this woman’s work

A couple of you asked what writing books I do like so I’ll do a rundown of those although it’ll be an incomplete and ragged list. Can’t be helped because it’s the way my sputtering, busy little brain works. I’ll put it below the cut to save the LJ readers.

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She showed up even though the roads are a mess from a snowstorm that blew through last night. It took me two hours to get from downtown to pick up Brett from work (he works about a mile from my house) because it was all stop-and-go traffic.

My accountability calendar is sorta helping and sorta not. It’s helping because it makes me work more than I otherwise would but it’s sorta not because it’s such slow-going right now. In fact, it’s a little bit like last night’s commute home (exhausting, frustrating, and with a bad soundtrack). Right now I’m re-reading some of the studies I set aside and taking notes on them in the context of this particular chapter. I’m also free-writing a lot to figure out what the chapter is about because I thought I knew but it turns out I don’t.

Anything I’ve ever written that was (in my opinion) any good was emotionally hard to write. I’m talking about the essays and articles that no one but me could have written — the ones that wring out my own voice even if the topic is universal. So I know that if I want this to be good, it’s going to be emotionally hard and so far I’ve got a denial block working that’s keeping me from getting to the heart of what I want to say. What I think is going on is that I don’t want to believe I’m as prejudiced against the fertility industry as I am or that I’m as angry about it as I am. (This is one of the things where my friends and family will say “duh” but since I’m the one in denial, I am really totally denying it.) I keep thinking I’m even-handed and I need to get the guts to make that leap and come down hard on the side of my opinion but I’ve got some work to do yet. A lot of this work is thinking-work and not writing-work so it’s productive but invisible and I know if I do this work, I’ll figure out my theme for this chapter.

I keep leaping ahead and going, “I really ought to interview so-and-so!” but I’ve done this enough times that I know I’m using that as an excuse to avoid the hard digging I need to do so instead I’m attempting to satisfy my “let’s put on a show!” self by making lists of all those interviews and books I ought to do and then forcing myself back, nose to computer screen, to free-write.

(Most of my free-write pages have “every little thing I want to say” at the top because Becca long ago gave me instructions to put down “every little thing you want to say” and then share it with her so she could help me find my thesis way back when I was first working on this book. For some reason putting this at the top of my file this makes my free-writing feel more productive than it would if I was just scrawling on paper. Also it reminds me that I have friends whose judgment I respect who believe that I do have things worth saying even if sometimes I don’t.)

I’m also reading a lot of non-fiction and enjoying the hell out of it. My inlaws gave me a $50 Amazon gift certificate and I was able to spend $49.97 of it (so I wouldn’t have to use a credit card) through the careful addition of used books to my shopping cart. These are the books I got:

• Journalistas: 100 Years the Best Writing and Reporting by Women Journalists
• In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (Annie Dillard’s advice alone is worth the price of the book)
• The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (which made me realize that I do want to be Susan Orleans and that she doesn’t have kids)

The used books were mostly to add to my green books collection: The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns (because I absolutely adore her), Getting a Life by Helen Simpson (because it’s all about how motherhood ruins your life and sometimes I have those days — thanks, Susan Orleans), and With Child in Mind: Studies on the Personal Encounter with Infertility (for my book).

Another book I’ve been savoring (one — maybe two, ok THREE, sometimes FOUR — essays a day, tops to make it last longer) is Deep in the Garden by Anne Raver. It totally reminds me of Kelly. Note Anne Raver also doesn’t have children. That Helen Simpson book is looking more interesting all of the time.

Madison woke up pretty soon after I hit “post” on the entry below. Brett is saying that we should rearrange our schedules in January so I can write in the evenings and I was thinking that in February — when we go to Florida for a couple of weeks — I can pull together a proposal from whatever I get done in January. I just need to hang loose ’til the holiday season is fully over (next Monday). I’m having a family Chanukkah party on Friday so I’ll need to get things ready for that and then there’s New Year’s.

My mom paypal’d me money for a haircut so I paid cash to the beautician and used the paypal to buy a bunch more green books off of ebay. I am greedy for green books. Here’s my collection so far: View image

As you can see, my green book collection has morphed to include books that by all rights should be green books or that are green books but I have them in non-green book editions or were earlier green books when the series was black or are later green books when the series sported nasty pink spines. If you are a woman and you visit my house and ask to borrow a book, this is where I head first but I won’t let you take one home if you’re untrustworthy; green books are too hard to find to just be loaned out like regular books.

