Publication Day

It’s one of those strange, disorienting days–the day your own book hits the stores. I remember, when my first novel was published, thinking that something would actually happen, like…I don’t know…a bit of swelling orchestral strings in the background of my life. Black & White is released today, and aside from the glorious bouquet of flowers sent by my agent, it feels pretty much like any other day. It’s appropriate that last night was the first night of Passover. Why is this night different from all other nights? Well, on Passover it’s because we eat matzo instead of leavened bread, because we recline at the table instead of sitting up…but I’m pretty sure that no one at any seder table around the country was saying: because Dani Shapiro’s new novel is being published tomorrow!

Actually, I taught at Wesleyan last night–didn’t even bring matzo for my students. Because I am a Bad Jew. Because I couldn’t come up with another night to make up the class, as I am about to go on book tour and am just back from two and a half weeks in Europe and my time is not my own. I’m an even worse Jew because I didn’t send my son to Hebrew School on Sunday precisely so that no one would ask him what his family was doing for the first seder, since the answer would have been: eating eggs and a salad at eight o’clock at night and then calling the in-laws to wish them a good yontef. Oh, well. I was weepy about this last night–holidays always make me miss my dead parents, my dead aunts and uncles, and bring home to me the fact that the family I have is the family I’ve made–but I had to remind myself that next Passover I will not have a book coming out, and we will be around the seder table with my wonderful in-laws, the whole raucous family I now call my own.

Life Imitating Art

This past weekend, while in Rome, we wandered into a small, nearly empty church not far from the Piazza Navona to see a Caravaggio. The streets of Rome are teeming with crowds, motor bikes, tiny bumper-car-like vehicles, suicidal cyclists–all moving at rapid speed down narrow alleys–but the churches are empty. We wandered along the aisles and marveled at the Caravaggio. I found myself musing about whether the gory crucifixion images might be too much for my seven year old, whose whole idea of religion at the moment boils down to making Hamentaschen at Hebrew School. Then, Michael pointed me to a shrine near the tall front doors of the church. Apparently, pregnant women come to pray at this particular shrine, and then–after their healthy babies are born–return with offerings: pink knitted booties, small plastic toys, and photos, taped up to the cold stone walls of the church. As I started moving to look closer, I was thinking of my various superstitions, both during my easy pregnancy with Jacob and then later–when achieving and holding onto several pregnancies wasn’t so easy, as I wrote about in my egg donation story in February’s Elle. When I was trying to conceive, I wore a gold and jade Abyssinian Lizard–a fertility symbol–on a chain around my neck, even though it was heavy and not remotely my style. It had been my mother’s, and she had worn it when she was pregnant with me. I borrowed a small, round fertility totem from my friend and hair colorist, Kathleen. I also kept another totem, meant to be the god of lost pregnancies, given to me by a friend after one of my miscarriages. I believed and didn’t believe in these symbols. I kept them around, on my bedroom vanity, scattered among the lipsticks and perfumes, where I could see them each day, but I never gave them a special spot, because that seemed too…well, too weird and desperate.

All of this was going through my mind as I began to walk toward the knitted booties and baby pictures on the church wall. Michael was standing next to me, when suddenly I tripped over one of those low benches they have for kneeling in churches–Jew that I am, I hadn’t been looking out for such a thing–and WHAM slammed down on my knee. And even as I was falling, in the less-than-a-second it took, I thought: what a perfect metaphor. An almost too perfect metaphor, actually. One that in a short story might feel heavy-handed but in life, a woman who once longed-for and has now given up on the idea of a second child can trip over a kneeling bench while looking at a shrine to healthy babies in a Roman church. In life, these things happen.

Stop the Madness

In the past couple of weeks, two very different op-eds have appeared in The New York Times that speak to the same issue. The first, titled “Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox”, appeared on the Op-Ed page two Sundays ago. It was written by David Brooks, whose columns usually annoy me no end. This time, I’ve got to say, I found myself reading Brooks and nodding, chuckling softly to myself. (This is rare, the soft chuckle upon reading.) He takes on hipster parents, in particular the Park Slope, Brooklyn version of hipster parents. (I have no doubt a similar breed exists in Seattle, Silver Lake, Portland and even perhaps Montclair.) He writes in a howl of conservative outrage about toddlers wearing the same ponchos and black skull slippers, sporting the same bed-head haircuts as their mommies and daddies. His point is that we parents are turning our children into little, narcissistically-driven mini-me’s. And I don’t think he’s at all wrong–but the problem is larger than the bummer of infants wearing “My Mom’s Blog is Better than Your Mom’s Blog” tee-shirts.

