Guilty Pleasure
Here is a totally Stray Thought that I don’t feel invades my privacy, although for many years I did keep it a secret. I love romance novels. The fat, trashy kind with hilarious titles like Mine Till Midnight or Love Again Later.
I even like the silly, skinny ones put out by Harlequin that you can buy in the grocery store. Soon I will have a "Three Books" piece on NPR’s All Things Considered about adult books to give your smart, young adult children. The original "Three Books" was to have been on romance novels, but it didn’t work out. I couldn’t make my love for and joy with the romance genre fit into a NPR series about books not to be missed.
But here is a brief essay that I wish I could have made radio friendly.
So it would appear that none of my thoughts have been stray for a while. Or perhaps they have been so stray that none of them have agreed to be captured. A few notes, then:
The air in North Carolina smells good. Not clean or like an éclair, but just good. It’s not quite the air of southern California, which can hang about you, heavy with floral bloom, but it’s still good.
I have a dog.
I should have lead with that. He is four or five years old, a shar-pei/pug mix, riddled with skin allergies, and is a sweet pea. Dorcas hates him. This is kind of funny, as D is too lazy to do much about it. Mostly they nap within a few feet of each other, but every now and then, Dorcas will turn into a Halloween cat, arching his back and hissing.
When you have a dog, none of your thoughts are stray. They are about walks, food, naps, and dog love.
I’d like to say that I am going to be better about posting here, but I probably won’t. Writers are supposed to make their pages places of destination. A place that invites readers in and makes them feel that they have found a writer with whom they can connect. I am rather of the opinion that people who become writers do so because they are not so great at “connecting” with others.
Plus, I’m insanely private, and am going to take down the stray thought about my crushes
on Garry Kasparov and Dwight Garner. I mean, really... who needs to know about that?
My stray thoughts for today are not moving-related, thank God and finally.
But they do reveal that I am still a little bit boring in that way that shell-shocked people often are. My cat, as you can see from the evidence below, is supercute in spite of his new location. I am watching so much tennis that if I had to file my taxes today I would put “professional tennis watcher” on the occupation line.
It turns out that when you are moving, there is no such thing as a stray thought. You can only think (or, more precisely, I can only think) about lists, boxes, undone tasks, not enough time, and why on earth you have so many books and tea cups.
I did, in the not too distant past, have an elegant and well thought out response to a revolting quote in Katie Roiphe’s WSJ piece about YA literature. My response had to do with the merits of moral codes when the only morality in both writing and the reading experience have to do with standards.
But, honestly, with my stuff everywhere and my mind half in DC and half in NC, I simply can not recall why I cared. Or why I thought anyone else would.
In what little private time I have I am reading Howl’s Moving Castle (which my beloved Sharyn recommended) and Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. If I were a little less frantic, I could come up with something pithy to say about how the two are similar.
Well, maybe not. Enjoy your Tuesday. It will be far less tedious than mine.
I probably never got to decide on my own if I liked French films or not. When I was fourteen I went with my mother to see Peppermint Soda, which was directed by the amazing Diane Kurys. The movie is about a 13-year-old girl in Paris who is trying to come of age under the shadow of her parents’ divorce, her older sister’s political rants (she’s against the bomb and what the French are doing in Algeria), and her own confused thoughts.
I loved the movie. By the time I was 14, I’d seen countless movies, TV shows, books for girls, and issues of Seventeen Magazine, all of which explained everything that a teenage girl should, would, could feel. Peppermint Soda assumed I was capable of entertainment that didn’t explain everything, and as I followed the heroine’s efforts to understand and accept, a French-film lover was born. I never did love Jules and Jim as much my father felt I should, and I can’t say that every bit of Breathless left me enthralled, and I really hated Vagabond. But as a rule, the films made in France that come to the States tend to share a belief in the audience’s abilities to connect the dots. No matter your age, it’s hard not to be seduced by that.
Which is why I dragged my husband to go see L’heure d’été (Summer Hours). It has Juliette Binoche in it and it’s hard to complain about anything if you have a chance to look at her. The movie, about how three siblings handle the dispersal of their mother’s estate after her death, is not great. It has amazing performances and a lovely depiction of the French countryside. It never once thought it needed to explain to the viewers, it simply revealed what it was like to be each of the siblings. The siblings squabbled and did their best. Paintings by Corot as well as a summer house are sold. It is up for debate if the grandchildren will recall much of the time they spent at their grandmother’s.
I liked that we never saw either the mother’s death or the funeral. I like how so much happened off screen. I liked how a sub-plot about a granddaughter told us miles about the eldest brother and his marriage. I liked how we found out about the failed marriage of Binoche’s character via a joke. I liked how her boyfriend showed up and left without a lot of set-up or explanation.
