Memoirs that mean something

When I was a family therapist, I often suggested to adult clients that they interview their parents about all those adult topics that parents don’t usually talk about to their kids. I’d always thought my own sons and I had covered all those topics in casual conversations, but I guess we skipped some because during a visit from my son and daughter-in-law last week, they whipped out a tape recorder and asked mountains of questions. Not just about me, but about my memories of family history as told to me by my parents and grandparents.

On one hand, I felt somewhat like an actor getting a lifetime achievement award because people have realized they won’t be around forever. On the other hand, I was surprised at how some of the memories I talked about still had emotional impact. At one point I had to stop and sob over a conversation I’d had with my brother when he apologized for not being more a part of my life when I was growing up. He’d been college age when I was born, and I’d never held it against him that he’d had his own adult life, but somehow telling about his apology made me break down and cry. I was also surprised at how many details of family history my son didn’t know anything about. I’d simply assumed he knew things that he didn’t.

But then when I answered questions about my own parents and grandparents, I found myself saying, “I don’t know how that happened,” or “I’m not sure this is factual or if it’s something I’ve made up from bits and pieces of information I overheard.” Since all the relatives who might know are dead, a lot of those gaps in family history will remain forever unknown. That’s a shame, because one way of being immortal is to be remembered and honored by those who come after us.

Memoirs have become trendy but many of them are either fictionalized accounts or selected memories rearranged to create a story. They’re written to sell, not to inform or inspire the author’s children or grandchildren. An honest telling of one’s personal history, the highs and lows, the triumphs and humiliations, is a different thing. If you haven’t thought about what to give your family members next Christmas, this might be a good time to sit down and start writing a personal history. Scan in some photos if you have them, or family recipes. It may be the most valuable gift you ever give them, and it’s almost guaranteed to be cherished for many generations.

Maxine’s Moods

I never intended to name my computer, but somehow I ended up calling it Maxine. For several weeks now Maxine been slow and cranky, almost spitting at me sometimes when I asked her to retrieve something. If I made multiple demands on her, she would crash to show me who was boss. Since my technological talents are roughly equivalent to those of a chigger, I put up with her moods with only a minimal of words not fit for print.

But then last night as I was leaving my office, she began making a loud and alarming whirring noise. I responded like a concerned mother, tapping keys to bring her face back up, but she wouldn’t speak to me. The whirring noise kept up, and when I tried to shut her down, nothing happened. Couldn’t Force Quit, couldn’t do anything to stop what sounded like a death rattle. Couldn’t even use the Power button to turn the whole system off. So I pulled Maxine’s plug. I felt bad about doing it, but she was obviously in pain and I couldn’t stand to see her suffer.

I called my wonderful Mac technician who promised to come take her to the hospital. To tell the truth, I didn’t expect her to come home alive. I was pretty sure I’d have to replace her, and I felt sad about losing my partner in a lot of projects. When the Mac tech came, he was respectfully solemn, and I watched anxiously as he plugged her back in. She came up smiling like she’d never been sick a day in her life. I felt the way I used to feel when I took my kids to the pediatrician and the little darlings who had been feverish and throwing up just hours before would be the picture of health the minute they saw the doctor. The Mac guy ran diagnostics, opened programs, tappy-tapped away, and Maxine cooperated like an angel.

I was flabbergasted and a little embarrassed, but he didn’t seem surprised. He’s probably used to computers who play sick to get attention. I paid him and he left with a promise to come back if I had any more problems. I’ve decided that I’d been working Maxine too hard. Probably she just needed a long nap. She’s been a partner in writing five or six books, creating a web site and a blog, sending zillions of emails, gathering gobs of information from the Web, and doing all kinds of secretarial work. That’s enough to stress out any system. I think in the future I’ll unplug her every few weeks and let her have a long sleep. I’m sure it’s my imagination, but I swear she’s a lot friskier and more responsive now. I’ve learned my lesson: I’ll never take Maxine for granted again.

