Gellhorn & Grandma

“…asked if sitting in my room writing all the time didn’t feel like prison. I said you bet, what a writer needs.” -Martha Gellhorn, writing to Peggy Schutze, preacher’s wife, mother of 4, and creator of the most awesome picture books ever custom-made for me in my whole life.

A few years ago I found myself procrastinating novel-writing and preparing for my first baby to be born (!!) by obsessing over Martha Gellhorn, the feisty novelist and journalist who was once married to Ernest Hemingway and, more importantly, had a correspondence with my grandmother. The result of this obsession was an essay that I sent around to a resounding “huh.” But now TV’s getting involved, and Nicole Kidman, who is for some reason always playing my literary heroines, portrays Gellhorn in Hemingway & Gellhorn. (Between this and Girls, I’m convinced there is a world-wide conspiracy to make me feel bad about not having HBO.) And now I’m so happy that the essay, “A Goofy State of Mind: My Grandmother’s Letters With Martha Gellhorn,”  is up at The Millions, and that Gellhorn is finally — as a prescient coworker of mine suggested years ago — having her moment. Not to mention my grandmother, a true writer and an imaginative, excitable, dreamy, bicycle-riding, fabulous-hat-collecting, typewriter-clacking space-case eccentric waaaaaay before Zooey Deschanel made it a brand.

So anyway, for a peek into the letters between a globe-trotting war correspondent and the “mouse in her own mind”, and for evidence that I once actually wrote things that were carefully thought-out or at least expansively researched, please visit The Millions.

Carley Moore: YA Novelist, Poet and Mother to Harper’s BFF.

The Stalker Chronicles, by Carley Moore

Carley Moore is basically why I live in Brooklyn. I mean, where else does your daughter befriend an adorable little child, only to find out that this child’s parents are both poets, and that this child’s mother is also a novelist? We can share so many complaints that no one else cares about! And Harper and her beloved Malka can entertain each other while we do! I feel so lucky to know Carley, and extra-lucky that she wrote the excellent YA novel The Stalker Chronicles. But who cares what I think of this book (which is a total page-turner, by the way, starring a complex, unique teen female protagonist — when does that happen?) — I’m not a YA. That’s why I asked my friend and neighbor, a smart 11-year-old aspiring writer named Lena, to read the book and interview Carley. Lena reports that she liked the book, found the subject matter interesting, and most of all liked the end — and this, after she had just been talking about how she never likes books’ endings.

And now…The Lena/Carley Interview.

What gave you the idea to write about this?

I wrote my dissertation on Seventeen magazine, and I devoted a chapter to a very popular column (which still runs both in print and on the website) called “Trauma-rama!”  Maybe you know about “Trauma-rama!”, but basically the editors ask readers to submit embarrassing or humiliating stories; real life stuff that happened to them.  I found this column fascinating—all of the shame and cringing around boys and having a body and just being a normal girl.  I think this column was probably lurking somewhere in my brain when I dreamed up Cammie.  But honestly, I think we all do embarrassing, stalker-esque things all the time when we try to find love (I know I have!) and I wanted to write a book about that shows us a character who is very real and who also goes too far.

How long did it take you to write the book?

Hmmm…maybe about eight months to write the first draft.  I didn’t write every day of those eight months, but a couple of hours every other day or every third day.  I revised it later for both my agent and then my editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Janine O-Malley, but that was a much shorter process (probably about three weeks worth of intense work for both of those revisions).

Are there going to be more of these books?

I’m not sure.  It depends on what readers want.  I haven’t written a sequel to The Stalker Chronicles, but I’m open.  I have a new young adult manuscript called Cemetery Gates, which I hope to have out soon.  It involves ghosts and a spunky, confused girl who in some ways resembles Cammie.  I’ll have to keep you posted.

From the beginning did you already know how it was going to end, or did you think of ideas as you were writing?

