If you ever come over to our house, you’ll notice we’ve got music on. I mean ALL THE TIME.
“It’s like you people have your own soundtrack that follows you around,” a friend once told me.
Now, I love music. I always have. But my husband takes it to a whole other level. Jack seeks out rare finds from eclectic artists and enjoys everything from classical piano and violin concertos to the twangiest, most Hee Haw country music you’ve ever heard in your life. He loves 80s British New Wave and Cole Porter equally. You never know if he’s going to put on a Gregorian chant or an Irish jig. And he really loves Jazz. So much so that it takes up the lion’s share of our collection of tunes, one comprised of some seven thousand songs.
His joy over that little known clarinet solo or quirky folk gem can range from infectious to tyrannical, depending on who you talk to in our household. There are simply some genres of music that won’t get play on his fancy stereo, and if you dare put them on, you’ll never hear the end of it.
Death metal, for instance, which our teenage son and his friends have developed a strange affinity for. You might be right there with him on that one, but Jack’s also got a lyrical jihad against rap, anything by Madonna, songs and artists featured on yoga class playlists, electronically enhanced voices, The Who, but not Pete Townsend, most Simon and Garfunkel songs – except for the five or so he thinks are great, and well…you get the picture.
But his particular brand of fascism can be forgiven for the unique aura of enchantment it has brought into our lives. Jack’s become famous for choosing just the right songs for the playlists he makes for friends, and knows how to strike exactly the proper mood for romance, the birth of a child, a new job, a gloomy afternoon, the arrival of a dear friend. It’s thanks to him that our children (death metal aside) have a broad repertoire and are highly attuned to quality musicianship.
Our daughter Charlotte can sing Corcovado in Portuguese.
Our son Eamon knows the words to every IRA fight song that’s ever been recorded.
Our youngest, Josephine, is just nuts about Bing Crosby.
Music is the one area of balls-out snobbery that we indulge in unapologetically and actually encourage.
On a constitutional level, my husband’s obsession with music has been as elemental to our survival during the worst of times as hope. It’s been a method of prayer that’s not only connected us to the greater world and kept us from feeling sorry for ourselves, but kept us bound to each other.
No small thing.
A few years ago, we went through a violent storm of events that lasted about five solid years. I’m talking unrelenting stress that started when we learned our third and youngest child was going to be born catastrophically ill. In what seemed like a New York minute, this head-spinning health crisis was compounded by an economy that crashed and burned, sending our business into a tailspin that cut our income by about eighty percent. It dragged us so far into a black hole that we honestly thought we might end up having to feed our children through Catholic Charities if something didn’t give. It was that bad. And all while our daughter was fighting for her life and we were trying to pretend that things were relatively normal for the sake of our two older children.
It was right in the middle of this personal Waterloo that Jack brought Herb Alpert and Lani Hall into our lives.
This married duo was a part of my husband’s early childhood, as his introduction to music came mostly from his seven (yes, seven) older sisters. Herb and Lani’s respective 1960s bands, Tijuana Brass and Brasil 66, were to the non-hippie set what The Doors and Jefferson Airplane were for the “tune in, tune out, drop out” crowd in those days. Aspirational, fun, optimistic and sophisticated, they offered a wholly uncynical groove during a time when everything seemed to be up for grabs and the whole world felt like it was on fire.
And suddenly, our world was on fire.
On our darkest days, Jack and I swayed in our kitchen to Herb and Lani’s cover of Irving Berlin’s Depression Era hit Let’s Face the Music and Dance. We clung to each other, swinging like a single hanging rope, not knowing if our little girl would survive or if we’d get to keep our house. But we knew we had each other. That had to count for something.
We’d blast Tijuana Brass, clapping and jumping around with our healthy son and daughter, dissolving into giggles at the end of every long day spent pushing our proverbial boulder up our proverbial mountain. We couldn’t afford to the leave the house that we were probably going to have to give back to the bank, but with Herb and Lani’s help, we made a daily party inside those four tentative walls.
And then one day, when we were still neck-deep in trouble, our avatars announced they were coming to Washington DC for an intimate concert at Blues Alley – a time-honored red brick and linen tablecloth jazz and supper club.
Not only could we not afford the tickets, but DC was anywhere between a 2/1/2 and 5 hour drive away from our home – depending on traffic. So, we’d have no choice but to spend the night.
“We’re going,” my husband told me.
“We can’t,” I said.
“We have to. This is about our future, and we need an infusion of magic.”
Music has magic and my husband and I believe in the voodoo of such hidden, natural forces. People who believe in magic believe in destiny. And Herb and Lani, despite the fact that we had medical bills up the wazoo and barely any clients who could afford to pay us, that we were charging our groceries and unable to pay our mortgage, felt like they were written in our stars.
“Have a little faith,” my husband said.
So, with our kid having just finished some pretty grueling medical treatments, and our business bleeding money like a slit throat, my husband and I got dressed up, packed our overnight bags and road-tripped to Washington DC. We blasted Spanish Flea and Zorba the Greek from our car stereo, shaking our butts in our seats. We pantomimed to Casino Royale, as if we were in an Aston Martin on the hills of Monte Carlo. Jack crooned up a damned fine This Guys in Love With You, just for me. It was the closest I’d felt to being nineteen since I was nineteen.
As for the show, it gave us a window into our best selves.
Not only did Herb and Lani sing and play with the joy and exuberance of their youth, but showed us what love could look like for us thirty or so years down the line. It helped remind us that our parents had survived wars, deaths and penniless moves to distant countries.
