Enough

I saw the reports of the Christchurch massacre just before I went to bed last night. I haven't been able to read the full coverage of it yet. I want to read the names of the people who died, I want to learn more about their stories, but I haven't been able to bring myself to look because I don't want to know a damn thing about their killer.

Or maybe I do, because the question no one ever asks or answers is, "What would be enough for you?" Asking what they want is missing the point. The answers to that question are always some kind of performance that boils down to MORE. More space (remember Lebensraum?), more privilege, more respect, more money, more love, more more more more more more more. Presumably they think whoever they're killing is taking that away from them, or keeping them away from it. They never go after the people who actually have more power or money or freedom than they do. (That wouldn't be okay, either, but at least it would be understandable.)

No, the question is, "What is enough?" If you feel you have enough, you don't have to pay attention to what anyone else is getting. You don't have to try to take anything away from the people around you.

What would be enough to make these men feel whole? And what would be enough to stop them?

Transatlantic

The plane from Belfast left late — high winds gusting across Great Britain — and my connection in Terminal 5 was very tight, from the A gates to the B gates in less than an hour. I was carrying my giant Bag of Stuff and am not a runner even when I'm empty-handed, but I made it to the plane to Dulles with about 15 minutes to spare. I lugged my bag down the aisle, down the aisle, down the aisle . . . to my seat, 55E, a middle seat in the very last row of the plane.

"Hurray!" I said to no one. "It's the worst seat on the plane. What do I win?"

The voice in my head was my mother's: You get to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Talk about coming to grips with privilege. Among my mother's belongings is an old photograph of some distant ancestor — I think of her grandmother Molony's mother, whose married name was Cahill — with nothing on the back but the printed word BELFAST. My aunt Patricia might have known who the woman in the picture was, but she's gone now too.

I don't know the date of the photograph, but my guess is somewhere around 1880. People had their photographs made before leaving on the great journey, and for most of them it was the first time they'd ever had their picture taken. The exposure time required the subject to be still, so no one smiled. They might not have wanted to, anyway. However much they wanted to leave for America, it was almost certain they'd never be back. That young woman was about to spend six days in steerage on a ship crossing the north Atlantic, all so I could whine about a less-than-luxurious seat on a flying missile returning me home after a weekend of fun.

And this voice is my mother's too: Who do you think you are? The tactical nuclear weapon of the Irish mammy, however many generations removed from the homeland. On a good day, I can say it and laugh; on a bad day, it still sends me to my knees. But it's damn useful as a meditation, and serves a vast spectrum of purposes.

It might be useful for a few of the people in this morning's news, from the mind-boggling college admissions scandal (who even knew Georgetown had a tennis team?) to Bryce Harper. But I'm working on the plank in my own eye before tending to the motes in others', so I'll keep it to myself.

Homelands

I'm in Belfast this weekend for a crime fiction convention, and it feels a lot like home to me. That's not Irish-American sentimentality, although at least one of my ancestors left from here. It's about being among a group of people I am glad to see, who are glad to see me. It's about taking common delight in something separate from us and sharing the human magic of storytelling.

I never know what to say when people ask me where I'm from. I was born in New Rochelle, New York, a place I never lived; my mother was staying with her parents in Larchmont while my father (our father, since I'm a twin) was in the South China Sea. But she wasn't from Larchmont, and neither were her parents. They were from Charleston, living the peripatetic life of a corporate lawyer. My mother had been born at Georgetown University Hospital, when my grandfather was an attorney with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Anyway, before my eighth birthday I had lived in Larchmont; in Coronado, California; in Norfolk, Virginia; in the Bronx; in Fairfax, Virginia; and in Virginia Beach, where I stayed until I was sixteen. From that point until my mid-thirties I moved every year or two, simply because that felt normal.

I say all the time that the universal human condition is homesickness. That's obviously based on my own experience, but I suspect most people just don't realize that's the name for what they feel. Even people who have lived in the same place all their lives feel it, and why is that?

It's because we were somewhere before we were here. At a minimum, we were in the salt sea of our mothers' wombs. If you believe in a world beside this one, that's where we were before that. Some piece of us remembers that, I think — or almost remembers that, and that almost is the longing for the home we can't name.

We want to believe that we have come from somewhere, that we are going somewhere, and that mysteries have solutions. This is why we have religions. This is why we have crime fiction.

Ash Wednesday, 2019

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn again
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

T.S. Eliot thought a lot about Ash Wednesday, obviously. Through the wonders of the internet, we can listen to him reading it himself:

This was his "conversion poem," the story of his embracing and renouncing. Lent is all about embracing and renouncing, and I'm reviving this blog for the duration as this year's Lenten observance. Exactly what form it will take is still unclear to me: my goal for Lent this year is to come to grips with my privilege and what it requires. Gratitude, first, but obligations too.

We don't see our privilege — or I should say, I don't see my privilege — because I'm always looking up. Most of us live aspirational lives, always trying to do more, earn more, live better (whatever "better" means). We don't look at the people who are aspiring to our lives. And so I whine about the invisibility of being middle-aged and overweight and female, and forget how that invisibility can be a superpower. I listen to colleagues describe their fancy vacations and wonder when I last took a "real" vacation, forgetting that I have work that lets me go almost anywhere whenever I like. I grumble at the unacknowledged volunteer work and retaliate by failing to acknowledge the work of my fellow volunteers.

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something 
Upon which to rejoice

Life goes only one way. The worst of grief, pain, anger, envy is the illusion that we could go back and fix things or regain what we lost. So for Lent I want to remember to look forward, to cherish my privilege, and to share as much of it as I can.

On Halloween

I woke up this morning to the news that the daughter of friends had died yesterday, much too young, much too cruelly. Crime fiction is a small and tight-knit community, and we mostly love each other a lot (with the necessary exceptions who just make the bonds among the rest of us feel even stronger). It's not true that pain shared is pain lessened, but we're grieving together today, and cherishing our friends even more.