The second piece, “Early Admissions”, by a young novelist named Karin Cook, came out earlier this week. On the surface of things, Brooks and Cook have nothing in common as writers or as thinkers, and are making very different arguments. Cook’s piece is a hilarious faux-letter to a private pre-school, exhorting, pleading, wheedling with the school to consider admitting the child in question. Pegged to this week in March when all the pre-schools send out their letters of acceptance/wait list/rejection–a week when all the New York City moms of pre-school children I know are popping xanax and not even pretending to maintain their cool–Cook’s letter pokes fun, but the reason it made it onto the op-ed page is because there is truth simmering beneath every jibe, every absurdity. I know of at least three children–precocious, beautiful, bright and gifted (99th percentile! how is it that every single New York City child I know is in the 99th percentile?)–who were shut out of kindergarten this year. Shut out! The parents are wealthy, hugely successful, even, in one case, famous. And the kids didn’t get in.

How can this be? Because we’re living in an insane culture. That’s how. Because this generation of parents, and perhaps the one preceeding it– the one whose kids are being tutored and coached within an inch of their lives by companies such as IvyWise so that they have a prayer of getting into a good college–have lost our minds completely. We have lost sight of the whole idea of the happiness of children. The idea that children will find their own way, with gentle parental guidance. That our children are neither our possessions, nor our reflections. (See the recent Tiffany’s ad on the back of Cookie magazine: a soft-focus mother, her head not in the picture, holding a chubby naked cherub of a baby in her bejeweled arms.)

The point Brooks makes — that we’re turning our children into replicas of ourselves, and ourselves into replicas of our children — is true not only of hipster parents, but of Ralph Lauren polo-playing parents, soccer moms who have stickers of soccer balls all over the backs of their SUV’s, and the list goes on. And as our dopplegangers rather than individual, idiosyncratic creatures, our children simply must get into the best pre-schools, because pre-school leads to Harvard, or wherever floats your boat, and everything is riding on it. Our egos, our children’s futures as we imagine them, our whole selves.

Drinking: A Love Story

In last night’s class at Wesleyan, I taught two books I’ve never taught before. Jonathan Rosen’s brilliant meditation, The Talmud and the Internet, and Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story. Both are books I know well, and I thought would be interesting additions to the syllabus for my course, which is called The Autobiographical Impulse. I like to mix it up when I teach, and bring in new works (new to my teaching them, that is) so that I continue to keep it fresh for myself. It was a pleasure to re-read Jonathan Rosen’s book, which is even better the second time around. It’s a moving and intellectually rigorous exploration of the ways in which a young man grapples with his own history–specifically, his two grandmothers: one who perished in the holocaust, and the other who lived a comfortable American life and whose dying wish was for a pastrami sandwich. Rosen’s thoughtful consideration of the talmud and the internet — the ancient and the modern, expansive, circular, with no periphery –acts as a perfect metaphor for the two parts of his family’s past he’s attempting (impossibly, of course) to reconcile.

