mothers and daughters

If you’ve been reading my posts in the last few weeks, you know that as I sat next to my grandpa the week he was dying, I was reading Rae Meadows’ new novel Mothers and Daughters. It was the perfect novel to read as I said goodbye to Spencer because so much of the story for me was about grief and loss and letting go.

The novel is told from the perspective of three generations of women—a grandmother, mother, and daughter. Violet left New York for the Midwest at age eleven on one of the turn-of-the-century orphan trains. Iris, Violet's daughter, now dying of cancer, has relocated to Florida and reflects on her mother, Violet, her daughter, Sam, and the love she discovered late in life. Sam, an artist and new mother living in Madison, is dealing with her mother’s death and the loss of her first pregnancy as she navigates early motherhood and tries to find her way back into her creative work and out of the secretive isolation she has created for herself.

So much in this novel resonated with me: needing to find balance between creativity and motherhood, coming to terms with loss, finding one’s way back to oneself. So I’m very pleased to have Rae here today to discuss Mothers and Daughters, writing, and how motherhood has affected her work. Welcome, Rae!

KH:  Can you talk a little about how this book started? Was it with an image, a character, an idea?

RM:  Learning about the orphan trains really was what got this novel started for me, and, soon after, the character of Violet was born. I actually based her on a photograph of my grandmother when she was young.

KH:  You’ve woven together three stories in three voices and alternating chapters. Did you always know that the book would be structured this way? Did you write them separately and then splice them together? I’d love if you would talk a little bit about your process.

RM:  I started out wanting to write a three-story structure—I was inspired by The Hours by Michael Cunningham—but when I got started, I had a hard time envisioning the novel as a whole. It seemed more manageable to write each part separately. I wrote Violet first, then Sam, then Iris. The revision process was very important for this book because I had to make sure the spliced stories worked with each other, both thematically and chronologically.

KH:  What did this involve? I’d love a sense of how long this revision process took. I’m picturing you on the floor with chapters spread out around you.

RM:  At one point I really did have chapters and scissors! And lists of who was born when, what happened where, etc. But I liked the challenge of it. It was kind of like a puzzle. And then I added details and scenes to fill out the narrative and cohere the novel. In the end it didn’t take as long as I feared.

KH:  A big part of this story for me was about the power of loss and how loss can isolate us from the people in our lives. One of the things we learn early in the book is that Sam terminated her first pregnancy because the fetus had genetic anomalies. How did you settle on this kind of loss to haunt Sam?

RM:  I had my children on the older side, so my husband and I had to weigh the risks of genetic testing and address all the possibilities. I felt like for Sam, it’s a complicated loss because she chose to terminate yet on some level she regrets that decision and doesn’t feel she’s allowed to grieve. I wanted to make her complicit in her loss, because it becomes a secret for her that gathers weight instead of fading.

KH:  What was the most surprising and/or challenging thing that happened in the process of writing Mothers & Daughters? (In terms of the narrative itself, your writing process, or how you approached the material.) 

RM:  I started out writing the novel as pure historical fiction, with two other characters at the turn of the century, including a doctor at the Wisconsin Insane Asylum. But when I returned to writing after having a baby, the idea didn’t feel right. After this tremendous life change, I knew I wanted to explore motherhood in some way. It was very much a lightning bolt moment to do a three-generational novel about women. (I’m still waiting for the lightning on my next project…)

KH:  I love this, Rae. Each of the women in the story has a very different experience mothering and being a mother. Was this a deliberate decision? How did your own experience with early motherhood help shape (or not shape) the ways Violet, Sam and Iris experienced motherhood?

RM:  It was a deliberate decision. Sam was heavily influenced by my experience as a new mother, but I really wanted to explore motherhood in different iterations. As a writer, I found it compelling to imagine how the circumstances of one’s life (and even one’s mother’s and grandmother’s lives) affect how one mothers. I liked the idea of legacy, for better and for worse. I couldn’t have written this novel before having children.

KH:  You have two children, and one is a baby. Can you talk a little about how your writing life fits in with the rest of your life—mothering, family?

RM: It doesn’t fit! As you know, it’s a crazy juggling act to be a mother and a writer. I am a full time mom, so writing happens in short bursts, late at night. I try to remind myself that this stage, with the girls so young, is a short one. My writing life will open back up. I try to remember that writing is not a race. If a novel takes an extra year to complete, that’s okay.

KH:  Can you describe the editorial process? (How much did you revise the manuscript after it was sold? Can you also talk a little about what it’s like to work with an editor?)

RM:  I spoke with my editor (Helen Atsma) before I sold the novel to Henry Holt, so I knew that I liked her and trusted her vision. It’s always a little scary to get the first round of editor’s notes back on a manuscript—I generally have a mini freak out—but Helen’s comments were clear and felt doable for me, and not that extensive. Most were about adding here and there to fill out the stories. For instance, she wanted more items in the box of Iris’s, and she wanted the box to arrive earlier. The story of Sam needed the most help, probably because she’s the character most like me! There were a couple little things I didn’t agree with, but Helen didn’t make me do anything I felt strongly against.

KH:  How does it feel to have this book out in the world? What kinds of responses are you getting from readers?

RM:  It’s wonderful to have the book out and I feel incredibly lucky. It’s so satisfying to have people read your work and have it resonate with them. Often people have a favorite character of the three—usually Violet. A lot of women tell me they cried, and that is a huge compliment. One of the most flattering comments came from the owner of a bookstore in Chicago. Given the character of Iris, she thought I would be in my seventies.

KH:  One more question: what are you working on now?

RM:  I loved the research part of this novel so much I decided to do it again. I’m writing an interwoven story about a family in the Oklahoma panhandle during the Dust Bowl and the photographer Dorothea Lange.

KH:  Fascinating! I look forward to reading. And thank you for taking the time to be here today.

Add Mothers and Daughters to your reading list! And to read more about orphan trains, visit Rae's website. 

quietly joyful

Both D and I were out with the stomach flu last week, and I’m having trouble getting back in the groove. Usually illnesses don’t keep me away from my computer; I work even when I’m not feeling well. But the stomach flu is, of course, a different kind of animal, and for much of the week last week I was incapable of doing anything other than lying in bed. I hadn’t felt that shaky since Stella was born and magnesium sulfate was pumping through my veins. And before that, it was when I had food poisoning in Panama during Carnavál. (That was the result of pure stupidity. Who eats pink potato salad from a street vendor when it’s 100 degrees? I’ll spare you that story—it’s much too long and disgusting to share here.)

By the end of last week I did feel better, but I was busy with the girls because both of them were out of school, and then I just didn’t feel like working. Then D and I celebrated our eleventh anniversary. (How have eleven years already gone by?) And I spent the remainder of the weekend playing with the girls and curled up on the couch reading Olive Kitteridge.

Maybe in part it was this book that made me feel incapable of work. I felt heavy with the lives in Elizabeth Strout's stories, heavy with their disappointments and betrayals. I couldn’t put the book down—Strout really is that talented—but I also found her stories terribly depressing. Short stories are often depressing, I think—there is something about the short form that can handle intense melancholy in a way a novel cannot—but the stories in Olive Kitteridge were filled with such loneliness that it was almost unbearable for me. All those affairs! All of those long, lonely evenings, with children grown and living far away, disinterested in the lives of their parents!

