New England

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

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

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

Every time I land in LA I feel like I’m walking into a sliding doors version of my life. I’ve never lived in Los Angeles though in aggregate I’ve probably spent a year here in dribs and drabs–a few weeks here, a month there. It’s a city I know well, but only as a visitor. My husband and I regularly entertain fantasies of moving here–especially because it would be an easier commute for him, as a screenwriter, than the CT/LA trips that he makes regularly. But what would it be like to live here? Certainly my days wouldn’t be like these few days: beautiful hotel on the beach, room service coffee with hot milk first thing in the morning, meetings and phone interviews and even a lunchtime trip to the LA Barney’s New York — which may well be my favorite department store in the world. Michael and I had lunch at Barney Greengrass –on the roof of Barney’s in Beverly Hills –which bears little or no resemblance to the Barney Greengrass of the Upper West Side, which has catered every Yom Kippur break-the-fast we’ve ever had, as well as my son’s bris and my mother’s shiva. That Barney Greengrass is one of the only places left where the Upper West Side feels like the Upper West Side, complete with cranky, overwhelmed waiters. But the Bevery Hills Barney Greengrass has a Cobb Salad on the menu and happy, attentive surfer-waiters, and the conversation drifting around us was a pleasant blur of Hollywood speak. I actually heard the word “characterization” at the next table. You never hear that word in Connecticut. Could we live here? Today–as I look out over the Pacific, at a view we could never afford, as I get ready to go downstairs and meet my agent for a glass of good white wine, as I contemplate tomorrow’s yoga schedule instead of the solitary unrolling of my mat–today, I think perhaps yes.

Publication Day

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.