Donna Levin’s Blog

            I once heard a famous and beloved writer give her audience this advice:  “Just write one true sentence after another.”  The gasp was followed by applause.

            Someone may have held a common law copyright on that advice, but it must be in the public domain by now.  The original quote, or some form of it, is usually attributed to Hemingway, but he’s one of those people like Churchill and Oscar Wilde who said so many witty things that if you don’t know who said it, you can throw it in his file and no one will think any the less of you for it.

            As advice, though, it’s pretty useless.

            One true sentence?

            That’s setting the bar pretty low.  “I own two cats.”  That is a true sentence, yet Judith Regan is not knocking on my door.  “I recently dyed my hair red.”  That is another true sentence, though I don’t know why I’m advertising it.

            The advice write one true sentence has an irresistible resonance to it; it sends the shiver of recognition of truth through the listener.  One has the feeling of having heard something deeply meaningful, something – well, true.  If you could just tap into the reservoir of magic, the wisdom, the God-given ability that the speaker of this advice possesses, one would achieve the same success.  We’re not talking about monetary success, or film adaptations, or big-budget tours, though of course all those will follow, to the modest writer’s humble dismay.  We’re talking about producing something deathless and profound, a work of fiction that will touch the hearts of generations to come.

            Did I mention that I have two cats?  One is black and white and the other is orange and white, so I call them my “Halloween cats.”  Isn’t that adorable?  Am I read for my Michiko Kakutani review yet?

            Since obviously my cats’ coloring isn’t what either Papa Hemingway or the famous-and-beloved-writer-who-shall-remain-nameless had in mind, we are still left to ponder the meaning of “one true sentence.”  I shall sum it up:  It is a noble goal, but useless as advice.  It’s like telling young writers to “write better,” or to “be funnier.”  It’s like that line in the movie Amadeus when Jeffrey Jones tells Tom Hulce (in the role of Mozart) that he doesn’t like his music because it has “too many notes.”

            Useless advice is all that some accomplished writers have to offer.  It’s sad that our culture of celebrity has blurred the distinction between the good writer and the good writing teacher.  The two roles aren’t unrelated.  It’s hard to imagine the writing teacher who hasn’t been in the trenches herself, digging for that one true sentence.  But it’s not as difficult to imagine the bestselling author who, though she works very hard at her craft, doesn’t really know how she does it.

            What writers need is specifics.  Examples.  Illustrations from other works.  Crazy ideas flung out in hopes of triggering the crazier, but personal and original, ideas that have been lying just under the surface of the writer’s consciousness.  The definition of terms like point of view and narrative hook.

            It’s too bad that teaching writing, like almost all teaching, is such a thankless and undervalued calling.  Everyone knows that we all remember both the inspiring and the personality-crushing teachers we had from kindergarten through graduate school.  And here our children often spend more time with their teachers than they do with their parents.

            I digress, as is my specialty.   Forget the kids for a minute; I can’t solve all the world’s problems in one post.  Let’s get back to fiction.  “You can’t make a writer out of a born druggist,” Wallace Stegner said.  Even here my research has revealed that Stegner was quoting Ring Lardner, but he went on to say what most writing teachers would agree upon: that talented writers are delicate seeds that must be watered, watched over, given sunlight and love, in order to grow into the mighty trees and lovely flowers that shelter and delight us.

            If you can’t make a writer out of a born druggist, neither can you make a good writing teacher out of every good writer.  When we try, we get self-important pronouncements like, “Just write one true sentence after another.”

            Few artists have risen to prominence on their reputations as teachers.  The only two who come to mind are acting coaches: Uta Haagen and Lee Strasberg.  Writers like Stegner and John Barth, though highly regarded teachers, are known because of their writing.  I’ve seen a few published writers who were not just not good teachers, but who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in kicking the chair out from under writers who were starting out and at their most vulnerable.

The man I will always remember as my first and most influential mentor, Leonard Bishop, published many novels but is virtually unknown today.  Mostly these mentors stand in the wings, invisible and uncredited.  On some days coaching is a noble calling and the results are the reward.  On others, it’s just a dirty job that someone has to do.

            I will conclude with three true sentences:  Writing is hard.  There is help out there.  You can find it.

            And a request: Don’t forget the people who gave you that help, especially if it was more than just a platitude.

            Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was an icon and martyr of the early feminist movement.  The wife of the Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was the author of the masterpiece The Great Gatsby, in that role Zelda embodies the fate of the talented woman of her day and many thousands of days before.  According to this version of her life, she was indoctrinated throughout her youth to play the role of wife and mother while remaining a frivolous Southern Belle.  The mighty river of her own talent became a tributary that fed into the ocean of her husband’s genius, where it dissipated, unnoticed.

            An earlier, but now politically incorrect view of Zelda’s life, was that she was a mental case (literally) who, though providing Scott with a role model for his deathless heroines (most memorably Daisy Fay Buchanan from The Great Gatsby), was herself a mediocre would-be artist who envied his success and the attention it brought him, and blamed him for her failure to become a star in her own right.     

Ironically it was F. Scott Fitzgerald himself who said that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”  I think both versions of Zelda’s life are true, and I can still function.  More or less.     

Zelda Fitzgerald published one novel, Save Me the Waltz, and it is not a well-written book.  That is putting it kindly.  Whether she could have become a good novelist eventually is unknown, but Save Me definitely challenges the belief that her husband plagiarized her work, as she claimed, though he might indeed have quoted from her diary – and show me the novelist who hasn’t reproduced the dialogue of his family and/or friends.           

At the height of the Zelda cult, some even maintained that she ghostwrote Scott’s fiction.  Apparently she did publish several short stories under his name.  Why?  Maybe it was because Scott was so threatened by her gift (there’s plenty of testimony that he was jealous and possessive of her, and liked the spotlight for himself) that he would only “permit” her to publish if he got the credit.  But I see at least one other possible reason: that the stories were only publishable under the name of an established author, and that he was letting her use his reputation to help her gain some recognition.  I doubt that the true author’s identity was kept secret among their friends, or could have been kept secret within the industry.

Whatever you or I feel about Zelda, we’d probably agree that hers was a tragic life, ending at 48 in a fire in one of the mental institutions in which she spent many of her later years.  I even heard a rumor some years ago that she might have started that fire herself, but I’ve never found any substantiation for that accusation; on the contrary, there seems to be evidence pointing to another arsonist.  It’s just one more example of the way that Zelda was, and remains, such a magnet for our own fears and fantasies.

And yet, even as I write “hers was a tragic life,” doubt creeps in.  Zelda was a legend in her own time, often enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, moved in the highest literary circles and was adored by a handsome, famous man.  Wouldn’t some of us make a Faustian bargain, trading in our minivans and snack week sign up sheets, for a couple of decades of the life she lived?

I said that Save Me the Waltz is a bad novel.  It is also an autobiographical one – so much so that today’s publishers would likely call it a memoir.  But late in the book when Zelda’s alter ego, Alabama (the character is named for the state of her birth), develops an interest in ballet dancing, the book suddenly comes to life.  In the parlance of the high school creative writing class, she begins to “show, not tell.”  Through the details of her dance lessons, which extend to the colors of the leotards of the ballet students, I felt her passion tingling through my own ungraceful limbs.           

Zelda found work.           

I read Save Me the Waltz during my high school Hemingway/Fitzgerald phase, which authors are common first loves of the American teen with literary aspirations.  In spite of my tingling limbs I don’t remember if I made the connection between what Zelda described and what I would learn over the years and how grateful I would one day be that I had been born in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century and not the first.  Because I would have been another casualty, like my mother, like my grandmother – women whose work eluded them.  Yes, many women found recognition in many fields long before they had the right to vote.  Edna St. Vincent Millay and Margaret Bourke-White come to mind, since they were more or less contemporaries of Zelda’s.  But they had far more than the average share of courage and self-esteem.  Most of us come closer to what the Wizard of Oz says about himself in Stephen Schwartz’s musical Wicked, “I knew what I was/One life’s dime-a-dozen mediocrities.”           

 “Mediocre” is too harsh a word.  Most of us just aren’t geniuses.  But we deserve work, too.           

Work didn’t save Zelda Sayre.  It was too little, too late, and with too many forces already fighting against her from within and without.  But it can save a lot of us.  As they say in the A-1 Sauce commercials, “Yeah, it’s just that important.”

This morning I have dropped kids off at camp, been to Starbucks, donated a beater car to charity, confirmed several appointments, washed a load of towels, and written e-mails to people I barely know.

Maybe it sounds familiar.  Maybe I just sound like a flake.