But of course there were moments of hope and connection in these stories, as well. I was so grateful for the last story, so grateful that Strout ended the collection with a sense of connection (even though it was tempered with sadness and regret). And I love the moments in so many of the stories in which Strout reminds us to live in the moment, to not take what we have—what we are living—for granted. I love this paragraph from “Tulips,” one of the stories in which Olive is the main character. Olive is remembering what it felt like to watch her son’s soccer games:

There was beauty to that autumn air, and the sweaty young bodies that had mud on their legs, strong young men who would throw themselves forward to have the ball smack against their foreheads; the cheering when a goal was scored, the goalie sinking to his knees. There were days—she could remember this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure. Maybe it was the purest she had, those moments on the soccer field, because she had other memories that were not pure.

I want to be quietly joyful. I want to know that I’m living life as I’m living it. I want my children (and D) to know that I am there, present, living with them, enjoying our lives, even on those days when living is hard. I’m not sure what I need to do to make this happen. Maybe it means I don’t turn on my computer on the weekends. Maybe it means stopping each day and taking stock, appreciating what we do have.

How do you stay in the moment? How do you remember to be quietly joyful?

plot, narrative urgency, and children's lit

The other day Stella went to the library with my mom and she came home with The Boxcar Children. When she pulled it out of the library bag, I started to squeal, “Oh that was one of my favorite books growing up. I can’t wait to read it to you!”

I could tell she was pleased by my excitement, and I was excited to read the book with her, but I was secretly nervous that I wouldn’t like it as much as I had as a child. It was the first book that grabbed hold of my imagination. I remember spending hours and hours sitting in the pink beanbag in my room with it propped in my lap, thinking about where my sisters and I would hide if we became orphans and had to take to the woods to flee an unloving relative.

D and I alternate putting the girls to bed. (If I read to Zoë one night, the next night I’ll read to Stella.) So I made Stella promise that The Boxcar Children would by my book and that she would read a different book with D. (I hate it when I’ve read the first three chapters of a book to her and then I two nights later I have to pick up at the 7th or 8th chapter. I feel completely lost.)

She promised, and as we cuddled into bed with the book the other night, we were both giddy. As I began to read—“One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from.”—I was immediately swept back in time, to the excitement I felt the first time my mom read me this story.

And the book moves! Talk about narrative urgency, from that first sentence. I didn’t want to put it down, but I could tell Stella was exhausted, so I stopped after four chapters.

I remember that Julie Schumacher, a wonderful fiction writer who has been primarily writing young adult novels in recent years, said that she turned to YA fiction because she felt she needed to work on plot and structure, and that because YA novels are very plot-driven, she thought she’d try it out. You can read an interview with Julie here.

The Boxcar Children is all plot. (I remember certain plot details from when I read it, almost 30 years ago, which is extraordinary.) But as we made our way through the first chapters, I kept getting the siblings confused. I know I’ll be able to differentiate them as the book goes on, but I was surprised that we weren't given a few more character details in those first chapters. But then maybe I spend too much time thinking about character development. (I’ll admit that I’m a little obsessed lately.)

Do any of you out there write for children or young adults? I’d love it if you’d weigh in on plot and character (or really anything else that you’d like to share about writing for young people.)

In the meantime, I’m going to try to sneak away with Stella to read the next chapter of The Boxcar Children.

remedies

The genre I post most often about on this blog is memoir, because, well, I’m a memoirist, and teach creative nonfiction. But I also love fiction. I love novels! I especially love to come across novels by emerging writers, and especially if these writers happen to be mothers. So you can imagine how excited I was to crack open Remedies, the first novel by Kate Ledger, who is a mother of a six-year-old daughter and twin 3-year-old sons and lives here, in the Twin Cities.

Remedies is a stunning debut novel about Simon and Emily Bear, a couple who have grown apart in the fifteen years since their infant son died. It’s a story of loss and healing and the lengths to which people will go to not feel pain. Ledger’s prose is tight and her narrative is engrossing.

Simon Bear is a doctor who runs a private practice from the basement of the couple’s home, and he’s obsessed with treating his patient’s chronic pain. When his father is in a car accident and fractures his ribs but feels no pain, Simon is convinced that he’s discovered a cure for chronic pain.

Emily, who is a partner in a PR firm and likes everything in its place, struggles with what kind of mother she is as she constantly battles her rebellious thirteen-year-old daughter. She seems dead inside, dulled by the energy it takes to protect herself from grieving her son. But when Will, an old flame, reenters her life, something inside Emily begins to thaw.

I have long wondered how Donny and I would have managed if Stella had not made it out of the NICU. We experienced her hospitalization and the long, isolated months that followed so differently, and it put a tremendous strain on us. But we always did come together. Eventually we sat down with each other on the couch and hashed out our emotions, trying to understand one another. But the loss of a child is altogether different, and I’m amazed by my friends and their spouses who have had to navigate this terrain.

I have more to say about Remedies, but I’m going to hold myself back because I have the author, Kate Ledger, here at Mother Words today, and she has been gracious enough to answer a few questions.


KH: Can you talk a little about how this book started? Was it with an image, a character, an idea?

KL: I write about health and medicine for a living, and I get to talk with a lot of doctors about their work. I was awed by several physicians I’d met who’d made incredible discoveries or developed new treatments. I decided I’d write a novel about someone who’d discovered a cure for something, and chronic pain seemed like a complex and amazing thing to cure. My first scratchings, though, were about character: what kind of person would believe he’d made a remarkable discovery, one that was quite possibly helping people but that also came with no actual proof? But as I dug in, it became clear that this doctor’s desire to cure pain in other people came from an inability to address his own emotional pain. I began to imagine Simon Bear in the context of his family, his desires, and the losses in his life. I imagined that this was a man whose marriage was in great trouble. The book became deeper then, and evolved into a story about a family and emotional pain, in particular the difficulties of experiencing—and sharing—grief.


KH: You began writing Remedies over a decade ago, before you were married and became a mother. How did your relationship with the subject matter (a troubled marriage and the loss of a child) change after you became a mother?

KL: Even though I knew Simon’s marriage was in trouble, for a while I wasn’t sure what that trouble was. The answer clicked after I had kids. It was a scary moment, though. I’d been thinking about Simon and what might be plaguing him. I asked myself what I was most afraid to write, what words was I most afraid to see on the page? As a new mom, I was most afraid of losing my child. And I was also afraid of the blame that might linger between two parents when it wasn’t clear who, if anyone, was at fault for that loss. My first response to the idea was to resist it—no way, I can’t write about that! And my second thought, feeling that I’d hit on a very vulnerable aspect of human existence and certainly of parenting, was that I had to write about it.


KH: A big part of this story for me was about the power of loss and how something as huge and devastating as the loss of child can pull partners apart. I’m wondering how you settled on this loss as the one that would come between Emily and Simon. Did you do any research on the affects of losing a child on a marriage?

KL: I did do research about loss. That was excruciating and humbling, and I spent a lot of that research time choked up and teary and feeling grateful that my kids were doing well. I did some reading about the effects of loss on a marriage. Some studies—though not all—suggest the divorce rate after the loss of a child is astoundingly high. Mostly I was concerned about how difficult communication might be between two parents who’ve lost a child. We all grieve differently. We need comfort at different times. We experience the need for answers, rationalizations, spiritual connection differently. For all their flaws, Simon and Emily Bear have a deep sense of respect for each other. For years, they’ve both been shielding each other from grief. They’ve done everything in their power to move beyond their tragedy. But my feeling was that if you don’t address that pain, it not only doesn’t go away, but it becomes heightened. And it gets expressed in your life in new and uncomfortable ways.


