Mardi's Link

Ann Romney & Me

 

Recently, presidential candidate Mitt Romney quipped that his wife, Ann, was born at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. While the media ignored that quaint little factoid, focusing instead on Mitt’s next remark, the one where he said that no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate, the details of Ann’s birth actually caught my attention.

That’s because I was born at Henry Ford Hospital, too. And it occurred to me that not only was Ann Romney born in the same hospital as I was, we have other things in common, too: We are both the mother of sons, we both like to ride horses, we both color our brown hair blonde, and we both have Welsh ancestry.

What else, I wondered, did little ol’ me, an a-political mom, wife, and writer in the Midwest, have in common with a woman who could become our next first lady?

I decided to do a little research and find out.

After Ann was born, she grew up with her family in Bloomfield Hills, one of the five wealthiest cities in the United States. After I was born, I spent three months in foster care in Detroit before I was adopted by my parents, who lived in Battle Creek. Where Purina manufactured their dog food and a quarter of families lived below the poverty line.

Ann did well in school and so did I. She at the private Kingswood School, a National Historic Landmark with forty acres of formal gardens attracting tourists from around the world, and me at seven different public schools scattered around the Midwest. My family moved around a lot while I was growing up.

But no matter, because at least Ann and I both went to college!

She attended Brigham Young, a private religious university where students follow an honor code forbidding them to consume alcohol. I attended Michigan State University where I received high marks in journalism and helped haul trash cans full of sand into the basement of the TKE House for a January blizzard beach party. A six-kegger.

After college Ann became a housewife, marrying Mitt in a ceremony at her parents’ Bloomfield Hills home, then hosting a reception at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. Among her guests was our future President, Gerald Ford. President Richard Nixon sent hearty congratulations to the newlyweds. After college, I worked as a reporter for an un-unionized daily newspaper, earning $180 a week, then married my long-time boyfriend in an outdoor ceremony. Among the guests at our wedding was Big Joe, an amateur bartender who treated guests to his signature cocktail, the “Mountain Dew Me.” My dog, a shaggy mutt from the humane society, congratulated me by jumping on my dress.

Now it’s starting to seem like Ann and I don’t have much in common, after all. But wait, Ann gave birth to five sons and I gave birth to three, plus have two stepsons from my second marriage, so there’s that. She and Mitt recently celebrated their 43^rd wedding anniversary;  my first husband and I divorced three months before our 20^th.

As a wife to Mitt, Ann has pursued charitable endeavors, many of these aimed at helping underprivileged children. Ok, so what if my sons were on the reduced school lunch list for a while. Ann can still relate to me in other ways, right? Take, for example, our shared love of horses!

In her free time, Ann enjoys horseback riding and I did too. Although I ride Western, she competes in dressage and earned medals from the U.S. Dressage Federation. And she has a California trainer to help her import new stock from Europe. And one of her horses, Rafalca, not only won a spot on the U.S. dressage team, but even competed in the 2012 Olympics. While I got a second job as a waitress and saved my tips to buy a pole barn kit, fencing and two mixed breed horses. Maybe Ann and I could have gone riding together, except that middle class people like me can’t afford to keep horses anymore. Or get our hair colored regularly, either.  

But at least we still have our Welsh ancestry in common, right? Ann is proud of hers and I’m proud of mine, too. According to the New York Daily News, Ann’s grandfather emigrated from Wales to Detroit in 1929 and went to work in the car industry. It was a pretty good decision, too, considering that her family’s personal fortune is now about $250 million.

I contacted the adoption agency and learned that my birthmother’s ancestors also emigrated to Detroit from Wales. But that’s really all I know. At least it explains my freckles and my good attitude in the face of adversity. And by adversity I mean my checkbook: My personal fortune varies month to month, depending upon my balance. Right now it’s $1,847.

For a minute there I thought that comparing myself to Ann was an exercise in futility. That the only thing we really had in common was that we were born in the same Michigan hospital. I don't begrudge her her wealth; far from it. I'd love to have access to that kind of dough. I just think that people who live in the White House should be able to relate to the people who don't And I'm not sure she can.

But then I learned one last thing about her. When she was Massachusetts’ First Lady, the Boston Globe criticized her for being, “largely invisible.” 

Geez, Ann, I know exactly how that feels.

I guess there is one more thing we have in common, after all.

