Patty Friedmann's blog

Prescience sucks

This week's Newsweek has a full-page review of a book titled Knock Yourself Up. It's a how-to for women who want to go the single-mother route. Whoop-de-do. This is 2007. In about 1978, with no understanding of what a book was, I tried to write one called And Baby Makes Two, a guide based on my experience of having decided to become a single mother in1975. I was a Seven-Sisters graduate with a j-o-b: evidently I was ahead of my time. I tried to sell my book, but there wasn't a market. Eventually I sold an autobiographical novel with the experience threaded through it, but it didn't put me out there as a spokesperson for single parenthood. It was fiction.

Last week as a birthday gift I received a book titled The Underachiever's Manifesto. It's published by Chronicle, a mainstream house. Big time for a book about failure. Hey, guys, what about my book in 1988 called Too Smart to Be Rich, a paean to failure? I predicted the ascent of George W. Bush when he was still drunk. We lionize the fool and the C+ human being. I said it in 1988. But my distributor went into Chapter 11, and while the book was selling like hotcakes and was syndicated by the New York Times, it died aborning. Nobody ever heard my pronouncements. Really, they were more like warnings when you look at the muddle we're in now in this country.

And then there's my last effort that has just about put a final nail in it. Right after Katrina, I sent a storm novel to my publisher. A great, dark, funny typical-me novel. And what do you know? The reading public is not ready for Katrina fiction. Two-plus years since the hurricane, and only three novels have appeared; mine's the only one that's not detective fiction. Publishers don't want them, readers don't want them, and one reviewer even said that my wealthy white protagonist wasn't the right "victim" of the storm. Ten years from now, people will be writing Katrina fiction. But not now. I'm out there hanging all by myself.

So this is what keeps happening. I have something to say. It reflects on what I'm doing. So I keep doing it, and I keep writing about it. People think I'm an oddball, and what I write strikes readers as exceedingly out of sync. But thirty, twenty, even ten years later, when I'm out of print, what I've written is dead-on.  Prescience sucks.

I mean it, Br'er Fox

The briar patch looks very comfortable. I can be thrown in there soon, and I will loll around in that prickly little world that is my own special relaxation zone. But I don't want to go.

I've been working steadily for the past few months on my screenplay. The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You. I have no way of knowing if it's a good screenplay as industry standards go, but it works for me. I just finished Act II, and at this point all story elements are nicely in place for Act III to roll right out.

That means that if I did nothing else, in just a few days I could be finished with a pretty big project. I've been editing myself as I've gone along, so unless someone else takes it in hand, I've got the best draft I can come up with.

In short, I'd be finished. I'd be ready for the briar patch.

I don't want to have nothing to do. I know somewhere along the line I swore I was going to be a rockin' granny, and I am a rockin' granny. But a writer's got to write. A writer doesn't have to tear her hair out showing her stuff to agents and editors and producers, but she does have to be working on something.

I'll finish because the momentum won't let me stop. Then Br'er Fox will be swinging my fluffy carcass toward the briar patch. But I hope I get a reprieve. Maybe I'll send the screenplay to my friend L. He'll make me insecure enough that I'll rewrite it.

Blinding white space

It's so nice to have quit writing. It means I can write like crazy.

Last month I wrote a whacked short story and sent it a couple of places and didn't give a damn what happened to it. This month I'm writing a screenplay.

Since I'm not writing, I have all the time in the world to do this very right or very wrong. And with a screenplay, it's not hard for it to look beautifully right.

I have Final Draft 7: that only took a few keystrokes and $89. I know the basic structure. I've done the treatment: it's my vision of an adaptation of my short story, "Two-Story Brick Houses." Since I've already seen the film in my mind's eye, all I have to do is get it onto my computer screen. With the software doing the format, it looks terrific.

To date I have eleven pages. The trouble is that it's easy. And I have a feeling it's deceptively easy. Dialogue floats on the page like tiny pieces of dry crap. Setting has to be spelled out, and I usually leave it up to my reader's imagination. Worst of all, action tells everything about everything, and I despise action. Altogether, this isn't the way a novelist does best.

But if I'm going to get my vision of this story in front of anyone, I'm going to have to try this method. So I drop a few dozen words onto a lot of white space. My one consolation is that I've come up with the best title I've ever conceived. This is a story of survivor guilt that ultimately drives a man to suicide. The title? "The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You."

Sand in the oyster

That's what it took. Though for all I know the pearl will not form. Or, if formed, will sit in the oyster until it rots. But I'm writing a short story.