I do believe the Virago books now include some male authors but you won’t find any in my collection unless someone grabs one for me by mistake. No, the green books for me are all about women writers. They’re my inspiration. Back when I did those featured authors every month (old timey blog readers will remember this), I usually pulled them from green book authors. My very most favorites? Barbara Comyns, Antonia White, Mary Webb, Mrs. Oliphant and E. H. Young. Oh and Elizabeth Taylor (she NOT of the violet eyes). I think Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness was my very first green book and that White’s Lost Traveler or Frost in May were early acquisitions, too. I was so excited when I found either the one or the other because it matched the first ones.

I used to buy my green books at a bookstore here in town that specializes in close-out books. I would go in there with ten bucks and come out with a stack of $1.49 Penguin paperbacks (orange spines). This is how I found Milan Kundera, Tadeusz Borowski and Face by Cecelie Pineda. Somewhere along the way a black Virago Modern Classic found it’s way into my shopping bag and the rest is history.

I found a bunch more in thrift stores in Portland. Portland has the best thrift stores for finding books probably because everyone there reads so much. (Portland has more book stores per capita than any other city.) That’s how I built up my pulp Alfred HItchcock presents collection and that’s how I amassed the bulk of my green books.

I still scan the clearance shelves of Half-Price Books for them but they’re harder to come by now. They continue to release some here in the states with the awful pink spines or with a green more pallid than the lovely pine color they used to have. But my best bet is doing a search on ebay and finding a used book seller with a nice big stack of ‘em and then combing through to find ones I don’t have. I really want the third book in Antonia White’s quartet (Beyond the Glass, which I got out from the library to read but MUST OWN) but the first two just seem much more easy to find.

This was a self-indulgent post. It made me happy to write it.

I bought some Virago Modern Classics that were missing from my collection and one of them is Who was Changed and Who was Dead by Barbara Comyns. I’ve been wanting to read it for a long time and our library doesn’t have it. How fortunate because then I was forced to buy it!

It’s about a small village that is beset by a flood and then by ergot poisoning. (This is the second book I’ve read in the last few months where ergot poisoning is a plot point; the other was Breathe, Donna Jo Napoli’s take on the Pied Piper story.)

I love Barbara Comyns; she write so smoothly and her books are deceptively simple. She drops images in with very little notice. For example, the grandmother in this story is a simply awful person and at one point Comyns casually writes, “Both ends of her tongue were protruding — rather a bad sign.” Did you get that? The grandmother has a forked tongue. She has reptilian eyes, too, but that’s just description — the forked tongue is in there as a matter of fact. At no point does the grandmother start slithering around or eating bugs, she just has a forked tongue.

Not all of her books are like this. The Vet’s Daughter is but neither The Skin Chairs nor Our Spoons Came from Woolworths are. However, every book I’ve read of hers so far (I think there are at least two I haven’t read) is written with that same deceptively simple prose. They read as if they took no effort to write, as if she tossed them off without worry — there’s no self-consciousness about them and it seems as if she had a lot of fun even when she was writing about horrible things.

Actually, according to the forward, Comyns was having a grand old time when she wrote this book. “This was a trouble-free time in her life,” writes Ursula Holden. “When she and her family lived in South Kensington. Her husband and children were out during the day; she had time for writing and everything was going well.”

So far my favorite book of hers is The Juniper Tree, which is based on the Grimm fairy tale of the same name.

Playing on iTunes as I hit publish: “Need to Be” from the album Margerine Eclipse by Stereolab

As my regular readers know, I love love love to thrift shop. If I was a zillionaire, I would still want to thrift because it’s so much fun. I went thrifting tonight to accommodate the incredibly growing Madison and did pretty darn well. My best bargains for the evening (and these are all in perfect condition):

–Gymboree overalls with matching snap-crotch top ($3.97; suggested retail price: about $40)
–Babymini par Catimini shirt ($1.91, SRP $35+)

It gives me chills to spot a diamond in the rough hanging there waiting to be discovered. It’s like hearing the clink of your shovel hitting the top of the buried treasure when a striped shirt that could have been Old Navy turns out to be Hanna Andersson; it feels like you’re getting away with something. Plus it just makes good sense. I’m having to supplement Noah’s wardrobe with new clothes now because it’s so hard to find boys’ pants with the knees intact. I go to Target and leave shaking my head over my thinner wallet. $14 for boys’ jeans?! It’s highway robbery!

I’m a snob about brands though. I won’t spend $2 on something I could get for $4 new; thus no Garanimals every make it into my cart. Especially when you’re buying used, you want something that you know is going to wear. Buy it right and even your garage sale treasure is going to make it on to a couple more kids.

I remember a friend of mine, appalled that I made Noah wear used clothing, pointed out to me that Target has reasonable prices on kids’ clothes. I gently pointed out to her that while her daughter was wearing Sonoma, Noah was wearing Gymboree and I’d paid about half as much as she did. Besides which they’ve invented these things called “washing machines” that get those clothes right sanitary in a twinkling!