It's a dark time of year, literally and spiritually. These three days — Halloween, All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day — originated in the pagan recognition that veils get thin around this time of year. Time starts slipping, and the mortal peril we all constantly live in becomes a little more visible and immediate. Winter is coming.  

Something exists at the edges, something we can't quite see, something our brains are too small to understand. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, merely converted from one state to another. We know this in our bones, we feel it in the crawling of our skin and the cold dread that gathers at the solar plexus when we feel ourselves sliding away.

We can lie down and let it take us, or we can fight it off with masks and jokes and human-built monsters. We can rise up behind our defenders — the saints, Michael the Archangel, the Marvel Comics Universe, whatever works. (It's hardly a coincidence that superheroes have come to dominate our popular culture as organized religion ebbs away.)

Every living creature fights for life. It's our first job, the most important job—and we pretty much have to pretend it will continue indefinitely, or how would we ever get anything done?

Once a year, from up on the tightrope, we let ourselves look down. We might have to dress up to do it, and it might require the fortification of candy. Through the veil, we wave at the things we don't understand, at the night that will eventually take us all.

Happy Halloween.

On Complicity

But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Luke 18:13

My father had surgery, several years ago, for a congenital hand malformation — he can correct me on this, but I think the disorder is called Dupuytren's contracture. It causes the hand to bend in upon itself, and surgery is the only real remedy for advanced cases. My father recovered well enough to go back to sea afterward.

Dupuytren’s contracture is not terribly common, but it’s not that rare, either. My father’s doctor told him that it was called the Viking disease, because it appears almost entirely in people of Viking descent.

Dad and I have both had our DNA analyzed by 23 and Me, and we don’t have that much Scandinavian blood, according to the ancestry report (although we do share ancestry with Niall of the Nine Hostages, so maybe we actually were kings of Ireland once). But Ireland was a land of shipwrecks and invasions, and the Vikings were all over the island, so at some point, some Viking took an Irish girl as his willing or unwilling partner.

I think about that a lot, as I think about my earliest maternal ancestor, a member of the relatively rare H13 haplogroup. Most living members of that haplogroup still live in a small pocket of the Caucasus Mountains, or around the Caspian Sea. But thousands of years ago, a girl child wandered — or was taken, or sold — west, and her descendants kept going.

Somewhere along the way, someone in my ancestry was forced into something that she did not want to do. And someone else in my ancestry did the forcing.

My mother’s family was from Charleston, South Carolina. Her parents met and married there in the 1930s, when my grandfather was a public defender and my grandmother wrote for the News & Courier. They were both Catholics of Irish descent, but my grandmother’s father, Henry Molony, had been a wealthy man, wiped out by the Depression.

Henry Molony was born in the U.S. in 1858. His father, John Molony, had come to Charleston from County Clare in 1845, and had kept a shop in Charleston until the war. John Molony owned no slaves. When the war came, he moved his store to Sumter, SC, and raised seven children. From what I can tell, he was not a Confederate. But one of his daughters married a Confederate veteran, and at least one of his sons — my great-grandfather, Henry — prospered in part by allying himself with the Democratic Party, which was not the Democratic Party as we know it today.

Henry Molony was an official of St. John’s Cathedral, a donor to many worthy causes, a founder of hospitals and a man of honor — but he was also, without a doubt, a man who apologized for the causes of the Confederacy and conspired to keep its memory bright. He left ten children, who have gone on to have hundreds of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of their own — my mother didn’t know all her cousins.

And every one of us — the hundreds, or even thousands — is a beneficiary of Henry Molony’s complicity.

Colonization was America’s original sin, but slavery was the foundational sin, and its repercussions still echo, 150 years after it was outlawed.

We’re not good at atonement, humans. We don’t like to admit we’ve done wrong. Adam and Eve, confronted with their first wrongdoing, lied about it. Lying is what distinguishes humans from other animals; it keeps us separate from God, separate from each other, separate from the real.

So here’s my point, at last: Charlottesville gives us all an opportunity to tell the truth. White Americans, and southerners in particular, are all complicit in some way. It doesn’t matter that we never held slaves ourselves. It doesn’t matter that our parents didn’t. It doesn’t even matter if our grandparents were public defenders (and I’ll say again, mine was). We had — and have — opportunities because somewhere along the way, somebody else suffered.

If we inherited the benefits, we inherited the obligations, too. It doesn’t matter if we’re not racists now. We can still do more. We can still make things better. 

On the return of "Twin Peaks"

We're four episodes in to the return of "Twin Peaks," and I'm locked in for the duration. I loved the first season of the original show, to the point of hosting a party for the second-season premiere, complete with cherry pie and dozens of doughnuts. I stuck with the second season through the silliness of the Miss Twin Peaks pageant, and Audrey Horne's icky romance with John Justice Wheeler, and Josie's disappearance into the drawer handle. I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in the theater and didn't understand it at all, though it is a movie that improves with repeated viewings, maybe because the brain insists on imposing some kind of order on it.

The inevitable backlash has already begun, from fans of the original series who expected something different from David Lynch — or to be more accurate, expected anything. Four episodes in, Lynch is already making it clear that all expectations are contrary to his agenda.

With no expectations, I am experiencing the return of "Twin Peaks" as a gift from a wise friend I haven't seen in a while. Four episodes in, this is what I'm taking from it:

We get old.

We get lost.

We forget who we meant to be, and if we are very lucky, someone reminds us in a way that gives us time to do something about that.

We are grateful, so grateful, for the companions we managed to keep along the journey, who are often not the people we’d have expected to stand with us.

The mysteries are more baffling because we (okay, I) have gotten to an age at which we think we’ve seen a lot, and we think we know things.

We understand that the universe is neither friendly nor hostile to us. It simply is, around us and within us. And it favors entropy.

Once we notice that entropy, we cannot stop noticing it — except we have to stop noticing it, or else we would never be able to get anything done. It’s the paradox of not being able to get halfway out of a chair, then halfway again, then halfway again. Eventually we must pretend some order is possible, and those moments when we remember otherwise are disorienting, even paralyzing.

