Dani Shapiro

The Process

2008-08-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a student, or a beginning writer, will tell me that she only writes when she feels inspired. I've given this a lot of thought--and practical application--over the years, and have come to the conclusion that if I only wrote when I felt inspired, I would have written, at the very most, one extremely slim volume by now. No. From the beginning, I have kept regular hours. Monday to Friday, 9-5, more or less. Weekends and holidays off. The idea of working in the middle of the night, or on a sunny Saturday, or on a holiday, makes me feel too out-of-step with the rest of the world. And, as a writer, I already feel out-of-step enough.

The process of writing Devotion, though, has been different thus far than any of my previous books. It's very stop-start, push-pull. It's by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Friends tell me that I say this about every book, but this time it's true. The nature of this memoir/journey dictates that I be extremely solitary and quiet in order to do the writing, but at the same time live in the world and experience life to its fullest. I feel excruciatingly open--as if I have one less layer of skin than everyone around me. Sensitized, quivering, alert to every nuance. It's sort of a great way to live, though some times it gets a bit too intense. But again, that's the nature of this book. I'm traveling inward, diving deep into the middle of the middle of life, then trying to articulate what it is that I find there. Whoever said that's supposed to be easy?

John Gregory Dunne once described writer's block as a failure of nerve--nothing more, nothing less. Nothing mystical about it. When we write, it means that we have overcome our own fears, our own inner censoring voices, if only for that minute, that hour, that day. And then the minutes and hours and days pile up, they accrue, sticking to each other as they become weeks, months, years--stories, poems, novels, memoirs in the making. In writing Devotion, I am learning that anew. Each day, I overcome my resistance. I watch the self-defeating questions float through my mind: why me? what right do I have? why do I think I have anything to say about this that hasn't already been said? On good days, I treat these questions the way I treat random thoughts during my meditation practice. Oh, yeah. You again. Okay. Thanks for sharing. Now go away.

Commotion

2008-08-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

Samson arrived yesterday--twenty pounds of soft, furry puppy energy let loose on our usually calm home. We all seem to be adjusting. Michael was up at 5:30 in the morning walking him in the first light of dawn; Jacob and I were up at 7:00, walking him again; and Zeke doesn't quite know what hit him.

On top of which, today begins the process of our driveway being redone--all quarter of a mile of it. That is, if the guys show up. This is perhaps the single most unsexy way to spend a lot of money--up there with re-doing a septic system. But the small bit of crumbling gravel in the center of our driveway has grown larger with each passing year, and has now become a man-eating pothole. So we have to do it. Instead of...a tennis court. Instead of...those mid-century modern chairs I've been keeping my eye on, we're getting a quarter mile of asphalt. Here's the driveway. If you look closely you can see the pothole, along with a deer.

All of which is to say, it's probably not going to be much of a writing day--or a writing week, for that matter. The holiday weekend is coming up, along with its parties and house guests and barbecues. Not Writing is usually an incredibly frustrating state for me, and so I'm resolving to live my life and enjoy these moments: a new puppy, a new driveway, a healthy and thriving family getting ready for a new school year. As I am always aware: it could have been otherwise.

Friends and Animals

2008-08-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

I have quite a few writer friends, and quite a few blogger friends, but the ones who really put me to shame are my writer friends who regularly keep up their blogs. I know, I know, I'm working on a new book. But so are they! I know, I know, I'm also a mother trying to get her kid ready to go back to school--but so are they! This morning, as I paid my usual visit to their witty, up-to-the-minute blogs, I resolved to blog more often myself. Really. I know I've said that before, but I mean it this time.

Jacob's back from camp. During a single bout of homesickness midway through the two weeks (it turns out that there's a reason camps don't like parents to call or visit) I had what felt like a eureka moment. It went like this:

"Honey, would you like to take Fudge, the bunny, home with you at the end of camp?"
Jacob turned to me, a smile lighting up.
Michael stared at me over Jacob's head, as if to say excuse me, but what-the-&%$#-are you thinking?

Here is a picture of Jacob right after we promised him Fudge, the bunny. In the upper right hand corner, you can see a little bit of the bunny's behind.

After returning home, my eureka moment faded. A bunny? What was I thinking, indeed. We have a terrier. Terriers are bred to kill small, rodent-like creatures. And besides, in the words of my most animal-loving friend, bunnies suck. So I thought and I thought. I had promised Jacob the bunny, hadn't't I? How could I break a promise like that? I needed to come up with something better, something bigger than the bunny. And so, the second week of Jacob's stay at sleep away camp, I spent a lot of time on the internet looking up various other possibilities. The end result? Well, we're picking him up tomorrow. Meet Samson. The newest addition to our family. And here's hoping that Fudge the bunny has found a happy, terrier-free home.

Bittersweet

2008-08-10T06:45:00.000-07:00

So my son Jacob, age 9, has now been at sleep away camp for a full week, and I have been on an emotional roller coaster. On the one hand, yippee!!! It has been fun, kind of exciting, to be able to go out in the evening (or stay home) without a ticking clock. We've stayed up late, watched movies, had dinner out with friends without even a downward glance at a wristwatch. And mornings have been lovely. I've never been a morning person, and motherhood did not change that. It changed my habits, but not my nature. Waking up in the quiet (as opposed to being shaken awake to hear the news of last night's Red Sox scores) has been a bit of a vacation. And one more thing: this newfound space in my head has been very good for my work. I'm writing like a demon, and I feel like I have my book in my grasp. A fantastic feeling, and one I haven't felt in a very long time. I'm holding the whole thing in my head. I can't hold my child in my head and my book in my head at the same time, so my brain is usually in a state of whiplash. Child, book. Book, child. But knowing that he's at camp, that he's having the time of his life on someone else's watch, has made my brain settle down, like sediment floating to the bottom of a clear glass of water. Book, book, book.

