Patty Friedmann as author redux

Three Steps to Death
It used to be that as we aged we'd talk about our aches and pains. Now it seems that all my conversations, even with people half my age, are about medications--but of the psychotropic variety.
I always emerge with bragging rights: I'm on Pristiq, Topamax, and Seroquel. No one I know--and my circle is pretty univerally wretched people--has such a delicately titrated cocktail. But that doesn't matter. We get to the topic of the cartoon on my refrigerator where the man on the psychiatrist's couch is saying something to the effect of, "Could you please raise my dose? I still have feelings."
I can write because I have no feelings. I wonder whether I could write if I had too many feelings to function. I used to write pre-drugs. I was out of control emotionally--or at least I was deeply unhappy--but my writing was no different. Still, I tell myself that if I were free of meds I'd surely be a wild poet. It's a moot subject, I tell my friends when we talk: for the rest of my life I have chosen to flatline. I never will get off my cocktail. I don't want pain again. I won't have pleasure, either, but, hey, that's the price.
So I was thinking the other day: is this step one toward death? First I die emotionally, then I die mentally, then I die physically. One, two, three. Three, two, one. I see my mental faculties slpping bit by bit. I'm not going to start a regimen of pills that will eradicate my ability to think. Nature will do that. Since I have no feelings, I won't care.
And once I can't think or feel, I can let go physically. I won't know, and I won't fear. My body can let go.
Three, two, one. I've already passed the first step. I can keep on writing until I pass the second step. And I won't grieve, because I won't know. By the time I'm at step three, I'll be warehoused. I won't even know my name on the book spines.

THE WRITER'S LEGACY
Every writer gets to that point of wondering what she's leaving behind. Not just the wondering at my age, of donating to archives or remaining on bookshelves, but wondering at younger ages of leaving behind impressions on audiences.
I wonder about both.
Especially right now, as I launch two books, I think about how I'm perceived and how I'll be remembered, and I think a lot of it all came together a few weeks ago at the launch of Banned Books Week.
I always have to get big laughs at the launch. Humor is my way of making a point, even when I'm being literary as hell. And when I got up on that program, I was making no exception. Even when it wasn't a literary moment.
The book I chose was And Tango Makes Three, the children's story about a pair of gay male penguins at Central Park Zoo. It was challenged and banned more than any other book in recent memory, but my point that day was that it had been "banned" somewhere that stunned even me. I pointed out that in the past I'd always read from politically incorrect books; clearly this one had to be a shocker if I was going to get up in public and be politically correct. So I read, and then I called to the back for Exhibit A. to be brought forth.
And up came my four-year-old granddaughter. Who had refused to listen to the book. She just wasn't interested.
"You see," I said, my hand holding her tight around the waist so she wouldn't fall off the dais, "it's perfectly understandable for a screamingly heterosexual, pre-latency Daddy's girl not to have a broad world view, but not a librarian in Missouri."
I brought the house down.
What was my purpose there? To impress the audience or to impress my granddaughter? A little bit of the former, in truth, and a lot of the latter. Because I've decided that my endurance as a writer--and as a funny person--is pretty much going to be vested in this little girl.
Feels good. And makes sense.

LEAVE MY WORDS ALONE
I've been in the throes of terrible self-defense for weeks now, and I decided to check myself out. I have two books coming soon, and I've been edited like crazy--something that never happened to me before, so I wanted to look back at my history.
Sure enough, this makes no sense. My two editors over six novels were Kathryn Harrison and Jack Shoemaker. A writer would be hard-pressed to find two more distinguished editors. Kathryn's gone on to huge fame as a writer; Jack launched Annie Lamott and publishes Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, MFK Fisher, and dozens of others. And what do Kathryn and Jack have in common: they NEVER edited my work.
In turn, I've looked at my reviews, and I've been consistently praised for my style...my voice...my flair. Clearly their choice not to edit me was a good one.
So why, when I've written a simple little book for a minuscule press, did the editor tear up every word on every page? I asked her why she did when Kathryn and Jack hadn't, and she said, "Well, they didn't have money invested in your books." Excuse me? They kind of had reputations, and their reputations are golden. When the book was finished, I asked to publish under a pseudonym. I was turned down. I'm not going into publication with a lot of enthusiasm.
I'm also struggling with another novel, editing by committee. But I'm getting more respect. Anything after the other editor is fresh and comfortable.
But I'm mystified. I know writers hunger for Maxwell Perkins. Maybe Kathryn and Jack should have paid more attention. But I've always felt proprietary about my words, and they knew that. I guess I'll be the way I am after most books: in just a matter of months,both will look to me as if someone else wrote them anyway. I never recognize myself.

Whaddya know: I had a few brain cells that didn't die in Katrina!
I'm back to writing my blog because I'm back to writing books.
The big deal is that I've written the book I was born to write. Appropriately enough, it's titled TOO JEWISH, and I've plucked out a lot of autobiographical material and twisted my small tragedies into larger ones. This is a story of a Holocaust survivor who can live somehow with the guilt of leaving his mother behind, but every day is defeated by having married a Southern Jewish girl whose parents see him as, well, look at the title.
This is an e-novel, coming out in October from the hot, fast-paced new booksBnimble.
I also have a YA novel, the first for this audience dealing with the experience of being trapped during Katrina in New Orleans. It's due out in paperback from Tiny Satchel Press of Philadelphia in November, just in time to mark the fifth anniversary of my city's near-destruction.
The last time I posted I said that "prescience sucks." This time I'm riding with the e-publishing trend and the wave of young adult fiction. Let's see if I'm ahead of the game or on top of it this time!

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.