This is nothing,” we said to ourselves and each other. “It shall pass.”
In the meantime, we got to enjoy two artists who made us feel as if our recovery – emotional, financial – was an inevitability.
Throughout the show, Herb Alpert looked at his wife, Lani Hall, like they’d just met. “Imagine getting to listen to this voice every morning in the shower,” he told us.
Then, as if on cue, Lani sang what had become for us what John Williams’ Indiana Jones theme was to that franchise.
There may be trouble ahead
But while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance
Let’s face the music and dance
Before the fiddlers have fled
Before they ask us to pay the bill and while we still have the chance
So while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance
Let’s face the music and dance!
“You’re my knight in shining armor,” Lani said, nestling her curly hair right under her husband’s chin.
I feel the same way about my guy.
There was a palpable feeling of love and a common core of humanity that floated through the club the way rich tobacco used to. Evident in the tapping of fingers on the nightclub tables, spontaneous laughter at Herb Alpert’s signature trumpet blare, and dreamy smiles at the couple’s naked joie de vivre.
Republican Jack Kemp was in the audience, and Herb, a die-hard democrat welcomed him as a dear friend, asked him to stand up and take a bow for his service in our government. Those were the days, right?
When the show ended and we walked to our hotel room that night, we didn’t give a single thought to how much we’d had to shell out for our indulgence. We put our daughter’s precarious health in a mental lockbox and placed it on a high shelf, far away from where we could see it.
“Tonight was divine providence,” Jack told me.
Indeed, that night was the start of a creep upward for us and our sick little girl. One that wouldn’t take off into a run for a couple of more years, but that we felt as deeply and as surely as we did a desire to make a life together on our very first date. We were right on both counts.
New Love at First Write! When asked about the secret to their happy marriage of some forty plus years, Lani Hall said, “Communication. Great conversations.” Apropos of today’s post, I’ve got an LAFW for you about Dialogue and the Art of Conversation. Hope you enjoy it.
We decided to forego our middle child’s usual summer camp this year, opting instead for a City Mouse – Country Mouse adventure with one of her best camp friends. A girl named Isabel who lives several states away in the Big Apple.
For one week, our country girl will spend her time roaming New York City. And when it’s done, her buddy will come here to Virginia, where we’ll show her rural America.
My daughter will see culture with a capital C, the wisdom of crowds, Harlem and Coney Island. High self-esteem and high fashion. Swanky digs and homelessness. What it’s like to view America from the top of the world. Look down on it, some might say. Either way, it’s a view worth contemplating. New York is a place that looks around corners and glimpses the future.
Isabel will experience slowness, colonial history, lush mountain views. Berry bushes and poison ivy. Southern accents and southern hospitality. Live music and home-cooking. Beautiful old houses with ghosts and stories. Ramshackle homes and Confederate flags. All of this surrounded by patches of land where real, live battles were once fought. Ordinary grassy knolls soaked with the blood of local sons. We live in a place that knows its past.
My husband warned me from the outset not to try to compete with the Great White Way and its surrounding boroughs. “It’s a banana split of glitz and glamor,” he said.
So, I opted more for an outdoorsy kind of experience. The kind that offers a bit of romance in an old-fashioned To Kill a Mockingbird kind of way. But without the courtroom drama and wrenching shadow story.
I took them tubing down the James River, for example. Floating by hay bales and listless cows that had wandered down for a drink in the humid ninety-degree weather. Isabel screamed at the sight of every dragonfly – I’d forgotten what an assault the bugs are around here to someone who’s not used to them.
We ate barbecue at local joints some nights, but mostly wound up eating at home, which is what we do. Outside at a long picnic table that lies under a thick awning of wisteria, surrounded by torchlight. The music blared from our kitchen – a vintage mix of jazz and country, and the fireflies blinked their secret codes. Later, the girls splashed in the stream behind our house, and we told Isabel stories about how our kids used to love to fish for crawdads when they were little. Clichéd as it is, these simple pleasures are still a childhood hallmark of rural life.
But we’re not completely out in the sticks. We live a few miles from Charlottesville and I dropped the girls off “downtown” one day to show Isabel around. True, we’ve got zero skyline, but we can offer a glimpse of what towns used to look like, say, two-hundred years ago.
In the stifling heat, the girls walked Courthouse Square, “the mall”, and “the corner,” visiting University of Virginia’s campus. Founded by Thomas Jefferson, it has a distinctly country gentleman vibe that the smart and hip student body try their best to offset. Even shout down, when they’re so moved.
Then to shake things up a bit, we drove down to Williamsburg to the big water park. Our plans for the colonial museum were thwarted by a rainstorm, which neither of the girls viewed as a tragedy.
“For Isabel, just being in an actual house, with family dinners and big family dynamics will be an experience,” her mother had told me. Back in NYC, it’s just Isabel and her mom.
To be sure, staying in a house, especially an old one like ours, is an odd experience for a girl who’s used to living within the sheltering walls of a nice, new apartment complete with a doorman. Add to that the fact that siblings are loud and sometimes really annoying. Brothers push sisters – figuratively and literally. Sister scratch brothers and know how to play the victim. Layers of love, grievances, insults, memories and secret jokes pile-on, present in each and every interaction.
“You are so NOT sick. Mom is supposed to take us to Lexington today!”
“Who ate our ice cream? We bought that with our OWN money you $#*&!!!”
“And oh my God, what happened to my bathing suit?”
The hustle and bustle of our family home can be as intense as any walk down a city street, and sometimes all the girls wanted to do was lock themselves for hours in our daughter’s room. Just to escape the household, or certain members of it.
