I spent last weekend cleaning and re-cleaning and shopping and re-shopping for parties in honor of Stella, who turned five on Saturday.
Five—it’s hard to believe.
Every year on her birthday, part of me relives those scary days leading up to (and following) her birth. This year, those memories were particularly close to the surface because for the first time since she was born, she was celebrating her birthday on a Saturday. I woke up Friday morning and thought, yes, it was a Friday, five years ago, when I woke up huge and bloated and knew something wasn’t right. It was a Friday when my dad and sister took me to the hospital. (D was in Seattle for a soccer playoff game.) It was a Friday when my blood pressure became dangerously high.
When I woke up at 5:30 with Zoë on Saturday morning, I thought, yes, five years ago I was also awake at 5:30, queasy from magnesium sulfate, waiting to be induced and waiting for D to arrive home on a red-eye flight.
Stella’s birthday was a day of contrasts. I stared at my beautiful, five-year-old daughter as she scurried around our packed house, giggling with her friends, and I wondered: is this the same child as that skinny three-pound baby I delivered? Is this the same child, the one I hovered over for all those weeks in the NICU? I kept trying to hug her, to squeeze her tightly, and she kept wiggling away, saying, her voice full of exasperation, “Mommmmm…..please stop!” I couldn’t help it. I just wanted her to know how much I love her. I wanted to reassure myself—yet again—that she’s okay.
She’s totally okay.
And she’s totally into Barbie. Who knew that five was the age of the Barbie?
For several months now, she has been very “into” the Barbie princess movies, and I have to admit (reluctantly) that I like them, as well. They feature strong young women who save kings and queens from being poisoned, restore fairy kingdoms, and rescue each other from trouble. There are problems with them, of course: Barbie is always very white and very blonde; princes are often stepping in at the last minute for a miraculous save. But the movies stress friendship and believing in yourself and standing up for what you think is right. (Does it sound as though I’m justifying these? I am.)
Stella was at a birthday party a few weeks ago, and her friends (who are twins) each received a Diamond Castle Barbie. This is the newest of the movies. The doll sings, and when she sings, her heart-shaped necklace lights up. When Stella saw these matching Barbies at the birthday party, her eyes sparkled. (I kid you not.) The Diamond Castle Barbie moved to the top of her birthday list.
I shrugged. Oh, alright. I passed the word: she’d like the newest singing Barbie and stuff to go with the newest singing Barbie.
Well, she got that Barbie (and two others). She got Barbie clothes and a Barbie scooter. She got two Barbie movies. She got a Barbie tea set. (I’m probably leaving something Barbie out of this list. Who can keep track?)
A few years ago I hated Barbie. I cringed when Stella got her first one. I didn’t approve. I realize I was being hypocritical. After all, I had played with Barbies. My sisters and I spent endless hours—days, really—enacting complicated stories with our Barbies. We were inventive and imaginative.
Why then was I so against Barbie? Well, mostly it was her physically impossible measurements, the unrealistic body image. I didn’t want to set my daughters up with that as an ideal. But the Barbies of today are a little more realistic. Her oh-so-tall-and-slender physique is still unlikely, true, but they toned it down enough to be anatomically possible.
I still don’t want Barbie’s body to be the ideal for Stella or Zoë, but that’s where conversation comes in, doesn’t it? We’ll talk about what it means to be fit and healthy. We’ll talk about real versus fantasy. We’ll work that part out. (I still do hate their clothes, however. Why would they make such skanky clothes for a Barbie doll? Luckily, I still have some of the clothes my grandma knit and sewed for our Barbies years ago, and I’ve thrown them into the mix to balance the trashy sequined halter tops. But really.)
I’ve caved, I know. Maybe I should be more hard-lined about this. But when I was upstairs yesterday changing Zoë’s diaper and I heard Stella signing along with Alexa, her new Diamond Castle Barbie, I couldn’t help smiling. She loves the dolls. She’ll invent stories and lives for them. She’ll spend hours playing with them. And we’ll just deal with the rest of it.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
dialogue
I want to thank all of you who commented on my last post. I was really scared to write about such a divisive issue on this blog because, quite frankly, I like to be liked. I don't like to rock the boat.