But...and you knew there was a but coming by the title of this post...it's a bittersweet feeling. I suppose this is what motherhood is: an endless series of leave-takings, of two people learning to let go. From the moment he left my body, he has been letting go and I have been letting go. First, weaning him. Then, leaving him with a babysitter for the very first time. Pre-school. Kindergarten. Sleep-overs. And now, two weeks where he is on his own. Is he brushing his teeth? Showering? Is he as happy as he sounds on the phone? Have I taught him well enough to make his way in the world of sleep away camp without his parents hovering?

We'll see in a little while. We're going to visit him today, half-way through his two weeks. We'll bring candy (upon pain of death), we'll see what he's been working on in this creative arts camp, we'll have lunch with him--and then we'll hug good bye. Michael and I will drive away, back down the dirt road. We'll be happy and sad. Excited for him, nostalgic, but with a twinge of unease. Keep him safe, I will think to no one in particular. Have fun, take care, be well.

When I get back home, I will stand in the doorway of his empty (neat, clean) room. I'll take a deep breath, wipe the tears from my eyes, and then I'll walk through our quiet house, both relishing the quiet and longing for the sound of small feet running.

A Room of One's Own

2008-08-01T13:07:00.001-07:00

Since this blog is named after a favorite Virginia Woolf book, Moments of Being, and since so much of what I understand about life I learned from the great VW, I find myself moved--not for the first time--to consider the importance of a room of one's own. Mostly because, at the moment, I don't have one.

Crazy, I know. I think that my single best writing situation was during the writing of my first novel, Playing With Fire. Just as early success can be a curse, having the perfect writing room at the age of twenty-six can also be its own kind of curse--since that particular writing room (or anything like it) will probably never again exist in my life. For six years, I lived on the top floor of The Dakota, famously on the corner of Seventy-Second and Central Park West. (My reasons for living in The Dakota are too surreal and unlikely to chronicle here. For the curious, it's all explained in my memoir Slow Motion.) Anyway...the top floor of The Dakota had once been the servants quarters of the building. I recently heard that these rooms are selling for literally millions of dollars. But back in the 1980's I lived in a string of such rooms, approximating a railroad flat, with my little Yorkshire terrier Gus, and a very nice struggling actor-waiter boyfriend. A friend of mine, owner of a palatial apartment on a floor down below, happened to have an extra room (an extra room!) on the top floor that he had forgotten all about. He lent it to me. It was perhaps twenty paces down the hall from my apartment. Every morning, while still in my pajamas, I trotted down the hall with Gus, coffee mug in hand, and settled into my spartan room, furnished only with a desk and a chair. There was no internet--or if there was, I didn't yet know about it. There was no phone. I didn't yet have children, and so saw no need to be reachable at all times. The window overlooked the interior courtyard of The Dakota, a glorious, cavernous space unlike almost any other in the city. Across the courtyard, a man who kept a similar schedule to me also worked in his warren on the top floor. He kept his window open in all but the most freezing weather, and his cigarette smoke drifted outside. I never met him, or knew his name, but in his own way, he kept me company.

Leaving home, walking a few steps away while still in pajamas, to a blank slate of a room with no possible intrusion of the outside world--it was a little bit of bliss I was too young to appreciate. Now--a scary number of years later--as I write this, I am sitting in Starbucks in Southbury, Connecticut. Around me are other people working on laptops, as well as moms with young children who make me all too aware that I am not, at the moment, with my own child. The music is okay--not too intrusive. But lord knows, it isn't a room of my own.

Of course, I could rent an office. I have rented offices in the past. In fact, Michael and I have a two-bedroom apartment in the town near our house where he works, and where theoretically I should be working too. But the truth is, it isn't a room of my own. It's a room with my husband with whom--love him as I do--I cannot share work space. The place I work from--the blank slate--requires a kind of anonymity. It doesn't necessarily require silence, or even solitude. But I do need to be able to forget that my domestic life exists, even for just a few hours. Strangely enough, lately I have been working quite well at home. I've cleared my desk so that camp/doctor/school forms are not in direct view. I have moved the pile of invitations and correspondence to the side. So when I sit at my desk, I am closer to the blank slate, and with a little bit of luck and tenacity, usually I can push myself to the place I need to be.

Blogging and Writing

2008-06-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

It is obviously the case that I have not been blogging. As much as I love to blog, there is a very good reason for my absence--which is that I have actually been writing. And lately it has felt to be that blogging and writing are uneasy--if not impossible--bedfellows. And not that I'm making excuses, but I have also been busy promoting the newly released paperback of Black & White. Promotion and writing are also not such a great combination. But I'm thrilled with the beautiful paperback edition by Anchor Books, which the New York Times Book Review featured in last week's Paperback Row. It's been a pleasure to do some terrific radio and to visit over the telephone with book clubs such as the Literary Lyres--a group of sorority sisters who live in the San Fernando Valley. Talking on the phone with book clubs is one of my favorite things to do. The members always have great questions, and I don't have to get out of my pajamas! In this particular case, the Literary Lyres prepared a feast of black and white food, and wore black and white attire, as you can see.

As summer gets underway--which also means longer days to work as my son gets on the bus to camp at 8 in the morning and returns (happy, dirty, exhausted) at 5--I am hoping to have the stretch of hours I need in a daily way for my new book. I don't mean that I am sitting at my desk writing for six, seven hours. Instead, I am doing yoga and meditating (yes, meditating) every day. I am immersed in a stack of books ranging from Walden to Karen Armstrong's Buddha, to a biography of Menachem Schneerson. And I am driving around the countryside more than I should, given gas prices, because there's something about the act of driving that frees up my mind. And freeing up my mind is what it's all about these days.