The worst thing about writing a novel is that you have so little to show for it in the short-term.  (No, the worst thing is that you might have NOTHING to show for it in the longest possible term, i.e., your life, but that way madness lies.)  At the end of the day, a few paragraphs?  A deep, profound connection with your characters, with the message you want to convey, with the nature of storytelling itself, that will spur you to be a better writer, even if you don’t have more than 100 words of drivel?  And after all, you never know when that drivel will suddenly spark an explosion (or mix a metaphor) and send you flying…  You can’t go flying unless you’re standing on the edge of that cliff.

I guess the caffeine is kicking in after all.  I’d better get on that ship before it sails, even though it might be going nowhere.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner said that the best job for a writer to have was a spouse willing to support him or her.  Lest any of his readers feel guilty about such an arrangement, he went on to say that the husband or wife in question should feel it was a privilege to get that close to the creative process.

I find this proposition unrealistic, irritating, and most of all arrogant.  I have also discovered it true.  Our toe-the-line line here in Teaching Writing World is that you can always find time to write if you want to badly enough.  That’s our story — my story — and I’ll be sticking to it, at least.

There is also real danger in having too much time to write.  I’m only good for a few solid hours of work a day, and I’m happy when I produce that.  There are exceptions at both ends: I can be too blocked to face the computer at all or, for rare but very precious periods, I can become absorbed for such long periods that when I finally do stop,  I find it difficult to carry on an actual conversation.  I picture the other person’s words on a white screen, and I line-edit as they speak, putting in the commas and coming up with more specific words to replace the vague adjective “great.”

But over the years I’ve learned to be both grateful and satisfied for three productive hours — and if I get up to four or five I’m on a roll.

When I was single, childless, and my father was supporting me in style — yep, I had it sweet, and I knew it, I just didn’t know HOW sweet — and I would tell people that I wrote three to four hours a day they would almost invariably ask, “What do you do the rest of the day?”  I was immediately on the defensive — yet I had no good answer.   What was I doing?  I had a moderate social life (long gone now, as my evenings are spent helping with two of the kids’ homework and the two hours of begging the other two to go to bed); I did some volunteer work; I took some photography classes; I went swimming every day.  I do not remember having time on my hands.  This was my life for about three to four years, and I remember it as a full, active period.  Maybe because of what one friend said when I complained about how other people made me feel defensive about all the supposedly free time I had.  “Writing is what the day is about.”  Blessed to be able to write without worrying about money, I still found that I had to guard my time.  My aunt, for example, was a lawyer working in the Financial District.  She was eager for me to come have lunch with her every couple of weeks.  Why not?  She needed a break in her day; we’d always enjoyed each other’s company.  But what to her was popping out for an hour for that much-needed break was to me day-buster. 

If you are lucky enough to have that spouse or parent or windfall from an Internet start-up to allow you unlimited time to write, be very, very grateful.  If someone is supporting you, it is not his or her privilege; it is his or her gift.  But don’t let the writers who must balance writing with a day job — and that includes unpaid day jobs, like raising children — make you feel guilty.  Writing is writing.  And by the way, life isn’t fair.

So much has been written about Harry Potter that I wanted to stay away from the subject.  I will follow any fashion trend as automatically as my Word spellchecker underlines “teh” in red, but in other areas I resist the popular.

But I’ve been doing some research, of a sort, on the series, for reasons unimportant to expound upon.  I’ve read dozens of articles about its literary merits (or lack thereof) and speculation (for speculation it is) as to its appeal.  I’ve read so much that I feel spurred to comment.  Fulfilling the urge to comment is why God gave us the ability to create blogs.  As for my qualifications, I read the first four books aloud to my son and then, since he had grown too old for Mommy to read to him, I read the fifth book on my own.  I’ve never bothered to pick up Book Six (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), but I dutifully read the synopsis online.  As of this writing the final book is just short of three weeks away from publication, so I won’t be able to voice an opinion as to how the series concludes.  I am curious — but not curious enough to read it.  

Are the books well-written or cliched?  Do they intelligently pay homage to ancient mythologies or are they “derivative,” as some critics claim?  (Talk about a fine line!)  Are they grounded in a morality that gives them weight, or are they pure fluff?  Why do grown-ups, as well as children and teens, like to read them?