KH: What was the most surprising thing that happened in the process of writing Remedies? (In terms of the narrative itself, your writing process, or how you approached the material.)

KL: All of it surprised me. I was surprised when the final draft looked completely different from the first draft. Same basic story, but completely different book. I was surprised the day I finished—because I hadn’t dared imagine that I’d reach a day when I’d lean back and say, “Wow, I’m done.” I was surprised a few days later to realize there was more I wanted to patch in the middle of the book and the patching turned out to take two months.


KH: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

KL: I think one of the most challenging parts of any type of writing is trusting the fact that the first draft is a first draft. You might hope what immediately bubbles up out of you will be polished and perfect, but getting to the final stage is an arduous process.


KH: Can you talk a little about how your writing life fits in with the rest of your life—mothering and teaching?

KL: That’s an interesting question. I assume you mean time-wise. Writing is like other work. And I spend each work day working on some form of writing or another. The writing part is pretty lonely. Some days, especially if I like what I’m working on, I find writing like problem-solving and it’s incredibly energizing. I go back to being Mommy at the end of the work day, and I think I’m better with my kids having occupied that other space for a time. I think my children are proud that I write. My daughter has been like a publicity force, telling people about the book. One of my three-year-old sons recently put on my one pair of high heeled boots and paraded around the room saying, “I’m going to do a reading.” I guess that’s what I look like.


KH: Can you describe the editorial process? (How much did you revise the manuscript after it was sold? Can you also talk a little about what it’s like to work with an editor?)

KL: I was tremendously fortunate to work with Amy Einhorn. She began her own imprint at Putnam, and she’s selected her own books, which means she’s working directly with the writers on about 12 books a year. She chose The Help and The Postmistress, both of which became bestsellers. She’s lovely and very incisive, and I felt this great sense of trust that the book was in great hands because she sent me an e-mail at one point saying that she was in her office and had to go fix her make-up. She’d cried while reading the book. She didn’t ask for any structural changes in the manuscript, but she did send pages of revision notes with lots of questions and requests to flesh some things out more thoroughly. I wrote another 40 pages. She was very specific, and I loved her ideas.


KH: How does it feel to have this book out in the world? What kinds of responses are you getting from readers?

KL: The most amazing thing is the way readers have hooked into the book from all angles. I’ve gotten e-mails from people who’ve said that the book affirmed their decade-long experience with pain. Others have written to say the book made them reflect on their marriage. There’s a spiritual aspect to the book, too, a longing for community and ritual, and people have responded to that, too. The most moving e-mail was from a woman who wrote that she and her husband lost a child five years ago, and that the effects of that loss have continued to ripple through their marriage. She wrote that it was both difficult and comforting to read Remedies, and that even though their outcome was still in progress, the book had come along at exactly the right time.


Thanks for taking the time to be here, Kate!

Go get this book, people.

change of scene

I spent the weekend at my mom’s cabin up north (which is what we natives say when we’re talking about Northern Minnesota.) The weather was perfect: sunny and warm during the day, cool in the evening. Stella played and argued and played with her cousin, and Zoë played in the sand and ate the moldy bread intended for the sunfish. It wasn’t relaxing in the way that, pre-children, I would lie on the dock and read all afternoon, but still, there were moments of relaxation, and more than anything, it was a needed change of scene.

I didn’t check e-mail or my cell-phone for messages even once. And I was able to read most of a novel--a non-motherhood, non-reviewing novel. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I couldn’t have picked a better book: Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the third novel in her Regeneration trilogy. These novels are based on the real-life experiences of British army officers who were treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. I’m reading the book for my book club, otherwise I probably would have begun with the first in the trilogy, and indeed, I find myself floundering a little in spots, knowing I’m not getting the full story on the characters. But still, the book stands on its own, and indeed, it won the Booker Prize in 1995.

Sometimes I become so consumed by my daily life and the juggling act of work and family (and weaning) that I lose sight of my place in history. I lose sight of the expanse of human experience. Pat Barker is an expert in capturing the complexity of human experience. Her characters in this trilogy are based on real people, true, but she brings them to life for us. The pause, the uncertainty, the lust and love, shame and confusion—it’s all there, and it’s there in the smallest gestures, in word choice, in the way a gaze lingers too long.

This book (though it is a novel) reminds me of why memoir and strong characters must go hand in hand. I’ve had more than one person ask me why I was teaching character development in a memoir class. (I’m serious.) There is an assumption that because the people in a work of creative nonfiction really exist, there is no need to be concerned about character development. But nonfiction writers need to write believable and three-dimensional characters precisely BECAUSE these characters are real people. It’s a way of honoring them. And this is exactly what Barker does: she honors these men by making them real for us on the page.

Go get this book. Hell, get the whole trilogy. She’s that good.

black box and an interview with julie schumacher

A couple of months ago, I discussed Julie Schumacher’s essay “A Support Group is My Higher Power,” which appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love column. I was struck by this piece, which rang true to me and resonated with my own writing about Stella’s birth. Today I’m going to discuss her latest young adult novel, Black Box, and also post an interview with Julie.

Black Box is the story of what happens to a family when depression enters their lives. After teenaged Dora becomes suicidally depressed, her younger sister, Elena, takes on the responsibility for keeping Dora safe. Though this doesn’t sound like an easy read, Julie assured me it was a quick read, so I thought it would be the perfect novel to take on the plane as I headed to Chicago for AWP last month. It turned out that it was the perfect plane novel in the sense that I couldn’t put it down—even when I began to experience motion sickness—but I’ll admit that it’s not the best book to read in public. By page three, my throat was tight and tears stung my eyes.

Part of what brought tears to my eyes was the carefully wrought relationship between the two sisters—I kept thinking, in a desperate kind of way, how grateful I was that Stella and Zoë have each other and how I hope they will be as close as Dora and Elena. Part of what brought tears to my eyes was a wrenching guilt for the pain I must have caused my own parents when—almost two decades ago—I was a young adult struggling with severe depression. All I can say about that is that I will never forget the look on my father’s face when he arrived at that emergency room in Iowa City. I will never forget the look on his face as he stared down at me in that hospital bed.

One thing I really appreciate about Black Box is that it is narrated not by Dora, but by her sister, Elena. I think it is difficult to convey the darkness of a suicidal depression, to open it up enough to allow readers in without overwhelming them. I was relieved not to be in Dora’s head because there is too much pain in there. That’s not to say that Elena isn’t in pain, as well, but her pain is at the same time easier for a non-depressed person to understand and more complex than Dora’s pain (and by this I mean that serious depression sometimes feels two-dimensional).

When Elena and her parents go visit Dora in the hospital, Elena struggles to find her sister, the sister she has known her whole life, buried in the young woman sitting before her. As Elena and her parents get ready to leave Dora after their first visit, Dora says,

“Little El. What the heck are you doing over there?”

I walked toward her and she reeled me in and held on to me tightly, her bony arms a collar around my neck. “Do me a favor?” she asked, with her mouth by my ear.

“Sure,” I said. “Name it.”

“Save me,” she said.

Elena tries to carry the weight of this request, tries to comply, to save her sister, and as the book progresses we how this impossible responsibility affects her.