It’s an absurd life we’re living, in an absurd world, in an absurd universe. The order we impose upon it is skin deep, and fragile.

These are the central truths of “Twin Peaks.” They strike me as the central truths of life on this planet.

They're working for me so far.

On being wrong, and the benefit of the doubt

Good morning, Americans. Good morning, world.

Today the United States follows one of the most important rituals of our government, the peaceful transfer of executive power from one individual to another. If you know me at all, you know that the recipient of this power is not the person I supported. I'm out of town today, and won't watch the ceremony.

But I'm still an American. And I'm still alive. And the distinguishing feature of Americans, if we have one, is optimism. We live in a country whose relatively short history is a narrative of improvements. In the United States, things get better. Oh, we might have temporary setbacks, we might have conflicts and disagreements and even tragedy — but things get better. More people move here. More businesses start. More people work. People live longer, live better, have more stuff. The poorest people in the United States still — mostly — have electricity, running water, refrigerators and televisions. We take all that for granted, and quite a lot of us never have occasion to learn just how rare and new it is, in human experience.

This expectation of endless improvement is what's brought us here, today, as a man with no political experience, whose financial obligations we do not know, will stand next to his third wife and promise to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He ran on a campaign that told Americans we were miserable, and that he could fix that. And he won, at least in part, because those of us who aren't miserable didn't believe the ones who said they were.

He says he'll make America great again. Nobody ever pressed him on the question of why and how America isn't great now. Over the last few months, I have asked people who've told me Barack Obama is the worst president in history: okay, I hear you, but tell me how? Show me. Are you homeless? Did you lose your job, your family, your dreams? Yes, entire industries have disappeared in the past 25 years, and more industries will go the same way in the next ten. Show me, tell me, how President Obama was responsible for that, and how he should have fixed it. What did he do wrong? How did he hurt you?

Nobody's given me a good answer. The one substantive response I've gotten is the increase in the national debt under the Obama administration. I'll concede that, for people who agree that government spending shouldn't be used to spur the economy. The problem is finding anyone serious who agrees with that statement. If you want to argue with me, go right ahead. I'll check back with you after Congress passes President Trump's infrastructure bill.

What worries me most about the incoming Administration — and a lot of things worry me — is that this is a group of people who measure success in terms of dollars, and don't understand any other measures of success. "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" becomes "I'm rich, so I must be smart." If you believe that the richest people you know are also the smartest, it's not in my power to convince you otherwise. But that is not my own measure of success.

Let's go back to this idea of improvement, of the United States being a country that improves over time. How does anything or anyone improve? By doing new things, trying new things. Does everyone get new things right the first time? Are all new things equally valuable or productive? Of course not. How do we choose the right improvements, how do we derive the greatest benefits? By making mistakes. By being wrong. By acknowledging the error, and going back to figure out how we make it right.

We have a new President who seems incapable of admitting error. If he cannot admit mistakes, he cannot correct them. He doesn't apologize because he's never done anything wrong. He can't acknowledge that his actions might harm others as they benefit him. If you can't do these things, you can't learn. You can't improve. The whole effort is self-defeating.

Some people are saying that we need to give this new President a chance, that he deserves our support for the sake of the office he holds, and that we owe him the benefit of the doubt. I'll agree with that — paradoxically — if he tells us that he knows he's going to mess up. If he expects to make mistakes, and welcomes the opportunity to learn from them. If he's willing to apologize to the people who get hurt along the way. This seems unlikely, since he's a 70-year-old man whose life has not yet taught him how to do that.

If he can't, and he won't, the American people will have to learn these lessons for themselves. We'll have to recognize our mistake, learn from it, and figure out how to do it right the next time.

The Year that Was

I had so many plans for this week between Christmas and New Year's. I have manuscripts due back to clients, and a research project I'm really enjoying, and I would like to bill a few more hours before the year closes — but I am unfocused, adrift, and overwhelmed by a sense of dread that feels more rational than usual.

2016, everybody says. This terrible year. We'll be glad to see the end of it. And I nod and say, "God, yes," as if I too had a terrible year.


And then I stop myself, because I actually didn't.

The world might be going to hell in a handbasket, but my own truth is that I had a pretty good year. No, that's not right: in many ways, I had a great year.

My year started in Niagara Falls with the brilliant and hilarious Lisa Lutz. In February, I got back to Maine to see my friends Beth and Cory get married, and catch up with my old trivia team and people I haven't seen since 2013. March was the Virginia Festival of the Book, where Sarah Weinman let me share her hotel room and my sisters came up to hang out with Sarah and Lisa and me. April ended with the Edgars dinner, which I attended with the lovely Northern Irish author Paul Charles and still don't believe I get to go to (actually, anybody can: http://theedgars.com/banquet.html), and Malice Domestic, in my own back yard.

May 12 was Max Scherzer's 20-strikeout game, which I wound up attending by myself (and in the process, discovered that I love going to baseball games alone). In June I went to Virginia Beach for one niece's baby shower, the first of two nieces who had babies this year; to Baltimore for a fantastic evening of books and steak with friends; and to New York for more books and more friends and more dinners. July was Juliet & Paul's wedding, one of the all-time greats, and more baseball, in both DC and Baltimore.

And August was the trip of a lifetime, through the generosity of my friend Megan Hills, who invited me to help celebrate a milestone birthday in Edinburgh. I'd never been to Scotland. Now I've been to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and I can tell the difference between highland and lowland malts (I prefer the lowland). I've been to the Edinburgh Tattoo, which everybody ought to do if they can. I went to Dublin, where I'd also never been, for a weekend with Claire and Zach, and made a visit to Belfast in the company of John Connolly and the legendary Joe Long. I got to go to yet another wedding in Dublin, celebrating Bob & Leon's long relationship, and had more dinners with dear friends I hadn't seen in much too long.

September was Bouchercon in New Orleans, with the mighty Judy Bobalik; Virginia Beach for my father's 75th birthday; and Fall for the Book at George Mason. October was a week at Rehoboth with Claire and Zach and friends and board games, and yet another trip to New York. November was a Thanksgiving with Chris and Claire and Zach and the Beas, all together under one roof for the first time in a couple of years, and December included a trip to Raleigh for yet another wedding celebration, with Jen and Lek.

