working.  This isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing.

Rejuvenated

The walls of my office are painted.

It was an interesting week.  In my last post, I complained about being frustrated by my lack of sales, by the effort of writing books that no one seems to want to buy.

Then, when I had to spend every minute of every day of the last week painting, I found that writing was constantly on my mind.

For the first time in years, I fell asleep dreaming of dialogue.

 

When I woke up in the middle of the night, I put myself back to sleep plotting as-yet-unwritten novels.

 

I am re-reading The Stories of Mary Gordon (Anchor, 2007) and finding that a great writer’s voice is supremely motivating.  I have always known this to be true, but it has struck me anew.  Gordon, like Alice Munro, writes about small, domestic moments in ways that render them urgent and important.  I particularly enjoy the stories about adults told from a child’s point of view.

At any rate, I heartily recommend taking a break from the daily task of setting words to paper in order to create in one’s self a near-frantic urge to return to doing it.

Or maybe it’s just the fumes.

On Home Improvement and Distraction

Robert and I are about to embark on a home-improvement project.  We are going to paint my office and the adjoining bedroom (aka my now-adult daughter’s old room), remove the carpeting and have hardwood floors installed, and have more built-in bookshelves built.  The end result will be an office/library.  I’m excited to start.

But I have a theory.

My theory, developed after years of watching friends endure the agony of home improvement—entire families living in hotels, eating take-out food for months—is that people put themselves through this misery to distract themselves from other life problems.  The reason I think this is true is that many of the people I know who have done this didn’t much like their spouse or their job or their children before they started building a family room, and hated them after it was finished.  And then started on the kitchen.  I found it staggering and mystifying.

So, as is my wont, I’ve given our project a lot of thought.  Am I distracting myself from something unpleasant?  Do I prefer the discomfort and limbo of having my office torn apart to something else?

And here’s what I’ve come up with: 1) I really need to fix up my office, and 2) I hate my career right now.

Okay, “hate” is extreme.  I love writing books.  But I hate working on a manuscript for over a year and then finding out that no editors want to buy it.  I hate devising perky, chirpy 140-character sales promos for my books on Twitter in the hope that a few of my followers will actually want to buy them.  Most of all I hate making the switch from full-time writer to part-time writer /part-time entrepreneur.  I don’t want to be an entrepreneur.  (If I did, I would have put my MBA to good use during the eighties, when it was actually worth something.)

So yeah, in the spirit of brutal candor, I must admit that I am looking forward to the diversion that comes with matching paint chips and gesticulating madly at non-English-speaking carpenters.

On the bright side, the paint currently on my office walls is the color of an Ace bandage.  It will be nice to look at something else all day while I am writing and not selling anything.

On Not Winning

Last week, I didn’t win a contest.

Earlier this summer, I entered the first three chapters of a Young Adult manuscript in a contest called (unsurprisingly) The First Three Chapters.  The first prize was e-book publication.

 

The reason I entered this particular manuscript was twofold: 1) I like it, and 2) my agent hasn’t been able to sell it.  She told me the reason lies (in part) with the fact that since the story takes place in 1968, it is considered “historical fiction,” and editors aren’t buying much historical fiction these days.

(So much about this just boggles my mind.  In the first place, how can 1968 be considered “historical”?  I was eleven in 1968: acing spelling bees, building model cars, outfitting Barbies, and falling helplessly in love with Peter Tork.  Isn’t there a difference between “history” and “the past”?  And also, even if 1968 is considered “history,” why aren’t editors buying books that take place in it?  Why must all teenagers be forced to buy books about vampires and slutty girls who drink too much?  Isn’t there any room for something else?)

I should note that the title of my manuscript is EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED THE SUMMER HELEN KELLER DIED.  The reason I should note this is that it is by far the best title I’ve ever come up with.

I should also note that I came in second.  Which is gratifying, although not as gratifying as coming in first.  I imagine.

The second-place prize is free copy editing with a company that specializes in bringing e-books to market.  I had my first conversation with the “publishing associate” at the company today.  He is named Shea and he is from South Carolina. He is very gentlemanly and has a cute accent, but he will not be my “publishing consultant,” to whom I will speak next week.

Despite all the aggravation involved in this process, I am planning to proceed with this new way of doing things, even as I nurse the secret fear that e-publication lacks the prestige of traditional book publication.  This, I know, betrays my own snobbery, which is based on my own preferences. For so long, I have loved not just literature, but books themselves: how they look, how they smell, the way they feel in your hands.  The fact that I have written seventeen of them is something in which I have always taken great pride.

 

I do not know if I will feel the same way about an e-book.

But the world is changing.  Three years ago, I couldn’t imagine needing a smart phone.  “Why do I need internet access on my phone?”   I used to say (snobbishly).

I will post about the process as it unfolds.  (I am very happy that my great friend, the artist Brigid Manning-Hamilton, will be designing the book’s cover.)   In the meantime, I will wait to hear from my “publishing consultant” and ruminate on all the ways that old preferences can yield gracefully to new ones.  (As it turns out, I now think Peter Tork is ridiculous.)