As for New York City, our daughter’s experience was nothing short of life-changing. Or rather, life-envisioning. Isabel’s mother showed the girls the time of their lives, doing all the touristy things she and Isabel never get a chance to do because they’re too busy living there.
The girls hung out with Isabel’s friends, went to The Met, played at an arcade in Times Square, visited the Statue of Liberty, ate real ethnic food and saw Hamilton! Since we hail from a hotbed of American revolutionary sedition, our daughter knew most of the characters so well that she could extrapolate on Lin Manuel Miranda’s depiction of our Founding Fathers and the political climate in which they lived and fought. That made her feel smart amongst the New York sophisticates.
“I know this is going to sound weird,” Isabel’s mom ventured. “But has Charlotte seen many African-Americans?”
Don’t laugh, it’s a reasonable question – especially at a time when the urban-rural divide is pretty great in our country. Most young Americans these days haven’t grown up with many family members who have an understanding of small-town life that isn’t based on a weird amalgam of coastal snubs and nostalgic old movies.
Add to that fact that last year, in the sip of a Mint Julep, we went from being known as a lovely college town region with a rich, American history to the place where activists from the far corners of the political spectrum got it in their heads to hold a riot. It cost one young woman her life. Locals refer to it as “the mess” and that’s about the most accurate description I’ve heard.
“Yes, she’s known plenty of African-Americans,” I told her. And I so appreciate that she asked. We can’t be afraid to get to know each other again in this country. Pose questions that might seem awkward.
“I love New York so much mom,” our daughter told me via text. “I want to live here. No offence”
None taken. I get it.
In big cities, particularly one like New York, the kids are cooler and have real style. They mature faster, too. It’s hard for my city friends to wrap their heads around the fact that my youngest, a rising middle schooler, still believes in Santa. That our children actually like pick-up trucks and are comfortable around guns – even if my husband and I have never owned one. They know how to drain the sweet stem of a honeysuckle flower and have no problem picking up a snake. As long as it’s not venomous. They know how to spot those, though.
City kids on the other hand know how to take public transportation by themselves, aren’t intimidated by strangers, and don’t just have big dreams, but fully expect them to be delivered. They stand up tall, confident they live in the best place on Earth, and that everyone they meet would change places with them in a heartbeat. They’re world-wise, connected. When they look out their window, they don’t see a mountain; they see the whole globe.
But there’s an underlying benefit to being raised in the country that may not reveal itself to our daughter until she’s much older. There’s a sense here of the dominance of nature. In a land of fields, mountains, overgrowth, swarming insects, wild animals, flash floods, and felled trees, it’s hard to see yourself as the center of the universe.
We feel the warm embrace of the local, the importance of community. Not long after we moved here, our youngest was born desperately ill and total strangers whose only connection to us was as “neighbor” brought us food, took our older kids for the day, bought school supplies for our son when we just plain forgot. These folks were black and white, working class, middle class and rich. Everyone pitched in.
I can tell you, if we’d stayed in San Francisco, where we were living before moving to the Charlottesville area, we would’ve had a much harder time. Friends would have certainly come to our aid, but neighbors? Some of our neighbors there couldn’t even be bothered to move our wet clothes into the dryer from our communal washing machine. They just plopped them on the floor. Many of them didn’t say hello when they saw us on the street. Just a nod, if it so happened that our eyes chanced to meet. I’m not saying there aren’t great neighbors in a big city – I’ve had plenty – I’m just saying that there’s a code in less populated places. When you know someone’s hurting, you step up.
All that said, New York was hands down the winner for these girls. I knew it would be. But I’m good with the way things turned out. This experience, right down to its essence was less about activities than about love and families and two girls trying to figure out how to be in the world. For both the country and city mouse, each week provided a stratigraphic layer that will settle with time, and reveal itself as they age, teaching both girls about place and people. About themselves. And that’s what it was all about all along when we adults cooked up this scheme.
For a look at fact, fiction and writing WAY outside of your experience, please have a look at Love at First Write. It’s my vlog all about the miraculous, challenging, wonderful and epic process of storybuilding.
And if my work moves you, please visit me on Patreon, which is a terrific and reasonable way to enjoy the work of your favorite artists. For as little as the price of a cup of simple diner coffee, you’ll gain access to original fiction, as well as book excerpts from novels-in-progress, new essays, and so much original art and content that’s been curated just for you! One-third of my Patreon goal will go directly to Camp Holiday Trails, a great summer camp that caters to children with special medical needs. My daughter camped there again this summer and had a ball!
I’ve always thought Jim Carrey a wholly original artist. His comedy – even when I don’t quite like it – rarely takes a safe avenue that ensures him a laugh. Damon Wayans, who along with his brother wrote, performed and starred in their early 1990s comedy show, In Living Color, (in which Carrey got his first big break) has said that Jim Carrey, above all other comedians with whom he’s worked, takes the greatest chances. His jokes, while often utterly brilliant, are just as likely to be cringingly bad, not only falling flat, but sucking him and the audience into a black hole. That’s how, Wayans said, he knew Carrey had a chance to hit the big time. His range, his fearlessness, his drive to create, is relentless. And when one of his jokes comes together, it’s like a mega-millions lottery win – confetti flying, horns blaring, tears rolling down flushed cheeks.