I love Julie’s writing—her prose is lovely without being overwritten and her characters are so real that I think I know them. I do know them. I see myself in them. I imagine what I would do and how I would feel if my own daughters ever experienced this. (Please, no, never.)

I encourage you to read Black Box and send it to your friends, especially if they have been touched by depression. It is a quick read, but I recommend finding a quiet spot where you can sit down and sob if you want. No planes. No coffee shops.

Julie was kind enough to answer a few questions about Black Box and about navigating writing and motherhood:

KH: I’d love to have you talk a little bit about why you chose to have Elena narrate the story. Was this how the book began or did she evolve into the narrator?

JS: I chose the point of view of the depressed girl’s sister because I wanted to write about the confusion and the helplessness of a person who was trying to understand the experience from the outside. I wanted to describe the desire to help, beginning with the hope that “this isn’t serious,” and progressing from disbelief to worry to fear. The attempt to understand and the desire to alleviate another person’s suffering—that’s where the book started.

KH: I’m also curious about what Black Box might have looked like it if had been written as an adult novel with the mother, Gail, as a narrator. Have you considered writing an adult novel on this topic?

JS: In retrospect, I do wonder what it would have been like to write the novel from an adult point of view. But I’ve always been interested in children as characters—whether in adult or young adult fiction—and I’ve always been drawn to younger narrators who are grappling with the material of their lives, trying (and sometimes failing) to understand the stories they tell.

KH: I know that primarily you write fiction, but since you are a mother of young adults (and since I’ve had this question on my mind since AWP), I’m wondering how you balance your need to write, to craft stories, with the needs of your kids—their opinions, their privacy, etc.

JS: There’s an ethical dilemma in being a parent and a writer of realistic fiction (or nonfiction), that is, a person whose real life and relationships can be a starting point for creative work. When your children are very young, you’re free to comment on their behavior—as well as your own parenting skills—in their presence; as they get older, they don’t want to be the subjects even of positive conversation (“Look how she’s grown!”). That said, I think writers can model responsible self-inquiry — Who am I? What does my life mean? — and demonstrate to their children that creating art, and asking difficult and sometimes unanswerable questions about relationships, families, and societies, is part of living an examined life.

When I have published nonfiction about my children (as in the “Modern Love” column in the New York Times), I’ve gotten permission from them first. (In fact, the editor at the Times pointedly asked if I had done so.) Fiction offers a bit more of a cover; still, I’ve asked my children to read each of my young adult novels — including Black Box — before they were published. I think my kids understand what are for me the two enormous truths of this parenting/writing experience: 1) I love my children wildly, unreservedly, and 2) I can’t live my life without writing things down.

KH: In the “author’s note” at the end of the book you say that you hope Black Box will allow readers to recognize some part of who they are and that you hope they will “feel acknowledged.” I was very moved by the whole “author’s note” and about why you wrote the book, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about the role of writing in your life. Has it changed over the years? If so, how?

JS: The author’s note at the end is something my beloved editor, Jodi Keller, urged me to write. At first I resisted: the book should stand for itself without an explanation, etc etc. But Black Box, because of its subject matter, is different from my other novels. I wrote much of it in a state of despair, feeling bitterly lonely — and the author’s note gave me a chance to say to someone reading the book, “You don’t need to feel this way. You aren’t the only one going through this.” I don’t want to pretend that books can solve serious problems, but I do think that in acknowledging and naming our experiences, they can make us feel less alone.

As for the role of writing in my life: I value the practice of writing more now than I did when I was younger. When I was younger I was conscious mainly of pouring my heart out onto the page. Now I’m more likely to think philosophically about the time I spend shaping words into stories and narratives. I definitely value that time more than I used to, and I probably make better use of it as well.

KH: Can you talk a little about the response to the book? Have people recognized themselves in these pages? Is there a specific reader response that has especially touched you?

JS: The response to the book has been very moving to me. I’ve gotten emails from readers who have told me about their own or their friends’ experiences with depression, about aunts or uncles who committed suicide, about the shame and loneliness and confusion they’ve felt in the face of mental illness. One reader wrote, “I don’t know why I get down so much because my life is perfect.” Another wrote, “I can feel Dora’s pain and I can feel her problems living in me and it makes me feel so connected to her.”

KH: Black Box is your fourth young adult novel published in five years. Can you talk a little bit about why you started writing young adult fiction and how you are able to write these books so quickly?

JS: Writers who publish a few books in quick succession did not necessarily *write* those books in such quick succession. I had an eight-year dry spell during which I published almost nothing, even though I was doing a lot of writing. I started writing novels for young adults as an experiment, because I was terribly stuck on a long novel that I’d been working on for years. The idea was to write something short and direct that emphasized plot and structure. And I discovered, when I was finished with the first young adult book (Grass Angel), that I had truly loved writing it. Whereas I had been miserable while working on the failed novel for adults.

KH: I’d love to hear a little about your literary influences.

JS: I’m a lover of realistic character-based fiction of any stripe, from George Eliot and Jane Austen to Ian McEwan, E.B. White, Grace Paley, Tobias Wolff — you name it. I never get tired of reading literary portraits of human beings and their interactions.

I want to thank Julie for taking the time to talk with me. Thank you, Julie! Please check out her books. I’d also like to congratulate Julie: Black Box is one of four finalists for the 2008 Minnesota Book Award in the young adult category! Way to go, Julie!

You can read more interviews with Julie here and here.

how far is the ocean from here

I’m here at the coffee shop near my house, the one where I wrote the majority of Ready for Air, and it’s exactly where I need to be. The sun is streaming in the windows and I’m all by myself (with the exception of the other customers, of course, but I don’t have to carry them around and rock them. Hell, I don’t even have to talk to them. It’s delightful.)

I will usually keep this time sacred for work on the book, etc., but today I just had to start my morning writing with this post about my friend Amy Shearn’s debut novel, How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

I met Amy in a fiction seminar at the University of Minnesota, and the first time I read her writing, I knew she’d be famous one day. She’s that good. It’s no surprise, then, that I love her debut novel. Her prose is so tight and lyrical, and I was immediately sucked into the life of Susannah Prue, the young surrogate mother who leaves Chicago for the Southwest just days before her due date. Susannah’s car ends up breaking down in the middle of the desert at the Thunder Lodge motel, where she interrupts the quiet lives of Marlon and Char Garland and their beautiful 17-year-old son, Tim, who has special needs.

There are two narrative lines—one set in the Southwest at the Thunder Lodge and the other set in Chicago. The latter follows the development of Susannah’s relationship with Kit and Julian, who paid her to carry their baby, and describes the events leading up to Susannah’s flight from Chicago. By the end of the book, these two lines merge, with tragic results.

From the first page, I was drawn in to the arid landscape of the Southwest, which is so pervasive and powerful that it almost becomes another character in the story: “There the horizon had a weight she hadn’t know a horizon could have; a plain unvaried by cactus or tree, unstirred by lizard or coyote, undimpled by even a shadow, only here and there the slightest swell of hills.”

It’s a triumph of a first novel, a delight to read. Amy took some time to answer a few questions for me. Here is our e-interview:

Kate: Your language is so rich. Can you talk a little about your process? Do you wait for the perfect sentence or do you get the writing out and then revise? Or a combination?

