I started Jesse, A Mother’s Story twice.
The stark beauty of this memoir hit me the moment I began. Marianne Leone’s narrative, written with an unrelenting immediacy, yanked me into her world.
Leone’s son Jesse owned me from his first moment on the page. By the end of the prologue, Leone had so engaged me that I put it aside. Because I knew how it would end. Because I was a coward. I’d already fallen in love with the family and I needed to build up courage to continue.
I never met a book by Ruth Reichl I haven’t loved, and my adoration continued with this book.
Where others were hearty meals, Not Becoming My Mother (retitled for the paperback as For You Mom, Finally) was a deceptively simple snack. (I’m certain that Ms. Reichl, editor of Gourmet Magazine, would find a more elegant food analogy, but I, alas, am but a quick and dirty cook, though one who loves reading the work of educated ones—like Ruth Reichl)
Do book trailers sell books? Is that the question, or should you ask which book trailer could help sell my book? Trailers aren’t monolithic products that work or don’t. Like books, like movies, like songs—some work, some won’t; the difference it’s a medium to sell another medium.
According to the New York Times,
(Looking back: As I ready to attend another Grub Street conference, I revisited a previous post I wrote about the event. Updated comments are in bold)
The first time I went to Muse and The Marketplace in 2006, Grub Street’s annual conference, I was so frightened that I could barely hold to the promise I’d made to myself: to speak with one agent. That’s all, I promised myself. One agent. (I don’t remember who that agent was . . . well, maybe a little–but it’s too embarrassing to remember all the way. I think I drooled.)
“I distrust styles . . . To have a style is to be trapped.”
I love books. Reading probably kept me from teen pregnancy, heroin, and robbing convenience stores with a badass boyfriend. I’ve read great books, good books, mediocre books, and book so awful they damaged my eyes, and it wasn’t genre that determined their ranking.
The opening words above from Milton Glaser, (whom Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, describes as “a living legend . . . having created a number of the most iconic illustrations of the twentieth century, from the I ©NY ad campaign to the 1967 Bob Dylan silhouette poster) define my voracious love of words.
Upon hearing about Atria Book’s plan for a multi-author twelve-city bus tour, I could only be grateful that it wasn’t me who’d be stuck in a bus for umpteen days (Eight? Twelve? Two hundred? ) However long, I could only imagine bad food, cramped quarters, and the wheels of the bus going round and round until I needed Dramamine.
Now I’m wondering who to bribe to get invited on the next one.
I tried to think of a, um, sexier title for this post, but they all sounded, um, icky, and the last thing I want when I’m writing about sex is an ick factor. Writing about icky sex: terrific. Writing icky about sex: terrible.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since Pia Lindstrom, an interviewer from Sirius Radio, shocked me out of my I-can-handle-any-question mood when she asked something to the effect of:
So, I was surprised by how much sex is in your book. You did it so well. People say it’s hard to write about sex. How did you do it?
When I was a kid, nothing was better than listening to my Aunt Thelma’s stories. She’d take humiliating awful situations and transform them into eye-popping, comic-tragic tales. Her pain was our gain.
Stories bang around my head and crowd my mind. I’m stuffed with ‘what if’ and ‘why did s/he do that?’ As a child, I made twice-weekly trip to the library. Writers were gods to me, purveyors of that which I needed for sustenance. Food. Shelter. Books. Those were my life’s priorities.
Tricks and Tactics
Hard writing makes easy reading. Wallace Stegner
I’m in the final gasps of revising a manuscript and, once again, I’m grateful that a friend’s fresh eyes gave me a proverbial kick in the manuscript. Whether I’m drowning in delight at my own cutesy-wootsy phrase, or persisting in beating the reader over the head with how important the d r a m a of the situation is, well for those times, I gotta have friends. Honest friends. Honest friends with eye for the ick.