In this case, I'm glad I rocked it. I think some good discussion arose from it. I agreed with so many of your comments, and even when I didn't agree, I could understand you. That feels like a first step to me. And this is my hope: that we will not shy away from controversy and that we will begin to really discuss these huge, important issues. I hope that we will talk about reproductive justice in the context of our lives, in the context of faith, and from a historical perspective. I hope we will work to reduce the number of abortions in this country without making abortion criminal. I hope that we will begin to support women and families with real, common-sense public policies. I hope we will educate young people so that they are able to make informed decisions about their sexual lives.
Thank you for reading and thank you for your comments. Once again, I find I'm grateful that I started this blog, and I'm grateful to all of you for reading it.
I'm over at Creative Construction this week. You can check out a much lighter post there.
In this case, I'm glad I rocked it. I think some good discussion arose from it. I agreed with so many of your comments, and even when I didn't agree, I could understand you. That feels like a first step to me. And this is my hope: that we will not shy away from controversy and that we will begin to really discuss these huge, important issues. I hope that we will talk about reproductive justice in the context of our lives, in the context of faith, and from a historical perspective. I hope we will work to reduce the number of abortions in this country without making abortion criminal. I hope that we will begin to support women and families with real, common-sense public policies. I hope we will educate young people so that they are able to make informed decisions about their sexual lives.
Thank you for reading and thank you for your comments. Once again, I find I'm grateful that I started this blog, and I'm grateful to all of you for reading it.
I'm over at Creative Construction this week. You can check out a much lighter post there.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
a long and controversial post
I’ve been thinking about this post for some time. I was going to write it last January, on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, but then I was busy being pregnant and tired and sick with a series of debilitating colds. I was going to do it in February, when I wrote a review of Kathryn Trueblood’s The Baby Lottery for mamazine, but I was still pregnant and sick. And then sweet Zoë was born and I was just too busy. It was easy to put off because I didn’t actually want to write the post. I knew it would cause controversy, and I was worried about alienating readers.
I can’t put it off any longer. I wouldn’t feel right. I can’t put it off any longer because it’s not only a personal issue, it’s a political one, and it’s an election year. And I can’t put it off any longer because McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Palin, like McCain, is anti-choice. This doesn’t surprise me—he wouldn’t have chosen her otherwise. Why does it bother me so much, then, that she is what she is? Is it because she doesn’t think abortion should be legal even in the case of rape? Is it because she went so far to say that she would not allow her own daughter to get an abortion if she had been raped? Is it that she says abortion is wrong in every case (except when a woman’s life is in danger), but opposes comprehensive sex education for young people, upholding that abstinence-only is the only sex education that kids should get? (Perhaps her own daughter would not be pregnant if she had received fact-based sex ed. Just a thought.) Is it because she failed to pass legislation that would support single parents by cutting funding for teen mothers in her state?
All of the above. All of these things bother me. And it bothers me that she claims some sort of moral high ground on abortion and everything else because she calls herself a Christian.
I hate to break it to her, but most religious Americans believe in treating woman as responsible moral decision makers. They believe in supporting women and families. They believe that abortion is a decision between a woman and her God. Indeed, the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, Unitarian Universalist Association, and Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism all have official statements in support of reproductive choice.
Clergy even fought for a woman’s right to choose abortion before abortion was legal. Prior to Roe v. Wade, a group of clergy in New York established what was called the Clergy Counseling Service on Abortion, helping women find safe abortions. The counseling service expanded to include over 2,000 clergy nationwide, and after Roe v. Wade, became what is known today as the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. If you have never seen From Danger to Dignity, a documentary film about the Clergy Consultation Service and the struggle to legalize abortion in this country, watch it. Watch it. Watch it—especially if you born after 1973.