I started by writing the flashbacks—the stories of past boys and girls who Cammie has stalked and then as I got those down, I started to come up with ideas for the contemporary story line with Cammie, Rosie, Toby, Henry, Tara, and Cammie’s parents.  But I was figuring out a lot of it as I wrote it.  Many writers say this, but it’s fun to see what your characters end up wanting to do or figuring out about themselves as you write them.  So, it some places it was very intuitive.  But I did know a couple of later plot points early on, like the garbage scene and what Toby had done in Pittsburgh.

While you were writing the book did you know what age you wanted children to read this at?

Cammie is 15, so when I was writing I thought the average reader would be 14 or 15.  But now that I have a little experience with my readers and with publishing, I see that she’s interesting for younger girls too.  There’s something very innocent and child-like about Cammie’s way of seeing things, and also she’s a teenage girl with urges and a major crush and a danger streak, so maybe that’s a bit older of a thing.

How did you decide on the characters’ names?

Cammie Bliss, Carley Moore (we both have three syllables, the same first initial, and similar sounding last names).  Everybody else’s name was very random, although I did know a guy named Toby in high school, but he was very different than the Toby in the book.

How did you begin writing it? Did you organize before your drafts?

I’m not a very organized writer.  I can’t really begin with outlines or plot summaries.  They make me nervous.  I just move from scene to scene and try to make each of those as good and interesting as possible.  Once I have about 40 pages, then I start to have a more long-term sense of where I’m going.

How many pages would you say you wrote each day?

One to five depending on the day.

At any point in the book did you not know what to write next or how the characters would respond to certain things?

Writing the garbage scene creeped me out and I made my husband and a couple of friends read it to make sure it was working.  I got stuck writing the ending too.  I think there are a couple of different versions of the last chapters.

If you keep writing about Cammie who would your next book be about? Would you write about another child who was a stalker and wanted to stop?

Cammie is probably the only stalker girl I will write about, but if she were to have a sequel I would want to explore her relationship with Toby and see how she handles being a girlfriend and actually having that “normal” relationship she so craves.

How do you imagine Cammie’s house?

It’s very much like some of the houses in the small upstate town where I grew up—Jamestown, NY.  Two stories.  The living room, kitchen, and dining room are downstairs and all of the bedrooms and the bathroom are upstairs.  I added a back staircase off the kitchen in Cammie’s house in the book because I needed a convenient place for her to spy on her family members.  Also, these houses are kind of old and have radiator vents that carry sound from one room to another—another great way for Cammie to eavesdrop.  The house itself is kind of a mess and the refrigerator is full of foods past their expiration date because Cammie’s parents are not fully present or able to deal with family life.

Thank you Lena for your wonderful and thoughtful questions!!!  I had a great time responding!!

The lovely and brilliant Carley Moore. I took this photo of her while Harper and Malka raced screaming from one end of the apartment to the other, and Ollie attempted to climb up Carley’s leg. And yet look how serene she looks! What a pro.

Household Wording Elsewhere

I've been blogging away. On a red typewriter. Okay, this picture doesn't make any sense.

As usual, I have many posts I intend to write that remain in my brain because instead I am doing other things like sleeping. But just wait. I have books to write about, and rooms in the new house, and novel revisions, and playschool, and my new obsession with cross-fit training. Totally kidding about that last one, I’m still all weak and pasty. Anyway, I have been writing posts for Mamarama over at Redbook that are the sorts of things I would be posting here if laundry magically did itself at night. Here are a few, in case anyone is interested:

The one about how awful it is when your toddler has a tantrum on an airplane and people are dicks about it.

The one about reading my favorite childhood books to Harper whether she likes it or not.

The one that is a letter to Alton about how much we adore him, even though we forget his name sometimes and refer to him as Harper’s brother.

The one where I try to be funny about Michelle Duggar.

And maybe one day I will write something for this blog too.

image from skippydesigns on etsy

 

The Motherboard.

So, I’m super excited to be blogging for REDBOOK’s Motherboard Blog Council. This means that every week I will have a post up at The Motherboard in which I reflect on my life as a perfect mother and offer tips and tricks on how you can be more like me.*

*No, not really.