A closed call for stories came out from NOLAFugees the same day I read a feature in Harper's about New Orleans. My first reaction was to write back to NOLAFugees and say that since their deadline was July 10 they were probably looking for work from all the writers who now were coming out of their respective funks and producing after I've gone to ground. And then to write to Harper's and tell them that their piece made even me, a bleeding resident, feel Katrina fatigue. It did not miss one cliche.

But that night I had the bad idea that I would sleep well if I took a good painkiller because I'd decided to move all the cypress doors that had been sitting by my pool into the basement; they'd been there since I demo-ed out after the storm. Bad idea for sleep. Good idea for waking up every hour with tiny increments of progress toward a story.

I'm maybe a third of the way through. I'm going to mix my media and please myself. Letter to the editor morphs into short story with self thinly disguised. I'm going to imagine meeting this writer and make him into a foolish female journalist. Hell, evidently I can do that in my sleep.

I am a Jew.

"I am a Jew... I am a Jew...I am a Jew...I am a Jew."

Len Glade is taking his MCATs now, but my friend Donice still can remember little Len in pre-kindergarten sitting in the backseat of her car whispering that sentence over and over, putting the emphasis on a different word each time, trying out the meaning for his tiny, thoughtful self.  Len always was light years ahead of me.

Here I am, age sixty, trying to get that phrase out in any permutation. I'm off tomorrow to Book Expo at the Javits Center, with a side trip to Hebrew Union College downtown to present myself to the Jewish Book Network. As I've mentioned, my publisher wants me to pitch myself to JCCs, synagogues, and Hillels from across the country as a good speaker they'd just love to fly in for a day or two. I've told my publicist that the only Jewish word in my book is "Friedmann," but evidently that doesn't matter. I've made the cut, and I'm on the roster. As I said before, I'm doing the American Idol gambit.

I mentioned this to my friend Pat Lambert. She's a Mississippi writer, a woman whose voice stays so strong in my head that when I drive through her state and see the sign for Tylertown I think to myself, "Pat says on paper that it's Tollertown; what's that sign doing up there?" Pat surely had minimal exposure to Jewish people; she was reared, she says, "Piney woods Holiness, a religion more likely to make one insane than holy." I expected her to agree with me, that I had no business taking my assimilated Southern self to New York.

But Pat wrote me back. And she said, "Your book IS Jewish--as is all your writing--in this respect:  you're not afraid to tell the truth, however ridiculous or pathetic or horrific it makes homo sapiens appear.  That puts you, at least in my mind, in the company of the greats, from Samuel and Isaiah, et al, to Elie Wiesel, who will not refute himself or history, who INSISTS on telling the truth."

Well, damn. I am a Jew.

You can't go home again when you're already there

I love appearing at this book group. The women reared their children along with my mother as she reared me and my siblings. (When their housekeepers weren't doing the heavy emotional lifting.) I'm trying to live in the present, seeing them as what my mother might be if she hadn't died in what I like to think was a freak accident on a tour of the Baltic that my sister never should have dragged her on to begin with.

But I digress.

I was invited to talk about A Little Bit Ruined. That was good. They would buy it, and a handful might read it and pass the word along to their offspring out of town. I profit from purchases of that book.  I've given away my portion of revenues from New Orleans Noir, and while I'd like to see it generate funds for good causes, I'm not going to stand alone in front of a crowd just for that book. And yet I had a sense we'd talk a little about it after I did a nice literary presentation about my novel.

And then, and then...

As an introduction my bio was read off lickety-split, and one of the women, Mrs. A., got up to do a little personal sidebar about my short story, in New Orleans Noir, all about the mean girls at Newman School, where of course most of them had sent their kids. Patty, she said, had been a fat girl, picked on by the mean girls, and that was what prompted the story. Yes, I had been fat. Everybody there probably remembered me as a fat kid. But I'd told Mrs. A. beforehand that I hadn't been picked on. I'd been ignored. I didn't bother to explain that I'd found a small circle of cerebral non-Jewish girls with whom I watched the shenanigans of the mean girls from the sidelines. Mrs. A. wasnt aware of my circle. Her daughter knew only the Jewish girls and, to her credit, was never mean. She was nice to me.

So what was I to do? I got up there and talked first about A Little Bit Ruined, and I flat-out said that part of the inspiration for it came from having had a very attractive plastic surgeon before Katrina who'd done some liposuction on me. I figured, Hey, you've seen me since I grew up. You know I didn't get 30 pounds sucked away. But I'll let you pretend I did!