Lonely vs. Alone

Lately I’ve been feeling very alone. Not lonely, which is a different thing. I think loneliness comes from a lack of an intellectual or spiritual or emotional connection to another person, especially if that person is physically near. Some of my most lonely times have been in intimate relationships with men who seemed farther away than distant galaxies. I’ve never felt that kind of loneliness by myself. To tell the truth, I actually enjoy my own company. I can see the movies I want to see and eat the food I like best. I can go to bed when I’m sleepy and read as late into the night as I want to. That’s the good part.

But when there’s an important decision to be made, two heads are better than one, and then I am acutely aware of being alone. Should I buy a new car? Spend money on major home improvements? Have the oak tree trimmed? Fire the yard man? I want somebody else to help me make those decisions. Even if I ask other people their opinions, they don’t live with me and they won’t be affected by the outcome of whatever I decide the way a spouse or partner would be.

And when it comes to making decisions that have a major impact on my health or my career or my future, I really need another person to discuss and debate the best thing to do. I had to make that kind of decision recently, and I would never have survived the trauma of it without the support of good friends. No matter how much I rationalized or equivocated or cowered, they looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re being a coward. You know what you have to do, so just do it!” They were right, and now that it’s over, I’m more grateful to them than I can ever say.

I started off saying I was acutely aware of being alone, but as I write this I realize I’ve missed the point. I’m NOT alone and never have been. I’ve had some relationships with men who betrayed and strayed and lied and connived, but through them all, my friends have remained loyal and honest and connected. How could I think I was alone?

Mysteries I don’t understand:

Barack Obama had a white mother and a black father, so he’s 50% white, 50% black. Why is he always described as black? His father was from Africa, but his mother was from Kansas, so why is he called an African-American rather than a Kansas-American?

And why do we only label certain people by their ancestry? You can be a mix of every nationality in the world and be called white. But if you have a drop of Latin American blood, you’re labeled Hispanic-American no matter how many generations your family has lived in the U.S. and no matter how many Caucasian relatives you have. Why is that?

Why are kids who make A’s and people who accomplish a lot labeled “over-achievers”? The term implies that somebody has achieved more than they are capable of, but if they did it, they’re capable of it.

Why is it that telephone companies have automated answering services guaranteed to make smoke come out of your ears? They’re communications companies, for Pete’s sake! Why aren’t they better at facilitating communication?

Why haven’t more women boycotted pants made to ride low on the hipbone? Only women with concave tummies look good in them, so why do women with cupcake-top tummies buy them?

Why do dental hygienists and people who slice your turkey at the supermarket put on rubber gloves before they adjust their equipment, open packages, etc. If the gloves are to protect us from bacteria, shouldn’t they do all that other stuff first and put on the gloves just before they stick their fingers in our mouths or handle our food?

Why is V.C. Andrews still writing new books when she’s been dead over twenty years? Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?

Oprah or Blogger?

Publicist Joan Stewart poses an interesting question today: Which would you prefer, an appearance on “Oprah” or an article about you by the most influential blogger in your industry?

Since my “industry” is writing mysteries, my immediate response was that I would choose an appearance on “Oprah.” On the other hand, I read somewhere that an author’s appearance on “Oprah” usually brought in no more than 10,000 extra sales. Whoever wrote that seemed to feel that 10,000 sales is peanuts to an author. It isn’t, of course, but it also isn’t the millions of sales that authors get when their books are chosen for Oprah’s book club. I doubt that any blog generates those millions of sales either.

Published writers have a misty idea that in some distant golden age authors could leave all the grubby work of promotion to their publisher. Those were the same good old days when every author had a devoted editor whose sole purpose in life was to get the author more money. Some of that faux nostalgia may actually be rooted in a grain of truth, but more than likely authors have always had to promote their own work.