Many educators and parents are just happy that Harry is getting their kids to read.  Others (a minority, but a vociferous one) believe that the series corrupts young minds, even to the extent of seducing them into Satanism.  (I’m scared of those people.)

All these issues have been so incredibly over-discussed that I won’t even weigh in.   I simply mention them to prove that I really did all that research.  Also, I already slipped up and weighed in on one, a little, and I might do it again.

Phenoms themselves follow a pattern.  (Malcolm Gladwell studied the phenom phenom in The Tipping Point.)  Something — a TV show, a book, a catchphrase like “Got Milk?” — resonates with a relatively few, but crucial, people who act as hubs for a many-spoked wheel.  Some years back a very, very bad novel called The Bridges of Madison County became a bestseller.  Every writer I knew was killing himself or herself trying to figure out why this bad book was popular.  I don’t know how that phenom started, but I believe I know how it became a phenom:  Most people only read a few books a year, or even just one or two.  And what book or two are they going to read?  The one they’ve heard about.  That year it was Bridges.  And they tell their friends, and they tell their friends…  It works like nuclear fission, and from a purely cultural standpoint, it has the same mighty power for good or evil.

I enjoyed the books when I read them, enough, as I mentioned, to read my son’s copy of Pheonix when he was finished with it.   Until today I haven’t asked myself why I stopped.  Today I did, and Self replied, “They were getting repetitive; the novelty had worn off.”

I’ve read everything from a psychoanalytic deconstruction of Harry Potter as Freudian arechetype to paragraphs of blathering hero worship to scathing criticisms of HP as pop icon to fierce and lengthy speculations about what will happen in Book 7.   But no one has made the above observation.  Am I alone in feeling this way?  It would seem so — unless the others who became bored are also too bored to bother joining the hoopla on the web.  As prosaic an addition to the debate it may be, at least it’s new.

The Starter Wife is a beach read. 

I suppose the term “beach read” is fairly self-explanatory.  Nevertheless it is based on the assumption that people prefer less thought-provoking fiction while sitting on the beach or flying on a plane than they do at other times.  But exactly what other times?  Before going to bed, or while waiting for the bus?  If you’re not in the process of getting a graduate degree in literature, fiction-reading is usually recreational.  I can think of very few situations in which I would read a book that I don’t want to read, and most of those wouldn’t apply to most people — for example,  I was a book reviewer for a San Francisco newspaper for a long time, and once I accepted an assignment I was pretty much obligated to fulfill it, even if, 50 pages in, I was slogging through the mud of dull writing.  Even when I was in a book group (a stimulating, enjoyable group, with intelligent and fun women, but nothing lasts forever in this vale of tears), if I found the chosen book a chore to read, I simply didn’t.  That was the general habit of our members.  That didn’t mean that we didn’t finish books unless we just absolutely adored them, because so much of the fun of book groups is trashing something that Oprah digs.

The point — circuitously made, as usual — is that “beach read” is a misnomer.   If you like a book, you’ll read it, if you don’t, you’ll bail.  At different times you’re in the mood for different writing styles, themes, or subject matter.  Or, in the words of a great ad person whose name I don’t know: “Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don’t.”

When you’re feeling like a nut, and if you’re one of the millions of nuts who are interested in how the movie business works, you might check out Gigi Levangie Granger’s The Starter Wife.  It’s not an insider’s look — it’s more of an outsider-looking-in look, or insider-looking-back look.  Gracie Pollock is “the wife of” (a Hollywood colloquialism) Kenny Pollock, a studio exec, living the good life of the wife of a studio exec, when Kenny asks for a divorce via cell phone.  If Kenny’s staticky cell phone dump is the humiliating part of their break-up, then the scary, and calculated, part is that the Pollocks are still some months shy of their 10th anniversary, at which time the terms of their pre-nuptial agreement would expire, leaving Gracie well provided for, if no longer “the wife of.”

The book proceeds to send-up the lifestyles of the rich, bored, ambitious, shallow, envious and as-beautiful-as-money-can-buy Hollywoodites, while Gracie tries to adjust to her new life as divorcee, single mom, and social outcast.  But after the dramatic set-up, the plot takes on no further momentum for a long time.  Instead, Granger has Gracie bemoan her fate repeatedly while mentally zinging the ludicrous pursuits of the Hollywood wives she left behind.  Lots of bemoaning, lots of zinging.