Fat Patty was free! Fat Patty got up there and named names! I said that as long as they could get any Newman School directory and see who was in my class, I'd just rattle off who the girls were on whom I'd based the story. And I did it. Took all the gossip out of them. Those women in the story are still mean girls, still walking around New Orleans.  Who cares?

Unfortunately for me, I had to go from that performance straight to New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts to do a master class for creative writing students. I was still bursting with candor. So I kept on naming names. I came right out with the name of the plastic surgeon I said was "really hot," and then one girl burst out with, "Hey, he's my best friend's dad!"

This is a terribly small town.

But Shanjaya's not sixty!

The first question I asked was: Is this going to be conducted like "American Idol"? I said that if it was, then I wasn't going.

The person to whom I was directing the question--by e-mail--was the publicist for A Little Bit Ruined. Remember that book? The one that launched a little over a month ago and gave me such a final case of miseries that I swore off writing? As soon as I did my last big local reading I went deep into Elmo and Zoe and tried not to look back, finding the culture of eleven-month-olds all I needed. And then...

I heard I'd been accepted to pitch this book to the Jewish Book Network before Book Expo in New York at the end of the month. Never mind that there is zero Jewish content in it. Never mind that, aside from my first novel and my short story in New Orleans Noir, I don't ever even skirt Jewish topics. I'm a Jew, J-O-O as Eric Cartman says. And for that alone (unless I have something else going for me) I seem to have cleared the first hurdle among Jewish cultural programmers around the country: I'm among only 40 authors who get to pitch in New York.

My publicist didn't answer back about the "American Idol" question. So I started losing any ego involvement in the selection process. They don't pick me? It's because my novel's about a crazy woman in a Catholic city. Nothing personal. I get to go to New York. Whee! I'll book my flight.

Then Darcy the publicist called. Yes, we'll be winnowed down to a "chosen" few.  Too late.  I've made my reservation! So now I'm picking out what I'll wear, when I'll get my hair cut. I don't have the self-esteem of a Sanjaya. I also don't have the years ahead of me to recover and find new identities. Why am I doing this?

Just when I thought nobody was looking

Wednesday I took my final bow, Thursday I went to Jackson to confirm I was right to quit, and Friday I primped to go to my family reunion.

My plan was to go tabula rasa.  A cousin in Connecticut had hunted down 600 relatives all over the country who went back four generations and forward three--all with New Orleans origins. That makes us pretty fancy around here, tracking to before the Civil War. We weren't going to put on matching T-shirts and picnic in the park. We were going to eat an elegant buffet at the Wyndham Hotel, overlooking the river and listening to a jazz quartet. No one would know anything about me except for what my dress looked like.

I walked in and a third cousin a few times removed walked straight up to me and said, "I was going to get Newman to select you as Distinguished Alum of the Year, but you blew it!" Newman.  Newman School. Where I suffered the agonies of adolescence more painfully than most by being in an exclusive private school the year that the class coming through was filled with unusually pathologically bitchy girls. One in particular was so disturbed she eventually was hospitalized, but not before destroying at least one very sweet sixth-grade classmate.

After almost 45 years, I had written a very fine--if I must say so myself--short story about that experience, and it was included in New Orleans Noir. (The collection I've been out hawking alongside my novel A Little Bit Ruined.) It was a dead-on, powerful story, but it didn't make the experience of going to Newman in the '60s look good. It had a universal quality to it, so it didn't make going to Newman at any time look good. (Or, really, going to high school anywhere, ever, look good.)

What could I say to my cousin? I saw a nearby wall. I banged my head against it. A chance to go back to my high school, recognized, "distinguished," and I had blown it. My cousin will vouch for me. I really banged my head against the wall. "Has anyone really read that story?" I said. "Everybody," she said.

And so it comes to this, now that it's all over with. What did I want all along? As a writer, I mean. I've often been honest enough to try to sort out vindictiveness and vindication in the motives behind some of my stories.  But what about my general posture as a writer? Here I have two works out there before the public, and the one getting the screaming attention in New Orleans is the short piece. Yet it's terribly misunderstood. If read correctly, it's sensitive and honest and doesn't malign Newman at all. Instead, everyone's buzzing that I've pilloried the institution and in turn wants to pillory me.  "Go for negative publicity: any publicity is good publicity" is what I've heard. But who wants this?