Abortion, you see, is not a black and white issue. We like to say it is because in America things have to be bad or good, right or wrong. But that’s not really how we live. We live complicated, muddy, very gray lives. And the decisions we make about reproduction are also complicated, muddy, and very gray.
There are two books I’ve been thinking about in relation to this issue: Kathryn Trueblood’s The Baby Lottery and Penny Wolfson’s Moonrise. Trueblood’s novel is about five women, college friends in their late thirties, who find their relationships strained when one of them, Charlotte, decides to have a second-trimester abortion after delaying the decision in the hope that her husband will change his mind.
I like what Kathryn Trueblood said last winter, when I spoke to her on the phone about the book:
“Most people have some ambivalence about abortion, and are at least a little conflicted about it, but we never talk about those feelings, and it was important to me to present some of those feelings here. I think we, as a country, have not progressed in our discussion of abortion.”
The novel records the voices of Charlotte’s four friends as they struggle to bridge the gap between what they should feel and what they do feel about Charlotte’s decision. Charlotte is an alcoholic and wouldn’t make a very good mother. She’s in a sad, lonely marriage. But she could have terminated earlier, no? I went back and forth, disliking her and feeling sorry for her. It’s complicated. It’s muddy. There is no black and white in this story, just gray, and that’s why I respect it. It felt real to me.
Penny Wolfson’s book is a memoir about her son, who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The book is about watching him grow up and deteriorate at the same time. It’s about genetics and what it means to know oneself on a molecular level. I have posted about her essay of the same title, which is one of my very favorite essays. The memoir is very good, as well, though I didn’t love it the way I love the essay. (I think this has to do with the longer form, and what happens when you turn an essay into a memoir.) I do think it is an important memoir, however. One of my favorite parts is the chapter in which Wolfson is pregnant with her third child. Girls are carriers of the disease, but it only affects boys. If prenatal testing shows the fetus is a boy and has Duchenne—a fifty percent chance if it's a boy—she will terminate.
In this chapter, Wolfson responds to a column by Anna Quindlen in which Quindlen states her opposition to amniocentesis, saying, “The only compelling argument anyone had made to us for amnio, which is not entirely without risk, was made by my doctor, who asked us to consider the possibility that we could not devote sufficient time to the needs of the children we have now if we were looking after those of someone so much needier. We considered that argument, and let it go. Having more than one child always means a willingness either to give less to the others or to stretch yourself more.”
Wolfson responds:
“I don’t completely disagree. But I am still, somehow, furious. If she’d had a child with a genetic disease, I think, she might not have felt the way she did. She might have known more about stretching herself, about how there are limits. How easy to think in black and white ways when the gray things haven’t occurred yet! If the gray stuff hasn’t happened, you can feel free to have that third baby or fourth or as many as you like. The future seems open.”
When she contemplates an abortion, she says, “Whatever pain, physical and otherwise, I can imagine from such a procedure pales beside the vision of another boy with muscular dystrophy, another boy genetically programmed to degenerate.”
(She did not end up terminating. The CVS showed her son would not have Duchenne.)
Wolfson is very brave, and I dare anyone to judge her. How can we judge something we have not lived? Unfortunately, we do it all the time. (I’m guilty of it, as well.) But this is part of the problem: we lack empathy. We lack understanding. We seem unable to move beyond our own narrow experiences in the world and imagine being in someone else’s shoes. This is a dangerous way to be.
Back to Palin: Another thing I dislike about her is how she uses her son (if, indeed, he is her son), who has Down syndrome, as part of her pro-life platform. I know hundreds of pro-choice women who would choose not to terminate a pregnancy because of Down syndrome. Pro-choice women and pro-choice families make this decision every day. It is the decision D and I would have made, and while I was pregnant with Zoë, we decided against the testing because we knew we would not terminate our pregnancy because of Down syndrome. This does not make me any less pro-choice. (Know that I would have terminated, however, if our twenty-week ultrasound had showed fetal anomalies incompatible with life.)