My personal tally for 2016 is four weddings, two new babies in the family, and no funerals. The friends who went through cancer treatments this year are all still here, for which I fervently thank them. I saw a lot of good baseball, some great theater and music, and some so-so basketball, most of it in the company of friends, and much of it through their generosity. I read some excellent books and had some very good meals. I had clients who paid me to do fascinating work. I am profoundly grateful for all of these things, and the world's sorrows shouldn't overshadow that.

2016 was a hard year for a lot of the world, and for many of my friends. 2017 may be harder, and I will not be surprised if it's a lot harder for me. But for now I am trying not to feel guilty about being the ploughman in Brueghel's Icarus. It's enough that I'm aware of it, and that I look for ways to pay it forward.

My resolutions for the new year are to pay more attention to the good things, to hold my friends and family close, and not to let externalities distract me from the things I value most. Oh, and to get my reading totals back up above 100 books. I spent way too much time in front of screens in 2016. We might all be better off getting back to analog next year.

What We Do Now

What do we do now?  

Three different friends texted me this question late last night, after I had turned the TV off; after I had said goodnight to my housemate, who insisted things might all look better in the morning; after I had tried to go to bed, listening to the Pray As You Go podcast and clutching my smartphone.

Last night I had nothing to tell them. This morning I'm thinking about at least two other times in my life when I looked in the bathroom mirror and thought: I have no idea how I'm supposed to get on with the rest of my life. How do I do this? 

This is what I did then, so this is what I'm doing now:

I brushed my teeth.
I washed my face.
I made a list of small, essential tasks that feel manageable: 1. Renew my ACLU membership. 2. Put away my laundry. 3. Clean my bathroom. 4. Figure out next week's trip to New York.

I'll add more things to that list as I go, and take what satisfaction I can in ticking things off. I will pretend to feel normal — I will pretend to be "normal" — until it's no longer pretending.

The terror we all live with, past the basic needs of food, water and shelter, is that someone will tell us, "You're not welcome here." Half the country told the other half that last night. I'm seeing a lot of posts on social media this morning to the effect of "this happens every four years, get over it," but that's not right. This is something new in my lifetime. The winning candidate didn't give us an inclusive, optimistic vision for the future; the best he could do was offer to rid us of whatever was scaring us.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm a college-educated white woman who supports herself. In the world of our President-Elect, I'm negligible — fat, unattractive, annoying and probably another "nasty woman" — but I'm not The Enemy. I'm not The Other.

But too many of my friends, in this new world, are The Other and even The Enemy. They're gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. They're immigrants. They're people of color. They have families formed by adoption and love rather than by blood. They do good work through government agencies that may not exist six months from now. They live with pre-existing medical conditions they may lose their insurance for. They live and work in the inner cities, in places our new President-Elect describes as lawless jungles.

Last night, half the country told my friends that they can't be sure of their welcome here. That this is not their home. But this is their home, and this is my home and this is your home and for God's sake — literally, for God's sake — isn't that what America is supposed to be about?

This is still our home. The important, essential thing for all of us to do in the weeks and months ahead is to remember that and to behave that way. Say hello to your neighbors. Offer help to people who look like they need it. Volunteer. Join up. Speak out. Today, right now, look up the names and addresses of your Representative, your Senators, your local lawmakers and send them a note to say, "Here's who I am, here's what I care about." Seriously, introduce yourself. That's what I plan to do this morning.

We still have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. It has not perished.

These are organizations that can use your money in the months ahead:

American Civil Liberties Union
Matthew Shepard Foundation
National Council of La Raza
NAACP
NPR
Planned Parenthood
Southern Poverty Law Center

Hug your friends and family. I leave you with the wisdom of Lou Reed:

What's good?
Life's good
But not fair at all.

Books 2-4: TRUE GRIT, I WISH I HAD A RED DRESS, and A TIME OF TORMENT

I've only recently come up with a good answer to the question, "What do you do?" That answer is, "I help people say what they mean." That's a big net that includes editing, writing, public relations and more — but it starts with listening, reading, and paying attention.

The "paying attention" is often the hardest part. As we gasp to the end of campaign season, I'm so distracted I feel hunted. Thank God I have stacks of books to retreat to. I'd have been very happy as a medieval monk, spending a month illuminating a single page.

It's November 6, and I've read four books of my 30-book challenge. The fourth book counts as both a reread and a book for work, which I'll explain below.

Book: TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis (1968) 
Format: Trade paperback

Owned Since: October 2016

How had I not read this book before? It was on the "supplemental reading" bookshelf of my fifth-grade classroom at Baylake Pines Elementary, I'm sure, along with Julie of the Wolves and Across Five Aprils and Where the Lilies Bloom and Island of the Blue Dolphins. Why didn't I read it? Did I assume that because it was a Western, it wasn't a book for girls? I am disappointed and indignant with my 10-year-old self, and can only imagine how different my life might have been if I'd read this book at a time when Mattie Ross could have been my role model. The 14-year-old narrator of this book pays attention to everything, has an opinion about most of it, and tells it all with every confidence in the reader's interest. Hell, it's not too late for her to be my role model now. Many thanks to Tommy Pluck for sending me this book.

Book: I WISH I HAD A RED DRESS by Pearl Cleage (2001)
Format: Trade paperback
Owned Since: October 2016

Last month I was part of a Facebook round-robin book giveaway that caused some anxiety and consternation among friends who groused about it being yet another stupid pyramid scheme. Well, yes, it was. But I got more than two dozen books out of it, and have since sent a couple of boxes of books off to friends who weren't as lucky, and have already read two books I would not otherwise have picked up. This was one of those books. Pearl Cleage is a playwright whose first novel, WHAT LOOKS LIKE CRAZY ON AN ORDINARY DAY, was an Oprah Book Club pick. I haven't read it, but this novel, her second, is set in the same world. It too is told in the first person, by Joyce, who runs a community center for at-risk teenaged girls and mothers in Idlewild, Michigan, which was a premier resort for the African-American community in the era of Jim Crow. Joyce is a widow striving to live a free life; I WISH I HAD A RED DRESS is a lovely book about how she manages to find new love and help her girls become independent women. I do wish I'd read the first book first, but it wasn't essential for this story.