In Portland the thrift stores were sad, empty things when it came to clothes. On the other hand, I got much better books at the stores there. I really miss thrifting for books; that’s where I got most of my green books (Virago modern classics) and all of my Alfred Hitchcock presents short story anthologies. Oh well. I guess it’s an even trade but the only thing that rivals grabbing a Beetlejuice jumper for a buck is finding a perfect set of parenting manuals from the 1920s for $.25 apiece. I’ve got the jumper hanging in Madison’s closet and the books sitting on my shelves.

I dislike that last entry so I’m adding a new one straight away.

I have a friend who writes because it’s a sure way (for her) to make money. She’s made a study of the market, she’s applied herself, and she collects the check. She doesn’t even particularly like to write but she knows she’s good at it so she figured it would be a good way to make money and stay home with her family. (As an aside, she is no longer writing because she’s gotten into another aspect of the industry, which she enjoys more.)

My friend has been a great marketing mentor to me. My platitudes get in the way sometimes and her practical point of view has helped me hop down off my high-horse. I like talking to her about it and I like that she respects my own art vs. cash struggle even though she doesn’t share it.

One of the things we’ve talked about in the past is a particular writer — very successful — who is, in my opinion, not very good. My friend argues that by being successful, this writer has proven that she’s good. After all, people read this writer, she makes a lot of money, and her books are pleasant. (I’m not naming her here because if I were her and I googled myself and happened to find this conversation, it would make me sad. Suffice to say that she’s well and unhappily aware that she is the subject of these kinds of conversations.)

“Who are you to say she isn’t an artist?” my friend said to me. “Do you dislike her just because so many other people like her so much?”

Good question. I am a snob about books. (Ask my mother.) But I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What makes a writer good to me? I need to know this because I struggle all of the time with what little success I’ve had. It’s not just that old Groucho Marx thinking (you know, that anything I am able to do must by definition not be worth doing kinda like the club he would not join because they would have him). Sometimes I look at a thing I’ve written — that people like — and I can’t be proud of it.

This week I read three books right in a row (and sometimes simultaneously — one book in the living room and one at the kitchen table and one in the bedroom). Two were very good. One was fiction lite. What made the fiction lite book fiction lite? What made the other two so much better?

The lite book was an easy read, enjoyable, moved quickly, had lots of nice similes and metaphors. More people are likely to read it because it’s pretty easy to fit into a busy life.

The other two were more dense, more difficult, required more attention and had lots of nice similies and metaphors. Less people are likely to read them — at least nowadays, they may have been popular in their time — because they are more demanding.

But is the lite book a lite book by virtue of its ease? Yes, in part, I think. The lite book was fun but forgettable. The prose moved quickly but slipped away quickly, too. I might vaguely remember the plot but there was nothing in the book that made me stop and stare off into the middle distance to contemplate a thought. There was not one line I re-read for the pure joy of it.

I don’t want to disparage fiction-lite because there’s certainly a place for it. It’s nice to have a quick, easy read and many of those kinds of books can be life-changing or inspiring. And it’s not easy to write like that (although those who can seem to do it with alarming speed and productivity). But for me, most of the time I’d rather be challenged in my reading.

This entry isn’t coming along well either. Damn. It’s just that it scares me to think that I’m only good enough to write lite when I want to write complicated. And then I wonder if giving in and being happy with lite would be selling-out or accepting my limitations?

Well, I’ll finish off by quoting from one of the books I read, At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor:
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we have brains for this week:

It’s officially summer and hopefully you’ve had a chance to lay outside with a good book. What’s your all time favorite feminist book (fiction/non)? Do you have a fave feminist character? Is she/he obviously feminist? Is it a character from childhood? If it’s not obvious why the book and/or character is feminist, tell us why you think they are feminist. How do you go about finding your feminist reading?

Once again I have to tout the Virago Modern Classics collection. Virago is publisher of books “by and about women” and they have been my best source of feminist fiction for the past 15+ years.

The Virago books were originally black paperbacks then were pine green and now are this kind of annoying tacky grass green. They publish women-authored books that are important either because of their literary influence, their political stance, or because they had an impact on popular thinking in their time. Through this fabulous series I’ve discovered amazing coming of age stories about girls, such as Antonia White’s amazing quartet, Saraband by Eliot Bliss, and Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book. I found authors that were to become favorites including Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress), Barbara Comyns, and E. H. Young.

I’ve gotten nearly all my green books from second-hand stores. I know that they’re still being published but I like finding them accidentally tucked in a bargain bin or hiding under a stack of bad romances. Many of them are now out of print but are worth checking out at your library.