I like what Kate Trump O’Connor says at the end of her Brain, Child essay “Not One of Those Mothers,” which is about being the mother to a son who has Down syndrome:
“Since Thomas’ birth, I have struggled with the moral and ethical issues surrounding the increasingly early prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. I do not want to impose on the personal choices of other, and yet I do not want fear—the fear of difference and the fear of our own inadequacy—to make life and death decisions for us. We are capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for. That’s something Thomas, with his determination and persistence, shows me every day.”
Abortion is never an easy choice. I don’t know anyone who takes it lightly. I don’t know any pro-choice person who is pro-abortion. I think, as a nation, we need to do everything we can to reduce the number of abortions, and there are ways of doing this: by making contraception, family planning services, and emergency contraception available and affordable; by providing people living wage jobs and the resources they need to start a family if they choose; by providing holistic, comprehensive sex education to all of our young people.
It’s a muddy, complicated issue, so let’s address it as such. Let’s not force it into one-line slogans. Let’s not make it about religious people versus secular people. Let’s give the real lived experiences of women and families space. Let’s listen to their stories. Let’s try to understand each other and be empathetic. Let’s support common-sense public policies that will give women and families real choices. And as we do all of the above, let us not forget that making abortion illegal won’t reduce the number of abortions; it will simply kill women.
I can’t put it off any longer. I wouldn’t feel right. I can’t put it off any longer because it’s not only a personal issue, it’s a political one, and it’s an election year. And I can’t put it off any longer because McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Palin, like McCain, is anti-choice. This doesn’t surprise me—he wouldn’t have chosen her otherwise. Why does it bother me so much, then, that she is what she is? Is it because she doesn’t think abortion should be legal even in the case of rape? Is it because she went so far to say that she would not allow her own daughter to get an abortion if she had been raped? Is it that she says abortion is wrong in every case (except when a woman’s life is in danger), but opposes comprehensive sex education for young people, upholding that abstinence-only is the only sex education that kids should get? (Perhaps her own daughter would not be pregnant if she had received fact-based sex ed. Just a thought.) Is it because she failed to pass legislation that would support single parents by cutting funding for teen mothers in her state?
All of the above. All of these things bother me. And it bothers me that she claims some sort of moral high ground on abortion and everything else because she calls herself a Christian.
I hate to break it to her, but most religious Americans believe in treating woman as responsible moral decision makers. They believe in supporting women and families. They believe that abortion is a decision between a woman and her God. Indeed, the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church, Unitarian Universalist Association, and Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Judaism all have official statements in support of reproductive choice.
Clergy even fought for a woman’s right to choose abortion before abortion was legal. Prior to Roe v. Wade, a group of clergy in New York established what was called the Clergy Counseling Service on Abortion, helping women find safe abortions. The counseling service expanded to include over 2,000 clergy nationwide, and after Roe v. Wade, became what is known today as the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. If you have never seen From Danger to Dignity, a documentary film about the Clergy Consultation Service and the struggle to legalize abortion in this country, watch it. Watch it. Watch it—especially if you born after 1973.
Abortion, you see, is not a black and white issue. We like to say it is because in America things have to be bad or good, right or wrong. But that’s not really how we live. We live complicated, muddy, very gray lives. And the decisions we make about reproduction are also complicated, muddy, and very gray.
There are two books I’ve been thinking about in relation to this issue: Kathryn Trueblood’s The Baby Lottery and Penny Wolfson’s Moonrise. Trueblood’s novel is about five women, college friends in their late thirties, who find their relationships strained when one of them, Charlotte, decides to have a second-trimester abortion after delaying the decision in the hope that her husband will change his mind.
I like what Kathryn Trueblood said last winter, when I spoke to her on the phone about the book:
“Most people have some ambivalence about abortion, and are at least a little conflicted about it, but we never talk about those feelings, and it was important to me to present some of those feelings here. I think we, as a country, have not progressed in our discussion of abortion.”