Carrey’s jokes have always worked on several different levels. That’s what makes him a true master. The same schtick can be simultaneously juvenile, low-brow, weird, slapstick, and intellectual, all without showing its seams. I remember watching one of his Ace Ventura movies years ago – gape-mouthed as Ventura, Carrey’s character, pushed, clawed and squiggled naked out of the back-end of a rhinoceros costume. He was at a safari park of some sort that he’d snuck into dressed as this exotic beast. That alone was funny enough, but all of this occurred while a young boy watched this spectacle, horror-struck, convinced he was witnessing a rhinoceros giving birth to a fully grown human male. And we saw this both from Ventura’s (Carrey’s) and the young boy’s perspective, adding yet another layer. It was an insane, grotesque, embarrassing and absolutely hilarious bit. In the end, Carrey’s character did indeed grease out of the rhino like an infant does out of his mother. Plopping in a fetal position onto the ground, Carrey’s Ventura guiltily scrabbled away, while the boy tried in vain to get his parents attention, and tell them of the freakish miracle he’d just seen with his own two eyes.
So, I wasn’t surprised when a friend sent me a vimeo about Carrey and his other passion – painting and sculpting. I admit, I did at first wonder if this wasn’t a trailer from a movie Carrey might be starring in. One where he was merely playing a fine artist. Ultimately, though, after a few seconds of watching, I knew this could only be the real Jim Carrey.
In it, he speaks with tremendous heart, authority, and vulnerability about what it feels like to be an artist. Someone who uses expression of imagination as his modus operandi. It is the way he interacts with the world – whether it be to make a living, to communicate or negotiate, to love, to mend, to heal. He talks of how his bedroom was a Land of Oz to him when he was young. Getting ordered to “go to his room,” was heaven for Carrey, where a thick jungle of wonders was awaiting him, and fed his soul better than any game of Red Rover waged by his neighborhood buddies.
Carrey goes on to describe being an artist as a calling, and I think he’s right. In my own life, it’s a voice that has been living in my head for as long as I can remember, whispering to me even when I was perfectly happy doing other things. More profitable things, perhaps, more stable things, possibly. A voice I’ve heard only artists, priests and warriors name. “I found I could do nothing else,” we all seem to say. I understand Carrey’s compulsion to make his ideas come to life. How he could quite suddenly go from expressing himself through comedy, to painting, say, a multi-hued, partially abstract head of Christ. How he could see comedy and painting, if not as the same, then on the same continuum.
And in much the way Carrey described, my mind has been my sanctuary all my life. A place where I was never bored, where no one could hurt me – unless I wanted them to, where my disappointments could turn into triumphs and my triumphs into adventures. Dangerous. Mysterious. Terrifying. Beautiful.
It is a most two-faced gift.
What Carrey doesn’t say outright, but I will, is how isolating an artist’s life can be. When creativity becomes the lens through which a person views and interacts with the world, that person is put at odds with the world. No easy part of a group or tribe, more often watching an experience as much as living it. Questioning, wondering. A mile deep, an inch wide. Blissfully, gloriously, painfully alone.
And loving it with a passion most people only reserve for their children.
When I was a kid, I wrote almost exclusively about what I didn’t know. Fantastical stories of superheroes, ghosts, and space aliens – I loved writing about space aliens. On the more down to earth side, I wrote about lonely, disaffected people who lived outside of the mainstream. People with strange deformities or frightening delusions who didn’t quite know where they fit in out there in the world, so they created their own.
In every case, I was writing about myself.
Growing into adulthood, I did start writing a little bit more of what I knew, sourcing from a rich catalogue of family mythology that had mostly been passed down orally – at the dinner table and such. Since I came from a pretty dramatic, war-torn family background filled with spies, lovers and rebels, that seemed like a good place to start my actual writing career.
So, I sat down and started relating what I knew… sort of. At least what I’d heard a lot about and experienced in an in-through-the-out-door-way when I packed up and moved to my parent’s home city of Prague, after the Iron Curtain was finally ripped down.
From there, I certainly was able to paint a picture and portray a culture. I wrote two full length historical novels, a collection of short stories, and a bunch of essays chronicling Eastern Europe during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. a time when my grandparents and parents were clashing with political and historical forces I could only daydream about. To them, the word cold conjured so much more than the winter. It was a state of mind and heart and war that still gives me chills.
Because there was so much to draw on, I would sometimes find myself fitting non-fiction events – stories told to me by my grandmother, for instance – into my very fictionalized accounts of World War 2 and Cold War Europe. And paradoxically, those are the very stories that some reader or another would always call out as “not ringing true” or “so obviously fictionalized.”
Other parts of my war stories – most of which are completely made up and never, ever, as far as I know happened to anyone – stay uncontested. I’ve always found that curious, but I think I get it.
One of the shortfalls of writing from our own experience, or our particular group experience (whatever that means), is that we know the story so well (or at least think we do) that we might take a lot for granted.
It’s easy to miss important themes and snap a fragmented picture when a person or event is too close. So familiar that we’ve made up our minds about it, and stopped learning. Without realizing, we get complacent, smug about our knowledge. Repetitive. The new angles, though so tantalizing, simply slip from our fingers.
That’s why I’ve set my sights on writing a new series that’s way outside of my sphere.
This is not a goodbye to my other genre as much as it is a well-needed break. I was finding myself getting stale and craving something that would wake up and shake up my imagination a bit. An endeavor that’s on this side of banzai and will not only bring me back to the unfettered joy of writing completely from the land of make-believe, but also bring me home to my beloved Cold War with more to offer. Infuse a desperately needed element of outside perspective into my storytelling.
