Patty Friedmann as author redux

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?