I’d like to thank everyone in the Murderati Tribe for your kindness over the last couple of weeks since my father’s death. I’m still feeling a little wobbly, but the memorial gathering my stepmother Bonna organized in Calabasas, California, was beautiful, with about 150 friends and family members attending–including three wonderful pals of mine who drove down from the Bay Area, setting out at 6:30 a.m.: Sophie Littlefield, Julie Goodson-Lawes, and Muffy Srinivasan. My daughter Grace and I are now back in New Hampshire and feeling way better about it all.
And on a much happier note, please allow me to introduce Reece Hirsch, an extraordinary writer whose debut thriller The Insider deserves wide attention…
My debut legal thriller The Insider is the story of Will Connelly, a young corporate attorney in a big San Francisco law firm who is on the verge of making partner. He thinks that becoming a partner will solve all of his problems but, in fact, his troubles are only beginning. In the week after being elevated to partner and taking over a major technology company merger, Will becomes the prime suspect in a colleague’s murder and an unwilling participant in a complex criminal scheme that involves the Russian mob, insider trading and a secret government domestic surveillance program.
Who’s wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Rock bands may have the edge when it comes to sex and drugs, but you just can’t beat writers when it comes to committed drinking. Writers drink like they mean it. Anyone who’s been to the hotel bar at a Bouchercon can testify to that.
Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
Here’s a favorite passage from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim that might describe the night after the Bouchercon hotel bar:
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not so much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
How do you relax?
See the two responses above.
What is your favorite indulgence, either wicked or benign?
My subscription to DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket, so that I can watch all of the Minnesota Vikings games. They rip out my heart every season, but in a good way. I’m not quite sure if this indulgence is benign or wicked.
Readers love to find little factual errors in novels. How’s THE INSIDER holding up to that scrutiny?
My book has a chase scene and shoot-out set in the middle of San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade. The scene features the aptly named Dykes on Bykes, a fixture of the parade. I was informed that I incorrectly placed the bikers in the middle of the parade when they are, in fact, always at the forefront, marking the launch. I stand corrected.
But what really concerns me is my upcoming appearance at the annual fundraiser for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in D.C. That consumer privacy group is referenced in THE INSIDER and the book touches upon encryption and domestic surveillance issues. At that fundraiser, I’ll be facing a room full of about 200 privacy and security wonks and wonkettes. If anyone is going to call me out on my book’s handling of data security issues, it’s that bunch.
If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and the subtitle?
I Fought The Law (And The Law Won). (I’m a partner in the San Francisco office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.)
Why do you write?
Given the demands of my legal practice, there are a million reasons why I shouldn’t write. I suppose I just can’t help myself.
Recommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise.
I am a film fanatic with a predilection for the films of the Seventies. Here’s my list of great books about Hollywood:
The Player by Michael Tolkin
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald (the Pat Hobby stories are also great)
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans (Audio Book). This is a rare instance where the audio book improves immeasurably upon the text. There’s nothing like hearing Evans himself ask the reader a question, then answer it with, “You bet your ass it was.”
Okay ‘Ratis, how about your indulgences, wicked or benign?
It’s quarter to two in the morning, and I’m lying in bed in a guest room at my Aunt Julie’s house in Vermont.
Just after midnight, I got the news that my father killed himself yesterday afternoon.
He struggled with mental illness for decades, and he owned nine guns. There is an awful sense of inevitability about all of this.
I am blessed that he and I had become friends again, over the last several years. He’d ceased all communication with me for twelve years before that, and I know his suicide would have been immeasurably harder for me to face had we not made peace with one another.
My heart goes out to my stepmother and to my half sister, who just turned seventeen.
Frederick Harvey Read, I will goddamn miss you.
Requiescat in pace.
Me and Dad on Bandicoot off Seawanhaka, circa 1967
The coolest thing about having a website is having a “contact” email link–you get to hear from old friends, and even make new ones. I can’t remember how Laura DiSilverio and I first started emailing each other, but the exchanges quickly turned into the kind of wonderful conversations you sometimes get to have with some cool person you end up getting seated next to on an airplane: wide-ranging, honest, funny. And then grew into something beyond that, into a real friendship.
I read an early manuscript of hers, which I think still is pure genius and should be published, and I got to hear updates on how things were going with her writing, her family, her friends, her kids, as she did mine. And finally, at Bouchercon in Indianapolis last fall, we got to meet in person. Can I just say here that Laura is AWESOME? She’s great fun to hang out with, and smart and funny and gorgeous, and a truly gifted writer. I am honored to call her my friend, and so excited to introduce her here to all you wonderful ‘Ratis.
Please welcome Laura DiSilverio, writing as Lila Dare. Her first novel, Tressed to Kill, has just been published by Berkley, and is already getting scads of glowing reviews.