Now that we have eighty zillion ways to do it, it’s both easier and harder. Easier because it’s a snap to sit in a cool spot and sip our bottled water and write a piece for our own blog or somebody else’s. Harder because every other writer is doing the same thing, and readers don’t have the time or interest in reading them all. And even when a rare publisher does shell out money for a multi-city book tour, odds are that only a handful of people will show up to meet the author. Or buy a book.

No matter what an author chooses to spend time and money and energy on to promote a book, there’s always the nagging knowledge that he or she would rather be writing. Most of us write because we love it. If we loved marketing, we wouldn’t be writers.

Anyway, Joan Stewart’s question is something to chew on. I’d be interested in what you other authors think the best answer is.

Sugar-free cake adventure

My son and daughter-in-law are coming to visit in two weeks, and I’m doing a lot of thinking about what we’ll do while they’re here. Places we could go to for sight-seeing, things we could eat, all those things you do when company’s coming. I even went out and bought a nine-inch springform pan yesterday, because I’d copied a recipe from DearReader.com for a flourless, sugarless cake that needed to be baked in a springform pan. Nobody who has ever known me would call me a baker, so I don’t know why I got this wild hair to bake something, but I stay away from flour and sugar, and the cake sounded good. I spent about $15 on a springform pan. Maybe I’ve once had a springform pan and forgot, but the thing doesn’t look familiar to me. It was a lot deeper than I expected, for one thing. And heavier. But I felt very domestic when I bought it.

Next I went looking for xylitol and cocoa powder and bittersweet chocolate with 60% cocoa for the recipe. I have a box of little packets of xylitol at home, but this cake recipe calls for about a third of a cup, so I thought it would be easier to scoop the stuff out than tear enough of those little teaspoon sized packets to make a third of a cup. I couldn’t find xylitol on my supermarket shelves, and when another woman heard me asking a store employee about it, she stopped to tell me that I’d have to go to the local natural foods store for it. She said it cost at least twenty dollars for a box or bag of the stuff. No matter, I’ve already invested $15 in the springform pan, and I’m committed now.

My supermarket did have bittersweet chocolate with 60% cocoa and they had cocoa powder. Actually, they only had EXTRA bittersweet chocolate, so I spent a few minutes wondering if it matters if it’s extra or ordinary, and ended up getting two big bars of the stuff because I need 7 ounces in all, and they’re each 4 ounces. They’re about $2.99 apiece. I don’t remember what the cocoa powder cost, but I can always use cocoa powder. Like I could mix a couple of tablespoons of it with one of my little xylitol packets and make hot chocolate. If I liked hot chocolate, which I don’t, but I could make it for somebody else if anybody should ever ask.

I came home with my springform pan and my bittersweet chocolate and cocoa powder, sort of pooped now and not too eager to make another trip out in 82 degree heat to get a box of xylitol. I didn’t take the wrapper off the springform pan. I figured the plastic wrapper would keep dust off it until I get around to using it. Which is probably a subliminal acknowledgment that I’ll most likely never go get that damn $20 bag of xylitol because my enthusiasm for baking that cake is growing dimmer by the minute. I looked at the recipe again, though, and it really sounds good. You serve the cake with a raspberry sauce also made with xylitol, and chocolate and raspberry are my two favorite flavor combinations in the world. So I decided maybe my daughter-in-law and I could make the cake together, sort of a woman project. But she doesn’t bake much either, unless she absolutely has to. Both of us would far rather go buy a cake and eat it while we read a book.

I’m saving the recipe — which I now realize with a bit of horror serves 10! — and there’s an outside chance I’ll make it and freeze it before my son and daughter-in-law come. But I haven’t taken the wrapper off that springform pan, and I still have the sales receipt, so I could just take it back and eat the chocolate. While I read a book.

The Page 99 Test

Ford Madox Ford said, “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” People whose parents gave them two last names probably think about things like that a lot. Anyway, blogger Marshal Zeringue wonders if it’s true that page 99 of a book contains the quality of the entire book, and he regularly asks writers to test that statement against their own work. The results are pretty fascinating.