Teachers

2008-04-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

"When the student is ready the teacher will appear" has always seemed, to me, to be one of those tired phrases, repeated in the absence of originality or imagination. It could be put in the same category as "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" (puh-leez!). But lately I've been thinking of the people who have appeared in my life at precisely the moment I've been ready for them. Right around the time that I started thinking about my new book, Devotion, I was seated next to Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, at an author event. Stephen is a scholar, a yogi, a great writer, a former psychotherapist, and a classically trained pianist. (Crazy but true.) He's also the scholar-in-residence at Kripalu, a yoga and meditation retreat in the Berkshires. I had long contemplated visiting Kripalu, but couldn't quite bring myself to go. And there he was. Stephen Cope. At a charity library event in Litchfield County. The student was ready and her teacher appeared. Coincidence? Destiny? Had it simply happened because I was ready? Or perhaps--if I hadn't been ready to meet him, I would have turned the other way and not noticed him at all?

I went to Kripalu to study with Stephen, who was teaching a workshop with Sylvia Boorstein. Even though Sylvia is famous in the world of contemporary Buddhism, I wasn't familiar with her. Again, since starting DEVOTION, I have been thinking deeply about how Judaism, my yoga practice, and a developing affinity for Buddhism can co-exist without turning into a spiritual supermarket mumbo-jumbo. As I browsed in the Kripalu bookshop waiting for the first session with Sylvia and Stephen, I came across one of Sylvia's books, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist. The subtitle is: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist.

When the student is ready...

And lastly, my dear friend Abby invited me to join a small Torah study group who meets each month at her apartment in New York. Abby's friend, Rabbi Burton Visotsky, one of the great scholarly minds in modern Judaism, leads the group. After a childhood spent in yeshiva learning religious rules and laws without context, being exposed to a thoroughly relevant and open-minded discussion of the Torah is nothing short of a revelation.

I guess this student has been getting ready. It makes me wonder about all the moments in my life when I have been surrounded by teachers, and it has been me, blind, unable to understand the value of what's being offered. Because one thing this process of writing DEVOTION is teaching me is that teachers are always there, if we know where to look.

Writing Process

2008-04-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, it's been a while. I've been immersing myself in my new book, Devotion, and every last bit of energy has gone into the writing. Also, I spent most of the month of March in Italy, first teaching at Sirenland, our writers conference in Positano, and then traveling to Venice and Florence with Michael and Jacob. But now, settled back home, I seem to be reaching some kind of rhythm now, so I intend to blog more frequently, I promise.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about how the writing gets done. Yesterday I had lunch with a wonderful friend who is working on a book. He described to me the process by which he enters his writing day--a process that seemed at once perfect and beautiful and thoroughly impossible for me to imagine. Essentially, he thinks, eats, sleeps, breathes and dreams his book and nothing else. This friend of mine lives alone in the country. He doesn't have a partner or children. I found myself, listening to him, thinking of my life P.J. (pre-Jacob) and how I used to just roll out of bed and get to work in a half-asleep state, when my inner-censor hadn't yet woken up and started to assert herself. I turned off the ringers on all my phones. There was barely email or internet -- at least not the way there is now, a constant intrusion. When my friend had finished describing his writing process, he asked if mine was similar.

"It used to be," I said.
"So how is it different? What changed?"

I described a typical weekday morning. Being woken up to the Red Sox standings; jumping out of bed; packing a lunch box with an assortment of healthy and unhealthy food, a constant calculus; making breakfast; cajoling (okay, sometimes screaming at) a little boy who would rather stare into space dreamily than put on his socks and shoes. And more than all the facts of these mornings, the feelings beneath the facts. The love, fear, rage, frustration, hilarity, you-name-it, that goes into every single morning so that by the time I sit down at my desk, I have already lived an entire day, complete with a full spectrum of emotions.

So I have learned to adapt, over the years. To re-start. It sometimes worries me, how very much it requires for me to re-start, to find the place where my mind is once again uncluttered and unconfused. For the past number of years, this process has required a lot of yoga. An hour of yoga a day, by myself, on my mat in front of the fireplace in my bedroom. I have recently added to the yoga a meditation practice of anywhere between five and fifteen minutes, a practice I learned at a recent retreat with the brilliant teacher Sylvia Boorstein. So now that's an hour and fifteen minutes, say. And then, after all that is done, I need to stay in the quiet. Which means no email, no internet, no phone. So hard, to stay unplugged! Many days I fail miserably. I go straight from the yoga mat to my desk, I click on the email icon and there I find the outside world. Next thing I know, I'm reading the Times online, or I'm looking up summer camps, or Googling the man I sat next to at dinner last week, or browsing net-a-porter to see if there are any Jimmy Choo boots on sale. Need I say that this is not conducive to maintaining an uncluttered mind?

But I am aware and I am working on it. The days I manage to walk downstairs after yoga, drink a bottle of water, make myself another cappuccino, then putter back upstairs and sit in the corner chair where I write--the days I manage to get a foothold in my work before the outside world rears its head--those are the best writing days, and the ones I learn from.

The Liar's Diary

2008-01-29T06:07:00.000-08:00

I know the title of this post sounds like it might be about finding yet another piece of my mother's psyche buried on our basement (first the therapy tapes, now the diary!) but alas, it is not. (I promise to write more about the tapes once I can bring myself to listen to them.)

Today's post is one of hundreds you'll see if you're trolling around the blogosphere (stop procrastinating now!) about a writer named Patry Francis and her novel, The Liar's Diary, which is being released in paperback today. Patry--who I do not know--has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and is busy fighting for her health, rather than on the road promoting her book. A call went out to writers, bloggers, publishing industry people, asking if we could all spread the word about Patry's book. And it strikes me that this is what community is all about.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

2008-01-28T06:09:00.000-08:00

Which is, of course, the title of Carl Jung's memoir. Though to call it memoir isn't quite right, because as Jung writes himself, he is not interested in memory per se, but rather in "interior happenings", or the unconscious. He writes:

"All other memories of travels, people, and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings...everything else has lost importance in comparison. Similarly, other people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection."