The Caroline Knapp did not stand up to re-reading, sorry to say. Published in 1996, it was the first of the spate of addition-and-recovery memoirs, ushering in a decade of books like Running with Scissors, A Million Little Pieces, Smashed, and a dozen others that didn’t make it onto the radar. I remember, when I first read Drinking: A Love Story, that it felt original to me, and brave. What changed in this decade? The book, obviously, hadn’t changed. I suppose that I had–and that the fact of all those other look-at-me recovery stories makes me read the Knapp in a slightly (okay, more than slightly) jaundiced light. It has its moments of poetry, but ultimately it now seems self-indulgent. As a memoirist myself, I don’t feel good leveling that criticism at another writer’s memoir, particularly one that required a certain measure of courage to write, and to put out there in the world. I remember, when Slow Motion was first published, the way every bit of criticism felt incredibly personal. But here I am, doing it. Why does it even matter? Knapp died tragically young, at the age of 42, of lung cancer. (If she were alive I might not be blogging about this.) I suppose that re-reading the book made me think about what makes a memoir good: a measure of irony, of distance. The ability to make oneself a character in one’s own life, one’s own story. The knowledge that it is a story, above all. Perhaps Knapp, who had only stopped drinking a year before writing her memoir, had not developed enough distance to write out of what Frank O’Hara referred to in one of his poems as “the memory of my feelings”. An emotion–when experience in real time–whether rage, panic, grief, joy, you name it–is incoherent. But that emotion, observed, with distance, can become coherent.

Overload

If I were to take a picture of my desk today it would be a scary sight. Actually, maybe I will do just that, to prove my point. I am usually one of those annoying people who have a completely clean desk. (My drawers, however, are another matter entirely.) My personal style tends to be neat-on-the-surface-but-messy-on-the-inside, which may be a metaphor for my whole life. I mean, even my house is like this. The front of the house is manicured and lovely, with perfect boxwoods by the front door, and tulips dutifully pushing their heads up from the sides of stone walls each spring. The back of the house? As I said, another matter. Let’s put it this way: the friend who helps with landscaping (why can’t I just bring myself to say: our landscape designer?) actively makes sure that people know that the way our backyard looks is Not Her Fault.

But I digress. My point is that my desk is teetering and threatening to fall over. I attribute this to a few things. First, I’m getting ready to leave on a big trip — big for me, at least. Some people I know hop on planes to Europe all the time. A friend who I saw in yoga class yesterday was leaving for London that night. I marveled at her ability to breathe five breaths in downward-facing dog even as she would be on a flight within hours. For me, a big trip means I need to clear my desk off before I leave. This is quickly becoming an impossibility. Yesterday, I made a “before leaving list”. I wrote it in big block letters, as if for a five-year-old. I drew small boxes next to each item on the list, so I could have the satisfaction of checking off each box as I went along. So far, one item has been checked off: pathetically, it involved sending a single email. The second reason my desk is a disaster is that my book is about to come out and this involves a motley assortment of daily tasks. A few weeks ago, I found myself riding the elevator to a high floor in the Conde Nast building in New York, delivering a shopping bag (Prada) full of family photos to Vogue, to illustrate an upcoming essay. Yesterday found me taking pictures of the inside of my house for a magazine that may or may not want to do a piece on me, and wanted to see the way I live. It can be strange, this writing business.

A week from today I will be on a plane to Rome. Michael, Jacob and I will spend a few days there, then fly to Prague, where we will meet our good friends and their kids. Our friends are Czech, and will no doubt show us a good Czech time. Then we’ll fly back to Rome, take a train to Naples, then a car to Positano, where for just shy of a week I will teach at a writers’ conference we’re starting — Sirenland, at the beautiful five-star hotel, Le Sirenuse. I say this as if I’m someone who travels easily. Who flies without fear. Who leaves home with no worries. Who settles into her seat with a perfect pashmina (does anyone still wear pashminas?) and a long, involving novel, say, Swann’s Way — which, in fact, I do have to re-read before I teach it at Wesleyan in May. But I cannot read anything more involving than Us Weekly on an airplane, and I don’t own a pashmina.

Books and Babies

A writer friend sent the following email: Can you imagine if our children, in utero, were “reviewed” before birth…. ‘So-and-so will be a sweet child, great sense of humor and yet will harbor deep resentment and struggle with learning. A nice achievement for Ms. Writer friend. A sparkling debut’.

Why is it that books are so much like babies? That bringing a book into the world feels like a difficult, arduous birth? Whenever anyone asks me which of my own books is my favorite, I feel like they’re asking me to choose my favorite child. (Well, I do discount the first two novels and am, in fact, glad they’re out of print. According to today’s theory — and just to carry this way of thinking a step further — that means I disown my first two children…which I guess in this case I’m saying I do.) But just to completely beat this analogy to death, books are also like babies in that the writer (at least this writer) forgets what it was like to go through the long, dark tunnel (no pun intended) of the months prior to publication when nothing is happening. It feels as if something–anything–should be happening. One wonders if anything is ever, in fact, going to happen, and one questions the entire enterprise, but of course, it is far too late for questioning.