The novel records the voices of Charlotte’s four friends as they struggle to bridge the gap between what they should feel and what they do feel about Charlotte’s decision. Charlotte is an alcoholic and wouldn’t make a very good mother. She’s in a sad, lonely marriage. But she could have terminated earlier, no? I went back and forth, disliking her and feeling sorry for her. It’s complicated. It’s muddy. There is no black and white in this story, just gray, and that’s why I respect it. It felt real to me.
Penny Wolfson’s book is a memoir about her son, who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The book is about watching him grow up and deteriorate at the same time. It’s about genetics and what it means to know oneself on a molecular level. I have posted about her essay of the same title, which is one of my very favorite essays. The memoir is very good, as well, though I didn’t love it the way I love the essay. (I think this has to do with the longer form, and what happens when you turn an essay into a memoir.) I do think it is an important memoir, however. One of my favorite parts is the chapter in which Wolfson is pregnant with her third child. Girls are carriers of the disease, but it only affects boys. If prenatal testing shows the fetus is a boy and has Duchenne—a fifty percent chance if it's a boy—she will terminate.
In this chapter, Wolfson responds to a column by Anna Quindlen in which Quindlen states her opposition to amniocentesis, saying, “The only compelling argument anyone had made to us for amnio, which is not entirely without risk, was made by my doctor, who asked us to consider the possibility that we could not devote sufficient time to the needs of the children we have now if we were looking after those of someone so much needier. We considered that argument, and let it go. Having more than one child always means a willingness either to give less to the others or to stretch yourself more.”
Wolfson responds:
“I don’t completely disagree. But I am still, somehow, furious. If she’d had a child with a genetic disease, I think, she might not have felt the way she did. She might have known more about stretching herself, about how there are limits. How easy to think in black and white ways when the gray things haven’t occurred yet! If the gray stuff hasn’t happened, you can feel free to have that third baby or fourth or as many as you like. The future seems open.”
When she contemplates an abortion, she says, “Whatever pain, physical and otherwise, I can imagine from such a procedure pales beside the vision of another boy with muscular dystrophy, another boy genetically programmed to degenerate.”
(She did not end up terminating. The CVS showed her son would not have Duchenne.)
Wolfson is very brave, and I dare anyone to judge her. How can we judge something we have not lived? Unfortunately, we do it all the time. (I’m guilty of it, as well.) But this is part of the problem: we lack empathy. We lack understanding. We seem unable to move beyond our own narrow experiences in the world and imagine being in someone else’s shoes. This is a dangerous way to be.
Back to Palin: Another thing I dislike about her is how she uses her son (if, indeed, he is her son), who has Down syndrome, as part of her pro-life platform. I know hundreds of pro-choice women who would choose not to terminate a pregnancy because of Down syndrome. Pro-choice women and pro-choice families make this decision every day. It is the decision D and I would have made, and while I was pregnant with Zoë, we decided against the testing because we knew we would not terminate our pregnancy because of Down syndrome. This does not make me any less pro-choice. (Know that I would have terminated, however, if our twenty-week ultrasound had showed fetal anomalies incompatible with life.)
I like what Kate Trump O’Connor says at the end of her Brain, Child essay “Not One of Those Mothers,” which is about being the mother to a son who has Down syndrome:
“Since Thomas’ birth, I have struggled with the moral and ethical issues surrounding the increasingly early prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. I do not want to impose on the personal choices of other, and yet I do not want fear—the fear of difference and the fear of our own inadequacy—to make life and death decisions for us. We are capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for. That’s something Thomas, with his determination and persistence, shows me every day.”
Abortion is never an easy choice. I don’t know anyone who takes it lightly. I don’t know any pro-choice person who is pro-abortion. I think, as a nation, we need to do everything we can to reduce the number of abortions, and there are ways of doing this: by making contraception, family planning services, and emergency contraception available and affordable; by providing people living wage jobs and the resources they need to start a family if they choose; by providing holistic, comprehensive sex education to all of our young people.
