New England
Thursday, April 19, 2007
I can comfortably give a reading in front of hundreds of strangers (okay, well maybe not exactly comfortably, but I can do it without feeling like I'm about to die of a heart attack). But put me in front of a bunch of friends and family--particularly the strange and unpredictable amalgam of friends and family who show up in distant cities for readings--and I find myself--in the midst of a passage--erupting into a full-blown panic attack. Take the other night in Boston: at the Brookline Booksmith, one of my favorite New England bookstores, I gave a reading to a nice crowd (my karmic payback after suffering in the Bay Area) and scattered throughout the audience were the following: my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, two sisters-in-law and a brother-in-law, my 9th grade English teacher, and my favorite aunt.
It was my favorite aunt--or perhaps the combination of my favorite aunt and my 9th grade English teacher--who tipped the balance. I was so happy they were there--thrilled really--but then I realized that I had to read in front of them. From my new novel, Black & White. From passages in Black & White that contain graphic images, nudity, and even the word fuck. It was the word fuck that did me in. It comes fairly late in the reading--on the last page, the home stretch--when my protagonist's father asks the gallery owner who is displaying provocative photographs of his young daughter, if the gallery owner thinks he "gives a flying fuck" about what other people think as he takes his daughters out of the gallery.
Well, as my heart pounded, my throat threatened to close up, and my mouth went dry, I spent the better part of the reading trying to figure out how I was going to avoid using the word fuck in front of my favorite aunt (did I mention that she's 83? did I mention that she's a deeply observant Jew?) and her friend who she brought along (also in her 80's, also yada-yada) and every once in a while also catching a glimpse of my 9th grade English teacher and wondering how Black & White was measuring up to A Separate Peace in his mind.
When I finally got to the offending passage, my eyes quickly skimmed the line. I figured I could say damn. Damn was definitely better than fuck. Wasn't damn in the bible? Or maybe that was the new testament. "I don't give a damn" I found myself reading. So it was a little bit flat. So it didn't have quite the same impact. So what?
Waiting Never Works, or Perils of the Book Tour
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Even though I don't believe that anyone up there is micro-managing my life, even though I don't believe that God finds me parking spaces, I can't help but believe that waiting for something to happen is the surest way to be sure that it won't happen. This has proven to be true again and again. The writer's life is full of waiting. There's the good kind--the patient, quiet waiting for a character to reveal himself, for the story to unfold. And then there's the bad kind: waiting for news. Waiting for reviews. Waiting for things to happen.
I remember, last summer, my husband-the-screenwriter was waiting for a phone call from Hollywood. Now, Hollywood has invented new forms of torture--an entire glossary of terms-- for the waiting writer. For instance, "the weekend read". The weekend read does not, in fact, mean that the producer/star/director will actually read said work over the course of the weekend. It simply means that the manuscript or screenplay is on a pile somewhere, perhaps on the floor of an office, with the vague intent on the producer/star/director's part that, eventually, it will be cracked open. On some weekend. Some day. So my husband (and therefore I) was waiting and waiting for a call from Hollywood. A lot was riding in the balance. Our mortgage, for instance. And do you know when that call came? When he was driving to dinner, along a country road with virtually no cell service, and at the crest of a hill is cell phone rang and it was his agent calling with good news from Hollywood. Was my husband waiting--at that exact moment--for that phone call? Of course not. Maybe he was thinking about dinner. But if he had been concentrating on his cell phone, willing it with all his might to ring--it never would have.
During publication, way too much of the writer (okay, this writer's) life is taken up with the wasted time of waiting. The internet has not done us any favors in this regard. There's always Google, and Google News, and Nexis (which my teaching job allows me to access) and a dozen other websites to be browsed when in fact there are better things to do. It would be safe to say that anything would be better. Staring into space would be more productive. Or taking a walk. Or a bath. I remember Grace Paley--who was my writing teacher at Sarah Lawrence--once telling a class that she did her best work in the bathtub. I thought she meant that she got into the hot, steaming water with a note pad. It was many years before I understood: she meant that she took a lot of baths. That ideas come when the mind is relaxed and empty.
Which brings me to the crux of the matter. When a writer is in the midst of publication--when a writer is even lucky enough to be on book tour--the mind is not relaxed and empty. The mind is tortured, waiting. And waiting for what? The reviews come. Some are raves, some are pans. The news dribbles in. That magazine is running the essay you'd hope it would run. That foreign publisher sends a lovely book jacket. The truth is that none of it is enough--and I doubt very much that there could possibly be such a thing as enough. My ex-agent once told me that she had a writer-client who was #3 on the bestseller list and he was concerned about #2 and #1. At the time, I was baffled and thought that writer was a fool. (Well, I still do, a little bit.) But I understand the moral of the story, which is that when you've poured everything you have--your life's blood--into a book, there is no enough. There are only things to be checked off a mental list with relief. And therefore, there is no writing going on. No ruminating, no musing, no peace. I was on the phone with a good friend yesterday, a novelist who just had a book come out last summer and hasn't started working on a new book yet. "The good news," she laughed, "is that it will be that much longer before I have to go through publication again."