I liked Gracie anyway.  Maybe it’s because I like to whine a lot myself, but I’d prefer to think it’s because somehow Granger manages to make the complaining seem as though it’s coming from the disembodied voice of herself, the author, rather than from the true, inner Gracie, who, before she married Kenny, was also an author – of children’s books.  Gracie’s sense of humor extends to herself as well as others, and she’s capable of deep affection for her real friends as well as her daughter.  Plus, I’ll warn you, I often like protagonists that other readers find unlikable.

The central problem was that the first half of this overlong-for-what-it-has-to-say book is highly satirical in tone.  I love satire, a la SNL, before it went south.  But pure satire is too distancing to engage me in a novel.

And then, midway through, the tone lurches toward funny-but-serious.  You’d think that would make me happy, and I did become more invested in the story, because the shift in tone coincides with a story finally developing.  But a tried and true principle of novel-writing is that the tone remain consistent.  Tone can be defined, over-simply, as the author’s attitude toward the world she has created.  If that changes, the reader, who has been generous enough to allow that author an opportunity to take her on a journey, finds herself in Seattle with a ticket that says L.A.  Further discussion of tone would go even farther beyond the scope of this review than I already have.

If I have to choose between a promising novel that disappoints, or a lackluster novel that redeems itself, I’ll take the latter, and The Starter Wife is the latter.  Calling the first part lackluster isn’t really fair, anyway.  What it lacks in compelling characters and story complications it makes up for in Hollywood dish.  I would really like to think that all those rich famous people are actually miserable.  I suspect I’m not alone.

By the way, some basic cable channel — TBS, I think — is doing a series based on the book.  I only know this because they have basic cable at the gym, I swear. 

I just came back from a trip to Hawaii.  I’ve been to Hawaii several times — this was my six or seventh visit in this incarnation — but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen the archipelago that comprises our 50th state.  Oh, wow, it’s really beautiful, too.  I remembered that from previous visits, but there’s nothing like seeing it up close and personal.  The sun so warm, the water so blue, the breeze so welcome, the rain so fleeting and refreshing.  The Starbucks on every corner.  It’s America, not paradise.  Oh, and I like Starbucks.  I don’t like the idea of Starbucks, or of any of the photocopied chain retailers that, once inside the door, make you feel you could be in Ohio or Texas or Oregon just as easily as a few hundred yards from Ka’anapali Beach.  But I like familiarity and predictability.  It’s not my most admirable quality.

Once outside of Starbucks, or the hotel bathroom, if you are in Hawaii, you know you are in Hawaii, back with that breeze and ocean and sun I mentioned.  But this isn’t a travelogue.  This is a diatribe against travel, because it doesn’t re-energize my writing, or give me new perspective, or make me more productive.  It interrupts whatever pathetic little momentum  I had.  It takes me out of the mythical world I’m trying to create for myself, and thus to make real for others, and puts me solidly in another realm, equally new but already real.  In the real world I have to find places where everyone in our “party” is willing to eat and listen to the kids in the backseat of the mini-van complain I missed the turn-off to Lahaina.  (”Would you like to drive, Sonia?”)  I have to rinse sand out of the bathtub.

In younger years I would take my writing along with me when I traveled.  That was before I had children, and even later, when I only had two children.  But once I had three, and then four, I gained perspective (or threw in the towel, depending on how you look at it).  I decided that it was difficult enough to travel with children without the near-futility of trying to write during the trip (not to mention that the whole point of the trip was to spend some extra time with said children, so often neglected at home because I was… writing).  I simultaneously came to the conclusion that on the short precious trips I took on my own, without equally precious children, that I wanted to put writing out of my mind.

But maybe it was a mistake.

Because my writing momentum is gone.  The mythical world is not only mythical, it’s non-existent.  Getting to Hawaii may have required a long tedious wait in a security line and a long tedious flight with a restless nine-year-old, but once I got there, everything was waiting, from those many Starbucks to the junk-filled gift shops and, maybe best of all, the fresh catch of the day at the end of the day.  By contrast, the world of my novel must be built up from the shoes on the characters’ feet to the timbre of their voices — and what shoes are they wearing?  Should I mention the color, the style, the brand name?  Living can be exhilarating or miserable, but it’s there.  Writing is always work.  You must invent the taste of the fresh catch without getting to eat it.