It’s a muddy, complicated issue, so let’s address it as such. Let’s not force it into one-line slogans. Let’s not make it about religious people versus secular people. Let’s give the real lived experiences of women and families space. Let’s listen to their stories. Let’s try to understand each other and be empathetic. Let’s support common-sense public policies that will give women and families real choices. And as we do all of the above, let us not forget that making abortion illegal won’t reduce the number of abortions; it will simply kill women.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
six unspectacular things about me
I was tagged by Ellen at A Girl’s Garden of Menopause, which I love, to list six unspectacular things about me. This won’t be difficult.
Here they are:
- I am almost always tired.
- I am newly addicted to granola bars (any size or flavor).
- I want to be a gardener, but I hate to weed.
- I finally have wireless internet at home and no longer have to pirate my neighbor’s wireless. (They cut me off, so I had no choice.) Note: I don't think they cut me off on purpose. Regardless, it had been a year, so it was time.
- I love Neil Diamond, especially the really old stuff.
- It’s difficult for me to listen to music and think at the same time.
Meme Terms & Conditions
1. Link the person who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. List 6 unspectacular things about you
4. Tag 6 other bloggers by linking them
I tag:
Rhena
Andria
Suzanne
Lisa
Melissa
Meredith
Monday, August 18, 2008
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!
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!
Sunday, August 17, 2008
de-funking
I’ve been in such a funk this summer, which is unlike me because I love summer. I love the green and the heat (within reason) and the long days. But the days have been so very long with the two girls, and I’m always scrambling to squeeze in one more thing. I have been taking Zoë with me to work for a couple of months now, and frankly, it doesn’t work. She usually falls asleep in the car on the way there, but she wakes up after about ½ hour, and then I nurse her and put her on the floor next to my desk or hold her as I type. I share the office, which is slightly larger than a broom closet, with two other people, and while they are gracious about my crying and fussy baby, I know that they must want to wring my neck or Zoë’s neck or both of our necks. So, after another ½ hour, I pack up my things and the baby and head home. Zoë sometimes falls asleep again on the way home, only to wake up as I pull up in front of our house. By the time I nurse her again and bounce her and get her ready to fall asleep for real (whatever that means), it’s time to go pick up Stella from whatever camp I’ve enrolled her in for the week. Sometimes Zoë falls asleep for a couple of hours in the late afternoon, during which I work a little and play with Stella. Later, we have dinner, Stella showers (she has declared herself too old for baths) and we read books before bed. All of these things are accompanied by Zoë’s fussing and crying and Stella’s late-afternoon whining. (Sometimes Zoë cries so much while I’m reading to Stella that I just put her in her crib in the other room and let her wail as we make our way through the three books of the night.) When I finally get them both to sleep (about 8:30), I pour myself a glass of wine and sit on the porch and stare out at the street, semi-comatose. This is when D usually gets home. We talk for a bit and often watch an episode of The Wire, which is fabulous and heartbreaking. Then I go to bed, wake up three times to nurse Zoë, then begin the day all over again.
Things will be easier in a couple of weeks because D won’t have to coach in the evenings anymore, so he’ll be home to help with dinner and kids and bedtime. Also, I’ll be done with my job in two weeks, and that will be a relief.
But the thing I can do in order to de-funk myself is to carve out serious writing time, and I’m determined to do this. D has agreed to go into work a little late so that I can write everyday from 7-9 a.m. It’s the only way I will make progress on the essay I’ve begun. I also need to dive back into my book because I finally figured out what it is really about. If I were one of my students, I would have pressured myself into this discovery about, um, a year ago, when I finished the damn thing. In workshops I always ask them to identify for the author what the piece is really about. But I failed to heed my own advice, failed to answer my own questions. (I hate when I do this.)
But this morning while I was changing Zoë’s diaper (after waking many nights feeling despondent about my “this is no market for this” book), I realized that the book is really about learning to live with uncertainty. Having a preemie is the situation, of course, but the real story is about uncertainty, control, and having faith that I will be able to handle the unexpected. (If you haven’t read Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, you should—she’s the one who makes the distinction between a memoir’s situation and its real story.) Knowing what the book is about won’t change the perception of my book as a preemie book, of course, but it will make the book better, and this makes me feel hopeful again.