As a human being, I’ve learned much about myself from outsiders. I can give a short and not even close to finished list of some of those things right off the top of my head:
That I’m at least in part of Jewish ancestry
But love like a Catholic
I look good in red
But awful in yellow
I’m a conservative
I’m a liberal
Kinder in my actions than my thoughts
Better on paper than in person
An American patriot, for sure
One who seems more European than American to Europeans, though
I won’t bore you with any more of these, but you get the picture.
Fiction is a radical reframing that helps us grasp such perceptions about ourselves and others. In training our creative impulses on wildly divergent people, cultures and worlds, we gain an opportunity to look at things anew, with the cold eye necessary for a true insight.
The kind of divination that only dawns on a person who steps over the divide, invites an oddball for coffee, buys a ticket to somewhere for something with someone. Who risks the raised eyebrow, the whisper, the Twitter troll.
That leap into a different story, another struggle, doesn’t have to take place across an ocean. Nor does it have to be for writers and artists alone. It can happen in your own backyard, spent among the people next door, who you might think you know. Who you may be wrong about.
Or damned right about.
It’s an ethos my husband and I are at pains to instill in our children, so they’ll feel comfortable around peasants and kings, artists and actuaries, Republicans and Democrats. We hope it’ll embolden them to hesitate before they condescend, place on a pedestal, vilify or otherwise distort their own view of a mere fellow human being.
Because we know full-well how easily this intention can fade away as we dig-in to our habits, get busy and distracted. As we grow up. It’s an essence I often find myself feeling drained of when I dip my toe into all the fighting and tribalism that’s going on right now.
But I hope to get a great, big infusion of it while exploring a brave new world – and without hardly stepping out of my home office. The world I’m mixing up from scratch for this brave new story.
One of deserts and ancient civilizations. Love and war. A world I can only understand through fantasy, and is only possible if I throw out all accepted wisdom. A world like this:
Dozing in and out of sleep, I awaken for the last time at least an hour before dawn. The storm is over and it’s so quiet that I can even hear my brother, who still sleeps with the feathered breath of an infant. I cradle him, laying him softly on his side and kissing his ear before getting up to tip-toe to the mouth of the cave.
The moon casts an icy glow over the sand and there isn’t even a breeze left over from the violent winds that lashed us only a few hours ago. The stars twinkle and I feel the sort of peace that comes after a good, hard cry.
On the heel of my own deep breath, I hear a rapping sound, rhythmic, like two sticks striking to a musical beat. I can almost recognize the song.
Out in the distance, a shadow splays across the dune. It’s the form of a man, slender, his arm stretched out in Salan – a gesture that means to be, to endure, always. I bite down on my lip. The man – an archer – steps into the pale of the moon, the skin of his face aglow like a pearl. His beard as black as a raven. Even at a distance, his eyes kindle, lit by some trick of the desert. I step closer to the edge and hold out my hand, and he raises his, though not in Salan this time. He waves his fingers in a gesture of voyaging. The one the god Mazal used when he set his wife, the moon, into orbit around him. Forever. –BREATH, Book 1
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Patreon is a wonderful platform that allows you to support and connect with an artist whose work brings something meaningful to your life. For as little as $1, you’ll have access to original fiction and essays, photography, vlogs and art that I’ve created or curated just for you. One-third of my Patreon goal goes to Camp Holiday Trails, a summer camp for kids with special medical needs. I love this organization and my daughter is campers there, so I’m well-familiar with how worthy it is.
And please have a look at the newest Love at First Write vlog entry! It’s about uncovering the secrets of world-building and fits right in with this Cold post today!
I was nineteen the first time a friend of mine – a very alluring and highly sexualized teen – admitted to me how much she hated sex and men. That she did not, in fact, have ten screaming orgasms every time she was with a guy – the way she told everyone, the way she made him believe.
I was genuinely shocked.
She just seemed much better at it all than I was. Fun, flirty, uninhibited. Men of all stripes were in her thrall and she soaked herself in their attention like they were a piping-hot bubble bath. Approaching sex with a voracious appetite and a democratic eye, there wasn’t a party, a bar, an event, where she couldn’t find an eager partner.
Yet all along she had nothing but contempt for the guys, the acts, herself. You would have never known.
As a young woman, I often found myself getting taken aside and told things to. Secrets. Heart of hearts confessions. Maybe this happens to everyone. Or maybe it’s because as a writer type, I take a cold eye to human foibles. I find them fascinating and find myself in almost every scenario.
So, unless someone is overtly cruel, dangerously manipulative, or catastrophically dishonest, I try not to judge.
As an adult, an author, people still tell me things, although I’m not sure if they’re secrets per se. I get a lot of love stories from readers – I do. Some of them so beautiful I can hardly stand it. But not every tale told is a candy and flowers routine, a scented envelope filled with blushingly awkward poetry. Many women and men have written to me about their wasted love, the mistakes they’ve made, how they never learned – often until it was too late – how to care for and be cared for by a lover.
I always try to imagine these people when they were young, and track the course of how they got to such a place of loneliness and despair all these years later.
I remember very well the many roads I could have gone down when I was a budding woman – ones that could have taken me far away from a place where I could intersect with love. As I listen in on my children’s conversations with their peers, I have some idea of how today’s teens could one day find themselves typing up a confessional missive of wistfulness and melancholy for a writer just like me.
As my older kids have entered Middle and High School, I’ve watched some of their friends – girls I’ve known since they were feisty, adorable kindergarteners – defiantly embrace a cheap and communal sexuality. I’ve seen the come-hither photos on their “parent-access” social media platforms, and can only imagine what their “friends-only” accounts have to offer. Those are the ones they don’t share with mom and dad, and are under pseudonyms like “girlfly” and “JuSoLit.”