Amy: It's really a combination. I tend to write slowly and obsessively, so that a lot of the time a sentence comes out pretty close to finished. My favorite moments of writing are sitting at my desk staring off into space and trying to think of the exact right word or image. But I think this obsession with getting the sentence perfect can be a form of procrastination, so I try to convince myself to move on after maybe 3 sentence rewrites to avoid getting mired in the never-quite-done-ness of the language. And then of course I go back later and tinker some more.

Kate: Can you talk a little about the using an omniscient narrator? Did you begin writing the book this way or did this develop later in the process?

Amy: When I started writing the book it was all close third person, very much inside Susannah Prue’s head. But about halfway through this started making me feel a bit claustrophobic. Not only that, but Susannah isn’t necessarily the best person to listen to all the time. She’s not terribly good at empathizing with others, though she tries. So I ended up feeling like I needed all the different perspectives in order to really tell the story. Some of the most minuscule dips into other perspectives -- when you suddenly get a paragraph from a passerby, for example -- were inspired by the shifting point of view in Mrs. Dalloway. I loved the way Woolf employed this device, and felt that it made the fictional world feel more full while also offering even more perspectives on the main character herself -- not just how people close to her see her, but how strangers see her, too.

Kate: How did you begin working on HFITOFH? Did you know you wanted to write about a surrogate mother?

Amy: It really started with this image of a pregnant woman driving through the desert, and a feeling that somehow the child wasn’t hers. The process of writing the book was really about me explaining this image and the mysteries behind it to myself.

I was fascinated by the idea of surrogacy in the same way that I’m fascinated by all of those weird things the human body does that almost seem like science fiction but actually are real. Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, organ transplants, even just your everyday average pregnancy -- the human body is so amazing and bizarre. That, and I’d also been writing lots of stories for my graduate thesis that involved people trying and failing to care for one another, so I guess I was still playing with that theme.

Kate: It seems that you wrote this incredibly fast. What is your writing schedule? (On Zulkey you said you don’t ever write on the weekends. Can you talk a little about why writing needs to be treated like a job?)

Amy: That’s funny that you say that, since I feel like I actually write very slowly. I’ll sit down for two hours and come away with a single page, or less. But if you do that every day, 5 days a week, for a year or two, then voila, you’ve got a draft. For me, writing pretty much only happens if I’m disciplined about making time for it. But then I also need weekends to see my husband and friends and do weekendy things. It’s all about balance.

When I was writing HFITOFH I was very strict about writing in the mornings, 5:30-7:30, before work. It’s a little easier now that I only work 4 days a week, so I have an entire day to devote to writing and can combine that with the early mornings. My Fridays are sacrosanct: just writing, all day, until I collapse! My ideal schedule would be writing from about 6-11 every day, but that hasn’t quite aligned with real life yet. We’ll see.

Kate: Can you describe the editorial process? (How much did you have to revise/change the manuscript after it was sold? Can you also talk a little about what it’s like to work with an editor?)

Amy: I think I was very lucky in that I got magically matched up with an editor, Sally Kim, who understood and loved the book in many ways better than I did. She’s just a miraculously careful and intuitive reader. First she gave me general notes on the shape of the story, and suggestions on which of the characters could be better developed. My editing process was probably unusual in that I added more than I cut. Scenes and backstory were added to flesh out certain characters.

After this general first pass Sally gave me really detailed line notes, plus her thoughts on what I’d changed so far. I don’t think every editor gives line notes, but they were such a pleasure to have, and her eagle-eyed attention made me feel so much less nervous about sending this thing out into the world. Finally there was one last pass from her, then the copy edits, and then the proofreading marks. All told, I ended up rereading my book about 1,000 times, until I felt like I could have recited it by heart. It was a rigorous, exhausting, and sometimes tedious process, because I got so sick of every last word, but it was also a wonderful experience, one which taught me a lot about writing and novel-making.

Kate: What was the most valuable part of your MFA program? How did it prepare you to begin writing this book? (Because you began writing it almost immediately after the program, no?)

Amy: I did begin this book right after the program. A few weeks after graduating my husband and I moved to New York and it was here that I started writing the book. I remember wanting to get the grad school voices out of my head and just trying to writing something freely, without thinking of anyone ever reading it or judging it or anything. I think a lot of the energy of the book comes from me thinking, feh, I’m just going to write something I like and who cares if no one ever reads it.

That said, grad school was immensely helpful. I was lucky to have wonderful teachers like Charlie Baxter and Steven Polansky who really pushed me and made me think about what I was writing and why. One of the most helpful experiences of all was having Maria Fitzgerald as my advisor for this novel I was writing. Over one summer, she basically put me through novel-writing boot camp, encouraging me to rewrite and rejigger and reconsider again and again. That novel ended up getting revised into oblivion (my fault, not hers, because I listened to too many people’s advice -- an easy pitfall of the writing workshop), but I feel like I gained some sort of muscle memory that made it possible to write HFITOFH.

Oh, and I shouldn’t leave out my classmates. I arrived at my MFA program expecting a certain degree of snobbery and pretentiousness that turned out to be, in my class at least, entirely missing. My classmates were these smart and thoughtful readers, and there seemed to be an overall emphasis on real feeling rather than flashy prose; sincerity rather than cynical glibness. I tend to go for flashy prose, actually, and probably a bit of the cynical glibness too, so I learned a lot from this down-to-earth emphasis on feeling and sincerity. So many readers of my book have talked about how much they loved the characters, and I don’t know that I knew how to be as sympathetic to my characters before the program, if that makes any sense.

And of course, I met Kate Hopper in my MFA program! That was pretty valuable.

Kate: Gee, thanks, Amy.

This is a lovely novel. Amy is also partly responsible for my new morning writing schedule—her 5:30-7:30 schedule helped inspire me. So thank you for that, as well, Amy!

reading again

D will be home tonight. He’s been gone for ten days with his new job. I doubt the timing, with Zoe just four weeks old when he left, could have been any worse, but there was nothing we could do about it, so he went.

Stella missed him a ton. Yesterday morning, she was watching The Lion King, and she had gotten to the part of the movie where Simba’s father dies. I was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, when she appeared and clung to my leg, crying, “When is my dad going to come back?” Tears streamed down her face. I felt awful.

I missed him because I love him, of course, but I also missed my partner, my co-parent. You don’t want to know how pissy I was by the end of each day. (Hats off to all the single mothers our there.) I’m exhausted, and all I can say: he owes me, big time.

But the time up north with my mom was restorative (even with all the snow) and it jump-started my reading-mind again. While we were up there, I finished Bernard Cooper’s The Bill from My Father, which I had started before Zoe was born. I liked it very much. Cooper, a middle-aged gay man, is an unlikely writer to be featured on Mother Words: Mothers Who Write, but I have to mention him because I love his writing. I should have included him in my post last fall on writers who rock dialogue. He’s got it down, and in this memoir, the banter between him and his father is wonderful. I can hear it. I can feel it. I also love his essays, which have been featured in Best American Essays, and his memoir, Truth Serum. His sentences are tight, his details alive, and he’s funny, darnit. I laughed out loud more than once reading The Bill from My Father.

I also read some of Grace Paley’s The Collected Stories, which are wonderful for voice, and for minding me how important it is to tell women’s stories, to give voice to our lives. Who can argue with this, from “Debts”:

“It was possible that I did owe something to my own family and the families of my friends. That is, to tell their stories as simply as possible, in order, you might say, to save a few lives.”