 

Writing for Revenge

Believe me, I’ve checked, and when it comes to revenge writing, the universal advice is, Don’t Do It. Ever. Do Not Do It. Don’t even think about doing it. And if you do somehow manage to fantasize about doing it, even in private when no one is looking, well, you should just stop. Right now. Writing out of some twisted and infantile need for revenge, the conventional wisdom goes, is bad form, bad news, and just plain bad juju.  

“If someone is writing to take revenge, or embarrass or punish someone, it’s not going to be a very good book. It’s immoral, and it’s bad writing,” says Heather Sellers, author of, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.

“It is a natural fantasy to imagine getting even with someone by exposing them in your memoirs, and revenge can fuel great writing, but for the most part complaints suffer like bad novels from one dimensional characterizations and an overly simplified Manichean vision of the world,” says Tristine Rainer, in her classic how-to guide, Your Life As Story.

I didn’t read it myself, but I have it on good authority that Donald Rumsfeld’s 815-pager, Known and Unknown, falls prey to the exact problem Rainer explains.

There are, of course exceptions. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough when reading Joyce Maynard’s At Home in the World. She balances confusion and youth with focus and revenge and the result is a memoir I devoured. Most of us are no Joyce Maynard though; we were not on the cover of the NYT magazine as a teen, and didn’t spend strange months in rural New Hampshire with iconic literary hermits.

Marion Roach, the author of a readable and newly published guide on memoir writing, The Memoir Project, has a list on her blog of eleven no-no’s to observe when writing about one’s own life. They include tips like don’t make your writing only about you, don’t give readers a boring list of events, and don’t complain. By my calculations, pushing back against an urge for revenge factors in on numbers three, four, five, six and eleven on her no-no’s. That’s almost half.

And yet, and yet. I feel myself slyly protest this “No Writing For Revenge” rule, hypnotized as I am by the sheen on a cold antipasto platter.

Salt, vinegar, and red meat. Yummy.  

Ah, Revenge, that tasty appetizer before the power steak, served bloody. Because however fleeting, exacting revenge with words will make the writer feel strong and back in control. For about ten minutes. Ten glorious, fang glinting, back-arching, howl into the emptiness minutes.

But then what?

The real problem of acting on this dark urge in print is not only that it’s wrong. The real problem is that by doing it, you’re using someone else’s story to tell your own. Writing for revenge gives away your literary power, instead of claiming it.  

Joan Didion says that writing itself is, “an aggressive, even a hostile act.” True. Writing dares to say I’m here, I matter, Listen to me. But aggression and hostility are emotions that move a story forward; while bad-mouthing –i.e. revenge- is just the soggy leftovers.

This topic has some resonance for me, after winning Creative Nonfiction’s Anger & Revenge personal essay contest. I was – am- thrilled the editors selected my work. And, a bit daunted, too. My submission detailed what happened to my wedding dress after my twenty-year marriage ended. How to reconcile my own two personal essay writing rules – 1) tell the truth, and 2) don’t give your power away to anyone else – with being recognized for something many writers I respect say is forbidden?

I spent not a small amount of time wondering about this internal conflict.  The conclusion I reached was this: I wrote the piece not for revenge, but to offer my mother an explanation of what happened to the wedding dress she and I hand sewed together, more than two decades ago. And that is just as good an impetus to write as any other.  Right?

 

 

Beginings

Here it is, almost the end of January, and I'm still thinking about beginnings. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm mulling over how to start a new project.

From a recent NPR interview with one of my heroes, Elmore Leonard, here's how the great man sits his story down:

"I have no idea where it's going to go. I don't want to know, because the idea is accumulated in the four months, five months, six months. . .  of the writing process. You get better ideas while you're writing. Ideas come to you, scenes come to you that (are better) than if you were to sit down and list scenes. So I don't outline."

The "to outline or not to outline" argument is one writers have long grappled with. And not allowing rigid A, B, 1, 2 scaffolding to dictate to creativity has always been my instinct, too. I didn't outline either of my two previous books and when I finished them I was convinced that lack of early structure helped, rather than harmed, their narratives. The ideas did arrive just as Mr. Leonard said.

And, I had a pretty good idea of where the story was going when I began my latest project, a memoir now in the hands of my editor. Not because I outlined it first, but because, well, I lived it. 