Today his site features my feelings about page 99 of Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues. It’s at America Reads

Earth Day

This morning at my church there was a special Earth Day observance, beginning with a film before the service titled The Story of Stuff. The film stopped running halfway through, so we only discussed the first part of it, but people discussed their concerns about our planet and all the indignities it suffers. Some people shared ideas of what we could do to cut down on waste and pollution. One woman said she always carried a special plate and fork in a plastic bag in her car so she had it handy at potluck dinners. She got a round of applause. A man said the whole problem was the political party in power and that they were all war criminals and everybody should vote them out. He got some nods of approval, but he soon left as if he was too disgusted to stay with people too dumb to get it. A woman said she bought everything at resale shops and she highly recommended it. Somebody else gave a web site where you could find people who wanted your old junk and also find somebody else’s old junk for yourself. She got a round of applause too. A man suggested one day out of the month when everybody returned everything they’d bought in the last few months that no longer worked. Just take it back to WalMart or wherever and stand in line and say, “I don’t want my money back, I just want you to take this and get rid of it.” People laughed at that. Finally a woman said what everybody else was thinking, that the problem was so monumental and so daunting that anything we did was like spitting in the ocean. Everybody agreed, but also agreed that we had to do whatever we could, even if it was only growing our own radishes and taking cloth carry-out bags to the grocery to replace plastic.

It was time for church then, so we shifted to the sanctuary where the choir sang a song about the earth while little children came in and tossed up big blue balloons that represented the globe. The congregation kept the balloons in the air, which tickled the kids no end and sent them scurrying up and down the aisles to catch any that fell to the floor. After that ended, there was the usual greet-your-neighbor business and a time for people to share their joys and sorrows and announcements. One man asked for prayers for his sister who had just been diagnosed with leukemia, a woman asked for prayers for friends having difficulties. Then a man said he’d stopped on the way to church to pick up a turtle crossing the road, and as he carried it the turtle had peed on his leg. He thought there was a moral: every good act carries possible consequences, and always point the business end of a turtle away from you.

Before the sermon, three middle-aged women wearing long white dresses danced with blue streamers in their hands. They weren’t terribly graceful but they were grave and intent, so it was sweet to watch. The sermon was titled “Immaculate Consumption” and the minister talked about how we might make our lives easier and more fulfilling if we didn’t constantly try to have more, buy more, be more.

After the service, I came home, ate lunch, read the Sunday papers. I didn’t think about book promotion or book plots or book signings, I just ate and read and enjoyed the afternoon. I’m going to get a cloth grocery bag, too, and be more thoughtful about how I add to pollution and waste and a throw-away society.

And if I pick up a turtle in danger of being smashed by a car, I will turn its business end the other way.

Writer’s Celebration

A good friend got “the call” from her agent this morning, and I’m as excited about it as she is. She’d submitted a book proposal, met with several editors, and then waited for those who really, really wanted it to make an offer by 10:00 a.m. this morning. The highest bid was from an editor she looks forward to working with, the publishing house is an old established one, and they have an innovative marketing plan for the book. If you’re a writer, it doesn’t get any better than that.

No non-writer in the world, including agents, editors and reviewers, knows how hard it is to write a book. Nobody can imagine that the sentences that flow or march or stagger across the page have been pushed and prodded and mauled and flailed until they did whatever the author wanted them to do. Or didn’t. In the movies, writers either sit in linen dresses and pen elegant lines in ink, or they sit at a typewriter surrounded by wads of crumpled paper and pound out brilliant novels before collapsing over the keys. In real life, most of us sit in front of computers several hours a day and scribble on post-its and newspaper margins and backs of envelopes the rest of the time. We write, we throw it away, we write, we rewrite, we chuck the whole thing and start over, always with the tantalizing scent of something really great hovering at the edge of our minds that we can’t quite capture no matter how much we try.