Isn’t that what we are trying to do: tell our stories as simply as possible in order to save a few lives?

The third thing I read (in the car on the way home from the cabin, even though I should have been sleeping) was Jon Hassler’s My Staggerford Journal. It’s not a book I would have chosen on my own. My mom, who is a huge Hassler fan, checked it out from the library. She knew Jon Hassler a little, maybe from the years she worked in a bookstore in St. Paul, and when I was young, we would sometimes run into him at the public library in town up north because his cabin was not far from ours.

Anyway, I tore through the book. I love reading about successful writers who didn’t begin writing until their forties. I love reading about how many rejections they received before being published. I hold up their accounts as proof that there is hope for all of us. I also love reading about writers processing their works in progress. I loved the notebooks at the end of Suite Française, and I loved this short journal for the same reason: how wonderful it is to see a writer work out character and plot, muck around in the confusion of a book half-written.

The thing that struck me most about this journal, however, was how incredibly male it was—how incredibly male Hassler was. He had children at home when he first began to write fiction. Granted, they weren’t infants or even young, but they were still there in the house with him. Yet, he was able to take off for a week here and two weeks there. He spent his evenings and weekends writing as far as I could tell. Apparently his wife did all the grocery shopping, all the cooking, all the home stuff. And I thought again how no one ever asks published male writers how they balance fatherhood and writing. This is a standard question I ask of women writers who are mothers, and most reply that they cobble together twenty minutes here and twenty minutes there or get up at 4 am and stay up until one am to finish a chapter after the kids are in bed and the laundry is done.

In January, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kathryn Trueblood, who wrote a wonderful novel The Baby Lottery. (I plan to write more about this here, but you can also read my review of the book on mamazine.) When I asked Kathryn how she balanced motherhood and writing and teaching she said:

“I don’t think balance is the right word to describe what my life has felt like over the years—chaos is more appropriate. I negotiated my tenure-track salary on the phone as my daughter clomped around the house in high heels, flushing the toilet over and over again. But this has taken a toll on me. As women, we are really programmed to take care of other people, but we often forget to really take care of ourselves. Now I have more realistic goals and boundaries. I’m taking a break from novel-writing right now, until my oldest graduates from high school.”

I can’t imagine that Hassler experienced this need to balance writing and fatherhood. From his journal, it appears that writing was his first priority. In the introduction, he admits this. He put his writing before his family, and even says that his marriage couldn’t survive his writing career.

How many writer-mothers do this?

losing kei

Thank you all for your comments on my last post. I still haven’t made up my mind about the C-section, but your stories and experiences have helped me relax a little about the decision. Thank you! I’ll see my doctor tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to talking through the options with her, as well.

But now, back to books. I had the pleasure of talking with Suzanne Kamata on the phone when she was in the U.S. a few weeks ago for the holidays and the release of her debut novel, Losing Kei. If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a fan of her writing and have used her essays in my Mother Words class.

Losing Kei is the story of Jill Parker, an American painter who settles in a small Japanese seaside village. Parker soon meets Yusuke, an art gallery owner, who takes an interest in her and her art. They fall in love and marry, but marriage to an eldest son proves difficult and their marriage is full of conflict.

Below is an interview with Suzanne:

Kate: Can you talk a little bit about how your process changes depending on whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction?

Suzanne: My process is basically the same regardless of genre. I write randomly, not beginning to end. I write scenes and memories that I find compelling and then figure out how to put them together. I do usually have a scheme or narrative arc in mind when I write, though I try to leave myself open to surprises. I actually had a different ending in mind for Losing Kei, but I realized it wouldn’t be realistic.

Kate: Because I’ve read a number of your essays, I can see some of your life experiences in the novel even though it’s clearly fiction. Do you ever run into people who read your fiction as nonfiction?

Suzanne: I think all fiction is autobiographical to some degree, and my fiction is no different. The scene in the first chapter of Losing Kei takes place at a real park near my home. In earlier drafts of the book I thought about giving Jill fertility problems, which I also experienced, but then I realized her marriage wasn’t strong enough to go through that. I was able to distance myself more in later drafts.

Kate: What kind of writing community do you have in Japan?

Suzanne: I’m in an odd position because I’m not known in Tokushima. Mostly I’m published in English-language magazines, so Japanese readers don’t really care about my work, and I’ve been gone from the U.S. so long that I don’t have a local community here either. I have a number of expatriate friends in Japan who read and write, however, and I have an online writing group with other expatriate writers there. I live on an island, which can be isolating, but I connect with people, and other writers, everyday via the internet.

Kate: Has motherhood changed you as a writer?

Suzanne: My subject matter certainly has changed. Motherhood provides great material, as you know. My writing time is also much more precious. I used to have evenings and whole weekends to write, but I actually got very little done. After I had kids, I realized there was no time to procrastinate. I became much more disciplined and learned to write in ten or twenty minute increments. This shortage of time also helped me turn off my inner editor. Before, I felt every word I put on the page needed to be publishable, but I stopped worrying about that, and I discovered that writing is much more fun when you’re not always worrying about publishing.

Kate: How do you balance writing and all the other roles you play—the life stuff?

Suzanne: Now that my kids are in school, I write during the day. I think my husband dreams that I would be a better housewife and a better cook—Japanese women seem to be cleaning from the time they get up until night—but I decided I wasn’t going to do that. So this regard, I’m sort of a failure in Japan. But I’m doing what’s important to me, and I remind myself that the day after I die, the dust will collect in corners anyway, so I might as well not worry about it.

You can read my full review of Losing Kei on mamazine. Order this book!!!

revision and Némirovsky

I’m sure some of you have already read Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. For those of you who have not, you must go out and get it.

Némirovsky was a Russian Jew who had lived in Paris for twenty years by the time the Nazis invaded France. She was a successful novelist and mother to two young girls. After the Nazis occupied Paris, Némirovsky fled with her husband, Michel, to Issy-l’Evêque, the hometown of their girls’ nanny, where the girls had been living for several months. Life was increasingly difficult for them because although they were all baptized Catholic, they were still Jews.

During this time, Némirovsky was at work on what she thought would be her masterpiece—a thousand-page novel in five sections, constructed like a symphony. The interesting thing about the way Némirovsky wrote is that she made notes about her characters, getting to know major and minor characters and plotting out the book before she actually wrote it. After she knew as much as she could about her characters, she wrote the book. This is amazing, especially for someone (me) whose first drafts are usually crappy. I write, then rewrite, then rethink, then re-vision almost everything. And indeed, I tell my students that they MUST revise, that through revision they will find the true subjects of their essays and stories.

Vladimir Nabokov said, “I have re-written—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” And Raymond Carver wrote 20-30 drafts of every story he published.

I know not every writer revises, but it’s so much a part of what I must do, that writers like Némirovsky blow me away. Suite Française is amazing. Her prose is lovely, her understanding of human nature is uncanny, and her characters are drawn so carefully that you know them within a few pages. It’s remarkable, also, that she could write so clearly about the times through which she lived in the midst of actually living them.

Suite Française contains only two of the five sections that Némirovsky intended. In 1942, she was arrested, deported, and murdered at Auschwitz. (Her husband was also gassed there.) The nanny fled with their daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, who took with them their mother’s leather-bound notebook as a memento, and made it through the war hiding in various parts of occupied France.

