Blogging and Writing

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.