In spite of the acting, the film’s many good parts didn’t add up. I think it was supposed to be about how objects hold memory and how stories fade in importance when there is no one left who cares to listen. It was no I’ve Loved You So Long (see below), but it was still nice to spend time with a movie that wanted to be more than its parts. This has gotten too long, and I’ve spent an insane amount of time trying not to sound like I love the French (I don’t—the one time I was in Paris, I cried every day because they were so mean to me). It’s simply that I formed a habit back when I was fourteen and I’ve never yet shucked it. I’ll write next week about the moral code, which has to do with YA novels, Katie Roiphe, and what a writer owes her reader.
Like just about everyone with an internet connection, I’ve been trying to cobble together the information out there on Iran into some kind of narrative. My head is full of soccer players, clerical in-fighting, street fighting, house arrest rumors, Roger Cohen’s dispatches (anyone know how he got to stay in Tehran for so long while everyone else was being thrown out?) and Andrew Sullivan’s energetic, daily round-up.
It’s a lot to absorb. You want to pay attention and you want to understand, with care and nuance, what is going on. This video of Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome, part of it in Farsi, made it possible, if only for a moment, to think less and hope more.
In the June 21st Week in Review section, buried between really good, interesting stories about Iran, Jennifer Schuessler wrote an essay about how kids today can’t really relate to The Catcher in the Rye, finding Holden Caulfield “a rich kid with a weekend free in New York City.” The boy who had once epitomized what it meant to be authentic, true and a paragon of virtue is now out of fashion.
So, I don’t watch American Idol, but this doesn’t mean I don’t have super frivolous habits (see, for example, watching Gilmore Girls on DVD without having a 12-year-old daughter). However, reading the style section in the Sunday Times (frivolous habit #27) leads me to believe that I had better start.
If Adam Lambert is voted America’s Idol by the Americans who vote for it (and, btw, that’s more than vote in most political elections), then we really are in Obama land. And for an hour, I’ll stop thinking about the economy, not to mention all those abandoned pets who are just one casualty of it.
But (if by some miracle you missed it) for just 7 or 8 minutes you can get a blast of triumph, hope, vindication and all that good stuff. I won’t spoil the surprise. Suffice to say it’s from Britian’s Got Talent (their American Idol, I think, since Simon Cowell is a judge on both). . . . and it’s better than the Kate and Gin.
The answer to this is a bit long, but it starts with a story that at least three different women — each, in 2001, the mother of a teenage boy — told me. Some of the details were different, but the story was the same. At some point during the day on September 11th, these mothers went into a quiet place (the bathroom, the laundry room, the yard) and cried big, hysterical tears knowing that a war was coming. And a war, to these women who had grown up under the shadow of Vietnam, meant a draft.
Well, this is a first, if not one I ever wanted. I have had five previous reviews from Kirkus in my life, all of them good, two of them starred. Now I have one I consider BAD, even if others say it's mixed. Sometimes you just have to break down and laugh when what you want is so opposite from what you have! — March 2009
Howard's End
I am reading Howard’s End for the second time. The last time I read this novel I was in college, taking a British Literature seminar. We read the usual suspects, one a week, and sat around a table talking about symbolism, structure, thematic motif and all that good stuff.
I loved the class, I loved the students (only one of whom I can recall, he was a fraternity brother of my first unrequited love), and I loved the teacher (whose name I’ve forgotten and whose face I can only barely conjure). I could even bear the Hardy, once it was explained and dissected for me. I am not, alas, a natural born Hardy lover, but I managed him with the help of the class.
A Few Notes
Who, Me?
Cups, Books, and Castles
Juliette Binoche and the "Moral Code", Part One
Music Over Words
A Few words in Response to my Beloved NYT
Well, duh.
What always amuses me about those who write YA and act as if it’s ground-breaking literature, is that they have somehow missed how ephemeral a teen’s identity is. I wanted to be an acctress as a teenager, and so the girl I identified with most fiercely (Roman Polanski’s young muse, Nastassia Kinski) is no longer the woman I wish I were (that would be A.S. Byatt. Or my sister.)
One of the great blessings and curses of being a teenager is that you get to try on a whole host of identities. No book written expressly for teens (as YA is) or given to them (as The Catcher in the Rye so often is by well-meaning English teachers) can last. Because as the years pass, the identities that teens want to try on change.
Obits, Fashion and Writing
I always tell my students to read the obits. One of my first writing teachers, Doris Betts, used to tell us that the obits were a great way to get ideas for names and job occupations for characters. She laughingly said I would need to read the Times while she would stick with a more local paper. (I grew up in NYC and most of the stories I wrote in her class took place there.)