Reading this, I felt a shock of recognition. That feeling of having known someone before, of an intense familiarity--has happened a few times in my life. It certainly was the case when I met Michael. "There you are," the words rang through my mind, my heart, my very body when we first shook hands. It was clear, irrefutable. I knew him already. But how? And from where? I don't know what I think of any of this. Jews don't believe in past lives--do they? I find myself thinking a lot, these days, about the whole notion of karma. Had Michael and I already been together? Or kept apart? Did we have unfinished business? What does destiny mean? Is it something over which we have no control, or something we create for ourselves as we move through life? Here's another quote, this one from Rabbi Hillel:

"Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character, for it will become your destiny."

I find this a more comforting idea, because it makes me feel like I have some say in the matter. When I sit and attempt to meditate, as I have been doing most days, I see that my mind is basically a dumping ground for thousands of random thoughts; if I don't observe them on a daily basis, I am at the mercy of them. They will lead me around and around like a dog chasing its tail.

Gotta make that hotel reservation.
Did I write that check for the sweater?
Jacob needs new underwear.
Can we afford to pave the driveway this spring?
Michael needs a colonoscopy.
When's the writers strike gonna end?
I need a haircut.

This is a typical chain of thoughts (no wonder they call it monkey mind!) during meditation, and it goes nowhere. Is this what Jung means by "interior happenings"? I know this much: I know that, for me, writing a book is an act of faith. In fact, for many years it is as close to an understanding of faith as I have been able to get. When I am in front of the page, my thoughts become less chaotic. My mind grows silent. Something emerges.

Beginning

2008-01-12T07:11:00.000-08:00

I think it was Joseph Brodsky who said "Endings can be difficult, middles are nowhere to be found, but oh, to begin, to begin, to begin..." A novelist friend passed that quote along to me many years ago--writers pass these tidbits of wisdom along to each other like talismans, we hold onto them the way a devout person might hold onto a scrap of prayer--and I remember feeling relieved that Brodsky, that most writers, have this difficult relationship to beginning something new.

As I embark on my new book, Devotion, I am reminded anew of how hard it is. Occasionally I've had a student ask me whether she should become a writer. Most memorably, once one of my Columbia students presented me with her dilemma: writing, or investment banking.

Investment banking! I practically yelled at the poor thing. By all means, investment banking! And what I meant is this: if you think you have a choice in the matter, choose the other thing. Being a writer isn't a choice. It's just what you are, like it or not.

I forget, each time. (In this way, beginning a book is a bit like childbirth. Who would do it again if they remembered?) I forget that a year passed during the time I tried and failed to begin Slow Motion, and that the click happened when finally a journalist friend suggested to me that, since it was non-fiction, a memoir, which meant I already knew the story, I should outline it. I forget that when I began Family History , I thought the first thirty pages were so boring, so awful that I deleted them from my computer, and eventually had go fish the one hard copy out of the garbage. I remember that by the time I began Black & White, my head felt like it was about to snap off my neck I was so wound up. And so, now I am here. Searching for the way back inside, to the place where I can think, to the place where I can allow myself to feel whatever is necessary in order to find this book.

Restless Spirit

2007-12-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

A friend's father recently passed away. I've never liked that expression, passed away, preferring the hard simplicity of died. But I suppose I want to soften this post, before I've barely begun. So. Died. Yes. Last week, while she and I were having lunch, she looked across the table at me, trying to put words to her thoughts and feelings. She'd had an immensely complicated relationship with her father.

"I supposed I preferred it," she said, "when his spirit was contained in his body. Now he's gone, and it feels like his spirit is unleashed."

I knew what she meant, felt it with a shiver. When my father died twenty-two years ago (he has now been dead almost as long as I knew him) I felt as if I had a guardian angel, someone watching over me, giving me signs, helping me along the way. I don't know if I actually felt this, believed it--or made a decision to believe it. But I do know this much: my father's death formed me, as a young adult, turned me into a person I wanted to be, a person I respected and liked. Before taking an action about which I was unsure, I would ask myself whether it was something that would make my father proud. I lived my life by the answers to those questions, and slowly I grew up, built something out of the sadness and dust of my childhood.

But when my mother died just a few years ago, I found I was having a very different experience. Like my friend, I worried about my mother's unleashed spirit, even though I'm not at all sure I believe in spirits. I didn't want her looking over my shoulder. I avoided the whole notion that she might be able to affect my life in any way, from beyond the grave. I tried not to consider the logic that whatever laws of the great beyond would apply equally to my father and my mother. That if he was able to keep an eye on me, so would she. Still, when something particularly good would happen in my life, I'd credit my father. And--fairly or not--when something bad would happen, I'd secretly fear that my mother had a hand in it. I remember something a therapist told me, as my mother was dying: "There are two kinds of people in the world," he said. "People who would, at the moment of their death, choose to press a button and take the whole world with them, and people who wouldn't."

I'm thinking about all this because of a discovery my husband made a few days ago. In our basement, for the past years since my mother's death, we've kept many boxes of slides and micro-cassette tapes that I hadn't been able to bring myself to look at or listen to. At times, it has felt to me that our basement is throbbing with it all, with the detritus of my mother's life, the stuff of my parent's marriage. Finally, Michael started to take a look. He began to go through the tens of thousands of slides, throwing away the meaningless vistas--mountains, oceans--and keeping the ones with the people: me with my father in London, outside the Dorchester Hotel, dressed for all the world like a five-year-old princess in a burgundy-and-white checked Marimekko coat. Me, at the same age, at my half-sister's graduation from Brandeis. He picked a micro-cassette at random, and played it to see what it contained. He came up to my office, sat heavily down in the chair near my desk.

"Your mother recorded her own therapy sessions," he said.
"What?"
"She recorded herself in therapy," he repeated.

So that's what I'm left with. Hours of my mother's voice, on tape, as she talked to her therapist in the early 1980's. I've started to listen, and I can hardly bear it. The sheer weight of her unhappiness. What daughter gets to have this knowledge of her mother? How do I explore it, how I think of it? In the years since her death, she has become more human to me. In the absence of her overwhelming presence in my life, I have found room to be more sympathetic to her. She was a profoundly miserable woman who could never get at the source of her own misery. She skated along life's surface, stumbling, tripping, hurting herself and others--never able to stop. To look, really look. Instead, she pointed her finger, always blaming. The source of her frustration and unhappiness was out there. Not inside, never inside. These therapy sessions, which she taped for some inexplicable reason, are the closest to the inside that she ever got.