It was 64 years before Denise opened the notebook, 64 years before she realized that it was a novel her mother had been writing.

There are several appendices, which explain Némirovsky life’s and include notes on what she thought would happen in the book. (So although you don’t know have all five sections of the book, you have a sense of what she intended for the last three.) These notes are fascinating because she had such a clear sense of what she wanted the book to be while she was still in the midst of it.

For me, the middle of a book is a messy time. I’m sloshing around in there, almost blindly. I have no idea if what I’m writing will be cohesive or coherent. Not Némirovsky. She knew exactly what she wanted to do: write a book dealing with the “struggle between individual destiny and collective destiny.” And she did it, even though she wasn’t able to finish it.

There has been some controversy about her and her posthumous success because she turned her back on the Jewish community. Pre-war, she moved in anti-Semitic circles, and during the war, she and her whole family converted to Catholicism. You would not know Suite Française was written by a Jew. Nowhere in the book will you find the word “Jewish.” There is no mention of the plight of the Jews during WWII.

I’m not sure how I feel about this, and I feel ill-equipped to comment on what I would have done in the same situation. (How can we really know?) But I'll ask this: if you thought baptizing your children as Catholic would save their lives, would you do it?

how hard must you look?

On Sunday afternoon I went to see The Mother Project at the Open Eye Figure Theatre in Minneapolis. It was a six woman production, directed by Augsburg College theater professor Darcey Engen, in which the women’s stories about motherhood, relationships, identity, grief, their careers, and how they balance art and work and motherhood were woven together on stage. Their stories were often funny and often moving, and the response to the performance was so heartening. The darkened theater was packed, and after the show, Nanci Olesen, one of the performers and MOMbo founder, conducted a Q & A. So many of the audience’s responses began with “I could totally relate to this...” and “Thank you for your honest portrayal of motherhood.” Over and over again people said how much they appreciated the actors’ honesty and nuanced look at parenting and life.

What I came away with was a great sense of validation: yes, people need to hear the real stories of motherhood—the dark ones, the ambivalent ones, the deliciously touching ones. (This selfishly translated into: see, there is a market for my book.)

How disappointing it was to then read the recent Newsweek article by Kathleen Deveny. A friend had mentioned the article to me, saying that the author had bagged motherhood literature, and unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised. How harsh critics are when the personal becomes public, when women write against the norm and debunk those glorious myths of motherhood. Blah.

In her article, Deveny seems to trash all motherhood literature, all at once. She says, “I am bored to death with talking, hearing and reading about motherhood.” Oh gag me with a spoon, Kathleen.

She bags researched nonfiction and the summer's "mommy-lit" novels (her language, not mine). She doesn't mention memoir, specifically, but you get the impression that it's included in her rant, as well. But this is where Deveny's article really falls short. Is she not reading the same literature (and I spell that word out, dammit) that I am?

Almost all the motherhood literature I’ve read (and though I certainly haven’t read it all, I’ve read enough to make some generalized statements about it), is about more than the minutiae of daily life with an infant or toddler or teenager. It is about more than what an average parent does on a day-to-day basis. Most of the motherhood literature I’ve read, like the pieces in The Motherhood Project, deal with issues of identity, loss and longing, neurosis and fear, ambivalence and joy (the things of life). These pieces are about transformation and how we see ourselves in relation to the world in which we live. Oh I’m sorry, did it sound like I was talking about something universal, like I was talking about “regular” literature? Uh, yeah.

Finding in one’s own experience something universal and being able to turn that into art is not narcissistic (which is how Deveny characterizes women writing about motherhood). It's the work of writers. I love what memoirist Patricia Hampl says: “True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.”

But when your subject has do with motherhood, people assume that there is no story other than changing diapers, nursing, and tackling toddler challenges. This reminds me of what the poet Deborah Garrison said when I interviewed her for mamazine. When I asked her whether she thought her second collection, which is focused around parenting themes, was taken as seriously as her first collection, she said, "I think that motherhood as a subject can blind people. They are distracted by it—they have ideas about what motherhood poetry should or shouldn't be—and sometimes they can't get past this to really see the way a poem was constructed." I'm afraid the same thing is true for all motherhood literature. People have ideas about what it is or will be and dismiss it out of hand.

But how hard must you look to find really amazing writing that has to do with motherhood? Um, not very far. If you've read 1/4 of the essays or stories or poems I've posted about on this blog, you know. And I'm wondering now, should I send Kathleen Deveny the essays of my favorite mama writers? Could it be that she hasn't read them?

Sadly, she would probably stack them with her other "mommy-lit," thinking, erroneously, that she'd read it all before.

pining

Yesterday Stella and I were running errands and I mentioned that Gahgee (what she calls my dad) was going to baby-sit because D. and I were going to a party. She got all teary and said that she didn’t want us to go and didn’t want Gahgee to come over. And then she said, “Are you guys leaving straightaway?”

Straightaway? Where the hell did she get that? She sounded so grown-up, and oddly, so British.

I’m thinking of it now because I miss the little bug. She’s spending the night at D.’s dad’s and step-mom’s house, and I’m really feeling lonely for her. It’s weird because she would be asleep if she were home, and it’s not as if I’ve never been away from her. She used to spend the night at my mom’s occasionally, but that was before she began sleeping through the night (which was, seriously, only two months ago). And usually when she slept there it was because D. and I were going out and were going to be late. (We can get really crazy.) Those nights away from her carried with them great benefits: night out, good sleep.

But D. and I weren’t going out tonight. He had to coach, so I drove home to our empty house by myself feeling sad. I actually didn’t know what to do with myself, so I plugged myself into the IPod and went for a run. I don’t usually run with music, but I cannot get enough of the Tsotsi soundtrack. It’s fabulous. I *love* Zola. (Hip hop in a language other than English can be so, so good.)

Anyway, I know Stella will have fun at her grandparent’s house because her cousins are sleeping over, as well, and I’m sure that at this very moment (2 hours past her normal bedtime) she is screaming and jumping around due to consuming way too much candy.

Missing her this much, though, reminds me the novel I just finished: Leila Aboulela’s The Translator. It’s about Sammar, a Sudanese widow working in Aberdeen, translating for Rae, a secular Islamic scholar. Sammar and Rae begin to fall in love, and as they get to know each other, they reveal their complicated pasts.

After Sammar’s husband was killed in a car accident, Sammar returned to Khartoum, and ended up leaving her two-year-old son, Amir, with her mother-in-law. She returned to Aberdeen to work on her own, paralyzed by grief for her dead husband. She admits wishing her son had died rather than her husband, and didn’t feel capable of loving him for a long time. I thought this was so interesting, such a different reaction than I imagine I would have (especially in the face of my current pining for Stella), but I do love when an author can make me experience the world in a new and different way.

Aboulela is very talented. Her prose is elegant, and the pace with which the story unfolds is just right. I love this line from a scene in which Sammar is sitting in a conservatory during the Scotland winter: “Tropical plants cramped in the damp warmth and orange fish in running water. Whistling bird flying indoors, the grey sky irrelevant above the glass ceiling.” As a Minnesotan, I can totally relate to this. I love to go to the Como Conservatory in January and walk among blooming orchids, breathing in the earth and plants.

This was her first novel, and I think this fact shows in some places—the ending, a heavy-handedness about her belief in the superiority of Islam, and some of the literary devices she uses—but still, I liked the book. It made me think, which is always good, and I do believe she is a talented writer. So, check it out. Her second novel, Minaret, is already on my bookshelf, and I am looking forward to reading more of her work.