Pathetic Reading Story
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Last night I gave a reading at Book Passage, a lovely bookstore north of San Francisco. I've heard of Book Passage for years and have always wanted to read there. And I should preface this by saying that the story I'm about to tell is in no way Book Passage's fault. They are a stellar bookstore, and I hope to read there again some day in the future, when I have Anne Lamott's career. Now, I've been collecting pathetic reading stories for as long as I've been giving readings. All writers collect them. They are our battle scars. We share these stories with each other the way foreign correspondents do:
How about that time in Sudan?
Remember that road block? I thought we were goners.
One such reading was at a strip mall in Westchester during a blizzard -- I believe it was for my third novel, Picturing the Wreck -- and no one showed up. I sat alone at a table for an hour, until finally a woman walked up to me and asked: "Are you Dana?" Then there was the one in Boston--also for Picturing the Wreck, as it happens--where the event took place in the way, way back of a store above a food court, and I couldn't find where I was supposed to read, and my audience couldn't, either. I had a few relatives there --and I was about to cancel (the shame of reading to only family members was too much for me) but then two fans showed up, who had driven an hour. So I read.
Well, last night I read to five people. The manager of the store, a man with his eyes closed in the back row, a woman my age in the middle of a sea of empty seats, and my two cousins who I haven't seen in a couple of decades--a delightful couple who must have been thinking: she makes a living at this?
Book Tour
Monday, April 9, 2007
Every time I land in LA I feel like I'm walking into a sliding doors version of my life. I've never lived in Los Angeles though in aggregate I've probably spent a year here in dribs and drabs--a few weeks here, a month there. It's a city I know well, but only as a visitor. My husband and I regularly entertain fantasies of moving here--especially because it would be an easier commute for him, as a screenwriter, than the CT/LA trips that he makes regularly. But what would it be like to live here? Certainly my days wouldn't be like these few days: beautiful hotel on the beach, room service coffee with hot milk first thing in the morning, meetings and phone interviews and even a lunchtime trip to the LA Barney's New York -- which may well be my favorite department store in the world. Michael and I had lunch at Barney Greengrass --on the roof of Barney's in Beverly Hills --which bears little or no resemblance to the Barney Greengrass of the Upper West Side, which has catered every Yom Kippur break-the-fast we've ever had, as well as my son's bris and my mother's shiva. That Barney Greengrass is one of the only places left where the Upper West Side feels like the Upper West Side, complete with cranky, overwhelmed waiters. But the Bevery Hills Barney Greengrass has a Cobb Salad on the menu and happy, attentive surfer-waiters, and the conversation drifting around us was a pleasant blur of Hollywood speak. I actually heard the word "characterization" at the next table. You never hear that word in Connecticut. Could we live here? Today--as I look out over the Pacific, at a view we could never afford, as I get ready to go downstairs and meet my agent for a glass of good white wine, as I contemplate tomorrow's yoga schedule instead of the solitary unrolling of my mat--today, I think perhaps yes.
Publication Day
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
It's one of those strange, disorienting days--the day your own book hits the stores. I remember, when my first novel was published, thinking that something would actually happen, like...I don't know...a bit of swelling orchestral strings in the background of my life. Black & White is released today, and aside from the glorious bouquet of flowers sent by my agent, it feels pretty much like any other day. It's appropriate that last night was the first night of Passover. Why is this night different from all other nights? Well, on Passover it's because we eat matzo instead of leavened bread, because we recline at the table instead of sitting up...but I'm pretty sure that no one at any seder table around the country was saying: because Dani Shapiro's new novel is being published tomorrow!
Actually, I taught at Wesleyan last night--didn't even bring matzo for my students. Because I am a Bad Jew. Because I couldn't come up with another night to make up the class, as I am about to go on book tour and am just back from two and a half weeks in Europe and my time is not my own. I'm an even worse Jew because I didn't send my son to Hebrew School on Sunday precisely so that no one would ask him what his family was doing for the first seder, since the answer would have been: eating eggs and a salad at eight o'clock at night and then calling the in-laws to wish them a good yontef. Oh, well. I was weepy about this last night--holidays always make me miss my dead parents, my dead aunts and uncles, and bring home to me the fact that the family I have is the family I've made--but I had to remind myself that next Passover I will not have a book coming out, and we will be around the seder table with my wonderful in-laws, the whole raucous family I now call my own.