On Clothes and Writing

Someone I love very much—a member of my ex-husband’s family—is terribly sick, and all my sad thoughts are keeping me from getting much done.

I thought I would blog about it, but I can’t yet: it’s too new and too upsetting.

 

So instead, I’m going to write about clothes (because they are frivolous and distracting) and what they have to do with writing (because this blog is supposed to be about writing, at least tangentially).

Recently I was at a party where someone significantly older than I was inappropriately dressed.  By that I mean that she dressed “too young” and didn’t take her particular body into consideration.  I might add that this woman is extremely slender.  (Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that being thin isn’t the equivalent of being stylish, which you might think if you believe the dunderheads who yak about this in the media.)

You can tell that this lovely woman looks in the mirror and sees her twenty-five-year-old self.

This happens to be something I don’t do, because I like myself more now than I did when I was twenty-five.  However, I can sympathize.  I have stopped wearing various items of clothing because at a certain point, I caught sight of myself in a mirror and saw with horror that I was trying to recreate an image of myself that can no longer be captured.  Into the Goodwill bag have gone ripped jeans, boxy t-shirts, midriff-baring workout gear, super-high heels, anything with shoulder pads, tankinis, and short skirts that no longer flatter me, even though I am thinner and fitter now than I was in college.

(I did keep one dress—short, figure-hugging, and backless—that I believe I wore out to dinner in 1984.  Recently I tried it on.  Still fits.  Looks ridiculous.)

So what does this have to do with writing?

Yesterday I was parking my car in the garage and I noticed atop a box in the corner three copies of the magazine in which I was first published as a children’s writer.  (I cannot explain how I hadn’t noticed these magazines before, given that I park my car in the garage every day.)  I thumbed through the June, 1990 issue of Cricket and found “Elliot’s Tough Decision,” a story I have almost forgotten.

Of course I read it, wincing as I did.  Treacly, obvious, preachy.  I hit readers over the head with what I wanted them to learn. (Ugh.  Bad writer, no scotch.)  And the dialogue sounds as though it belongs in a terrible 1950s sitcom.

Well, okay, it was my first published work for kids, the beginning of a new career.   I was just starting out, learning the craft.  I consoled myself with the fact that I don’t do those things anymore.

That’s when I thought of my clothes and the way I have learned how to dress myself over the years.  I wasn’t one of those girls born knowing what looks good on her.  It took me a long time to figure it out.

The analogy doesn’t hold completely: some of what I no longer wear was once fashionable (whereas bad dialogue never is).  But I still say that there is an aspect of honing—and of ever-increasing self-knowledge and self-confidence—that informs both fashion and writing.

I’m hoping that by the time I’m in my seventies, I’ll get both of them right.

What I Found under My Daughter's Bed

Yesterday, Robert and I paid a hauler to come and remove my 24-year-old daughter’s few remaining belongings from her room.

Well, actually, more than a few.

Robert and I moved in together about four months after my daughter was graduated from high school.  She had already gone off to college by the time I left the house and the community in which she had grown up.

 

She was really mad about it.

Really, really mad.

I know this because she told me years later, not because she was exceptionally unpleasant about the whole process as it was occurring.  In point of fact, she was an amazingly good sport, helping to pack up her room, bringing a bunch of new friends home during her first fall break, enjoying our Thanksgiving and holiday traditions with her customary spunk and spirit.  But I now know that she was masking her true feelings, keeping them private, out of my field of vision.

Still, she managed, despite her sadness and anger at me, to build a life here for her late-teenage self.

Here’s some of what I found on the floor under her bed, after the haulers took it away:

A shoe box she had decorated, filled with makeup brushes and bottles of dried-up nail polish;

A crumpled Obama poster (she went to Occidental, where the president went for two years before transferring to Columbia; she campaigned door-to-door for him in Las Vegas with college friends);

A binder full of sheet music from her high-school choir classes;

About four hundred mini Milky Way wrappers;

A small ceramic shoe—a leopard-skin pump—that I had given her when she was a little girl (I used to buy her different styles of these shoes once in a while, as a treat);

A book about origami;

A postcard from her friend Shanna;

Two fuzzy pink slippers that didn’t match.

In the end, I let the haulers take her bed and her dresser and boxes and boxes of clothes.  I kept her bookshelves , at her request.  And her photos.  And her books.  (I don’t give books away, on principle.)  And her stuffed animals, because it’s like I’m still four and they’re still real, and I can’t, I just can’t.

But here’s the weird thing.  The things I found under her bed—the things she seemed to care about least—were the things I found the most moving, the most evocative of her, my little girl who became the most friendly, bubbly, talented, funny teenager and is now a college graduate, living on her own, working hard, paying her own bills.

So I kept those things, too.  (Except for the Milky Way wrappers.  Those I managed to let go.)

Robert and I plan to make the room into a library, an extension of my office, which adjoins it.  But it will be empty for a little while.  And that is fine with me.