I don’t look down my nose at them for it; I do understand the seduction of exhibitionism. Young women are especially prone to its charms. It promises instant celebrity and seems downright glamorous, sophisticated. It’s a bam-pow shot of power during a time when a girl is desperate for it and boy is desperate for a girl. And since most of the stigma – perhaps rightly – has been removed from sexuality in our culture, there seems to be no downside. What’s wrong with a girl having a little fun? Dipping her toe into the kind of flagrant sexuality that until recently had only been the domain of boys and really, really bad girls.
But I’m sceptical.
It’s not about the overt reputational hit a girl might experience. That kind of finger-wagging doesn’t really go on much anymore. And when it does, it feels weirdly outdated. Like a visit from the ghost of 19th century schoolmarm. Nobody today wants to be called a slut-shamer, after all. It’s simply not woke.
What it is about are the secrets, the whispers; the deep currents of traditional mores – ones that are perhaps even biologically driven, I don’t know – that run beneath the shimmering surface of cultural trends.
If you’ve never driven around a group of kids for a good length of time, I highly recommend it. They forget you’re there, that you’re even human – and say things that are way out of school. Stories that under normal circumstances they would never want an adult – especially a parent – to hear. My long carpools to this or that game or practice over the years have been a real time-suck, and I love to complain about them. But they’ve also made me privy to a treasure trove of information. And from what I’m hearing, there’s plenty of frustration, disappointment and distaste for the current state of sexual affairs among our young people.
I’ve overheard boys lamenting the fact that they’ve seen the breasts of so many girls in their grade – I’m not kidding here. It takes the mystery away, they say.
Another common topic is the mainstreaming of porn. They observe how their most porn-obsessed friends have all but given up on “real” girls. With a smorgasbord of fetishes and base depictions of sexuality available to them at the touch of a keyboard, sex has taken on a cold and abstract quality that they’re trying to resist. Some of the boys have even sworn off porn altogether, although they do fall off the wagon from time to time.
One young man expressed sympathy for a girl whose compromising photos made the rounds at school. He noted how it didn’t seem to bother her, but wondered how she was going to find a guy who really cared about her. What’s more, all the other boys in the car agreed with his assessment. As far as genuine girlfriend material goes, this young woman was now kryptonite.
The girls are equally confused about their role in all of this, and quite aware that there’s a disconnect between the “You go, girl!” sexuality that’s part of the greater culture and the way they actually feel about sex. There seems to be no middle ground for them anymore, where a girl can take things slowly, get to know herself and her potential boyfriends. According to the talk I hear, our young women often feel stuck between stamping a big, fat NO! on their bodies, or giving away intimacy like it’s a free raffle ticket. That’s a really tough place to be for a teen girl with raging hormones, and I have no idea how I would’ve handled what they have to contend with today.
Now, I’ll tell you what I don’t hear.
I have never, not once, heard a girl frame public and/or casual sexuality as being a source of liberation or real empowerment. Or a boy speak admiringly of a girl who has eroticized herself, earning her the latest teen moniker of THOT (That Ho Over There). And I’ve had every kind of kid in my car – liberal and conservative, church-going and atheist. Gay and straight. From the most “popular” to the downright nerdy.
I hate to see our girls giving their hearts away to the lowest common denominator. And at a time when their self-image is taking shape and their dreams are so tender and ripe. I hate to see boys thinking that’s all a girl has to offer. Yet wanting so much more.
A teenage heart is malleable, fragile. Like an infant’s skull.
I sit behind the wheel of my minivan imagining myself in their place, swimming with a cultural tide that could’ve hardened me as a young woman. Made me less resilient.
I say all of this not out of prudery. I’ve written hot and raunchy poetry, watched really dirty movies with glee, and have rarely found myself cringing when it comes to sexual content on page, screen or in real life.
It’s not about “the act itself,” as my sweet and southern mother-in-law calls it. What it is about is understanding – on a deeply cultural, biological and emotional level – what sex means in the context of love, living and growing up. That it’s exciting, sublime, funny, and critical to a successful relationship. That it can eat away at your soul if you treat it with recklessness too often.
It’s not that a girl, or boy, for that matter, has to be an angel. Or that making mistakes will taint and haunt a young person forever and ever. Leave them unredeemable in the eyes of a person who’s looking for someone to truly care about.
There’s a lot to be said about screwing up, and learning from it. But there’s also a lot of crap out there.
From the boring, spirit-crushing nature of partisan politics and media culture, to most feature films, to our one-man PR machines on social media, to Tinder hook-ups. All of these can push us further away from any real examination of who we are and what we are doing. Most of these things will be fleeting, and we’ll look back on them years from now and see them as a phase, a growing pain from a time when the ground felt like it was shifting beneath our feet.
What isn’t a phase, and hasn’t changed since the dawn of man is the vital, burning and relentless role that love plays in our very survival as a species. It is how and why we care for each other. The vehicle through which we populate our lives, our regions, the whole damned earth. The reason we would give our lives for our child, our spouse, even a total stranger. We underestimate its power at our peril. We risk everything in taking it for granted.
But you don’t have to believe me. Just listen to the teens who ride in my minivan.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” –Rumi
New Love At First Write! How To Sprinkle Magic Dust Onto Your Story.
I want to introduce you to a fellow writer this week. Her name is Jane Davis and she’s thoughtful and nuanced. Right up a Cold reader’s alley.
Jane spent her twenties and the first part of her thirties chasing promotions at work, but when she achieved what she’d set out to do, she discovered that it wasn’t what she wanted after all. That’s when she turned to writing.