Well, I still read the Times obits, but it’s not for names or job occupations. It’s to read about odd and ordinary lives. Each obit usually has the quirky detail or alarming life-turn that is the stuff writers, for the most part, love. Last week, Kenneth Paul Block died. He was a fashion illustrator for such magazines as W and Women’s Wear Daily. Although I do not follow fashion much, the obit caught my attention because of his illustration of Babe Paley. Block’s artistic creed could best be summed up by his belief that "Gesture . . . is everything in fashion. It is in the way we stand, sit, walk and lie. It is in the bone."
The poet Michael Collier once said to me that while you could not teach people to be writers, you could teach them to be careful readers. I would take it one step further and say that you can ask people to be careful observers. Any writer would be glad to capture human gesture as well as Mr. Block did. And that’s why I ask my students to read the obits. Guest Hosting on Blogs
You can — and I do — say a lot of things about how blogs cut down on our attention span, create an echo chamber, and generally lead to some sort of mental decline. But they are also, I hasten to add, a really neat way to find out about what people are thinking. I am, as anyone reading this will know, a terrible blogger. Kelsey Boeckermann at Reading Keeps You Sane asked me to write about the title of my new book, After the Moment. I did, and she posted it here.
Ashley Thompson at her blog asked me to write about rape and abuse in literature, and since it is not posted, I have it here...To continue reading, click here
Hope and Stuff
After the Moment - Why a boy? Why this boy? Why this book?
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If you're going to brag... You've got to pay the piper.
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More Bragging
I know that it is SUPER braggy, and it probably displays my nerves and fears to link to an early review from a blog. I should just put up a few discrete quotes when the trade reviews come in and leave it at that. . . but, here is the thing. Three and a half years passed between the publication of my third and fourth YA novels, and by the time Stay With Me came out, the world of Young Adult literature had moved into a web-based universe. And Jen Robinson's book page, which explained my own book to me, beckoned me into this brand new place. Here were passionate people, thoughtful discussions —and, yes, some crazy stuff too — but it was exciting, and I felt like I was a tourist with no visa. So anyway, yes, it's bragging, but bragging with sentimental attachment.
—February, 2009
Bragging —November, 2008
They say it's not bragging if it's true. And it's okay if you're bragging on the behalf of someone else's true thing. And a web page devoted entirely to one's work is a form of bragging, no matter how many people claim it's a social networking tool.
One of the many, many reasons I failed at blogging was that I found it impossible to escape the sensation that every typed word was a form of bragging. Even if all you write about is how you take your coffee, there's a subtext of bragging and it's that you think the way you take your coffee is worthy of mention.
Ha!
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Surprises About Men; Unexpected Lessons from the Other Side
I didn't set out to write a book from a young man's point of view, but once Leigh's story began forming in my mind and on the page, I knew I had some work to do. Young men tend to be portrayed as either maladjusted geniuses (have you noticed that the YA genre is littered with boys who are intellectual prodigies?) or video-game playing dunderheads. The guy I was writing about was neither. He was thoughtful, but not brilliant. He simply got up every day trying to figure out how to do the best he could. I started to read memoirs by thoughtful men about what life was like when they were boys. I was reassured that, yes, thoughtful boys exist, always have, still do. But I hit a wall when it came to boys & sex. A wall no amount of reading could fix. So, I located my bravery (it was next to a pair of old ballet shoes), and went out to talk to those on the other side of the wall.
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In Defense of Great Expectations (and a brief look at the joys of reading way above one's grade level) —August, 2008
Every now and again the question arises as to whether the words Young Adult belong in a phrase that contains the word Literature. As someone who makes her living writing YA novels, I refuse to have a dog in that fight for two simple reasons.
One, if I say, "Of course YA novels are great literature," I sound self-important and, far worse, a tad defensive. After all, if you need to say you're smart or beautiful, how smart or beautiful can you really be?
Two, if I say, "Come on, who are you kidding, YA novels are judged by how or if a teenage reader can relate to or see him/herself in it, and not by how well the writer used language, character, nuance, detail," I not only run my work down, I risk offending all of my colleagues as well.
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Welcome to Stray Thoughts —June, 2008
This is where a blog would go if I were the sort of person with any propensity for blogging. But as I have just closed up shop, as it were, on a social networking site called Livejournal, I can hardly claim that. I could give you a lot of reasons behind my belief that only Andrew Sullivan, Stephen McCauley and Novella Carpenter should blog, but my reluctance comes down to an improbable fear which sounds a little bit more like delusional fantasy.
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