Publishers Weekly gave her a starred review, commenting: “Fans of the themed cozy will rejoice as new talent Dare debuts her Southern Beauty Shop series… Dare turns this off-the-rack concept into a tightly plotted, suspenseful mystery, and readers will love the pretty, plucky, smart, slightly damaged herone and the rest of the charming cast.”
The first in my Southern Beauty Shop mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime debuts on 4 May. Tressed to Kill features five women who live in fictional St. Elizabeth, Georgia, and work in Violetta’s Salon. I think of it as “Steel Magnolias with dead bodies.” Lots of humor, heart and suspenseful plotting, according to very insightful reviewers and blurbers. Buy it. Please.
What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I was going to answer this in a humorous way–I’m pretty sure some of the guys I’ve dated have been fictional characters—but then I asked my recently widowed, seventy-five-year-old mom this question. Our exchange went like this:
“You know, that guy I liked in that movie we went to.” Asked to clarify, she said, “The one in the sequel. He had super powers.”
Oh, him.
“His hands turned into knives.”
“Wolverine?” I asked.
“Yes!” said with enthusiasm. “But he’d need to do something with his hair.”
So, the answer is, Wolverine, as portrayed by Hugh Jackman, but only if he combs his hair.
Who’s wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
If I were a hotel, I’d rather book a room to an author. Consider: Rolling Stones vs Carolyn Hart, Amy Winehouse vs Dave Barry, Guns-n-Roses vs P.D. James. Writers know how to drink with the best of ’em, but it’s just harder to destroy lamps and bedside tables with a laptop than it is with a guitar.
On a clear and cold day, do you typically get outside into the sunshine or stay inside where it’s warm?
I’ve got a dog . . . need I say more? We walk every day–in the cold, the heat, the rain, the snow, the wind, when I’d rather be reading More magazine with a glass of wine . . . you get the picture.
Talk about your vision of the ideal life.
I’m living it. I’m still with my starter hubby (seventeen years in June!) and we appreciate each other more as time goes on. We have two lovely daughters who delight us with their wit and kindness and haven’t yet (they’re only 10 and 12) distressed us with any of the following statements:
– “Come bail me out.”
– “I’m pregnant.”
– “I totaled the car.”
– (Yes, I realize there are even more frightening things they could say, but I’d rather not dwell on those things. Don’t write and tell me about them.)
We have our health (mostly), good friends, and get to live in Colorado. I am blessed to write every day and get paid for it. Life is good and I am thankful.
Dogs, cats, budgies, or turtles?
Companions, shedders, poopers, salmonella.
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
What I’d like to hear: “Welcome. You’ve been upgraded to the penthouse suite.”
What I’m more likely to hear: “I’m not seeing your reservation in our system. Do you have a confirmation number? You weren’t paying much attention when I mentioned that your reservation was tied to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Let’s review (in no particular order):
– Yes, your brothers count as neighbors, even though they lived in the same house with you for going on seventeen years. Oops.
– The year you turned thirteen and made your mom cry every day with your sulks, anger, and general shittiness stands out. Hormones are not an excuse. Damn. And just when I’m old enough to start blaming them again for my bitchiness.
– Would it have killed you to coach your daughter’s soccer team just one season? Probably.
– And that guy in San Antonio in 1982. What was that all about? Just be grateful that night was pre-AIDS epidemic. Which guy? Can you narrow it down for me?
See what I’m getting at? Maybe we can squeeze you in out back in the parking structure.”
Recommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise. Please provide a brief introduction about the list. You’re welcome to describe each book, as well, but that part is optional.
Five Books Given to Me as Gifts that Are Incredibly Meaningful (Mostly Because of Who Gave Them to Me) (Yeah, I know it’s a long title, but it’s my list.)
1. High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver
My father gave me this. I think it’s the only gift buying task he didn’t abdicate to my mom.
2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
From my friends Fred and Ellen, specifically to share with my daughters.
3. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Given to me by my friend Jill who is so in touch with who I am and what’s important to me.
4. The Cider House Rules by John Irving
From my friend Jamie who died climbing Mont Blanc.
5. Venetia by Georgette Heyer
With this book, my mom introduced me to my life-long favorite comfort books, Heyer’s Regency novels.
Laura and I are both on the road today–she’s touring and I’m driving home to New Hampshire after the Edgars in NYC, but we will both be checking in today as often as possible. Thanks you guys, and please give Laura a very warm welcome!
Okay, so this week I have completed both my taxes and financial aid forms for daughter Grace, and then I flew to Houston (via Cleveland, which I can’t help but remember was always referred to by my first stepfather as “The Mistake by the Lake,” even though the airport is perfectly fine.)