Book: A TIME OF TORMENT by John Connolly (2016)
Format: PDF
Owned Since: October 2016 as is

It has been my privilege to work with John Connolly for several years now, offering general assistance and obnoxious advice on his extraordinary range of projects. A TIME OF TORMENT is the 14th novel to feature his tormented detective, Charlie Parker (or 15th, if you count the novella "The Reflecting Eye"). This read was both a re-read and for work, as I proofread the galleys for the UK paperback edition, to be published in February 2017. This is a series that continues to evolve in marvelous ways, and as familiar as I was with the story, it still gave me chills. (And a running joke about bathroom keys actually gets funnier every time I read it.)

Proofreading is not like other kinds of reading. It's more like sifting rice through a sieve, looking for stones. In fact, if you let yourself be drawn into a story while you're proofreading, you miss things. If you're paying attention to the story, your brain skims over mistakes and sees what you expect to see. Proofreading requires tricks, especially when it's a text you've seen several times, as this one was for me. I went through it forward, then I went through it backward. I moved from chapter heading to chapter heading to make sure the numbers were sequential and none were skipped. I searched for one particular character name that I knew had been misspelled in the galleys of the hardcover (where we did catch it).

It is almost impossible to publish a 125,000-word novel that is entirely free of errors. Some readers get indignant about this, and I share that indignation in the rare cases where it's obvious no one edited the book at all (a Southern literary novel I read last year, for example, where the main character mysteriously became ten whole years younger between one chapter and another). The goal is perfection, of course; but two or three typos in a 125,000-word book is an error rate most airline pilots would be okay with.

Book 1: ANNE FRANK: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

Book: ANNE FRANK, The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose (2009) 
Format: E-book
Owned Since: March 2015

E-books are not my preferred reading format. Batteries die, which is incredibly frustrating, and I hate reading on my phone. But I get at least two daily emails notifying me of cheap e-books, and at least once a week I click the "Buy" button. The Kindle app and the iBooks app are both loaded to both my iPad and my iPhone, and I'm afraid to tally up the number of unread books in my virtual libraries. They're all books I want to read, and I tell myself I'll get to them eventually.

Francine Prose's ANNE FRANK was one of those books. I'm glad I finally got to it. It should go without saying that no one should read this book without reading some edition of Anne Frank's diary first, whether that's THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, originally published in 1947 (but not in the US until 1952, for reasons Prose explains), or the revised/expanded DEFINITIVE EDITION published in 1995.

I first read the original diary when I was ten or eleven — that would have been fifth or seventh grade — and while it was on a couple of "suggested reading" lists for classes in high school and college, I never took a course that taught it. I've never seen the theatrical adaptation, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett; and my own mother warned me off the 1959 film version, even though Shelley Winters won an Oscar for her portrayal of Mrs. Van Daan. I've reread THE DIARY several times over the years, and always felt a need to preserve that experience as mine, personally, without any outsiders telling me what to think of it or how to feel about it.

Francine Prose's book was an exception worth making. She gives us Anne Frank the teenager, Anne Frank the writer, Anne Frank the legend and ultimately Anne Frank the industry, walking us from Anne's own determination to be taken seriously as a writer through the wonderful and strange long-term effects her work has had around the world. Prose looks closely at the nature of memoir — as Anne's book ultimately was, since she rewrote the earlier entries herself over the last year of her life — and the difficulty of separating the writer from the work, even after the writer is gone.

Writing is a deeply personal act that creates something separate from the writer, something intended for strangers to read and react to. A writer can't always anticipate a reader's reaction, and certainly can't control it; and yet that writer-reader interaction is so intimate that the better the writer is, the more the reader feels he or she knows the author, and possibly someone the writer knows the reader as well. (See: Stephen King's MISERY.)

We can't know Anne Frank, but Prose shows us how the very action of writing her life down changed her. Measuring things, naming things, changes them; it's a fundamental law of the universe. Anne Frank would have changed more as she found new things to name and measure, and it's still a gaping wound in human history that she didn't get that opportunity.

One problem with reading is that it leads to more reading. A casual reference to Carson McCullers and her husband reminds me that I know almost nothing about Carson McCullers — I had not even known she was married — and makes me think I really ought to read something of hers beyond A Member of the Wedding, which I disliked when I had to read it in seventh grade. I also remember that Flannery O’Connor hated McCullers’ last book, which leads to the thought that I really need to reread The Habit of Being. If I read McCullers, which one should I read?

NaNoReadMo: 30 Books in 30 Days

Many people I know are starting National Novel Writing Month today. To them I say good luck, God bless and — how many books have you read lately?

At one point in my life, when I commuted by bus and Metro, I regularly read more than 200 books a year. Even after I started driving — and then even after I started working from home — I regularly read more than 150 books a year. Working at The (late, lamented) Mystery Bookstore boosted that number, but I've always been open-minded about where my books come from: bookstores, libraries, publishers, friends, Goodwill and yes, even Amazon.

Last year, for the first time in my adult life, my reading list didn't break 100 — and that was even after I let myself count everything I'd read for work, including galleys I proofread and manuscripts I edited. I topped out at 99, with an advance reading copy of the delightful BE FRANK WITH ME by Julia Claiborne Johnson. (Read it, it'll make you happy.)

This year my pace is even worse: I finished my 73rd book of the year, Thomas Mullen's DARKTOWN, yesterday, and again that list includes proofread galleys and edited manuscripts. If I keep reading at this rate, I won't even break 90 by the end of the year.

What happened to me? I got a smartphone. Apps now fill the waiting time I used to spend reading. Waiting for a bus? I'll check in with my virtual pals on Nats Twitter. Stuck on the Metro? Let's level up on Candy Crush. Train to New York? Somebody linked to a great article in The Atlantic . . . and am I caught up on the Wittertainment podcast?