Which brings me to yoga. Specifically, to my current favorite yoga pose: tree pose. Each day (well, each day that I unroll my mat) at a certain point in my yoga practice I find myself in tree pose, balancing on one leg, my gaze focused outside my bedroom window at the meadow in front of my house, which happen to be blessed with some beautiful old trees. Bending is a part of tree pose. One leans as far as one can to the side, swaying, continuing to balance, arms extended like the limbs of…well, like the limbs of a tree, head loose and heavy. The object–at least as I understand it–is the willingness to fall. And I’ve realized in recent months that, paradoxically, the more I’m willing to fall, the further I can bend, without, in fact, falling. I just train my eyes on the old trees out front, the gnarled branches curving out in all directions, and remind myself to locate that willingness.

Balancing Act

Lately I keep hearing women talking about their lives as balancing acts — as if daily life is a tightrope and the only way to avoid falling is to keep moving carefully forward — never looking down. An attorney friend whose firm is expanding at a rapid rate gave a Bingo party last night for a bunch of second graders and their parents, complete with two different kinds of chili (the batch I tasted was quite delicious, attributed to a recipe by Al Roker) and presented a thoughtful assortment of prizes (everyone got a prize, Bingo or not) including confetti bubble bath, soccer and basketball pillows, and a Bush-bashing book, especially for my husband. She had gone everywhere from the local toy store to Target in search of the excellent party favors, had made the chili, and the kid food (mac and cheese, pizza, bowls of healthy crudite) set the table. She was still in her work clothes. As we were leaving, she headed upstairs to check on her daughter’s friend who decided to sleep over at the last minute. Having only recently entered the land of sleepovers myself, I imagine that the night was long and perhaps sleep interrupted — or at the very least, today started very early, with crack-of-dawn pancakes. As I watched her recede up the stairs, I thought of Alison Pearson’s hilarious novel of a couple of years ago: I Don’t Know How She Does It. Everybody’s trying to do so much, and that’s it, the whole answer — there’s nothing to do but to try.

Balancing act, juggling act, tightrope — it makes me again think of Leslie Bennetts’ upcoming book, The Feminine Mistake — in which she writes about the myth of “having it all” and the pity that the phrase became so associated with feminism. There is, of course, no such thing as having it all. There is work, family, romance, health, fitness, sleep, solitude, spiritual life (whatever that means). There is reading for pleasure, travel, the absolute luxury of free time — such a luxury that many of us have no idea what to do with it when we have it. Every day, something wins out, which means something else is lost, or at the very least put on hold.

Today I am taking care of the business of writing, which means that I am not in fact writing. I have a teacher-parent conference at my son’s school. He has a swimming lesson later this afternoon, which may or may not be canceled on account of snow that may or may not start to fall. Which means I may or may not unroll my mat to do my yoga practice, which is one of the things (aside from writing) that keeps me on an even keel. Tonight, another school function. And this isn’t a whine, or a complaint, or a rant — at least I hope it doesn’t sound that way. I’m grateful for it all, the mothering, the writing, even the business of writing. And I’m aware — always aware in this sort of neurotic, Jewish, fishwifey way instilled in me by generations of worriers — that it could be otherwise. The phone could ring. Someone could be sick, or worse. The possibility of bad news is always on the other side of the rich, sometimes annoying, sometimes exhausting dailiness of life — I think that’s what helps me to understand (that is, when I’m feeling even remotely centered after a day or writing and yoga) that it’s all a blessing, not in a dumb Pollyanna way but it simply, truly is. And which is why, last night, watching the attorney-mom slowly make her way up that staircase — knowing what was ahead of her (the dirty dishes, the chaos left behind by masses of children, her daughter’s sleepover, her bulging briefcase, her buzzing Blackberry) — it looked to me like the happiest scene possible.