I remember the first time I ever heard the expression: The only way out is through. Intuitively I got it. I had to go through. I had to take a hard, hard look at myself. I somehow knew that there was freedom in that self-examination. In the willingness to say: this is me. And part of being me, the most uncomfortable part, is being my mother's daughter. I can't get away from it. I can only try to understand.

Different Selves

2007-11-14T06:10:00.000-08:00

Something about being on the road is turning me into a daily blogger. Well, at least I'm blogging two days in a row, which is a record for me. I'm writing from Boca Raton, where yesterday I spoke to nearly five hundred women at a country club luncheon, as part of National Jewish Book Month. Now, I figured that a few of the guests would probably know me slightly, given the amazing reach of Jewish geography (we are a people who love nothing more than establishing a connection, no matter how slim) and the fact that my Aunt Roz, a big golfer, had lived in Boca. But what I hadn't counted on was the huge overlap between the tri-state area and Boca, as if, at a certain age (retirement) the entire Jewish population migrated south to this very particular place.

Yesterday I learned the difference between "snowbirds" -- an expression I had heard before, meaning those retirees who go south for the winter -- and "snowflakes". Snowflakes are those who flit back and forth, like...well, like snowflakes.

But I digress. At the luncheon, I had women coming up to me right and left hugging me. Women who had known my mother. One woman who had actually visited my mother in the hospital after my parents' car accident. Another woman who had been a neighbor of ours in Hillside, New Jersey. Still another, whose son went to high school with me. It was a lovely feeling, being embraced by these women as their collective daughter, or long-lost niece, as one of their own. Whenever I meet someone who knew my parents, it always makes me feel warm inside, slightly more connected to the earth.

So when I got up to speak, instead of my customary terror--especially in front of a crowd of that size--I felt bolstered. Supported. The crowd was with me. I gave my talk, made them laugh, made them cry. I felt that thing that perhaps comedians or dramatic actors feel regularly, but for a literary writer is rare indeed: I was in control of the room. After I finished, people started asking questions. A microphone was passed around. After the seventh or eighth question, the microphone was handed to a thin, blonde woman with bangs. She stood up and smiled at me.

"I don't know if you remember me, Dani. I was a close friend of your mother's."

And then she said her name. Which I won't repeat since this isn't a nice story about her. Still smiling, she went on:

"You seem very changed to me. Like a completely different person. And I'm just wondering why you seem so very different. Something changed you. You're so different," she went on somewhat redundantly.

"And I'm also wondering if you regret what you wrote in the past. If you wish you could have softened some of what you wrote in your earlier books."

She sat down, looking for all the world like a thin, blonde cat who swallowed the canary. And I--for once in my life--had a comeback. Usually, in a situation where I'm being dissed, I think of what I should have said, oh, a few hours later. But as she was speaking, something occurred to me:

"Lovely to see you, X," I said. "You know, as you were speaking, I realized that you never once saw me without my mother. The few times I was in your presence, of course my mother was with us. And I was a very different person around my mother than I was in any other aspect of my life."

Around the room, I saw nodding. Agreement. And continued support from the hundreds and hundreds of my benign, surrogate mothers in the audience. Later, I discovered that I had struck a chord. Many of us feel like we're different people in different situations. (Particularly around our mothers, where we may regress, revert into being their daughters and nothing else.) But many of the women at the luncheon found themselves musing about this. In work situations, with our husbands, our children, our friends, we can seem like we're being different people. Does this mean we're acting in some way fraudulent? That we're creating false selves? I don't think so.

In my case, I didn't like the person I became around my mother. I was shut down, angry, withdrawn, withholding. I was these things because I needed to protect myself from her, and I didn't know any other way. But the person on that podium yesterday is the same person as the glum, miserable woman I was around my mother until her death. We are all made up of many different selves.

Devotion

2007-11-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons for my recent radio silence (and a big thank you to those of you who wrote and gave me a gentle nudge to get back to blogging!) has been that I've been busy trying to start a new book, and I'm not so sure that blogging and book-writing are happy bedfellows. Though in this case, it may turn out that they are. My new book, which I just sold to HarperCollins and will be hitting the shelves in a couple of winters, is called Devotion and though I hesitate to call it a memoir, it is, at least, memoir-ish. In many ways, Devotion will be about motherhood, daughterhood, sisterhood, midlife (gulp), anxiety, and a search for meaning. It will be about trying to find shape and depth within the randomness, the chaos that is life. And one of the coolest things about embarking on this book is that I get to read a lot of great stuff, books that I have bought over the years intending to better myself by reading, but have somehow never managed to get to. I finished one of those books last night on a plane flight: Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea. Though she wrote it in the 1950's, it seems so deeply relevant today. Here's a passage:

"Vague as this definition may be, I believe most people are aware of periods in their lives when they seem to be 'in grace' and other periods when they feel 'out of grace', even though they may use different words to describe these states. In the first happy condition, one seems to carry all one's tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide, and in the opposite state one can hardly tie her shoe-string. It is true that a large part of life consists in learning a technique of tying the shoe-string whether one is in grace or not."

It seems to me that so much of being a grown-up is in finding techniques to tie the shoe-strings, no matter what. It's true of being a writer as well. There are days in which I feel inspired, on fire. And then there are days when the words feel like they're trapped somewhere inside me. But nonetheless, if I sit down at my desk--no matter how I feel--I will have a writing day. I will live my life. I will tie the shoe-strings.