Here is what my bedroom looks like right now:
(Oh, and “have a nice day” my ass, BTW. It’s mid-April, who are we kidding?)
Because A) I think doing taxes is a perfectly good reason to take to one’s bed and B) when you get to that point in the paperwork where the IRS asks you what form of accounting you use, I always wonder why there’s not a box to check that says “lightning rod for entropy in the universe.”
Or just a picture of this with an X next to it:
And here is what I would like to say to the IRS:
And here is about how well my brain is functioning:
Did I mention what my bedroom still looks like, since I finished the taxes and everything at the very last minute before leaving for the airport? Here’s another shot:
And here is what I feel like, after this week:
So, you know, having to post the day after Neil Nyren is making me feel kind of like this:
Even though I’m sure to the IRS I look like this:
And now I must turn my attention to book number four, which I think I just thought up a title for on the airplane (Crash and Burn, considering it’s about an arsonist and my marriage falling apart and stuff). Though even though I had a fabulous time in Houston, I am still feeling as though this should be my theme song right now:
But mostly, because it’s all over with, I feel like singing this:
Or maybe doing this:
Although, hey, I would like to sing this to the IRS on behalf of all taxpayers:
‘Ratis, what song would you pick to illustrate this week?
(p.s. For Chris and Louise, the Shonen Knife version:)
Our beloved friend Louise Ure is in all our thoughts this week. Please consider making a donation to the American Cancer Society in her husband Bruce Goronsky’s memory.
Well, this will be the second time I’ve written this post this morning. I’m lying in bed at my pals Sue and Glo’s house in Glendale, California, and didn’t do the intelligent thing of asking them how to log onto their wireless service before I tried to save and publish my thoughts to Murderati today. O joy, o rapture. But maybe it will make more sense this time (at least I hope so.)
The bed belongs to their son Malcolm, who’s away on a sleepover, and it’s made up with extremely cozy Star Wars sheets, so there is definitely some mojo in being wrapped in likenesses of Han Solo and Princess Leia.
I’ve been on book tour since Monday, and it’s a wonderful thing to be back on the green lush west coast when everything in New Hampshire is still very grey and mouse-colored. I’v been blessed to see dear friends at every stop along the way. I’ve been given rides to and from every airport, and beds to sleep in, and have gotten to break bread with people I love at every meal–in Seattle, in Corte Madera and Berkeley and Piedmont and San Mateo, and now here in LA.
In Seattle, Fran and Lillian blessed me with a mojo-rich leather biker jacket that belonged to their friend Lou, who died seven years ago of breast cancer. The only condition of the gift was that the little pink ribbon pin on the left lapel must always stay in place, and I am honored to oblige them in that.
The only thing that’s felt a little off about my travels this time is me. Normally, I’m pleased to get up and speak to a crowd at the drop of a hat. I’m very lucky, especially in this line of work, to have no nerves whatsoever about public speaking. This time, though, I haven’t felt as solid about what to say about my work. I think this is partly because my third novel is a tougher thing to encapsulate in a polished way. The issues in it go too deep for me, it’s too personal, and it’s become a divisive thing within my family. This is the book I worked on as my marriage fell apart for once and all, and it’s also done a good bit to shatter the fragile peace of my immediate family’s long held truce of denial. It’s a dark book, though I’m pleased and honored that the Richmond Times-Dispatch called it “at once heartrending and hilarious.”
And, too, seeing so many wonderful friends on the west coast has driven home how solitary the life I’m returning to on Monday is, by comparison. I lived in Berkeley for nine years before lighting out for New Hampshire, and I was blessed with a wonderful collection of beloved friends and colleagues in the Bay Area. I miss them all a great deal.
This year has been the first in which I lived alone, ever. I met my husband a couple of months after leaving college, when I was still sleeping on a friend’s dorm room floor at Williams. I haven’t ever been the sole grownup in a household, and I’m discovering all the ways in which I’m not very good at being said grownup, when everything’s on me. Parts of it have been really cool, but most days there are at least a few instances where I feel like a twelve-year-old masquerading as someone who knows what she’s doing in a forty-seven-year-old body.
The best part of the year has been the realization that I am supporting myself and my daughter with my writing alone, the scariest part my uncertainty that that will remain true, given the tenuous nature of this line of work. My friends have sustained me through all of this, even though most of them are now 3000 miles away from the zipcode I currently claim as home.
If you’ve found me a little more shy and hesitant at signings this time out, all of this is what’s been going through my head. And I have one more gig today, 3:30 p.m. at The Mystery Bookstore, 1036 Broxton in Los Angeles. I’d love to see you there if you’re local at all.
So, ‘Ratis, who are the people who’ve sustained you at points in your life when everything changes, especially when if feels like there’s no context at all?