Okay, I’m off to sleep now, and hope I won’t wake up in the middle of the night worry about the little bug.

have you hugged your hygienist today?

Yesterday afternoon Stella and I went to the dentist.

Earlier in the morning, as Stella was getting dressed she said, "Mom, I don't need to sit on your lap today."

"Oh?" I said, not really knowing what she meant.

"At the dentist," she said, exasperated. (How a 3 1/2 year-old can be so exasperated with me, I don't know.)

Then I remembered that at her first visit to the dentist, six months ago, I had to sit in the dentist's chair and she sat on my lap because she was nervous and didn't want to sit in the big, reclining chair all alone. We hadn't talked about it since then, but it had obviously been on her mind.

But now, since she's 3 1/2, she has decided that she's too big for that sort of thing.
And she did great, sitting in the chair all by herself. So grown up. So much attitude.

I got my teeth cleaned, as well. I love this. I love getting my teeth scraped and polished. And I love when the hygienist and the dentist confer and decide that my teeth look fabulous. (I'm obsessive about flossing and this seems to be the one situation in which my hard work actually does pay off. Twice a year, I get a glowing dental report.) This is a very sad thing: that my depleted self-esteem can be buoyed, at least momentarily, by my dental hygienist.

I'm back in my funk now, though, clean teeth and all. So, I'll turn back to O'Brien's The Light of Evening, which I'm reading ever so slowly.

A passage I love:

"It was snowing in the vast cemetery in Brooklyn, big bulky overcoats of snow on the tall tombs, draping the headstones and the flat tables with their long loving recitations. Not a soul about. The paths cleared for visitors to walk on: the Ravine Path, the Cedar Path, the Waterside Path, the Sunset Path. We walked and walked. On the heads of the marble angels and archangels caps and skullcaps of snow, so jaunty, so jocular, and the silence so immense and Gabriel and me. We came upon a little house, a little vault with steps down to it and an entrance door with a woman's face carved on the outside, a woman with a mourning expression and strands of long marble hair that fell down onto her shoulders."

There is something so desolate here that I love.

I think one reason I'm having a hard time with O'Brien is that the mother-daughter relationships in the story (Dilly's relationship with her mother, Bridget, and Dilly's relationship with her daughter, Eleanora) are so passive-aggressive, so filled with love and loathing. They suffocate each other.

And this scares me, of course. Will this happen to Stella and me? Do I do this, suffocate her with my love? Is that why she shrugs me off, prefers her dad?

Last night, I sat in the bathroom as Stella pulled a long strand of dental floss through her teeth. She was doing very little in terms of removing plaque, but she was so proud of herself and her new skill. I smiled and told her I loved her.

"I know Mom," she said.

escaping into O'Brien

I’m late posting this week because my blog day was sacrificed for Pro-Choice Lobby Day at the Capitol. Stella was my proud lobbying assistant, wearing her “I ♥ Pro-Choice Girls” button. Let’s go, girl!

My Mother Words class at the Loft wrapped up on Tuesday, which makes me a little sad. But how wonderful to have been able to spend every Tuesday morning for three months with such an inspiring and talented group of mother writers!

I am now going to try to advantage of this little break in teaching to catch up on some fiction. (I will never really catch up, of course, because my list grows faster than I read.)

I just started Edna O’Brien’s The Light of Evening, a story of mothers and daughters and the ways they are tied to one another. I’ve never read anything by O’Brien before and I wonder how this can be. She’s written 18 works of fiction! (How could I have missed her?)

The book begins by telling the story of Dilly, an older and ailing mother, as she prepares to check herself into the hospital. O’Brien’s prose is thick and lovely, and the way she describes the disorientation of being in the hospital is perfect. But this is my problem, of late, with reading. A scene I read reminds me of scene or sentence I’ve forgotten to put in my own book. (Which always leads to this thought: shit, another draft.)

But though I’m often reminded of my own shortcomings as a writer, I’m also inspired as I read. Another person’s written words often spark a glint of something in my dull brain, so I always have paper and pen ready to jot down ideas. But this is tiring, and consequently, reading rarely feels like an escape to me anymore. (Which is why, most evenings after Stella is in bed, I turn to television. I can just sit there and let that alternate world seep into me. I don’t have to think.)

But then occasionally, a book does offer escape. There is something in the voice, in the language, in the plot, that makes me stop thinking about craft. I lose myself. This is what has happened with The Light of Evening. It didn’t happen right away, on page one, and I think this is because the book begins in the third person, and there is something about that and the thickness of O’Brien’s prose and the stream-of-consciousness style, that made it difficult for me to fully engage with the novel. (This also may have something to do with the fact that I don’t have large blocks of time to dedicate to reading.) But then, the narration switches to first person, and now I’m hooked.

Maybe the stream-of-consciousness makes more sense to me in first person. Or maybe I finally set aside the time to just read, and that’s what I needed. I’m not sure, but I’m determined to dedicate the time this weekend so I can escape, again, into O’Brien’s rich story. And I’ll report back next week on the story’s complicated mother-daughter relationships.

mother love and Snow Flower

I just finished a wonderful novel: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. It’s a story set in nineteenth century China about enduring friendship, footbinding, and nu shu, women’s secret writing. It’s also a story about motherhood and mother love. Aha! The dialogue between different pieces of writing continues.

Just two weeks ago, my students read Andrea Buchanan’s “Mother Love” and wrote about what mother love meant to them. I have been thinking about it, as well, what it means to love a child, what that feels like. I think of a moment in the car when Stella was staring out the window, singing Joy to the World softly. I think of waking up in the middle of the night to her cries, getting out of bed though it's freezing, and going in to lie down with her until she feels safe again. (And I'm not bragging or trying to make myself seem like a great mom here. I really, and I mean really, hate to get out of bed in the middle of the night.) But these moments, to me, are what mother love is.

Maybe it's because I've been thinking about this so much that I had such a hard time getting into this book. I knew it was about footbinding, and it's hard for me to get my mind around the fact that for over a thousand years, mothers had to do this to their daughters. I think of Stella running around the house, jumping from the couch, scaling the jungle gym at the park, and then imagine binding her feet, not only taking away her freedom, but inflicting that kind of pain. It seems impossible.

The crazy thing is that Snow Flower’s narrator, Lily, uses this exact term--mother love--throughout the story: “This type of mother love (is) teng ai. My son told me that in men’s writing it is composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother’s love.” After Lily’s mother slaps her, Lily says, “Although my face stung, inside I was happy. That slap was the first time Mama had shown me her mother love, and I had to bite my lips to keep from smiling.”

How do I reconcile the kind of mother love I was thinking about with Lily's sense of mother love? Is there is difference, really?

I do understand the cultural significance of footbinding, and I understand that if I grew up in China a hundred years ago, I would have had my feet bound and I would have bound my daughter’s feet. But it still makes me teary, and I didn’t really want to read about it.

Those parts of the book are hard. Period. But See really is a wonderful storyteller. Once I got into the book, and accepted footbinding as inevitable, I was captivated by the special friendship, the laotong relationship, between Snow Flower and Lily.

So, I'm curious if anyone reading this blog has read this book and and/or what your ruminations are on mother love? I'm thinking it's something to which I'll keep returning.