There are some seriously great bloggers on this here Blog Council, which is a little intimidating but whatever, it’s also flattering: Tracey Black of Don’t Mess With Mama, Alicia Harper of Mommy Delicious, Joslyn Gray of Stark. Raving. Mad. Mommy. and Carmen Stacier of Mom to the Screaming Masses. Seriously, check out their “Don’t Judge Me” posts — they are amazing. Alicia Harper still goes clubbing! I admit, I am judging her…to be awesome.

Yesterday was the official launch of the Blog Council, but, in classic Mama-trying-to-do-too-much-form, I was all scattered and crazy all day — helping out at playschool last minute and then working in the afternoon (by which I mean, trying desperately to concentrate despite the JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE BLARING at the coffee shop, aka, my office). So, what I’m saying is, Don’t Judge Me Because I Didn’t Post This Until Today.

Check this out!

Anyway, here’s my post, about how I let Harper watch television even though it makes me feel so guilty. I mean, not guilty. No judgment! No guilt!

But really, a little guilt.

I hope I don’t get fired for writing that.

It was the good book news that made me forget to buy butter.

So, in case you’re a stranger (do any strangers read this blog?) or a friend who’s like a weird monk of some sort and not on facebook or twitter (if you take a vow of silence are you allowed to tweet?) …I have some news.

My second book has sold!

That sounds weird. (Has sold what? Its cute letterpress cards on Etsy?)  What I mean to say is that my clever agent has sold my second book.  Which is to say that the wonderful editor of my first book (How Far Is the Ocean from Here, now available as an eBook, purchase it today!) has acquired it. Which is to say that this new novel, tentatively titled The Double Life of Jenny Lipkin, will be published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, sometime around spring of 2013. Double birthday party/book party anyone? (Harper will be turning 4 and Ollie 2. This makes it seem like AGES from now.)

Here’s how I got the news: I was driving to Fairway. My phone rang  and I saw my agent’s number and had three heart attacks and pulled over to answer. “Is that Daddy?” Harper was saying in the backseat.  My agent told me the deal was done. “I want to talk to Daddy! Let me talk! Is that Daddy? Is that Uncle Matt?” I never talk to Uncle Matt on the phone, so I don’t know where that one came from. I thanked my agent, hung up, said, “Great news, Harper!”, and tried unsuccessfully to explain what was happening.  “Well, I really wanted to talk to Daddy,” she said.  Then, to celebrate this wildly exciting turn of events, we continued on to Fairway.  Where…I grocery shopped. Harper honored the event by eating a cookie shaped like Dora’s face and narrating the whole thing. “Ow! You ate my lips!”

I was reminded of getting that fateful agent-call for my first book. I was younger then (could I have been 26? I can’t do math.), without children, and I was glamorously…at work. I quietly spoke to him from my corner of the cubicle, hung up, turned around, told my cubemates what had happened, bounced exitedly in my office chair — lifelong dream, yayyyyy! — upturned my desk and quit then and there. Kidding! I just went back to programming the homepage for the website I worked for.

Okay, so it’s not like the ghost of Gertrude Stein flies into the room and coronates you with a tiara made from shredded Shakespeare plays. But finding out a book is going to be published makes working in a cubicle or grocery-shopping with the kids about 95% more fun.

Sorry I Forgot About My Blog for a Second There.

image: eleventy's etsy shop

Where have I been? I know that all of my readers (i.e. both my mother AND my mother-in-law) have probably been missing my mush-mouthed missives (I don’t know what that means). But the last few weeks have been just crazeballs, as our babysitter would say. Playschool started — more on that later. I started a new part-time job — more on that sooner. Various other large life-changing projects in the works. Also, muffins. Two-ingredient muffins. That is what we can handle these days.

I will admit, I have moments when I secretly think, I have got this shit on lockdown. I am Supermom. This usually happens when both of the children have clean hair and clipped fingernails, which is basically the zenith of my competence. It is a wonderful feeling. It is also a fleeting feeling, completely forgotten when a few seconds later I leave a public restroom with my skirt fetchingly jacked up in the baby carrier or perform some other act of crazy frazzled momdom.