At Zoe’s kind behest, the name of the book is Invisible Boy, my publisher describes it as follows:
The smart-mouthed but sensitive runaway socialite Madeline Dare is shocked when she discovers the skeleton of a brutalized three-year-old boy in her own weed-ridden family cemetery outside Manhattan. Determined to see that justice is served, she finds herself examining her own troubled personal history, and the sometimes hidden, sometimes all-too-public class and racial warfare that penetrates every level of society in the savage streets of New York City during the early 1990s.
Madeline is aided in her efforts by a colorful assemblage of friends, relatives, and new acquaintances, each one representing a separate strand of the patchwork mosaic city politicians like to brag about. The result is an unforgettable narrative that relates the causes and consequences of a vicious crime to the wider relationships that connect and divide us all.
My husband, Bruce, died yesterday morning, slipping away peacefully in my arms. How can a heart be so full and so shattered at the same time? My words run dry. I had written the following blog post several days ago, unaware that I would have no time to do it today. And unaware that “the other shoe” I was referencing was already dropping. And that my husband’s voice is the sound that isn’t there. Give yourselves a hug today, and send one my way, as well.)
By Louise Ure
Our days are usually filled with sound. Voices, traffic, music, TV, individual ringtones, jackhammers, birds, pots and pans clanging, a dog’s whine. It’s a cacophony that we’ve become used to, an ordered and expected series of sounds that define our day.
Some sounds are more sudden but less common—squealing brakes, a crash of thunder, a child’s cry– but recognizable enough as part of our world.
In my last blog post I used the phrase “waiting for the other shoe to drop” and it’s that thought—the absence of expected sound–that I was thinking about this week, and how that applies to both lives and our writing.
The term seems to have originated in the mid-20th century, descriptive of a man in a downstairs apartment who is awakened nightly by his upstairs neighbor removing his shoes and dropping them heavily on the floor. The first shoe hits the floor with a loud bang, awakening the sleeping tenant in the lower apartment, who would remain awake until he heard the other shoe drop. In the story my head, (British television? Mid-century American radio?) the upstairs tenant once remembered that he had a sleeping neighbor below, and after dropping the first shoe, took the second shoe off and carefully placed it on the floor, making no noise. The groggy neighbor would then yell, “For God’s sake, drop the other shoe!”
It is the absence of expected sound—the absence of an expected ritual—that gives the phrase such a frisson of power.
In literature, no one used it better than Conan Doyle in the story “Silver Blaze,” which hinged on the famed “curious incident of the dog in the night-time”:
Scotland Yard Detective: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Detective: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
The sound that wasn’t there.
I can imagine other actions and plot points that would tweak that tendon waiting for an expected outcome. A slap, but no sound of surprise or pain. What’s going on in there? Is the victim gagged? Is the victim used to such abuse? Or is it nothing more that the thumping swat of a buzzing fly?
A crash outside in the street, but no horns or sirens or voices raised in alarm. Are they dead inside the car? Is the town deserted? Or was it simply a parking brake that didn’t hold on the steep hill?
Like a bolt of lightening without a following peal of thunder, the absence of sound can be as intriguing as what is there. And that goes for dialogue, too. Like real life, what’s left unsaid is sometimes the most important language of all.
What about you ‘Rati out there? Who do you think does a good job of leaving things unsaid, like a shoe waiting to be dropped, in films or books?
So I’ve been sitting here wondering why on earth I decided to chair Left Coast Crime Santa Fe. I mean, it’s a whole year out and already I’m getting daily emails and having to talk with the hotel, worry about content on the website, write the blog (yes, I try to post daily on the blog on the website now), think about the program and on and on and on.
I hope I don’t sound like I’m complaining. That’ll come later when people aren’t happy with their program assignments . . .
But the question still needs to be asked. Why did I agree to do this?
Simple. I love New Mexico. I want to show off my home state.
Let do a little of that right now. Last week, my kids were on Spring Break. We took a small road trip west. About an hour or so outside of Albuquerque, near Grants, we turned south and headed for the Ice Cave and Baldera Volcano. These tourist attractions are on private land. For moderate admission fees, we hiked ½ mile up a muddy, snowy trail that led to a collapsed volcano. From where we stood we could see well more than a dozen other volcanoes.
Then we walked 400 yards in the other direction, down several uneven stairs, and gazed at the mouth of an ice cave.
Gorgeous hunh?
Less than an hour later, we visited El Morro National Monument. This rock formation can be seen for miles and harbors a pool that sustained many a traveler across the high western plains of NM. Those travelers left their marks – petroglyphs, inscriptions from people like Juan de Oñate in 1605, children who later died in transit . . . There’s also a pueblo ruin on top of the monument, but we couldn’t visit because of the snow and ice on the trail.
