Commotion

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

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

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

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

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.