For example, the other day I picked Harper up from playschool. She hopped in the stroller, happily telling me about the day and eating her snack. What I didn’t pick up where her shoes. Right, I left the shoes at school. LEFT her SHOES. WTF. That is so something my mom would have done. No offense, Mom.

Then there is this whole working from home sitch. It’s great. If I were the kind of person who said things were blessings I would say, “This is a blessing.” I feel very lucky to be able to be home with my kids and at the same time write for Mommy Poppins and, as of a few weeks ago, Oprah. Honestly, I pretty much have the best job of all times ever. It’s what Harper would call “the most best.” The work is fun (and part-time), my brain feels nice and stretchy, and I get to work at a coffee shop while hogging the outlet and demanding endless tea-water refills, or at home, in my pajamas, while snuggling the dog on the couch. But working at home can be tough too. A few weeks ago I was finishing up a post one night after a long day of whatever it is the kids and I do all day. I was so…tired…and then…woke up to Adam’s laughter. I had fallen asleep on my laptop, people. My forehead typed three pages of V’s. I am not exaggerating in the least. The next day I had a bruise. Do not sleep on laptops. Not comfortable. Adam thought this episode was delightful. Hurumph.

So yeah, I haven’t checked in with this little blog much lately. But I am happy to be here now. Hellovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

A few of my time-consuming hobbies.

Loving, Housebroken Novel Seeks Good Home

The Finish Line. (from LSE Library's flickr photostream)

And…we’re back. Sorry for the break in posting, in the odd case that anyone cared. I was in self-imposed blog exile while I spent every free and semi-coherent moment finishing my last (uh, 4th? So far?) round of uptight, overly detail-oriented round of revisions before my agent submits my novel. Because I am a mistress of strategery, I sent him the draft on a summer Friday afternoon, so that it is sure to molder in his inbox and will probably have an odd odor and unidentifiable bubbles on the surface by the time he discovers it. Still, it’s a semi-good feeling to be semi-done with it!

These edits were result of my own last-minute cold feet, so I know that my sage and skilled agent for the most part approves of the book (and trust me, this man tells me when he thinks I’ve written a big pile of shit, which of course I always appreciate and accept gracefully) (did that sound sarcastic? Because I’m serious, I love/need it/him) and that soon the thing will be floating through the ether to editors who are sure to fight each other mercilessly for the chance to publish it/celebrate me as a genius/ask my agent to take them off his contact list/request that I never write anything ever again.

Because I have a very good imagination, the book is about…a mother of two young children who lives in Park Slope. I started writing it when Harper was a few months old and my agent informed me that the first second book I’d written was sort of, how you say, a big pile of shit. I didn’t disagree. So I promptly set about to start this one, the kernel for which I’d been mulling over since a certain stroll through a forest preserve in St Paul, Minnesota, when I told the excellent writer Amanda Fields (who was accompanying me on a RIDICULOUS childless person’s outing designed to entertain the DOG who I felt would enjoy a romp in the WOODS ha ha ha) about something that my grandmother had just told me, that I’d been trying to write an essay about. We’d been in the shoe section of Fields (no relation to the aforementioned Amanda, I don’t think), my grandmother and mother and I, looking for shoes for me to wear to my impending wedding. My grandmother casually said, “Did I ever tell you how a pair of shoes saved my mother’s life?” And proceeded to tell me this amazing anecdote about my great-grandmother, Jenny Lipkin, and her life-saving shoes. When I repeated it to Amanda she said, “Hm, that’s not an essay. That’s a novel.” So really, this is all her fault.