A Desk of One’s Own

Until very recently I had an office outside of my house, but then my landlord raised my rent and I decided — since I am “between books” — to hold off until I’m actually starting a new book before I rent an office again. That office was (bizarrely) a retail space in the small town ten minutes down the hill from my house. I could have been selling hats or scarves or real estate. I was the only person in the building who didn’t have a shingle. On gloomy days, when my lights were on, people would tell me they could see me framed by the picture window, writing as they drove by. The accountant who worked on the other side of the tissue-thin wall was possessed of a, shall we say, sonorous baritone. I found myself knowing more than I should about the tax situations of my fellow neighbors. I found myself listening to music while I wrote (in the two years I was in that office I wrote Black & White as well as a few stories) through very excellent Bose sound-deadening headphones. Sometimes–when I could still hear the accountant through the headphones, found myself aggressively turning up the volume on my stereo and playing Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations really really loud. Nothing worked. So here I am, back at home, at the desk of my own, in lieu of a room of my own.

Today’s desk: a notebook open to a list I’ve started to scribble of people to invite to my book party for Black & White; a Buddha head bought last summer at a local Tibetan festival, Tibetfest; photos of my husband and son; one of my husband from when he was a war correspondent, taken on a rooftop in Somalia (this picture reminds me that there is a side to him I’ll never fully know); on the bulletin board, some favorite quotes: this one, from Nietszche, reads “That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” (I keep this one to remind me not to talk through ideas for novels or stories or essays when they’re new in my mind.) Also on the bulletin board, a print of my son’s baby feet; the paperback book jacket of Family History; more photos, which appeared in Real Simple, of my family. An invitation to the party for my friend Jonathan Wilson’s new book about Marc Chagall, coming out in March. A small grouping of essential oils (violet, lime, basil, tamarack, vetiver) which I haven’t opened in months. A pile of galleys, including Amanda Eyre Ward’s compelling new novel, Forgive Me, which will be published in June (this is the only one of the books on my desk which has migrated from the need-to-read-pile to the whew-I’ve-read-it pile); Peter Godwin’s memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun; a book my editor at Anchor gave me at lunch last week, which just got a great New York Times daily review, Still Life With Husband; Old Calabria, a book about the part of Italy where we’ll be next month, sent to me by the owner of Le Sirenuse, the astoundingly gorgeous hotel where we’ll be launching the Sirenland Writers’ Conference along with One Story magazine — a copy of which is also on my desk. A manuscript of a non-fiction book about nannies. And that’s just ON my desk. Both to the left and the right of my desk there are many more. Hopefully by the time I take inventory of my desk again, at least a few items may have shifted.

Pecking and Wretched

My favorite Virginia Woolf quote of late, a reflection of hers upon finishing a draft of The Waves: “I must hastily provide my mind with something else, or it will again become pecking and wretched–something imaginative, if possible, and light.” Pecking and wretched is exactly what I feel in the months that stretch between finishing one novel and starting the next. I promised myself, when I finished Black & White, that I’d do the Trollopian thing — Trollope is reported to have simply drawn a line beneath the ending of one novel, and straightaway started the next. What that does (or what I would imagine it would do, since I’ve never managed to even try it) is to take away the fear, the dread, the self-consciousness of telling oneself: oh, I’m starting another novel. Starting a novel is such a crazy thing to do. I mean, who in their right mind would embark on something that takes years, that is an act of faith, that is like being in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight? (A poet friend of mine, when we were batting around this analogy, remarked: “yeah, AND you’re building the boat!”)

What I seem to do, these days, is this: Surf the internet. Make a cappuccino. Surf the internet some more. Start with a lofty goal: say, research for a story I’m thinking of writing. End up — and how did this happen? — browsing websites for boots, jeans, summer camps, kids’wet suits, not necessarily in that order. Debate between another cappuccino and doing my daily (okay, six times a week, okay, this week it was four) yoga practice. Decide on yoga and THEN more caffeine. The caffeine then leads to busy-work (gotta get those files organized!) which then leads to the sun setting in the sky and…what just happened?

What isn’t happening on a day such as this is writing–and since I am someone for whom writing is necessary (by which I don’t simply mean I make a living at it, but rather, that it is medicinal, it is required, I don’t quite know what I’m thinking or feeling without it)–this is not a good thing. Not remotely.