I'm frittering my reading life away, and this year in particular the election news has become a malign drug. I know who I'm voting for. I know her adversary is a candidate of unprecedented venality and ignorance. I don't need to be any better informed about that person than I already am, and it's literally giving me nightmares.

So for the month of November, I'm changing course. I'm retreating into words on the page, and the goal is to read 30 books by the end of the month. That's a lot, but it's doable if I stay off social media and allow myself a few semi-cheats:

1. Three of these books can be work-related (galleys I'm proofreading or manuscripts I'm editing)
2. Three of these books can be re-reads
3. A book longer than 500 pages counts as two books (I'm making this exception specifically for James Michener's TEXAS, which someone sent me as part of last month's book swap)
4. Three of these books can be young-adult or children's books

I'll keep track of my reading here. Please keep me honest if you see me hanging out on Twitter or Facebook. I'm not asking for reading recommendations, because I have more than 30 unread books on my dining room table right this minute. (Apologies to my housemate.) If you've read any of the books I post about here, please do leave your thoughts in the comments section. Half the fun of reading is being able to talk to other people about what you've read.

Onward . . .

On Letting Go

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 

So many things seem filled with the intent 

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.  

— Elizabeth Bishop 

It’s human nature to hang on. I’ve never been an accumulator of things, and I’m actively stupid about money, but that does not seem to make it any easier to let go. I made Dizzy, my dog, live too long in pain and confusion because I was too sad to let him go; delaying the sorrow didn’t make it any easier, and might have made it worse. I’ve stayed in jobs too long. I’ve lived in apartments too long. I’ve kept trying in relationships where it was obvious to everyone but me that I was wasting my time. I can look back on all these situations and see exactly where I should have walked away, but each new situation is just as hard as all the last ones were.

Last weekend I tagged along with friends to the House of Broel, a unique New Orleans structure that combines an events hall with a dollhouse museum and an exhibit of designer dresses, in a Garden District mansion that was built and expanded before The War. House tours are available by appointment only, and conducted by the home’s owner, Countess Bonnie Broel — the “Countess” is a legacy from her father, who fled Russia during the revolution.

Countess Broel is a small, glamorous, brisk woman of a certain age who distills everything that’s great about New Orleans, and possibly everything that’s great about Americans. She used to live in the House of Broel, and she used to run a couture business from its first floor. Her husband left her just before Katrina, and Katrina wiped out her business. She moved to the property’s carriage house, created a family foundation to preserve the home and its collections, wrote an autobiography and is now selling three of her dollhouses in order to protect the property after her death. She is energetic and gallant and shows no outward sign of mourning the three dollhouses for sale; she cares only that they bring in enough money to justify their loss.

The dollhouses are extraordinary. The website says they “must be seen to be believed,” and that is the literal truth. No description could do them justice. Constructed over a period of fifteen years, they are full of painstaking detail: miniature furniture, rugs, artworks, knick-knacks, and beautifully costumed figures who live imaginary lives in their rooms. Countess Broel told us that she’d begun creating the dollhouses as a project with her young son, and then become — well, she might not have used the word “obsessed,” but that’s the word that seems to fit.

The masterpiece of the dollhouse collection is a vast recreation of a Russian dacha that runs along one full wall of the second floor’s hallway, and stands at least ten feet high. The Countess said she had wanted to imagine what her father’s life had been like before he left Russia, and the result is a combination of Tolstoy and the Arabian nights, topped by an attic observatory with a tiny telescope and astrolabe.

The collection moved me, and the thought that the Countess is starting to sell it off moves me even more. The dollhouses represent so many possible lives, so many imaginary homes that are permanently luxurious and happy, never deserted and never torn apart by storms. But she seems content with her decision, satisfied with the thought of trading these precious creations for something that matters more to her.

This is what I focus on, what is directly relevant to me at this point in my life, as I too contemplate letting go of some things: what, if anything, am I trading those things for? As I let go, is it loss, or is it more like a trapeze I relinquish so I can grab on to the next one? Does letting go of one thing mean I get to keep something else, and if so, what might that be?

I don’t mean to be cryptic, only to find the universal in some specific questions we all eventually have to wrestle with. I’m grateful to Bonnie Broel and her collections for giving me a prism through which to consider them. And I wonder what my own dollhouses might look like.

Photo from the House of Broel Dollhouse Museum Gallery.

On Homeland

It’s fifteen years today since the United States suffered its first coordinated attack on our continent. Fourteen years and eleven months since the United States invaded Afghanistan; fourteen years and ten months since Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act; thirteen years and ten months since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security; thirteen years and six months since we started combat operations in Iraq; five years and four months since US forces killed Osama bin Laden.

My 13-year-old nephews and 10-year-old niece have never lived in a time when the United States was not at war. They have no memory of a time when you could drive past or even park in front of the White House. They have grown up in a world of metal detectors and “If you see something, say something.” See what has never been specified, nor has say what, nor has to whom.

In this new world, “what” is anything strange or other — and “strange or other” is proving itself to be the ultimate test of the American ideal.

Last month I had the opportunity to go to Belfast, and through the generosity of a friend took a Black Taxi tour of the political murals in the city’s Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. A steel wall runs through the city, still, dividing Protestant and Catholic territory. Catholics are no longer prohibited from living on the Protestant side — but the murals, and the sectarian flags that fly on almost every lamppost, send the clear message: You are not welcome here.

As an American Catholic of Irish descent, I felt those flags as a warning.

I always knew, growing up white in the South, that the Confederate flag was offensive. But until I saw the green flag commemorating the centennial of the Battle of the Somme, and the white Ulster Banner, and the blue UFF flag, I did not understand that the Confederate flag is not just a symbol, but a message. That message is: this is our country, not yours. This is our history, not yours. You are a trespasser.