Zoom back to the future of 2009 Brooklyn, new baby Harper sleeping on my chest. I decided to write Jenny Lipkin’s story (mostly in stolen bits of time, on weekends, at the Red Horse Cafe, while drinking too much coffee for a nursing mother), told of course in current day Brooklyn and without any real regard to the actual Jenny Lipkin or her actual story. I had in mind as I wrote the mothers I was meeting now that I was a staying-at-home mother myself, and how everyone had these incredibly stressed-out moments they felt they couldn’t quite cop to – how being a mother was harder than you’d think. Weirdly, I gave my Jenny two kids two years apart JUST LIKE I HAVE NOW. (My first novel, which came out the day before I found out I was pregnant for the first time, was about a pregnant lady. I think I will have my next novel be about a fabulously wealthy lady who travels the world, drives a cool 1970s BMW, cooks amazing meals without a recipe, can run 10 miles without getting winded, and writes wise and witty novels that are always runaway bestsellers. You know, just in case.)

Last week, I finished this round of revisions with new baby Alton sleeping on my chest. Isn’t that some nice symmetry? Of course, most of my revisions had to do with the bits about actually having both a toddler and a baby at the same time, which now I actually do and felt I could deal with a little more realistically, although I would like to say for the record that this poor lady’s kids are way more trouble than mine are. As is her husband. As I keep telling mine, “But if there’s no trouble, there’s no STORY! Of course her husband isn’t PERFECT AND ALSO DEVASTATINGLY HANDSOME LIKE MINE IS. Just for the story!”

Now we wait. Maybe there will never be a triumphant update here and I will set about to, sigh, revise again. Or go back to that other first second novel and start sifting through that particular shit pile.

Now, to do the dishes before the family wakes up from naptime.

Stephanie N. Johnson: Mother-Poet-Extraordinaire

Kinesthesia, by Stephanie N. Johnson

Since becoming a mother who writes (or a writer who mothers? Hm!) I have found myself becoming little weirdly obsessed with other mom/writers, wanting to seek out each and every one and grill them (the way undergraduates always want to know what time of day writers write and with what sort of pen or computer) on, well, when they write. And how.

Which is why I imposed on Stephanie N. Johnson, a graduate school classmate of mine whose luminous poetry collection, Kinesthesia, was recently released.

Here is a little bit about Stephanie, from her website: “Stephanie N. Johnson’s first book of poems, Kinesthesia, was published fall 2010 by New Rivers Press as a winner of the 2008 Many Voices Project. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Borderlands, BPJ, Massachusetts Review, Water Stone Review and elsewhere. She holds a BA in English from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota with a graduate minor in Complementary and Alternative Therapies (CAM). Stephanie’s poems and essays are concerned with the relationship between imagination and the natural world, how human-imagination crosses a field of realization and possibility, leaving tracks.”

In grad school, Stephanie wrote an amazing essay about bow-hunting caribou in Alaska and holding a heart in her hands. It was seriously the best thing ever.

And voila! Our interview:

How has being a mother affected your writing?

I don’t worry about my writing like I used to. I don’t worry about losing inspiration. I am more efficient. I receive line edits in my dreams. I feel all of life conspiring so that I can continue to do my work. I celebrate the poems as they come, and I am writing much more broadly. Fiction, nonfiction, young adult and children stories too. My writing has matured as I have, growing in the deepest of ways from the challenges and the joys of being a mother. I love to experience the unfurling of a little human being, to have these girls grow and meet me with a language all their own. They remind me that my artistic (and interpersonal) evolution is never complete.

Many of these poems have to do with relationships between females. Did having two daughters inform the subject matter at all?

Interestingly, most of these poems were written before my daughters were born. Sometimes I feel like I had daughters because my writing is so often female centered. It seems appropriate somehow that I would have two girls. Since the book has been published I’ve found the poems instructional, a stanza coming to me in a moment of indiscretion when I’m floundering to decide what to do next. I have the sense that these poems have always been alive, which is how I feel about my daughters sometimes. It’s almost impossible to think that at one time these girls (and these poems) were not alive. There is a mystery to all of this that softens and inspires me. I feel like life is inherently benevolent. In short, I feel blessed somehow.

How long have you been working on this book? When do you find time/energy to write, with all the other responsibilities in your life?