Her debut, Half-truths & White Lies, won the Daily Mail First Novel Award 2008. Of her subsequent three novels, Compulsion Reads wrote, ‘Davis is a phenomenal writer, whose ability to create well-rounded characters that are easy to relate to feels effortless’. Her 2015 novel, An Unknown Woman, was Writing Magazine’s Self-published Book of the Year 2016 and has been shortlisted for two further awards.
See…told you she’s worth a shout out.
Jane lives in Carshalton, Surrey with her star-gazing, beer-brewing partner, surrounded by growing piles of paperbacks, CDs and general chaos. That’s where I tracked her down to answer THREE BIG QUESTIONS.
Number 1: Why do you write?
John Green says that writing is a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it. I was always the quiet middle child in a family of seven. It’s not that I don’t want to make eye contact, it was that I could never get a word in edgeways. I think that explains why I always have more going on inside my head than comes out of my mouth. There’s a great deal of satisfaction in writing dialogue for characters who are braver and more outspoken than I am. I’m the kind of introvert who can be very sociable, but also needs to balance that with time alone. I’ve always been very comfortable with my own company.
Fiction provides the unique opportunity to explore one or two points of view. It is never going to provide the whole answer, but it forces both writer and reader to walk in another person’s shoes. And, in many ways, it is the exploration that’s important. The idea of a single truth is flawed. I have a sister who’s less than a year older than me, but our memories of the same events differ substantially. There are many different versions of the truth and many layers of memory.
As my collection of books grows, I’m also beginning to see them as my legacy. As someone who doesn’t have children, they are the mark I will leave on the world. So another reason for writing – one that I didn’t think about in my mid-thirties when I started to write – is to create a legacy that I can be proud of.
Number 2: What are the themes that most inspire your work?
It took me some time to identify that the common thread that runs through my novels is the impact of missing persons on our lives, how the hole they leave behind can be so great that it dwarfs the people we’re left with. In I Stopped Time, it was an estranged mother. I addressed the theme head-on in A Funeral for an Owl, with teenage runaways. And in These Fragile Things, a mother is obsessed by the child she lost to a miscarriage, almost to the exclusion of the child she has. In Smash all the Windows, given that we have fifty-nine victims, the presence of the theme is again obvious. It almost certainly comes from both my personal history – and that of my parents.
When I was aged seventeen, I had my first experience of a young person – someone I knew – dying. A school friend was murdered, someone I felt a particular connection with because he shared my birthday. The ripples from that single death are still felt today. In my parents’ generation, death was far more common but was seldom spoken about.
My father’s mother died when he was just eighteen months old. Because men didn’t bring up children on their own in those days, Dad and his two sisters were taken into care. As was the norm, he was separated from his sisters, Marian (aged 6) and Lois (aged 4). Six months later, Marian woke to find Lois dead in the bed beside her. Can you imagine that? Lois’s death certificate says that she died of a broken heart. My father has no memories of his mother or his sister Lois, but he feels their absence keenly.
My mother was the first child of her father’s second marriage. His first wife had died in 1937 at the age of 37. We only came into possession of a family tree last week, which shows that there was another half-brother, Patrick, who died in 1938, just six months after his mother. So having lost their mother and a brother, Mum’s older siblings (two half-brothers and a half-sister) were evacuated at the beginning of the Second World War. They returned five years later to find that their father had remarried and that they had two new sisters, my mother and Alma. Alma was killed in a car crash aged 23 shortly before she was due to be married.
All families have hidden histories. Loss is a universal theme.
I’m also very interested in how people behave under pressure. I meet them at a particular point on their journeys, usually in a highly volatile or unstable situation. And then I throw them to the lions.
Number 3: What would you never write about?
While much of my fiction has its basis in fact, I’m wary of writing about recent history. You have to tread so carefully, especially with cases where the survivors and relatives and partners of the victims are still alive. This was the case with Smash all the Windows. I make no secret of the fact that I took my inspiration from the result of second inquest to the Hillsborough Disaster (The Hillsborough disaster was a human crush at Hillsborough footbal stadium in Sheffield, England on 15 April 1989, during the 1988-89 FA Cup semi-final game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.). Twenty-seven years after the disaster, the pain on the families of the victims was still so raw. My gut feeling was that I didn’t want to add to that. If I’d wanted to explore the idea, I would have had to ask myself some hard questions. Firstly, I would have considered what I could add to the material that’s already been produced. A number of documentaries were made by Dr Phil Scraton and the families. Plus there was Jimmy McGovern’s powerful TV dramatisation, which I saw as a call to action, part of the protest. McGovern based his script almost entirely on court transcripts and used eye witness reports. Added to which he had the blessings of the families. You have to ask yourself, would a fictional account be welcomed? Would it be disrespectful to add a fictional character to the storyline? And what right do I have to tell this story? My only connection with Liverpool is that it’s my partner home city. That didn’t seem to me to be a close enough link.
And now some words on Smash all the Windows
‘A dazzling high wire walk through interwoven strands balanced so carefully you know you’ll never fall.’ Dan Holloway, novelist, poet and spoken word artist
‘Just fricking perfect. An all-round triumph.’ John Hudspith
‘This is an astounding read. I was completely captivated.’ Liz Carr
It has taken conviction to right the wrongs.
It will take courage to learn how to live again.
For the families of the victims of the St Botolph and Old Billingsgate disaster, the undoing of a miscarriage of justice should be a cause for rejoicing. For more than thirteen years, the search for truth has eaten up everything. Marriages, families, health, careers and finances.