The other thing that makes me feel hopeful is that D will be back tonight (he’s been gone all weekend), and tomorrow I’ll start my morning writing. It will help snap me out of my funk. I’m sure of that.
Things will be easier in a couple of weeks because D won’t have to coach in the evenings anymore, so he’ll be home to help with dinner and kids and bedtime. Also, I’ll be done with my job in two weeks, and that will be a relief.
But the thing I can do in order to de-funk myself is to carve out serious writing time, and I’m determined to do this. D has agreed to go into work a little late so that I can write everyday from 7-9 a.m. It’s the only way I will make progress on the essay I’ve begun. I also need to dive back into my book because I finally figured out what it is really about. If I were one of my students, I would have pressured myself into this discovery about, um, a year ago, when I finished the damn thing. In workshops I always ask them to identify for the author what the piece is really about. But I failed to heed my own advice, failed to answer my own questions. (I hate when I do this.)
But this morning while I was changing Zoë’s diaper (after waking many nights feeling despondent about my “this is no market for this” book), I realized that the book is really about learning to live with uncertainty. Having a preemie is the situation, of course, but the real story is about uncertainty, control, and having faith that I will be able to handle the unexpected. (If you haven’t read Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, you should—she’s the one who makes the distinction between a memoir’s situation and its real story.) Knowing what the book is about won’t change the perception of my book as a preemie book, of course, but it will make the book better, and this makes me feel hopeful again.
The other thing that makes me feel hopeful is that D will be back tonight (he’s been gone all weekend), and tomorrow I’ll start my morning writing. It will help snap me out of my funk. I’m sure of that.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
what vacation?
I am up north this week with the girls and my mom and grandpa and my older sister and her fiancé. (Up north is what we say in Minnesota to mean anything north of the Twin Cities.)
On Saturday, I led my “Writing Family” workshop in Park Rapids, and it was so much fun. Out of the 21 participants, 3 were men. Men in class—who knew? I haven’t had a man in one of my classes since I taught at the University of Minnesota. And really, those undergraduates weren’t really men yet—they inhabited that nebulous space between boyhood and manhood. Something like being a pre-teen, I guess. Pre-man?
Anyway, it was fun on Saturday to have a little thoughtful, writerly testosterone in class.
We covered a lot of ground in 3 ½ hours: we discussed the use of concrete details and how to develop three-dimensional characters, strong scenes and believable dialogue. We also discussed ways for them to tap into their reflexive voices. They wrote a lot, and they were good. It’s so inspiring for me to sit in a room with a group of people writing at the same time. You can almost see the creativity rising like steam from their bent heads. It made me excited to begin my fall Mother Words class.
I would like to say that I’m now spending the rest of the week relaxing, but it’s not very relaxing to be out of town with my two darling girls but not with D. He’s home, working, and feeling bad that he’s not up here with us. As a former teacher, it’s been very hard on him (and me) that he’s working so much this summer. We’re used to coming up here for a couple of weeks every summer. Every morning he would golf, then play with Stella in the afternoon, and fish in the evening. (And we would cuddle and go for walks and sometimes sneak into town for a movie, just the two of us.) But now he’s at home, working ten to twelve hour days. And when he gets home from work, he’s been working around the house: re-grouting the bathroom window and assembling the crib in Stella’s room. (Zoë has been in a co-sleeper in our room up until now.) He’s talking about painting the porch, as well, but that seems excessive.
So I’m up here and it’s gorgeous, but I miss D and I miss his help. My family members, and especially my mom, are so helpful with Stella and Zoë, but I always feel as though they are doing me a huge favor—which they are—by taking Stella down to the beach or walking Zoë until she falls asleep. I don’t feel I can say, “Hey, can you watch both of my kids while I go down to the dock and read?” And I know it can be hard to have a very active almost-five-year-old constantly saying, “Auntie Sara, Auntie Sara, Auntie Sara, look at me, look at me!” Not to mention how hard it can be on people’s nerves to have a screaming baby around.