Then it was on to Window Rock, AZ – a short drive, maybe 50 minutes, to see the rock from which the seat of the Navajo Nation derives its English name. I’ve always been curious about this place but doubted it’d be very interesting. A hole in a rock. Big whoopie. We went because it was close, that’s all.
Boy was I surprised. A stunning formation and a meaningful park commemorating Navajo veterans.
After a happy night in Gallup and several visits to the hotel’s nice swimming pool, we headed home by way of Acoma Pueblo (known as the Sky City). Rather than go to the casino, we went to the cultural center and bought tickets to go to the old pueblo on the mesa. This is the longest continuously inhabited pueblo in the country.
Photos can be taken – and I took quite a few – but hesitate to post them because of all the restrictions the pueblo places on them. I’m posting this picture of the sky instead. I took it atop the mesa.
I think it demonstrates nicely another reason why I adore my home state: the sense of possibility here. You find it in our mountains, mesas, wide open spaces.
Well, I’ve gone on long enough. I hope my pix do some justice to the state I love so much.
I’m getting down to the deadline wire for book four, spent yesterday giving a talk to fifty awesome eighth graders at the Gray New Gloucester Middle School in Maine (thanks to the ever-fabulous Michelle Guerard, AKA Ms. G)
Go Pats!
took my daughter Grace on college tours last week, got my website updates finished, figured out my Southwest itinerary for the book tour that kicks off March 29th (Seattle, LA, Corte Madera, San Mateo, Houston, and Chester, Vermont) and generally turned into a giant ball of confusion–and therefore hope it’s okay that I reproduce here my answers for a questionnaire for the Powell’s Bookstore website that went up this week.
Part I.
Describe your latest book/project/work.
Invisible Boy is my third crime novel chronicling the adventures of Madeline Dare, a foul-mouthed cynic with a dark and twisty worldview who still secretly yearns to be Batman when she grows up.
She’s now escaped both rust-belt Syracuse and the clutches of a gothically culty boarding school in the Berkshires, finally having clawed her way back to Manhattan. This is 1990 New York, pre-Giuliani and well before the Disneyfication of Times Square: it’s brutal and it’s sketchy and everything reeks of piss, but it’s still her spiritual homeland.
Her sense of relief is, of course, short-lived. She volunteers to clear brush in an abandoned Queens cemetery and discovers the skeleton of a brutally murdered three-year-old.
When she starts fighting for justice on this little boy’s behalf, Maddie gets slammed with the revelation of a gut-wrenching secret at the heart of her own fractured childhood, upending everything she thought she knew about her family.
I was tremendously honored that Tana French described Invisible as a book in which, “the victim isn’t just one person, it’s all the world’s broken and betrayed children, and the danger can never be safely locked away.”
Part II.
1. If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
They can call it whatever they want, but if it’s going to be an authorized biography, I insist that the epigraph be what my Sarah Lawrence classmate Ptolemy Tompkins posted as his Facebook status last weekend:
“The first rule of Wacky Childhood Club is that you must always talk about Wacky Childhood Club.” –Emily Zinnemann
This is mostly because I feel that quotation affords me some blanket forgiveness for the number of times I’ve been slightly lit at cocktail parties and launched into the story of my ponytailed dad showing up at my boarding school
unannounced one year for Father’s Weekend
wearing a t-shirt that said “FRY BRAIN” in red iron-on velour letters (gift from his fellow short-order cooks at The Neptune’s Net in Malibu),
his Marine Corps blouse (tie-dyed by these opium-freak bicycle mechanics in Marin),
boot-cut Levis belted with a ten-speed tire innertube (see above, opium-freak bicycle mechanics), and a pair of Gokey double-bullhide snake-proof boots held together with duct tape
—whereupon he proceeded to do continual massive bonghits while sequestered in the guest bathroom of the headmaster’s cottage over the next forty-eight hours, in between catching up with all the other dads he hadn’t seen since his days working on the floor of the NYSE or discussing Atlas Shrugged at The Brook.
2. What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
Since the series I’m writing is hugely autobiographical and there’s about a twenty-year time lag between when what I’m describing happened and the point at which I’m actually writing about it, I’m now stuck having to portray the guy I just divorced as the kind of person I would voluntarily hang out with (an attempted mental contortion at which I always fail miserably for at least three drafts, to my editor’s increasing despair.)
This means I can’t say anything about my former spouse’s o’erweening latter-day Rush-Limbaugh fixation, his increasingly delusional claims that we should mistrust The New York Times while keeping the faith with bloggers who still seem to keep discovering briefcases full of “proof” that Saddam Hussein was meeting with Osama Bin Laden at every third falafel joint in Baghdad throughout the Nineties,
or his wearing of camo army hats around Berkeley despite the fact that when he had to register for the draft back in college he gave his name as “Siddhartha Gautama” and his address as “under the Bo tree.”