Finally, the coroner has ruled that the crowd did not contribute to their own deaths. Finally, now that lies have been unravelled and hypocrisies exposed, they can all get back to their lives.
If only it were that simple.
Tapping into the issues of the day, Davis delivers a highly charged work of metafiction, a compelling testament to the human condition and the healing power of art.
Written with immediacy, style and an overwhelming sense of empathy, Smash all the Windows will be enjoyed by readers of How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall and How to be Both by Ali Smith.
Get Smash All The Windows Right Here!
And if her want to know more about Jane…
And yes, there’s a brand-spanking new vlog episode of Love at First Write. It’s on, appropriately enough, The Art of Redemption in a Story – particularly when a pair of lovers are involved. Hope you enjoy it!
The great Raymond Chandler, smirking
Some months ago, I was talking to my friend, Karen, about this epic romance I’m writing. You know, the one I can’t shut up about because it’s been consuming me for about three years. Karen is a writer, too. A huge talent, in fact, and one of the best readers I’ve ever come across. She also knows me pretty well.
She knows how much I love Raymond Chandler, for instance. The way I’m in awe of his skill at weaving humor into the lives of some gritty characters with pretty depressing outcomes.
“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”
“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”
“Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.” –all by Raymond Chandler
But we were talking about romance, as I said. Not thrillers. And the kind of romance with a lot of history in it. Maybe some fantasy and sci-fi mixed in to make the story more like an Indian chutney than a fancy ketchup. And I was just squeaking towards the finish line of my first draft, complaining that it was about as rough as Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow.
“You’ve got to read Diana Gabaldon,” she said. “Not only because your series has a historical component,” she told me. “But you have a strong point of view on humor, and I think you’ll find a like mind and some inspiration in her books.”
She was right, of course. My friend Karen is right about a lot of things: feminism, our Founding Fathers, Emily Dickinson and any kind of editorial advice, just to name a few.
There’s a lot to be in awe of when reading the Outlander novels. Their length and subsequent ability to hold our interest, the fact that men and women can both enjoy them (swear!), that she doesn’t shy away from sex or violence, yet doesn’t make either gratuitous. That she writes character-driven books with great atmospherics. And yes, that she writes with a heavy dose of humor.
Humor isn’t just something meant to make us feel good. It is defiant, subversive and smarter than we are. Through humor we can say things we’re too afraid to say. It allows us to speak truths that polite society won’t tolerate and reminds us that no word or circumstance can hold power over us. Humor is such an essential element to getting us through the hard times, to making us more resilient, more compelling. It brings us together, makes us closer, foments friendships. A sense of humor will make a potential lover want to introduce you to his friends, take you in a twirling, spinning hug, kiss you with joy.
Such is its power. More than beauty, because it outlasts our youth. More than sorrow, because it gives us a reason to keep going.
As a reader, I can’t imagine sticking with a series if it didn’t employ a sense of humor that bonded me to characters and their worlds. As a writer, I find humorless prose exhausting and depleting. Often sanctimonious, or uninspired. It drains me to read such passages, let alone have to conjure them.
The best authors weave humor through the fabric of even the most heart wrenching, serious stories. They may do it subtly, through irony perhaps, but they do it. I think of Orwell’s 1984, anything by Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare, Twain, whose humor is often wrongly mistaken for racism, and even Herodotus.
Herodotus
That’s why, as I was reading the Outlander series, I was especially struck by one part that illustrated to me why it’s crucial to maintain a sense of humor, even when you’re writing about a topic or event that’s downright horrifying.
In this particular segment of the story, one of Gabaldon’s characters is being raped. And potentially by more than one man.
Not. Funny.
However, Gabaldon uses humor in such a graceful way, that she not only keeps from degrading or making light of the severity of the situation, but actually gives it greater meaning. As her heroine is being abused by this group of very bad men, one of these desperados fails miserably in his quest to rape her. The heroine actually quips to herself about his complete sexual incompetence, then remarks upon her own good fortune of this having happened to her in middle age. “Twenty years ago, there would’ve been a much longer line,” she says to herself.
That bit of humor brings humanity and hope to a soul-crushing set of circumstances. As a reader, it lends me a hand in getting through a terrible incident with a character I’ve grown to love. I want to believe that our heroine will prevail, or at least emerge from her ordeal intact somehow; it’s her sense of humor that helps me look what is happening right in the eye.
Because that’s what humor does for us in our own lives.
By Gary Larson
“Oh, please,” you might say. “No one can have a sense of humor while when they’re about to be raped.”
Allow me to step out of the realm of fiction and back into real life in order to answer that.
“While one of his men held me down, this Russian officer took out a mirror and leaned it against a rock. Removing a brush and cake of soap from his canvas bag, he began to lather, spreading this luxurious foam all over his chin and jaw. He took his time. Then he pulled a razor from his belt and began to shave. Ah, a sophisticated rapist, I thought to myself. Isn’t that the height of cosmic sarcasm?” –Dina Babbit, holocaust survivor, on the prospect of being raped by a Russian officer, only days after her liberation from Auschwitz.
This is why, as I embark on editing my romance – the one filled with war and passion and heartbreak and history and pitiless violence perpetrated by corrupt individuals – my writer’s eye is trained on giving my characters a balls-out sense of the absurd. Bringing a dark bit of crackpot levity into a situation – even when there doesn’t seem to be room for anything but tears and screams.
Please have a look at my vlog, Love at First Write. It’s an ongoing series that chronicles my efforts to write an epic romance. I’d love to hear your comments.