I’m knocking on the door of the world of my novel.  No one is coming to answer.  No, that’s not true.  I haven’t yet dragged myself up the pathway to the front door.  And, as Annie Dillard points out in her brilliant essay from The Writing Life, no one but me cares whether I write this book or not.  I have no illusions that the world needs my book.  The best I can hope for is that some people might enjoy it, but if I never write it, there are plenty of other books for those people to read, more books than any of us will ever have time for.  I recommend To Kill a Mockingbird and Nicholas Nickleby and Crime and Punishment if you haven’t gotten to those yet.  (E-mail me for more recommendations.)

We did have a lovely time in Hawaii.  At least I know I did, and if the others didn’t, they’d better not tell me.  We writers spend a lot of time anticipating what we’re going to think about on our deathbeds, and my guess is that I’ll be glad I took the trip, even if it costs me a month of writing.  As of this moment, it feels as though it will.

Here in San Francisco we have a deservedly famous and popular attraction called The Exploratorium.  School children take buses from all over the state to visit, but MY kids go to a school three blocks away.  Neener-neener.

The Exploratorium has been around since I was a kid.  My grandmother, who lived about a block away from the school my younger kids attend now, used to take me there when I came to visit on weekends.

But until last week, I’d never been in the Tactile Dome.

I went to the Exploratorium on a field trip with my youngest daughter’ s third grade class.  The school takes good advantage of its proximity to this first-rate attraction.  It sounds corny to say that the Exploratorium makes science fun, but they do.  There is a wide assortment of exhibits aimed at children from pre-schoolers to senile.  You can blow giant bubbles or measure the frequency of your voice.

Have I mentioned the Tactile Dome?

The Tactile Dome in a completely dark — and I mean completely dark — maze in which, although one can’t technically get lost, one is deprived of all senses except touch.  You start in a very small, circular entryway covered in tarp and feel your way around until you find the only way out, which is an upholstered slope, re-inforced with ridges to help you climb.  At the top of that is another… I don’t know, I couldn’t see it.  What I remember is feeling around until I discovered that the only way to progress from this point was to enter a small tunnel.  And so on.  For once I don’t digress, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The Tactile Dome was to be the main event of our visit.  We would divide the class into halves.  The first group would have the Dome for an hour and fifteen minutes, we’d re-group for lunch, and then the second group would have its turn.  The non-Dome group, divided into smaller groups and assigned to an adult volunteer (like me) would spend that time at the other exhibits.

I signed up for the field trip early.  (It’s common knowledge that I am a slacker mom, the go-way-kid-ya-bother-me mom, who can’t make lasagna like Liliana’s mom.  Just ask my teenagers.  I am photocopying all these f****** field trip forms to show them some day.)

When the  final information sheet came home there was a warning, “People who suffer from claustrophobia should not enter the Tactile Dome.”

Claustrophobia?  Edgar Allan Poe had nothing on me.

No problem.   They weren’t asking the parent volunteers (who weren’t volunteering in their usual droves, I might add — and that’s been a bad sign that I’ve ignored in the past, cf. the ice staking trip of May ‘06) to go in the Dome, just to wait while the kids went through.  Some kids would want to go multiple times.

But when our group, the first group, arrived, my daughter showed some hesitation.  Er, I mean, she wouldn’t go.  And here I am, with my weakness for the grand gesture.  Off comes the black silk shantung blazer.  “Cover me,” I said dramatically, “I’m going in.”  And in I went, with my daughter and another girl behind me.

I was terrified.  When I got to that tunnel part I described, I thought I might have a panic attack.  I’ve never had a panic attack.  I’ve found it more efficient in the self-inflicted misery department to spread my anxiety more thinly across whole days and weeks.   So I don’t really know how close I came, but I think it was shouting distance.

That tunnel was the worst part.  After that there was some kind of pantyhose-running net to crawl across, and a slide.  I didn’t like going down a slide, not knowing how long or steep it was going to be, but nothing on the rest of the trip had me so tightly enclosed as that first tunnel, and that’s what I was most afraid of.  Then, finally, there was a red light.  H’m… red.  Who cared.  It was light, and I knew I was about to get out.