But I’m not bitter.
I do, however, henceforth plan to give the whole fictional dating thing a VERY wide berth.
3. Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
Right now I am most totally loving the following from the sublime and lapidary Joshilyn Jackson’s forthcoming Backseat Saints:
Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrikes’s copy of Forever and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was head dog in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation, wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair, never once cut. They were a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near-constant headaches…. They probably had no more than an inkling about what went where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had dogeared the sex parts.
At first glance it seems so effortless, but she’s made this entire rich world—complete and poignant, oddly but achingly familiar—unfold within what’s basically an aside. You never see any of these girls again (except for Rose), but so much of what the book is about resonates through that passage in this Joseph-Cornell-oblique kind of way. Right down to Rose’s hometown being almost “fruition,” but not.
The woman is a goddamn genius.
4. What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
My preferred shoes are an appallingly expensive pair of old-school men’s black Gucci loafers, purchased with a meaty swath of my first-ever royalty check. They’re social Kevlar/Kryptonite: I can wear them with my most blatantly ratty Goodwill-crap clothing and still strike a resounding chord of fear in even the most pompous Midtown maître d’,
which gladdens my tiny black heart.
As my alter-ego Madeline once said, “I wondered anew why some women were so desperate to wear ‘fuck-me’ shoes. I have long preferred ‘fuck-you’ shoes.”
If I’m going to pay the big bucks for footwear-subtext, I don’t want that subtext to be “OMG! I sooooo think I’m Sarah Jessica Parker!”
I want a shoe with gravitas, a shoe that says “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” in no uncertain terms.
I still yearn for the plate of red papaya chunks and large cup of killer-intense “kopi susu” (market-Indonesian for coffee with milk—literally “coffee with tits”) delivered free to our doorstep every morning at this funky Balinese guest house my sister Freya and I crashed in for two months in 1988. Seven bucks a night with a perpetual racket of geckos in the palm-frond eaves and a plethora of totally hot Swedish surfer dudes in batik sarongs: awesome.
Barring that, an H&H salt bagel bedizened with Barney Greengrass Nova certainly wouldn’t suck. Something wicked about the succulence of that salmon, in a “Modest Proposal” way.
6. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I spent my junior year at Trinity College Dublin because I had a bit of a Joyce fetish during the better part of my misspent youth. It took me less than a week to comprehend why he split for the Continent. On the bright side, the Guinness was excellent and cheap, I read The Basketball Diaries a bazillion times,
and I can still speak Hebrew with a County Kerry accent (useful amusement to proffer when you’re the seder’s token Episcopalian chick.)
7. Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why, or not?
Let’s just say that Mary McCarthy’s famously scathing summation of Lillian Hellman
(“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the…”) in fact accurately describes all writers who’ve ever lived—not least Mary McCarthy.
Then again, I’m a writer and I’m writing this, which makes my assertion pretty much like that thing in the book of brainteasers from Stuckey’s you read in the station wagon’s way-back oubliette while driving across Iowa forever on summer vacation in third grade—the one where the generic cannibal chief in the hula skirt and Sioux headdress tells the pith-helmeted missionary dude that he’s allowed to make a single statement and if it’s a lie they’ll boil him to death in a big pot but if it’s the truth they’ll just shoot him with a poison dart.*
And can I just point out here that pursuing scenarios of this hypothetical ilk to their fullest ramifications can only ever end with a blinding ice-blue flash and a noxious bang before—hey presto!—there we all are swanning around on the bridge of the Enterprise in that dopy alternate universe where Spock has a beard. Again.
I mean, maybe if you want to know whether or not writers are liars—accomplished or otherwise—you should ask a former Lehman Brothers executive or a closeted Republican senator with “a wide stance”
or, God help you, a good tax lawyer. Anyone else, instead of a writer. Especially a writer on deadline.
Because we poets and prose-hounds lie like rugs. We lie like Astroturf and wall-to-wall carpeting. We lie like faux-hardwood laminate flooring from IKEA, for chrissakes. In our sleep.
Or do we?
Oh, the mendacity!
* The missionary said, “I will die by being boiled to death in a big pot” so they couldn’t actually kill him, since if that’s a true statement they had to take him out with a poisoned dart, which obviously makes what he said a total lie once they did…. And, yes, I only know that because I totally peeked at the answers printed upside down in the back of the book. I also suck at algebra.
Part III:
Five Books That Best Explain What it Was Like Being a Little Kid at the Heart of the Counter-Culture in Late-Sixties California:
1. Living On Earth, by Alicia Bay Laurel
The commune handbook of choice, with tips on everything from why it’s important to use LOTS of incense when you’re cremating friends at home to optimal methods of organic delousing and surefire ways to craft weather-proof fashions out of second-hand army blankets and old tires. Bonus: a really good recipe for “Digger Bread.”