I put a lot of dedicated work into this book in 2006-2007, between the first and second child. This was after the manuscript was basically “complete.” Most of the poems themselves were written in 2003 when I was traveling in eastern Europe where I stayed in a monastery for a time. I basically downloaded the poems straight out of the air, air that the Catholic nuns breathed in and out on their way to morning prayer. I used to get ice cream from a particular ice cream stand where all the nuns also bought their vanilla cones. I’d sit at the picnic tables near them and listen to them speak in Polish with one another. Late summer and nuns and vanilla ice cream. It was delicious.

After my first daughter was born there was a mental test period where I wondered whether I would be tenacious enough to keep writing with all the cloth diaper washing, nursing, late nights etc. It was a wary time. And then miraculously I found plenty of opportunities to write in that first year. I was a “stay at home mom.” But I was also a “poet finding inspiration in any free moment.”

The busyness increased after my second was born, but I have stayed committed to snatching stolen moments and the late nights of writing, even though I frequently have bags under my eyes. My friends will say, “You were up late writing last night, weren’t you.” Also, my husband and I bought a TV this past year. I admit it. I let the girls watch Dora the Explorer while I revise and send submissions. Thirty minutes a day of work like this goes a long way in the grand scheme of things.

Your family semi-recently moved from Minnesota to New Mexico – how has this affected you as a family, and you personally as a writer?

I grew up in Minnesota, and I appreciate this fact more now that I live in New Mexico. But I needed to leave to carve out some space for myself, to define my life in my own way.

I consider myself to be a very spiritual person. Not religious, but connected. I am inspired by living closely to the earth. I believe in the magic of the imagination. I deeply believe in human potential. My writing has always been a location in which I’ve been willing to risk being myself. But in Minnesota I hid a lot. When I wasn’t sitting at my writing desk I was stingy with myself. I felt confined by other people’s real or imagined definitions of me. Self-judgment! I had to leave my self-judgment behind. I had to drive and haul an entire household of goods 1,400 miles cross country to symbolically leave it behind. Such work! We all have to leave self-judgment behind if we want to dream big. This physical move has facilitated an internal shift within me that has made all the difference in my life. It has strengthened my relationship with my husband and my children. And the skies the limit where my writing is concerned. I am of the general opinion that it’s good to shake things up a bit (for one’s writing & livelihood), and a good, strenuous move to another state or county will certainly do this! I expect new horizons are before us in the future. But where? Who knows.

I’d like to note that at the end of her email, Steph wrote: “(I apologize for any editing flaws contained herein; I’m getting some flack for not helping with dinner. time to go).” That’s life as a writing mother for you.  Thanks so much, Stephanie, for finding the time to answer these questions and write those poems!

Check out her book.  It’s wonderful.

 

 

 

 

The Travails of the Literary Mama

You can't really see my face here, but you can see Sam Lipsyte thinking "What a brilliant literary talent." If you squint.

This week I attended an event that had nothing to do with children and wasn’t even in Brooklyn: The Literary Death Match. For some unknowable reason, the talented and enterprising writer Shya Scanlon, who harnessed this LDM as a clever way to promote his new novel, Forecast, invited me to read along with Jim Freed, Anya Ulinich, and Morgan Meis (spoiler alert: Morgan won! I think partially because of his excellent suit.  I was in the same preggings I wear everyday, of course.).  The LDM is a rare thing – a literary event that is raucous, funny, and well-attended – and I’m proud to say this is the second time I’ve lost one.  You get up there, you read something, the judges (in this case, Sam Lipsyte, Susan Blackwell, and an absentee Roz Chast) judge you.  Two finalists compete in strange finales.  Last night it was charades.  I have to admit, I don’t mind reading in front of an audience, but both times I’ve been part of an LDM the final round has involved some sort of physical challenge and both times I’ve been relieved I wasn’t up there having to relive gym class traumas.