I know why I'm bothered. Because I was a cut-up in school. I was one of two people in the history of the school voted down by the faculty for the National Honor Society. (The other served as Chief of Protocol in the Bush White House; talk about ignominy.) I've already been badly behaved. I might not be the most distinguished alumna, but they might give me a shot at Most Improved.

The fat-in-her-mind lady sings

There wasn’t a dry eye in my head. On Wednesday night I launched my novel A Little Bit Ruined, and before I read told the gathering of people I loved deeply, without benefit of alcohol, that I was calling it quits.

My ten-month-old granddaughter was there, and I held her before the audience like Kunta Kinte before the moon and recited the book’s dedication. “For Summer Amalia Roberson, the love of my life, with apologies for calling you Katrina Fema while you were in utero.” I didn’t go into my usual apology for her having that silly first name, which I’d lobbied against with literary offerings like Flannery most of the time she was gestating. I just stood up there and announced that she was good enough reason to quit writing. She would fill my days.Though I added, even in the deeply kind presence of Susan Larson, my friend and everyone’s best book editor, that I couldn’t stand the having-written part of writing.

I couldn’t stand what was, in effect, that part of being a writer. Of counting the house. Of being reviewed and feted, in some measure or other. The party was pretty wonderful, with a gathering of some of the greatest people who still live in New Orleans, writers and artists and every other kind of fine mind. Much better than a funeral. Altogether a group of great laughers who I think listened to me while Summer mugged in the front row.

The next day Julie Smith and I drove three hours up—and three hours back—to Jackson, Mississippi, to do a signing with Ace Atkins at Lemuria Bookstore for our anthology, New Orleans Noir. Ace is a hot commodity in Mississippi, and he’d done a noonTV show in Jackson. We drew six people. It was a perfect final lesson in book marketing. A perfect capstone to a writing career.

Why, you'll ask, do I call myself the fat-in-her-mind lady? I answer this only because I don't want any "you're so thin!" comments. I was a fat, miserable kid. Once fat, always fat. It made for a rotten childhood--with a lot of help from external circumstances--so I had the requisite baggage to grow up to write. And now I have those requisite insecurities that eventually take their toll of having to walk out of the marketplace. The fat girl takes her leave. Except to tell the truth.

The joys of the gimpy wildebeest

Technically I'm involved in three books coming out just about now. So I can see how it feels to have different roles: as the author of a novel released in a new paperback edition (Side Effects), the author of a new novel fresh out in hardback (A Little Bit Ruined), and the contributor to an anthology (New Orleans Noir) that's being published with all writers--I think--waiving their monies to benefit Katrina victims.

And now I know what kind of writer I want to be.

I want to hide in the pack. Maybe I'm not the lame one: so far reviewers have been generous to me. Maybe I'm not going to get any share at grazing time; I'm giving away the money. But I'm not out there alone, completely vulnerable. In all the years when I've been out promoting books, I've never had a moment's fun doing public appearances and interviews. Now I'm simultaneously promoting my own private books and a collective book, and I'm here to tell you that it's a blast being in the crowd.

A few nights ago, five of us--Julie Smith, Jimmy Nolan, Chris Wiltz, Ted O'Brien, and I--gathered at the corner of Bourbon and Orleans to do a photo shoot for the front page of the Times-Picayune "Living" section. No holds barred. I walked right through the French Quarter in a black slinky outfit cut wa-a-ay down, in fuck-me heels, more makeup collectively than I've worn in a lifetime, and an 18-inch knife in a Whole Foods bag. Sunglasses, fedoras, trenchcoats, bandoliers, guns, a police badge, a mink coat that I threw furiously over my shoulder: we festooned ourselves with props and hammed it up on the sidewalk. New Orleans being New Orleans, over the two hours we were there, no one paid any attention. And we had great good fun. Of course, Julie had selected writers whom I adored, none of the people at the wedding two weeks ago who give me nightmares. I was in the pack of like-minded wildebeests.

In changing combinations we'll do appearances in the coming weeks. And in between, I'll do solo appearances to promote A Little Bit Ruined. I'll field all questions. I'll count the houses. I'll watch the cash registers. I'll go home depressed no matter if it's standing room only. I'll lament my write-ups because of course one writer can't get a hilarious front of the "Living" section spread. Never mind that I've had it twice. I have a short memory because I'm miserable alone. I think from now on if I write anything it'll be in the company of others. It's not so hard when I edge myself into the middle and hope somebody else gets picked off by the predators.