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Nothing captures the mid-Nixonian zeitgeist like Thompson’s “wave speech” at the end of chapter eight, which reads in part:
[…]You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
3. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
Purportedly the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the late Sixties, Go Ask Alice was my very favorite childhood read. I first raced through it when I was eight years old, and I’ve reread it an average of once a year since.
When I was a kid, the cool grownups all got stoned, only narcs wore ties, and Republicans were the people who drove down the freeway in their Cadillacs throwing just-emptied bourbon bottles out the window while they told jokes about poor people.
Alice totally got all of that, especially after she ran away to Haight-Ashbury.
Still today, I think of her as the big sister I never had—even though she was probably the pastiche of some snarky Williams guy working at Prentice-Hall, patched together from a few issues of Seventeen and some chick he sat next to at a Jefferson Airplane concert.
I don’t care. Alice is family.
4. A Child’s Garden of Grass, by Jack S. Margolis and Richard Clorfene
From the original jacket copy:
“When you finish this book you will know all there is to know about the use of the weed from first joint to final effect.”
Includes two recipes for “Grass Tea”: the kind that makes you throw up, and the kind that doesn’t.
5. Be Here Now, by Ram Dass
“That’s it, then you’ll know, that’s the whole trip man, and you gotta get in there, in that state of knowing man, to be really free, but you cant think about it, because then you wont know.”
Right on.
And here’s a bonus thingie… I remember being in the audience for this (my first and last time at Esalen–the whole hippie thing cured me young of any interest in public nudity):
Okay, guys… your assignment for today is to pick one of those seven questions above and throw me an answer, okay?
Back to hanging out with the arson investigator in Boulder in 1995 (fictionally). Please wish me luck!
(David Corbett is someone I’ve known and respected for years. A couple of weeks ago, he was so moved by some of the posts here, that he asked if he could contribute a message close to his heart. I am certain everyone here at the ‘Rati can benefit from David’s personal experience and wisdom. Pari)
If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call.
This is the sentence most people who are grieving from a devastating personal loss, or suffering through a crisis, hear over and over and over and over. It is almost always well-intended. Unfortunately, it also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the person is going through.
In this country, where individual initiative, responsibility, stoic resilience and good-natured optimism are so prized, one seldom feels as unattractive, unworthy, uninteresting and burdensome as when withstanding some personal crisis or struggling through a terrible loss.
The sorrow is so disorienting, the rage so unpredictable, the numbness so leaden—while the rest of the world quite rightly goes on about its daily business—that one comes to think that the best thing to do is hide away. You feel like a raw and suppurating wound. You can’t imagine anyone wanting to waste time with you and you don’t blame them. You’re sick of yourself.
So if someone tells you that, if you need anything, just call, they’re missing the point on two scores. One, you have no clue what you need, except for this part of your life to end. And you wouldn’t dream of asking anyone for anything—the imposition feels obscene. Why stain anyone else’s life with your pathetic relentless misery?
As a friend, you need to instead do something. Stop by with food, for example. Nothing was more valuable to me after my wife died than a neighbor’s bringing frozen dinners she’d prepared that I could microwave if I finally did recover my appetite. Everything tastes like sand, cooking feels too intimate, too laden with memories of shared meals—and so having someone else bring food is a surprising grace note.
As odd as it may seem, providing help with chores is also incredibly helpful. My friends came by and helped me one weekend in the garden. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.
And of course just stopping by. Or calling. Or sending a card.
The problem is, we feel as though we’re imposing, violating the chapel of our friend’s sorrow. Well, yeah, you may be doing just that. But the tendency of someone going through a terrible ordeal is toward isolation, and that’s just unhealthy. You have to be willing to risk being a bother, a nuisance, a nag, and accept criticism or irritability if that’s the case. Apologize, discreetly withdraw. Your love for the person and hers or his for you will survive such things. You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to show up at the wrong time, you’re going to stay too long, you’re going to say the wrong thing and offer the wrong help and blunder in who knows how many other ways. Get over yourself. Give up on perfection. Grief is the realm where perfection vanishes forever. You’re not going to be a perfect friend. You’re just going to give as much as you can and try to sense when enough is enough, it’s time to go. And there is no smart little guidebook for that. You will simply have to pay attention, open your heart, trust your instincts. And be willing to mess up.
Don’t leave it up to the person going through the ordeal to decide for you what the right thing to do is. That’s abdicating your responsibility as a friend. It’s putting your fear of doing or saying the wrong thing ahead of genuinely caring. Be willing to enter with him or her into this new world, where nothing is right, all the cues are mistaken, and simply putting one foot in front of the other borders on the miraculous. If you can do that, share the devastation and give up on being the perfect pal, be willing to accept some hard feelings if you cross the line (understanding that you cannot be spared anger, you cannot be spared the feeling of not having enough to give, not in this situation), you’ll offer a gift of genuine friendship and concern. You will have shown yourself willing to understand what it means to enter a world where nothing is right, at least not yet. That’s courage. That’s love.