All day leading up to the event I felt a vague sense of anxiety.  Harper is always a good sport when I leave her with a babysitter or at the YMCA daycare during the day, but we’ve almost never had a non-family babysitter put her to bed at night.  My very capable friend Allison, who Harper knows and loves, had angelically volunteered to sit while I battled the other death matchers.  But would Harper give her a hard time?  Would she eat any dinner?  Would she go to bed?  Would Allison have to endure a scene like that one in “Tootsie” where the kid tears up the apartment while Dustin Hoffman frantically follows around in a dress, and then secretly hate me forever?  Yipes!

When we met in the snow-caked city to walk over to the shmancy Le Pousson Rouge, Adam asked if I was nervous about reading.  He always gets nervous before my readings.  I on the other hand usually endure a moment of gut-wrenching doubt and then think, well that isn’t helpful, and then it goes away.  I mean, once you’ve taught you realize that reading a page or two in front of a bunch of strangers is way easier than teaching.  And teaching used to make me nervous too, but then I had a couple of years when I taught writing classes at night after working a full day in an office, and I was so tired that my concern was always staying awake and so I kind of learned to forget to be afraid then, too.  So in this strange roundabout way I seem to have figure out how to avoid the terror of public speaking.  No, instead I was nervous about Harper and Allison.

Who, as it happens, had a wonderful time.  Harper woke up in the morning asking where Allison was and if they could play some more.  I asked myself why I was such a ninny about leaving her with a sitter.  And then I asked myself how I could wreak my revenge upon those judges who deemed me a literary loser.  Just kidding!  It was an honor to be nominated.  And to get into a fun event for free.

PS – I read an essay about writing in cafes that first existed as a post on this blog!  And was called out for being a little “Carrie from Sex and the City”ish because of it.  Which is funny because I never saw that show and don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m willing to bet it had nothing to do with sexiness.  Sigh.

The Read Balloon: Anne of Green Gables

It’s the season for comfort: comforting clothes like scarves and puffy jackets and flannel pajamas (and hello, a little something we’re calling preggings), comfort food like leftover stuffing and pie and all things mushy and brown, and even, I’ve been thinking this year, comfort reading.  When you are the pregnant mother of a toddler who loves to dance and dislikes to sleep, and you can barely stay up for an hour or two after baby bedtime, it’s hard to find appropriate reading material.

I always feel funny if I’m not in the middle of some fictional world.  It just makes life feel a bit too small.  And after attempting some of the actual grownup books in my formidable to-be-read stack, I landed on a sweet old-timey favorite, Anne of Green Gables. I loved this book as a kid, and just couldn’t wait for Harper to be old enough to read it to her.  It’s surprisingly hard to find a book that’s this nice, you know?  And sometimes what a mushy pregnant brain needs is nice. This book is just so – nice!

As I revise my own book, which is about a depressed person making bad decisions – is there anything else a novel can be about? – I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make a complicated character sympathetic.  You’d think I’d have learned this last time I wrote a book that, as it turned out, had similar problems in the revision process, but whatever.  And then here’s Anne, who’s maybe not all that complex but just as sweet as can be.  The novel always makes it clear that her so-called flaws – absent-mindedness, imagination, temper, having red hair – are actually strengths in disguise.  She’s off-kilter and out-of-step with everyone around her, but she tries so very hard to be cooperative and good.  Maybe that’s what’s so lovable about Anne – that she’s always trying so hard to be normal – no attitude problems here! – but she’s just irrepressibly zany, and vulnerable.

I love this: “There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn’t be half so interesting.”

I mean! Oh please let Harper be into these books at some point, and not whatever apocalyptic dystopia the kids are reading about by the time she’s into chapter books. Anyway, it’s been really lovely to reread this book.  The descriptions of Prince Edward Island are so lush and beautiful; Anne is so fun to be reunited with; there’s something just so, well, comforting about the largely shapeless, episodic plot that really lends itself to the sporadic sleepy reading sessions I can handle these days.

(By the way, we are firmly back in the realm of Brown Bear here in the daylight hours, the newest development being that I hold the big book and Harper holds the “tiny book” (yes, we have two copies) and we “sing it” together.  Over and over and over and over and over.)