Speaking of my screaming baby, she is now sleeping sounding in her stroller next to me, and maybe I’ll even have time to finish this post before she wakes up. The little dear is five months old today, and this seems impossible. How did it happen so quickly? (The days don’t go quickly, mind you—they are sometimes excruciatingly slow. But the weeks and months seem to fly by. That funny trick of time—how elastic and changeable it is.)
Zoë loves to grab for things now, especially when I am trying to feed her rice cereal or mashed blueberries and apples. The food gets everywhere, and when I try to loosen her vice grip on the spoon, she lets out a piercing pterodactyl cry and glares at me. I sense that she will be just as stubborn as her sister. Where did this come from, this steel will? Hmmm.
Ah, I can hear her now, waking up, so I’ll sign off and post this now or it will be days before I get back to it.
On Saturday, I led my “Writing Family” workshop in Park Rapids, and it was so much fun. Out of the 21 participants, 3 were men. Men in class—who knew? I haven’t had a man in one of my classes since I taught at the University of Minnesota. And really, those undergraduates weren’t really men yet—they inhabited that nebulous space between boyhood and manhood. Something like being a pre-teen, I guess. Pre-man?
Anyway, it was fun on Saturday to have a little thoughtful, writerly testosterone in class.
We covered a lot of ground in 3 ½ hours: we discussed the use of concrete details and how to develop three-dimensional characters, strong scenes and believable dialogue. We also discussed ways for them to tap into their reflexive voices. They wrote a lot, and they were good. It’s so inspiring for me to sit in a room with a group of people writing at the same time. You can almost see the creativity rising like steam from their bent heads. It made me excited to begin my fall Mother Words class.
I would like to say that I’m now spending the rest of the week relaxing, but it’s not very relaxing to be out of town with my two darling girls but not with D. He’s home, working, and feeling bad that he’s not up here with us. As a former teacher, it’s been very hard on him (and me) that he’s working so much this summer. We’re used to coming up here for a couple of weeks every summer. Every morning he would golf, then play with Stella in the afternoon, and fish in the evening. (And we would cuddle and go for walks and sometimes sneak into town for a movie, just the two of us.) But now he’s at home, working ten to twelve hour days. And when he gets home from work, he’s been working around the house: re-grouting the bathroom window and assembling the crib in Stella’s room. (Zoë has been in a co-sleeper in our room up until now.) He’s talking about painting the porch, as well, but that seems excessive.
So I’m up here and it’s gorgeous, but I miss D and I miss his help. My family members, and especially my mom, are so helpful with Stella and Zoë, but I always feel as though they are doing me a huge favor—which they are—by taking Stella down to the beach or walking Zoë until she falls asleep. I don’t feel I can say, “Hey, can you watch both of my kids while I go down to the dock and read?” And I know it can be hard to have a very active almost-five-year-old constantly saying, “Auntie Sara, Auntie Sara, Auntie Sara, look at me, look at me!” Not to mention how hard it can be on people’s nerves to have a screaming baby around.
Speaking of my screaming baby, she is now sleeping sounding in her stroller next to me, and maybe I’ll even have time to finish this post before she wakes up. The little dear is five months old today, and this seems impossible. How did it happen so quickly? (The days don’t go quickly, mind you—they are sometimes excruciatingly slow. But the weeks and months seem to fly by. That funny trick of time—how elastic and changeable it is.)
Zoë loves to grab for things now, especially when I am trying to feed her rice cereal or mashed blueberries and apples. The food gets everywhere, and when I try to loosen her vice grip on the spoon, she lets out a piercing pterodactyl cry and glares at me. I sense that she will be just as stubborn as her sister. Where did this come from, this steel will? Hmmm.
Ah, I can hear her now, waking up, so I’ll sign off and post this now or it will be days before I get back to it.
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