David Corbett has published four critically acclaimed novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime, Blood of Paradise, and Do They Know I’m Running? His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2009. Visit him at www.davidcorbett.com
(Pari here: I’ll be around today — as will David from time to time — so please, let us know what you think. I know that so much of what he writes here is absolutely true. Grief is incredibly nonlinear. The friends I remember most from those times in my life were often people at whom I raged the loudest. But they stuck by me and it made all the difference in the world. David’s message today gives each one of us a small roadmap to help those we love.)
I was randomly Googling my Great-Grandfather William A. Read a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know a huge amount about him, since Dad is a little nuts and doesn’t like to talk about his family all that much.
Here is what I do know (mostly from a book about the investment bank he founded The Life and Times of Dillon Read, by Andrew Sobel):
He graduated from Brooklyn Polytechnic at the age of nineteen, and went to work for a bond house called Vermilye & Company. He could apparently write with both hands at the same time, composing a letter with one while solving equations with the other. He formed his own bank, William A. Read & Company, which later became Dillon, Read. He was walleyed, and always wore violets in his lapel. He invented the bond issue which underwrote the construction of the first subway system in New York City. Four of his sons, including my grandfather, his namesake, were naval aviators in World War I. By that time, however, he was no longer around, having died in 1916 of the flu. He was fifty-two years old.
An older cousin once told me that her father (my grandfather’s brother Bayard) had sold his shares in Dillon Read before the 1929 stock market crash. He got $29 million for them. My grandfather waited until after the crash and “only” got $6 million for his. I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to have six million bucks, cash, at the outset of the Depression. It’s kind of astonishing to think about the lengths my grandfather must have gone to to squander all of that by the time he died in 1976. I figure he must have stayed up late at night, pondering ludicrous investments.
But when I Googled his father the other day, I found something else that was exceedingly bizarre–something I’d never heard about. On a rare book site, a copy of the hardbound 1936 auction catalog of “The Splendid Library and Collection of Historical and Literary Autographs of the Late Mr. and Mrs. William A. Read.” It was offered for twenty-five dollars, and extremely oddly, this volume was for sale at a rare bookstore a block from my apartment in Exeter.
The stuff parted with at this auction included a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Poe (“her reply to him for his dedication of The Raven and Other Poems to her”),
from John Keats to his love, Fanny Brawne,
the first four folio editions of Shakespeare (published in 1623),
stuff from George Washington, Thackeray, Twain, Dante, Milton, Oliver Goldsmith, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and apparently a large collection of primary documents used in the witchcraft trials in Massachusetts, first edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, “the finest copy of Grimm’s ‘Popular German Stories,'”
“M.T. Cicero’s CATO MAJOR, or his DISCOURSE of Old-Age” printed by Benjamin Franklin,
among lots of other groovy crap–the catalog is 287 pages long. And all of it sold “By Order of the Heirs.”
Some days my family annoys me far more than others.
The foreword of this catalog describes these books as “not the modern sort of library limited to the collecting of one or two special classes of books. It is a more generous kind of collection, rich in many fields and showing a wide range of interests. It is the result of the collaboration of two elaborately balanced minds in search of a library equipped to fit all moods. Not every volume is a rarity, yet every volume was chosen carefully to satisfy a particular need and the whole is so compacted with treasures and delights that it must necessarily attract many collectors by its variety and excellence.”
I bought this catalog for myself yesterday, an early birthday present since I’ll be turning 47 on Monday.
And as I’m now leafing through it, I wonder what the library itself looked like, when all these books still lived together on its shelves. I wonder that these two people I never knew, my great-grandfather William Augustus and his wife, Caroline, would make of me.
Here is a crappy photograph I took last summer with my iPhone of a portrait of her with their daughter Carol (who died in a car crash in France in the Twenties):
I wish I knew what that book lying open across her lap is.
I wonder if my great-grandparents were the people I get my love of books from, as not a whole lot of people who came generationally between us seem to have quite this deep a lust for the printed word.
I love that the foreword of the catalog refers to them both as the minds responsible for putting together this library. I wish I could have known them.
Most of all, I’m glad that the catalog of their library ended up in the magnificently dusty basement store I visited yesterday, just across the String Bridge from my new digs. How odd is that?
But it makes me miss my own collection of books,38 cartons now in storage in California until I can afford to rent a U-Haul truck to drive them across the country. I feel so rootless without them…
‘Ratis, what’s a book you’ve lost that you wish you still had?
;)