Most of us look up now and then and ask ourselves, “Why the hell am I doing this?” It’s sure as heck not for the money. For every writer who gets a big six-figure advance that you read about in the paper, there are a hundred whose annual income is less than they’d make if their job was to ask people “Do you want fries with that?” It isn’t for the prestige, either. Tell somebody you’ve just met that you’re a writer, and they look at you funny. Show them your latest publication, and they say something like, “Is that a real book, or did you write it yourself?”

We get carpal tunnel syndrome. We blow out the joints of our fingers. We get torqued computer necks. Our lower backs give out. Our eyesight shrinks to the distance to the computer screen. Our social life shrinks to the number of people who don’t require more than two or three hours notice because that’s as far ahead as we’re able to plan because we’re immersed in a chapter and can’t leave it.

Ah, but every now and then, when you’ve wrestled with a sentence long enough, it suddenly gives up and stretches itself out in a sinuous line and hums. Even if you’re the only one who hears the music, that little bit of harmony that you’ve just created causes your brain to light up and smile. It’s like watching a bunch of colored bits of glass swirl into a harmonious pattern in a kaleidoscope. Even if you’re the only person who will ever appreciate it, those moments of creating word-music keep a writer going back in hopes of doing it again.

Which is why we celebrate the success of our writer friends, because we’re all in this together. So today I’m going around with a big sappy grin on my face because a writer I care a lot about has been given a boost of approval. She deserves every bit of it.

Stop Smoking — the Easy Way

Yesterday I wrote about a study that demonstrated how beliefs can change physiological processes, and that made me want to write about how to lose a habit like smoking. I’m always leery of writing a “how to” thing because it’s giving advice that nobody asked for, but I finally decided it was worth telling, even if only one person benefits from it.

So here’s the thing: If you smoke and want to quit, there’s an easy, relaxed, natural way to do it. You won’t gain weight or crave cigarettes or get the jitters. You won’t have to chew gum or slap on patches.

It’s your brain that has the habit of smoking, not your lips or your fingers, so your brain has to change from smoker to non-smoker. To do that, you simply fall asleep every night with an image of yourself in a situation in which you usually smoke. As if you were on a movie screen, see yourself as clearly as possible, with all the color and background sound that would be in that place. See your hands loose and relaxed, see your face smiling, see yourself being cool, because wanting to be cool is the reason everybody started smoking in the first place. Spend about 15 minutes every night seeing that image, and let it be the last thing on your mind as you go to sleep — the brain continues to process images fed it just before sleep.

Do that every night, and during the day forget it. Smoke when you want to. Smoke as much as you want to. Don’t do any smoking substitutions, just smoke. But each night, do your imaging, always relaxed, always happy, always looking sharp and fun, and always not smoking.

Don’t tell anybody what you’re doing! Don’t even think about it yourself. Just smoke when you want to, and when you notice that you’re forgetting to smoke for hours at a time, don’t mention it to anybody. Don’t celebrate. Don’t do anything. Just continue doing your imaging sessions every night, and smoking whenever you want to the rest of the time.

If you do that imaging religiously, and KEEP QUIET ABOUT IT, I absolutely promise that a day will come when you realize you haven’t had a cigarette in two or three days. If you want to, run smoke one real fast. It won’t matter, because you will have gone from being a smoker to a nonsmoker, and nonsmokers hate the taste and smell of cigarettes. Pretty soon, so will you, and you’ll never want another one.

The reason this works is that the brain doesn’t know the difference in something we vividly imagine and something we actually experience. So every time you imagine yourself not smoking, your brain adapts a little bit to this new way of being. But if you talk about it or TRY to stop, you’ll be reminding your brain that it’s a smoker, and it will think you’re trying to make it do something it doesn’t want to do. Brains aren’t stupid. They learn quickly, and one vivid imaginary experience has as much power as a lot of real ones. The key is to repeat the image until the habit of not smoking has become stronger than the habit of smoking. Whether it takes thirty days or three times that, it’s a lot easier and more permanent than any of the cold-turkey or assisted-nicotine techniques. I promise.