Grace Paley

2007-08-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

The world lost one of its brightest, fiercest, most intelligent and compassionate souls this week when Grace Paley died at the age of eighty-four. I had heard that Grace was ill, but it seemed impossible to me that she would die. She was just too damned tenacious to die. Too alive. It seems impossible, too, that her pen has now stopped moving across the page. While it's true that she wasn't exactly prolific, a Paley sentence was its own animal. It couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's sentence, though plenty of writers imitated her--consciously or unconsciously. She influenced generations of writers, myself among them. Mostly, she was one of the handful of people I encountered in my twenties who taught me how to live.

I remember, as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, the first time I wound up on the floor of Grace's office. You didn't sit in chairs around Grace. Everything somehow ended up grounded and earthy -- she was a powerful maternal presence. We students curled up in her lap--sometimes literally--or lounged on pillows on her office floor, safe in her capacious embrace. To be with her was to learn. I remember things she told me. She told me I was a writer. She told me I should stay at Sarah Lawrence and go to graduate school. She helped to make that happen. And she also told me something that I have repeated to countless students myself: Grace said that she did her best writing in the bathtub.

The bathtub! At the time I imagined an elaborate scenario in which Grace lounged beneath the bubbles, note pad and pen clutched in her fist. Years later, I realized that she had meant simply this: she took baths. She took time. She never wasted time, but she took it. For Grace, shelling beans, passing out leaflets, teaching a class, taking a walk, making soup -- all of it was valuable. It was valuable because she paid attention. Nothing escaped her notice. But even though she missed nothing, even though her intelligence was razor sharp, she herself remained soft and porous, open to the pain, the injustices, the magnificence, the indignities of the world. Her outrage wasn't intellectual--it was personal. It came from the same deep wellspring of feeling that gave birth to her gorgeous prose, those inimitable sentences.

She made me want to write, to teach, to become a wife and mother, to cook beans, to pass out leaflets. To be an authentic person. She was one of the best role models out there, though she would have shied away from the term with a quick smile and a flick of her hand. She shone because she had a light. She had to shine. Those of us who knew her were beyond blessed. And it is small consolation--though consolation nonetheless--that her sentences, her stories, her lessons, her voice will live on and on.

Neuroplasticity

2007-07-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Neuroplasticity: The brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Previously thought to be a characteristic only of the brains of the very young,...this capacity for rewiring of the neuronal synapses to allow for re-development of entire regions of the brain is present in adults as well as children.

At a reading from Black & White the other night at Stockbridge Booksellers, a cozy little bookstore in Stockbridge Massachusetts, the Q&A afterwards turned into an interesting discussion--who knows why?--about neuroplasticity. A fellow in shorts who was sitting in the rear of the audience asked me in my capacity as a student of the human condition (those were his words) whether I believed adolescence to be the time in life when we are most able to withstand trauma, when our brains are most elastic. It was clear from the way he phrased the question that he believed this to be the case.

I emphatically didn't agree with him. And it got me thinking, both about adolescence, about development in general and about the whole subject of developmental milestones. (I guess this is what we students of human nature do in our spare time.) Do we all grow at the same rate, as if we're on a conveyor belt being stamped with certain criteria for growth at certain precise moments along the continuum? This thinking seems more and more prevalent in this wacky culture we live in. Take the books that mothers of young children read. For instance, What to Expect: The First Year. What To Expect: The Toddler Years. And so forth. I could have saved myself a few gray hairs and a few sleepless nights as a mother of an infant and toddler if I hadn't poured over those books as if they were an owner's manual to my child. Developmental milestones such as stacking blocks, putting two words together, pulling up to stand are very clearly delineated by the authors into categories such as:

Should be able to:
Probably is able to:
Might Even be able to:

Not taking into account the vastness and complexity of human nature, even--or perhaps particularly--as it relates to babies. Not taking into account that there are children who don't talk until they're five (hello, Einstein?) and children who literally never crawl but just get up and walk one day (my own dear boy). This idea that there are markers on the marathon of life that we each pass precisely at the same clip (if at all) strikes me--based solely on my own personal experience--as ludicrous. And I said as much to the fellow in the shorts. Using myself as an example, I told him I had been a late bloomer. That I had been a tremendously screwed-up adolescent. (I even have proof! See my memoir, Slow Motion.) That I didn't come into my own true self until I was past thirty. That--like the wonderful character of Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie--I hit my prime well into my thirties, and that I feel more aware now of my own capacity to adjust than I ever have in my life.

If new age wisdom holds that there are no crises, only opportunities, it seems there are those among us (and again, who knows why?) who are able to grow from their crises at any age, at any point in their lives, regardless of the crisis. And others who fold. Who stop growing. Who ask: why me? I'm thinking now of my mother, who after suffering terrible injuries in the car crash that killed my father, was able to heal physically--in and of itself, a remarkable feat--but never took hold of the life- changing opportunity she had been presented with to become a different (happier, more fulfilled, less angry) kind of person. And I'm thinking of the man I (along with the rest of America) have been haunted by for the past week: Dr. William Petit, the endocrinologist in Cheshire, Connecticut who has just suffered the most unthinkable, impossible, monstrous loss of his wife and two daughters at the hands of murderers. There was a photograph of Dr. Petit in The Hartford Courant yesterday, speaking at the memorial service for his family. He stands gripping the lectern, the gash on his forehead from his own injuries still visible. Dr. Petit exhorted the people in that auditorium to do good in the world. To love one another. To take care of another human being. To reach out to a neighbor. He was able to impart that message less than a week after suffering the worst kind of loss. Neuroplasticity, indeed.