When you're writing from your own experience, my logic went, it's even more impossible to get off track than when you're telling someone else's story. Stick to the truth, mine your emotional highs and lows, and, as Mr. Leonard also advises, "leave out the parts that people skip."

Do all that,  everything is sure to turn out just dandy, I reasoned. Outline? I don't need no stinkin' outline.

Revisions, though, have a way of picking up the glare the warm sunshine of just writing away, free and easy, without a care in the netherworld of your imagination, misses. I ended up crafting a detailed outline after I finished the first draft.

It was a good exercise, and helped me identify both the cuts and additions the book needed in a way my own "just sit down and write" process had not.

So, despite the advice of Mr. Leonard, I've reconsidered the value of outlining a long work first, before beginning to write. I'm starting to believe outlining will organize my creative impulse, not stifle it.

Writer and writing teacher Adair Lara has a great article about how to do this here. Good advice for those of us writing about our own lives, particularly if, like me,  you have previously eschewed outlines.

January feels like a great time to sit down and dig in to something new, doesn't it?

 

What 50 Looks Like

I got a little nostalgic yesterday and I blame it on two things: The New York Times and my impending milestone birthday.

An article in the newspaper's Style Section introduced a handful of photogenic brainiacs and their recently launched online magazine of literary criticism, The New Inquiry. Bravo, kids.

It's an old story, buffed and polished for the internet. Shunned by the establishment, these younsters started their own literary gig. Marcel Proust did it once, and so did Queen Christina of Sweden, The Bluestockings got their thing going, and these ruffians did, too.

Yours truly has fond memories of following this same bliss. Back in the prehistoric year that was 1998, I helped get this going concern off the ground.

On April Fool's Day that year, Victoria Sutherland, Anne Stanton, and I plotted to launch a book review magazine to give independently published books their due. It still amazes me that I was standing at the top of the escalator at BookExpo America in Chicago just two months later, eager in my new lime green suit to hand out copies of our first issue of ForeWord to the rising throngs. And boy, did they take them! And read them! And visit our booth to subscribe! We had launched!

Then, some spoil sport called security.

Apparently even back in 1998, you couldn't occupy such high dollar real estate for free. No, the book fair had a protocol for guerilla marketing like this and said protocol involved a fee for exhibitors who greeted attendees with swag. And no quarter was given for high brow literary swag, either.

But no matter. Even two of McCormick Place's thuggish rent-a-cops couldn't wipe the triumph off our faces that fine day.

Tomorrow I turn 50. And you know what? I've still got that lime suit.

What's your gig?

Repurposing is My Weakness

Perhaps I have pilgrim DNA. Or, maybe it's The Great Depression memories my mother has frequently shared with me. (Lard on toast anyone?) Whatever, I abhor waste.

And when you have a dominant character trait like this, it spills over into everything. I abhor waste in my menu planning, waste in my writing, and waste in my powerbrokers.

Because of this, I have been known to repurpose. Some may even call it recycling. (Though I am not anywhere near the level of this guy.)

Still, that leftover rice? Cabbage rolls. That three thousand word stream-of-consciousness on violent and sudden loss? Chapter Two in my memoir. Political hornswogglers (see above) dominating the headlines? Crow repellant for my vulnerable and just-planted sweet corn.

There is something deeply rewarding about finding a purpose for what otherwise might seem useless. Just be careful not to do this or this.

Wiffle Ball Rules & Memoir

The first day of June and this (not-so-very) young woman's fancy turns to . . . Wiffle Ball. After extra innings this weekend with the family, it occurs to me that there are parallels between the rules of memoir and the rules of Wiffle.

And hey, Mortenson, Frey, Defonseca, Khouri, Jones and Rosenblat. You are not on my team.

From the Official Wiffle Ball Inc. rulebook: "The WIFFLE ball is thrown like a baseball and will curve very easily. Experiment with different grips and releases to find the pitches that work best for you. There is no need to throw the ball hard to produce results!"

"Experiment" doesn't mean invent out of thin air. Plus, there is no need to lie so hard to produce results. Truth can be thrown like a baseball and will curve easily. Curve, not spin. That's what craft, emotion, imagination, and work is for. It's for gently curving truth with the wind of your words into a compelling narrative. That's where home plate really is, anyway.