A couple of days and maybe three beers later I had distanced myself enough from the experience to see a metaphor here.   The Tactile Dome is the physical equivalent of writing a novel.   You start with no idea of what to expect.  You think you know what to expect, but you’re wrong.  And then you’re in the dark, “a darkness more than night,” to quote Michael Connelly, and groping for your life, because you just might have that panic attack.  You can turn back but how will that look?  Never mind to the teacher or your daughter.  How will you feel, after that dramatic shedding of the black silk shantang blazer the announcement for all to hear, “Cover me, I’m going in?”

How will you look to you?

 I have never stared at a blank computer screen and feared a panic attack.  As I said, I like my unhappiness like my leaky faucets: dripping slowly and steadily, knowing that eventually the water can wear a hole in the toughest metal.  Maybe it’ll take years of false starts, then finally pushing through to the end of at least one draft, to discover there’s a fatal flaw that requires tearing down years of work, leaving nothing but reams of nonsense, that if you think it’s worth the bother, you can examine for months in order to cull out what bon mots can be shoehorned into version #5.

Unlike the Tactile Dome there is no underpaid but lawsuit-skittish monitor at the lighted front, listening on an intercom, to make sure you get out in one piece — in this case with your ego intact.

But cover me.  I’m going in.

I feel bad (shouldn’t it be badly?) about a lot of things, but not about this book, which is a collection of essays by Nora Ephron, generally centered around the issues faced by women of a certain age.  “Women of a certain age” is a pretty common and transparent euphemism so I’ll leave it at that. 

I am younger than Nora Ephron, a lot younger, really, but not too young to appreciate what she has to say about teenagers with attitude, the uphill struggle to keep oneself groomed (she spends eight hours a week on hair, exercise, and manicures among other similar activities), and even a recollection of the JFK years, even though I was a tiny, tiny baby then.  Honest.

The first, eponymous essay (isn’t ”eponymous” a classy word?  It means named after, so in this case it means that it’s the essay with the same name as the book — sorry, I mean, duh) started out faintly amusing, but slow, and I thought to myself, well, okay, I’ve read worse, lots worse, but this would not have been published if she had submitted it under the name… oh, say, Donna Levin.  She’s sliding by on her reputation — yeah, she wrote When Harry Met Sally, which is an overrated movie in my book anyway, a very poor woman’s Annie Hall from the late 80s.  But by the second essay she had me hooked all the way through the gullet.

The book isn’t for everyone, and that’s one of its strengths.  The more narrowly a writer focuses his or her audience, the more intimately he or she can address that audience.  In the case of Neck, the essays aren’t just aimed at women over 40, they’re aimed at city women.  You don’t have to be a New Yorker, but I think you’d miss a lot, no matter what your age or gender (this is definitely a woman’s book, not a chick book, a woman’s book) if you weren’t also a city girl, I mean woman.  You have to understand, for example, how difficult it is to find a decent apartment that you can afford, and how precious that apartment can become to you when you find it.

Being a city woman is about more than where you live, it’s about your priorities.  I have to admit that the priorities that come to mind as illustrations, either Ephron’s or mine, are not admirable.  She writes of her need to have “any kind of food delivered at any hour,” of having access (not just in walking distance, but in short walking distance) to hair salons and delicatessens.   Not exactly the pioneer spirit.  On the other hand, if you live or have lived in a city like New York or San Francisco or (I’m guessing now) Chicago or Atlanta, you know that there are mighty trade-offs.   Transportation and general overcrowding top the list for me.  It’s marvelous to have so many varied and stimulating activities available to one, from marathon races to free concerts in the park, but I rarely take advantage of them.  It’s been more than twenty years since I last attempted to watch the fireworks on the 4th of July.  On that night three of my girlfriends and I drove to Chrissy Field, which was then the site at which the public gathered, sat shivering in our San Francisco summer arctic weather for two hours and then, after thirty minutes of peering through fog at a few anemic pyrotechnics, sat in the car for another two hours before we were able to get out of the parking lot. Yeah, right, we should have taken public transportation.  Next time.

There’s no great depth to I Feel Bad About my Neck.  The closest Ephron comes is when she writes about how, after sixty, funerals suddenly become more common events on your calendar, about the sadness of losing old friends and the unavoidable knowledge that you, too, will be that event on someone’s calendar eventually.  But this won’t be news to any reader, or if it is…. ooops.

But if you are in the target audience herein described at length, I believe you will enjoy this subtly (if not lol) funny collection, that ended, as life itself always does, too soon for me.