Instinct vs. Impulse

2007-07-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately--my mind unleashed like a hungry, mad dog--about the roles of instinct and impulse in my life and how to tell the difference. We are creatures of impulse, all of us, and often impulses become habit. For instance: when I wake up in the morning these days, I go straight to the computer and check my Amazon number, as if, perhaps in the middle of the night Terry Gross or Oprah have interrupted regular programming to praise the virtues of Black & White, and I have shot stunningly and instantly to #1. And so, on these mornings, after I check my (so not #1) Amazon number, I type my name into Google. I check book reviews, blogs, you-name-it, for up-to-the-minute news about the state of my book's publication. And given that my book's publication is now three months old, very little news is to be had. There might be a mention of a book club choosing it as their next pick. (Fleeting small surge of pleasure.) Or there might be a blogger tearing it apart into tiny, bite-sized morsels. (Devastation, the certainty that of course this blogger is right and everyone else is wrong.) By the time I have finished this insane sprint through cyber-world, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes have passed, but my mind has become fragmented and buzzy. A cartoon version of me would have my eyes swirling madly and bits of lightning escaping from the top of my head. I know I shouldn't start my days this way, and yet I do. I do, because after three months of doing very little other than publicizing my book, I am used to a certain pace. A fast, exciting pace full of news and people and nice outfits. I am used to getting up in front of audiences and performing. It was hard to get into that mode--but now it's even harder to get out of it. I fight against the idea that it's time to go back into the cave. To start all over again with a single word, a sentence, a page. A glimmer of an idea...so delicate, so easily blown away. So hard to trust or believe in.

When I am following my instincts--rather than my impulses--the inside of my head becomes quiet enough so that I can hear the whispering voice that tells me what to do next. That voice--which of course is my own best self talking--tells me it's time to read, or take a drive, or practice yoga. It's the voice that will eventually tell me what my next novel is about, if only I can be still enough to listen. Writing a novel is a devotional act--Annie Dillard describes it as following the line of words. This devotion, this following, cannot be done in a frenzy. And it most certainly cannot be done in the same hyper-self-conscious universe in which Amazon numbers and anonymous bloggers take up valuable, semi-conscious morning time--time time when the mind is at its softest, most open. It has always fascinated me that some of our finest, most lucid writers have also had some of the noisiest, most painfully cluttered, dare I say damaged minds--and I stand in awe at the sheer courage, discipline, determination that it takes to heave all that noise away as if it's a solid mass, a boulder.

All I know is this: whenever, in my life, I have followed my impulses, it's never led me anywhere good. And when I have followed my instincts--whether in falling in love at first sight with my husband, or realizing, one summer morning, that it was time to have a baby, or hearing the whispering voice through the fog telling me just enough to begin again, and again, I have been rewarded beyond anything I could ever have imagined.

On Being a Working Mom

2007-06-12T05:29:00.000-07:00

In an hour a car is coming to pick me up and take me into the city, where I am taping a radio show -- part of the slow and steady trickle of book publicity that I continue to do two months after Black & White's publication. And this evening, I'm giving a reading at a Barnes & Noble in New York with ten (you read that right, ten) other writers for the anthology The Other Woman, in which an excerpt of my memoir Slow Motion is included. These are two non-negotiable things that I have to show up for, for a variety of reasons, all having to do with my career.

And so, early this morning, I sat down with my eight year old son on the bottom step of our staircase, and--after wrestling his "twenty questions sports trivia" game away from him--told him that I would be going to New York today. That I would be sleeping over in the city tonight, since I have no way of getting back to our home in the country at night. (There are no trains, one of the things I like about living here on most days-- except for today.) And, worst of all, I told him that I will not be able to attend the Montessori School's second grade performance of "The Terrible Leak" at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.

His little face fell. There is nothing sadder than an eight year old boy's little face falling, crumbling into momentary crushing disappointment. And I'm not even sure I should be writing about this, since it is my policy not to write about him -- but really, right now I'm writing about myself, and about the dilemmas that face working mothers everywhere.

"Why?" he asked.
"Because I have to work, honey."
"This book publication is taking a long time."
"I know."

I thought I had "The Terrible Leak" nailed. I had called his second grade teacher a week ago to ask when the performance would be, so that I could do everything I could to work my schedule around it. She told me the date, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief because I realized (so I thought) that I would not have to miss the performance. The delicate balance between my life as a mother and my life as a working woman would remain exactly that: balanced. Everything getting somehow accomplished, no one or nothing getting lost in the shuffle. And so, when the little slip of paper appeared in our school mailbox announcing that the performance of "The Terrible Leak" would be at nine in the morning--the very morning I would still be in New York-- I felt it like a physical blow. That voice that I am convinced visits all mothers at least once in a while, that voice screamed: see--you're failing, you're not getting it right, you're a Bad Mother.

But here is my question, and I know it's an inflammatory one, my small contribution to a term I deplore, the Mommy Wars: why would a performance of a school play be scheduled for nine o'clock in the morning? Where does the assumption come from that parents would be able to arrange their lives in order to be there when most people are at work? Granted, my family and I live in an unusual community where a lot of people make their own hours and have an inordinate amount of flexibility -- but what about those who don't? Why are we penalized -- and much worse, why are our children penalized -- by the notion that the stuff of real life (in other words, working to make a living) can be dropped at a moment's notice?

Fortunately for us, my husband is able to go to tomorrow's performance of "The Terrible Leak". As a screenwriter who is, at the moment, not on a crushing deadline, he's able to take the morning off. In fact, he's taking three mornings off in a row: this morning, as I write this, he is at the Montessori School, showing the first-through-third graders slides from his years spent in Africa, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, then as a foreign correspondent. And the day after the play is the last day of school, which means the school picnic, which takes place at eleven in the morning. And of course I will be there.

I know this isn't a problem limited to my son's school, or to the community I live in. I hear these stories from my friends in New York and LA. But this blind spot seems to be spreading, rather than diminishing, and I found myself wishing that the people who make these decisions--the teachers, school administrators, even the stay-at-home moms who arrange some of the school events--had been able to see that little face crumbling this morning, that child's voice piercing the air, asking why?

Why, indeed.

Blogging Elsewhere

2007-06-02T15:16:00.000-07:00

I was excited to receive an invitation from the folks at The Huffington Post asking me if I'd like to occasionally blog there. My first blog post appeared this week, and here it is and it doesn't mean I'm going to stop blogging here -- so check back soon!