Here are some memoirists who hit home runs and whom I would draft in a Michigan minute: Rick Bragg, Nick Flynn, Thomas Lynch, Rick Bragg again, and Noel Perrin. And I can't forget the gals; Anne LaMott, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, Mary Karr and Rhoda Janzen. Now that there is what I call a Wiffle Ball team.

Here's how a game with these folks would go down: LaMott would give the convocation then Bragg would lead off the game with a Sourthern-style double. Didion would need just a single pitch to tap a perfect sacrifice fly ball to put Bragg on third. Karr would get the RBI for her triple effort, and Janzen would show up late to the dugout but she'd have a plate of fresh Zwiebach with her to share with the team. Instead of taking his at bat, Lynch would announce the game in his hypnotic Irish brogue, while Flynn tossed Janzen's extra dozen or so Zwiebachs to hungry fans and Perrin grazed his sheep in the outflied. Out in right field, a butterfly would land on Dillard's glove so she could observe its compound eyes up close.

This game is, of course, fiction. I may have wanted it to happen but it didn't. The fake memoirs we've all winced over of late feel just like my imagined Wiffle Ball game. Authors Mortenson, Frey, Defonseca, Khouri, Jones and Rosenblat may have wanted the things in their books to have happened, but they didn't.

I have no idea whether or not author Tracy Seely plays Wiffle Ball. Her new memoir (one I'm looking forward to reading) is titled, My Ruby Slippers, not My Ruby Sneakers. But she does have some illuminating things to say about memoir rules here.

What's So Bad About Happy Endings?

Maybe it's those impossibly beautiful images from the Royal Wedding lingering in my head. After all, I'm officially still a newlywed myself. Or, maybe it's that all of the armageddon-laced predictions of late turned out to be wrong. Hell, maybe it's simply that spring has finally arrived in Northern Michigan. Whatever it is, I'm feeling decidedly cheerful these days.

Which is why I was so taken aback to read this in The New Yorker: "Marriage is an anachronism."

Having just turned in a memoir containing the two literary sins of marriage and a happen ending, this caught my attention. I've been using my newly aimless days to plow through my reading pile like a hired hand. The above pronouncement is part of a review of Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage that the magazine published a ways back. The review goes on to say this about Ms. Gilbert's happy ending: 

"The 'peace and contentment' at which Gilbert abruptly arrives in the final chapter of the book is a little suspicious . . . As in all romantic comedies, from the novels of Jane Austen to the 'Sex and the City' movie, 'Committed' ends with a wedding that brings with it the cessation of doubt and strife."

From there, my reading veered off to an anthology, My Mistress Sparrow is Dead edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. In the introduction, I found this: "The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart."

Well, I like a cold heart just as much as the next person but only if it's earned. Same with warm and happy endings. They have to be earned. But to criticize a happy ending only because it dares to be happy? Now that's cold.

In my stack of reading it is beginning to seem like a happy ending is, well, stranger than fiction.

 

 

A Chicken in Every Book

 

Has anyone else noticed that chickens have become ubiquitous?

This thought occured to me only after reading a feature story in The New York Times about the writer Susan Orlean. Many writers, it seems, have a yen for the hen.

This is not a trivial matter and chickens are not to be trifled with. To paraphase Anton Chekov, if you put a chicken in chapter one, you'd better be serving your hungry reader up a platter of fried chicken, or at least a few scrambled eggs, by chapter three or four.

A few examples from the poultry genre: Still Life With Chickens by Catherine Goldhammer, When Did I Get Like This? by Amy Wilson (Disclaimer: this book discusses chicken nuggets, not live chickens.), and The Chicken Shack by Henry W. Jenkins. Most notably, the extraordinary writer and Pulitzer Prize winner  Alice Walker's The Chicken Chronicles is out just this month, and a new hardover edition of P. G. Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens is forthcoming.

Why, I wondered, all the Chicken Lit? I include myself among those writers who have flocked to chickens - the rotund birds make an appearance in my own forthcoming memoir.

Still, I knew I was onto something when a search revealed that even academia has a fascination with literary chickens. Yale University devoted an entire conference to the topic: "The Chicken. It's biological, social, cultural and industrial history from neolithic middens to McNuggets."

What is it about the chicken that attracts the writer's eye? And keyboard? Ms. Walker says this on her blog: "I sat with them expecting nothing and over the months they pecked open places I hadn’t been able to enter by myself."