What could possibly be more un-American than that? The United States was founded as a nation whose citizens are bound not by ethnicity or any inherited attributes, not by religion, not by economic status, but by mutual commitment to shared ideals — those ideals being not only life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, but the right of every citizen to participate in government, to own property, to move freely within the country, to speak without fear of government reprisal, and to expect equal justice under the law.

New American citizens swear to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” The very first amendment to the Constitution specifies that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It is literally in the DNA of our nation.

With the few exceptions of entirely pure-blooded native Americans, all of us are descended from people who chose that American ideal and were lucky enough to find welcome here — or from people who were brought to this country without their consent, enslaved, and left to survive as best they could after liberation. To pretend that the descendants of willing immigrants and the descendants of enslaved people experience the United States in the same way is delusional — but we can still move together to embrace that ideal going forward, can’t we?

Regardless of how we got here, we’re all Americans now. And being American has nothing to do with your religion or your ethnicity or your socioeconomic standard, but with whether you agree on the fundamental rights of humanity as laid out by our Constitution.

This ideal has been a beacon to the world for 240 years. If we let it be chipped away because of the actions of 19 terrorists fifteen years ago, then they won after all.

On Storytelling and Tragedy

This morning, as the East Coast wakes up to realize last night's news from Paris was not just a terrible dream, I am thinking once again of W.H. Auden's poem about Bruegel's painting of Icarus, "Musée des Beaux Arts." I know I've written about this before.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Today I have laundry to do. I have a ticket to Georgetown Basketball's home opener, and was planning to get there early enough to snag a Jack the Bulldog bobblehead. I have a ton of work to do before I flee the country next week: a newsletter to write for one client, a Wikipedia bio for another, four (!) manuscripts to be edited, and the usual social media stuff, which includes promoting a client's book event, happening tomorrow.

It all feels a little trivial, and yet that is exactly what it is not. Like Brueghel's ship, we have somewhere to get to, and sail calmly on. And the book stuff, especially, is not trivial, because storytelling in situations like this is what heals us and keeps us going.

In the days to come we will hear stories of kindness and heroism. These will be the stories we remember, the stories that survive. We repeat the stories that remind us of our best selves, we create the stories that describe the world as we wish it could be. Nothing, nothing is more important than that. We can be better than we are. The story does not end, as long as we keep telling it.

Tell someone that story today. Tell yourself.

Social Media for Readers — The Basics

A while ago, I posted a list of basic social media guidelines for authors. This morning, looking over a few clients' social media feeds, I feel the need to post some guidelines for readers.

Before you get all indignant and worked up, I'll reassure you: I think it's wonderful that social media lets readers connect with authors. As a reader, I love being able to keep track of upcoming books and events via my favorite authors' Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. I know authors who have built hilarious, caring communities online, and when it all works well, it benefits everyone. I know lots of authors who have made personal, in-real-life friends among readers via social media.

As in any social setting, however, missteps are bound to occur. I'm willing to give the vast majority of people the benefit of the doubt, and assume that when people do say or do something inappropriate, it's not from malice, but because they don't know any better.

All of the following guidelines are based on the fact that social media interactions are public. Having someone you admire Tweet back at you, or reply to a comment on Facebook, can feel like getting a gold star —literally, because that's how you mark a Tweet as a "favorite." That feeling of being noticed, recognized, acknowledged and rewarded is what we're all on social media for. It's lovely, isn't it? There's nothing like it. But this interaction happens on a platform that is open to the entire world. It's not a kiss behind a closet door; it's a high-five on a football field. Therefore, rule #1 is this:

Do not make a comment, post a link or share a photo that the recipient would be uncomfortable receiving in a public place that includes his or her parents, spouse, children, employers and clients. Any public figure's social media account is his or her virtual office. Social media is a dangerous place for private jokes, even with the people you're closest to. 

Do say hello, let the author know if you liked the latest book, ask about upcoming events, post photos taken at public events, ask questions about the book and the characters (respecting concerns about spoilers, below). Do understand that most authors have a full-time job other than writing, so maintaining social media networks might be something they have time for only after everything else — after they've gotten home from work, met their daily word count, had dinner with their families, put the kids to bed, etc., etc. Please be understanding if timely responses aren't always possible.

And a few corollaries:

• Spoilers. Personally, I don't care about spoilers. I was lucky enough to see both The Crying Game and The Sixth Sense before anyone told me the endings, and if someone out there still doesn't know that Keyser Soze is [REDACTED], I don't feel responsible for keeping them in the dark. But basic courtesies apply, especially in situations where a book's publishing date varies by countries. Social media is international. If you wouldn't have wanted to know before you read the book, don't mention it in a public electronic forum without marking it as a spoiler. How do you do that on Facebook or Twitter? Good question. You could try starting the post with the word SPOILER in large angry letters, then hitting a couple of returns before posting the meat of your comments. Or you could ask the page administrator to set up a private area for discussion; Facebook lets you do that. Or you could wait a year.
• Corrections. It happens to me, too: errors in spelling, punctuation, timelines, geography, word usage, etc. jump off the page and sometimes pull me out of the story. I hate when that happens. But it does happen, and in a book of 125,000 words, it might happen more than once. (And as I always say, most heart surgeons would be happy with a rate of two errors per 125,000 words.) If it really, really, really bothers you and you think it might bother other people too, it might be possible to correct the text for the paperback edition or the e-book. In that case, the polite thing to do is to send an email to the author via his or her website. Almost every author on Facebook will have a personal website that lets you do this. Better yet, send an email to the book's publisher. Leaving these corrections on someone's public Facebook wall, or Tweeting them in the public newsfeed, is the online equivalent of standing up in a cafeteria and announcing that someone has a mysterious stain on their trousers. 
• Promoting your own book/services. It's rude to promote yourself on someone else's professional page or news feed, regardless of the circumstance. Don't do it.
• Demanding quid-pro-quo. Following someone on Twitter or Facebook does not obligate them to follow you back, or to like your page. If you're following people on Twitter or liking their pages solely in an attempt to get likes and follows for yourself, you're doing social media wrong. You might benefit from my earlier post. 
• Harassment/Stalking/Trolling. Everybody on social media knows someone who's left a network because it became too unfriendly or scary a place. Some people, sad to say, actually enjoy that. If you're a troll, you know that you are, and this post isn't for you. You already believe the world's a rotten place, and you want the online community to be just as rotten. Know this, though: most of us disagree with you. 