Mother's Day

2007-05-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I was in New York City to tape a segment of "Weekend Edition" with Scott Simon. I have always loved Scott Simon's interviews, and the prospect of being on his show was both thrilling and terrifying--mostly because the way it works is, he interviews you for a half-hour or forty-five minutes, and then--depending on a combination of world events and your own ability to string sentences together in an eloquent manner, a segment either a) doesn't run at all, b) runs for three minutes, or c) runs for up to ten minutes. So my own personal eloquence was on the line. Now, I'm certain that one of the reasons I became a writer is because I never feel, when I'm speaking, like I'm getting it right. I never say quite what I intend to. I tend to feel like I've landed slightly to the side of the point I'm trying to make. The words flee, they have no heft, unless I'm committing them to the page. I like to control my ideas, to hone them and craft them--arrange and re-arrange words until they fall into a precise order, like a line of musical notes. And you can't do that on the radio.

Before heading down to NPR's offices, I took myself to lunch at a restaurant called E.A.T. on the Upper East Side. I settled into a seat against a mirrored wall, ordered a ridiculously expensive salad and cappuccino, and realized that I was thinking about my mother. E.A.T. was a restaurant where, for many years, I used to meet her for lunch. We probably had fifty E.A.T. lunches, my mother and I. The bread basket with its raisin nut bread, it's ciabatta and sourdough, are like Marcel's madeleines to me. As readers of my non-fiction know, my mother and I had, to put it mildly, a contentious relationship. (One magazine editor who shall remain nameless even carped behind my back that I have only one subject: my mother.) Be that as it may, for many years it is true that I turned my difficult mother into my muse -- it was all I could reasonably do with her. And now--as I sat in this improbable, noisy restaurant filled with well-turned out women in complicated designer jeans, their sapphire-and-diamond solitaires flashing--my mother, who died almost four years ago, appeared before me. Not quite an apparition, she was nonetheless very much present. And she was not pleased. How could she be? I was here. She was not. I was about to go on NPR. She was not. I was about to have an essay come out in the June issue of Vogue, about HER. She was not. I had become the author, not only of my own destiny, but, in a deeply uncomfortable way, of hers as well. The mother of my memory quivered with rage. Her jaw shook. She seemed to be telling me that I am a terrible person and deserve nothing good. I felt myself shrink. I began to disappear.

I paid the check, bolted out of the restaurant, and began to quickly walk downtown on Madison Avenue, trying to leave my mother behind, in the cathedral of memory that is E.A.T.. As I headed south, I had no way of knowing that in just an hour, Scott Simon would ask me to read a passage from Black & White about a little girl who wants to shrug out of her own skin, to leave her shell behind the way the cicadas in her backyard do. But what I was thinking, on that beautiful spring day as I headed off to do battle with my own fears and my own sense of deserving, was that my mother will always be lurking in the cathedrals of memory: Jean-Georges, where my husband and I first introduced her to my future in-laws. Edgar's Cafe on West 84th Street, where she first met my husband after we had been dating for three weeks. The hushed, airy floors of Bergdorf Goodman, where I used to walk with her--our shared love of fashion one of our only true bonds. My mother--all of our mothers, whether we had it easy with them or not--is like a phantom limb. I feel her presence--and her absence--when I least expect it. I will never be able to totally shrug out of the skin of my childhood and leave her behind. Honestly, I don't even want to. Not exactly.

God Is Not Great

2007-05-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

Which is, of course, the title of the brilliant Christopher Hitchens' new book about religion. It is also, lately, the ground zero of my deepest confusions as a mother. What am I supposed to teach my son about God? What do I do about the fact that I am, at best, on the fence when it comes to the spiritual life? My basic relationship to the whole notion of God is a lily-livered, poorly thought-through, pathetic melange of Buddhism, self-help, nature, the Hebrew songs and melodies of my childhood, the transcendence of great music, and little bits of my dead father's voice that float around in my consciousness. I could have drifted along in exactly this stupor for my whole life if not for motherhood. If not for the fact that it is my responsibility to expose Jacob to the religion of his heritage--if only so that he can later reject it.

When I was Jacob's age, I went to a yeshiva. I spent half a day learning in Hebrew, the other half in English. On Shabbat, the Sabbath, I went with my father to temple where I played with the tassels on his tallit, and listened to the passion in his voice has he swayed back and forth, davening. I spoke Hebrew so fluently I thought in it. When I traveled to Israel with my family, at the moment we disembarked at Lod Airport my inner life, my thoughts and random daydreams took place in a language I no longer can speak, nor understand. The language of Hebrew eludes me, much in the same way I am eluded by an understanding of faith, or of God.

But since we live in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut -- the land of white Protestant people -- since we live in a house with no mezuzah on the door, a house where my parents Shabbat candlesticks are on display on the dining room table only because they're beautiful, old Tiffany ones, and satisfy my aesthetic desire for lovely silver--since if you saw us, my husband and son and me, riding the winding Connecticut hills, you might be forgiven for mistaking us for characters in a Cheever novel--I end up embroiled in what feels like a moral dilemma. My concern has grown over the last couple of years as Jacob has begun to ask questions. What happens when we die? he asks regularly. Where do you go? What does it feel like? And then, just last week, when Little League practice was canceled because of rain four times in a row: "There's a man in the sky who's making it rain." A man in the sky? Where do we go when we die? How am I supposed to guide him through these questions when I myself don't know how I feel about any of it. And as for my husband, it's easy for him. He's an atheist. End of story.

But for me, it can't be the end of the story. The faith that I grew up with--that faith is inside me still, not as a belief in God but, rather, as a part of me that gives me a tangible access to my childhood. My father has been gone for more than twenty years--and yet, if I want to hear his voice, if I want to feel the way his short hair bristled against my small fingers on the top of his head, if I want to see his eyes--hazel-green and kind, as he gazed at me--all I have to do is go to temple and a door opens. Memory floods through, unstoppable. And that is the closest answer to what happens when we die that I ever get.

New England

2007-04-19T06:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-17T04:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-09T16:19:00.000-07:00

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.