Truth and Lies

What has happened to literary memoir? It’s developed a bad reputation, like the kid on the block that everybody knows is a big fat liar. Why should I believe you? Readers are now asking of every story. Why should I trust anything you tell me? Our faith that a memoir writer is at least attempting to tell the truth as best as he or she can remember it–that faith has been seriously shaken. Last night, a student of mine asked what the difference is between a “based on a true story” made-for-tv movie and the memoirs we’re reading in class. In other words, what’s the difference between, say, a Lifetime biopic and This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff?

Of course this hasn’t been helped along by the James Frey fiasco, in which A Million Little Pieces was famously exposed, first on Smoking Gun, then on Oprah to be…well…a work of fiction. Nor has it been helped by the recent revelations about Augusten Burroughs in Vanity Fair. (Things weren’t as bad as all that, is basically how the story ends up going.) But more personally painful than these examples–which were books I frankly hadn’t been all that interested in to begin with–are stories now coming out about writers I have admired all my life. Nadine Gordimer apparently made up a first cousin in a personal history piece she wrote for The New Yorker, and laughed about it with her biographer (until he turned on her by revealing her duplicity). Vivian Gornick, whose lucid memoir, Fierce Attachments, was one of the formative books of my college years, recently admitted, in a talk at Goucher College, that some of the walks with her mother that she writes about in her book (a book in which the entire structure is dependent on these walks that Gornick takes with her mother around New York City) — well, these walks didn’t all exactly happen. Some of them were invented. She had taken creative license–a writer’s prerogative, after all.

For years I have been trying to answer these questions for myself, for my readers, for my students. What’s kosher–and not kosher–when writing something understood to be non-fiction? Certain things seem fairly obvious. It’s not kosher to lie. It’s not kosher to invent, or at least not to have the awareness of inventing. Memory is a slippery business, and one’s relationship to memory changes at every single moment. It’s elusive and maddening, this working with memory. Where I stand in relation to a story I’m telling will entirely dictate how I remember–and therefore how I tell–that story. But the intention is to tell it as truthfully as I can. And that intention matters. That intention is the bond between the writer and the reader. It’s the hand that the writer extends to the reader: come with me. You can trust me. I’ve been to this place and now I’m taking you there.

I’ve been thinking about some of this because of a piece in The New York Times yesterday, about a writer, Jay Forman, who wrote a piece of journalism in Slate about monkey fishing. Years later–now–a class at the Columbia School of Journalism has exposed Forman’s piece to be wholesale invention. The latest, sad example in a string of examples. And then, over the weekend, I read Janet Malcolm‘s review in the New York Review of Books about Allen Shawn‘s new memoir, which sounds fascinating. Malcolm–always a pleasure to read for her bracing clarity–writes in the first few paragraphs of the review, about the trustworthiness of Shawn’s voice. And I found myself wondering: would trustworthiness have been mentioned a decade ago, before all these lines between fiction and reality became so impossibly blurred?

Last Mother’s Day an essay of mine was the cover story in Salon. It was excerpted from a longer essay I had written in an anthology, Maybe Baby. It was a tough, painful piece that explored some of my ambivalence about having children, after having had such a rough relationship with my own mother. In it, I reveal some very personal details about my own family’s life and recent history. Before the piece came out, my editor at Salon called. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t read the letters to the editor,” she warned me. “They’ll drive you crazy.”

Well, there’s nothing like telling a writer not to read something about herself or her own work to make sure that it will be the first thing she’ll do. At least this writer. I waited, oh, about five hours after the Salon piece was first posted before looking at the letters, which were already pouring in. Some of them were lovely, some of them were nasty — but what was surprising to me was this: some of them actually questioned whether the story I had written was true.

Now that–that had never happened to me before. That hand I extend to the reader–I had always first used that hand to carefully pick through the sharp rocks of my own history to produce something coherent and meaningful and above all true. I had believed that the reader on the other side of the page was also holding out a hand–palm open, willing to trust until proven otherwise. I had not understood until reading through those letters (a reader had actually written “I don’t believe her”) the extent to which the very truth of what I was saying was apparently up for grabs. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.