Angels Unaware

Yesterday, I stiffed Jesus. And I maybe, possibly, was the victim of a con artist. Both of these things may be true.

I had gone up to New York for a couple of days to see people who were in town for Thrillerfest, the annual gathering of the International Thriller Writers. It was a good time, but a lot of travel for a relatively quick visit. New York was hot and crowded and I have lost another small chunk of my field of vision, so just getting around the city is tenser than it used to be: I walk in front of people, I can't see people who are right in front of me (hi, Mark!), and that kind of concentrated socializing is exhausting when I'm used to spending days alone in front of a computer.

So when I got off the bus last night in Arlington, trudging into the Rosslyn Metro for the last leg home, I was tired and cranky and even a little bus-sick. A large woman about my age, dressed nicely with some dramatic eyeliner, was sitting with a cane right outside the Metro entrance.

"Excuse me," she said. "Do you live here? Are you from here?"

"Yes," I said.

"Can you talk to me for a minute?" she asked, so I stopped.

On the verge of tears, she told me a long and complicated story I had trouble following. She had gotten into a car accident that morning; she had gone to work, on a Saturday, at a Department of Commerce office in north Arlington. She had recently moved to this area from Atlanta, and was living with her mother in St. Charles, MD, a town so far from DC that I might not even call it an exurb. The bus to St. Charles wasn't running on the weekend, she said, and she was stranded. She needed $89 and change, an oddly specific number, to get a cab driver to take her home. She didn't have access to her bank account, which was in Atlanta. She had bone cancer, she said, which was why she had the cane.

I had a dollar in my wallet. I told her so. "There's an ATM right in there," she said. "I'll pay you back."

I remembered a time I had been stranded at an airport at the end of a trip, without enough money to get my car out of airport parking. My parents had bailed me out that time, and the manager of the airport hotel had let me eat at the breakfast buffet while I waited for the money to hit my account.

"I can give you $40," I said.

She walked with me to the ATM, and I took out $60 — that's what the ATM quick-withdrawal option dispenses, so I just hit that button. I gave it to her with my business card, and she said she'd pay me back. I wished her luck and went down the escalator to catch my own train. She had told me her name, but I can't remember it.

This morning, I wish I could. I wonder whether and how she got home. And I wonder why I didn't just give her $100. I could have. It's not money I can easily spare; a freelancer's life is a constant scramble, and this is the first year in 15 years of self-employment that I have any breathing room at all.

But, but, but. Jesus talked in parables, but on this question, he was absolutely clear. "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in . . . Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." 

It's actually none of my business whether this woman was truly in need, or a scam artist. She presented herself to me as someone in distress, someone in need. She asked me, personally, for help. It was in my power to help her and I did it halfway. 

I don't feel great about this. I want to be the person who would rather get ripped off than turn her back on someone in trouble. I have tunnel vision in more ways than one, and I don't always see when the people closest to me need help and can't or won't ask. I'm going to be thinking about this encounter for a long time, and wondering what a whole-hearted response to that woman would have been. 

Because America (no, really)

My younger sisters and their families came up to Washington to celebrate Independence Day this weekend. It's something I had come to take for granted in the years after college, something that was at best irrelevant to me and at worst an inconvenience (tourists on the Metro, traffic, loud noises from fireworks I couldn't see). But yesterday morning we all headed into our nation's capital in the pouring rain, hoping to see a reading of the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives.

A woman on the street told us the reading had been cancelled for security concerns. I hope that's not true, and I couldn't find anything in this morning's paper to confirm that. Nevertheless, the line to get into the National Archives wrapped around the building, so we worked our way over to the part of the Mall where the Folklife Festival would be starting in another hour or two.

We had forgotten about the National Independence Day Parade, which was starting from 7th & Constitution at 11:45. It takes a while to get a parade that size organized, so we walked among floats and bands and people inflating giant balloons. The rain backed off, and everyone seemed happy to be there. The bands had come from all over the country — it's an honor but it's also hugely expensive, and I wondered how many bake sales, car washes, wrapping paper drives, etc. had gone into those appearances.

In our neverending political cycle, we hear angry people talk about "taking this country back." As I walked past a float sponsored by the Sikhs of America, I wondered, not for the first time: back from whom? Back to what?

The Sikhs were walking the Smokey the Bear balloon, and a Vietnamese-American group was walking the giant American eagle. One float carried clowns (Coulro-Americans?) and another carried cloggers. A Chinese-American group marched behind a man on horseback, dressed as the Lone Ranger. The Salvation Army Band led things off, and the Society for Krishna Consciousness followed about half a mile behind. I've never felt so American in my life, so joyful to be part of this nutty country where we are bound not by genetics or heritage or history, but by belief — belief in the self-evident truth that all are created equal, endowed by the Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Start with those, and the right to walk down Constitution Avenue holding a giant inflated orange lizard goes without saying.

This country has never been about "back" to anything. The writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would have mocked the idea of "returning" to anything. They set out to create something entirely new, and they expected that it would continue to evolve as a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

I empathize more than I want to with some of the people who talk about "taking the country back." Some of them have been friends of mine since high school or college. They did everything the way they were supposed to: they stepped up and took responsibility when they might not have wanted to, they went to school and applied for jobs and paid their taxes, and watched other people get chosen and promoted above them, including some they consider stupider, lazier and less qualified. Today's Republican Party offers them the fantasy of a time when they could reap the rewards of that struggle, but the ugly truth is that time never existed. The 1950s era of prosperity? Funded by the GI bill and VA housing loans, with a top income tax rate above 90%.

Growth and prosperity have always, always been driven by the people who bring something new to the party, who don’t do what they’re supposed to, who challenge received wisdom and are willing to take a risk. Some of those people were marching in yesterday's parade, and I was proud to be cheering them from the sidewalk.