Patty Friedmann's blog

Something personal

My children marry in varying degrees of haste and so far show no signs of wanting to repent now that they have leisure. This means that weddings--which seem to be the family's only sacrament--are not huge state occasions. So I don't invite the known world. For me that would involve gathering together the literary community in New Orleans, which would feel like stepping into a Bosch tryptich.

Yesterday a friend married off her daughter. The wedding was a pluperfect affair, and because she is beloved among book people and others of the word, all my friends and ex-friends were there. It was my ultimate nightmare, several shades blacker than going back to high school. I moved through a minefield, skittering quickly over to the table where the T's were seated with W because C had gone out for a cigarette. C had written me off cruelly and unnecessarily. I had fantasies that C would take this blissful occasion to come over, put his hand on my shoulder, apologize, pick up where we left off three years ago. It didn't happen. On the other hand, M also was there. She wrote me off for no good reason, and I hated her for it. I assumed it was because I kept selling novels, and she couldn't. She won a short-story prize, and everyone in town surmised that she won because the person behind the prize also had redecorated M's kitchen. Losing her friendship was fine with me. Except that she always seemed to sail her big old body right through literary gatherings, leaving a wake that my 110 pounds would drown in. I stayed home from any party I thought she might attend. And that often included launches for anthologies in which we both had stories. At the wedding, she had seated herself at a table, the better to feed her great appetites, also the better to visit with my friend L. I spent a lot of time with some very splendid people last night, but I went home feeling like I was thirteen and needing my mother to tell me that I should focus on the good friends, not the bad. Oh, wait, my mother never did that, or I wouldn't have this problem now.

I suppose my spirits somewhat can be buoyed by another incident this past week. It didn't start out as a good thing: on Wednesday R died at the age of 78. She was an English PhD whose mind deteriorated to taking pleasure in the Food Channel. For some strange reason, the minute I heard, I picked up the phone and phoned S. I hadn't talked to S in over four years; something about something I'd done wrong. A hurricane and a lot more had intervened. S probably has more literary chops than everyone in that entire wedding reception put together. She and I picked right up where we left off. She is a class act. After I hung up, I remembered the finest moment I ever had with her. It was an evening many years ago when she and the man I call C and I went out to dinner. Afterwards we went back to her house for several rounds of drinks. Deep into his cups, C said, "S, what do you look for in a friend?" S thought it over for a moment. "I suppose I look for someone who can take fun where he or she finds it," S said. And then she told the story of how she and a friend found themselves stuck in Scotland one evening after missing the last train to London. So they just got drunk and hung around until the first morning train, having a hell of a good time. C then asked me what I looked for in a friend. "Cynicism," I said. Of course C wanted us to ask him what he looked for, and S obliged. "I look for devotion and loyalty," he said.

"Ah," S said. "You meant something personal."

Ya got me where I live

I know authors aren't supposed to respond to reviews. To believe a good one gives a false sense of achievement; to believe a bad one gives a false sense of despair. But my first pre-pub review just came out for A Little Bit Ruined, and I have to react, because it got me where I live. Literally. One line says that Eleanor Rushing "is perhaps the wrong narrator to drop into post-Katrina New Orleans."

Excuse me? Eleanor Rushing is my alter ego. I can channel her voice on a dime. Yes, she is nuts--delusional and out of control--but there is a little of Eleanor in all of us. Eleanor's contorted story is the vehicle in which I convey my own experience of entrapment in a destroyed city. Eleanor learned the lesson I learned. For those caught in the city after the storm, loss leveled the playing field: white, black, rich, poor--no one had electricity or gas, water or food, communication or transportation, no safety or future. I was rescued in four feet of water. I know on the most visceral level that Eleanor is a true New Orleans character. I am Eleanor. She is the genuine article--or I'm not.

I know the whacked perspective from which this reviewer writes because I used to be a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, where this review appeared. I reviewed The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta and gave it a starred review because it was fine writing. Later I was given Election by the same author and said it paled in comparison because it was a shallow story that I thought pandered to commercialism or some such thing. Sure enough, Election became a hit movie starring Reese Witherspoon. I quit soon after that because I realized that book reviewing had nothing to do with literary merit. I could tell that I was seen as having made a bad call on the Perrotta novels when I knew I hadn't.

That's what's so ridiculous about this review. Is there one word about its literary merit? No, it's all about the reviewer's skewed perception about what he/she thinks is going on in New Orleans. The national view of the city is that we are a bunch of black welfare mothers trying to break into the housing projects and loll around on the dole. What's that have to do with fiction?

In an interesting footnote, the review also begs the question of Eleanor's obsession with plastic surgery as a metaphor for New Orleans's ruination. On January 16, 2007, the full front page of the Times-Picayune carried a feature titled "Best Face Forward," with the subtitle reading, "Disheartened by a disfigured city, many Katrina survivors are turning to plastic surgery as a pick-me-up."

Too bad the review wasn't written by someone who understands what's going on in New Orleans. But as with most reporting about this city, that's usually the case. It's just that this time it got personal.

Cue the shark

Forget the wailing jazz trumpets: the music on the streets of New Orleans these days ought to be the theme music from Jaws. You know: Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water...

Earlier this week I had a houseguest, and I was giving her the complete tour, the "disaster tour of me." She was a friend I knew through her days in publishing, so we were dealing on a metaphorical level in some ways. When we went to the Lower Ninth Ward, she saw devastation, even though I saw huge improvement from when a mutual friend had been here in January of '06. The miles and miles of destroyed houses were gone now, and in their place were small concrete pilings and miles and miles of empty green spaces. I realized I was seeing a new kind of sadness.

The next morning, the day we planned to tour the virtually untouched French Quarter, we woke up to learn that the reason we had no electricity was that a tornado had touched down mere yards from my house. So we could tour fresh rubble on foot. We could see victims on their porches with that terrible hundred-yard stare that I once had. But in the place of deathly silence that I experienced when I was trapped in New Orleans after Katrina, the neighborhood was buzzing with activity, with chain saws and emergency vehicles, with the Salvation Army and volunteers. City Councilman Oliver Thomas was on the spot, and of course the mayor was nowhere to be seen. Within 48 hours, recovery was about as good as it could get if we were in the Midwest.

So how do I feel? Well, two things have brought back the mental paralysis that it took nearly eighteen months to break out of. The first was the loss of electricity. I'd been told it would last about three days. I'd still have phone and gas, but without electricity I'd have no heat. That meant a winter version of hurricane survival mode. That's not good for a person with PTSD.

And then...

The New York Times, New Orleans's greatest advocate outside of Brian Williams, ran a piece this morning about the sorry exodus of people, a sort of brain drain, from the city. It described every grim reality of life here--even finding an instance of excrement on someone's roof. Yes, it's based on probably good statistics. Yes, it's happening in some parts of town. But why couldn't they skew it a little and talk about how well we did in my neighborhood? We proved how well we can mend if the disaster is reasonable.

Now if only I can learn to wrap my mind around the concept of reasonable. Unfortunately, reasonable and rational are closely related. And fiction writers are neither.

LOL: the Big Lie

I've been annoyed for weeks now, because recently I've made a few attempts at entering the New Yorker cartoon-caption competition--with no luck. The cartoon each time has inspired me to submit a splendid caption. I've never come close to winning, but that's not what chafes. I'm peeved because the finalists--not to mention winners—didn’t make me laugh.

Humor's my stock in trade. It has been ever since middle school when I became the fat Jewish girl who could only win friends by making them laugh. With me, not at me. I'm not fat or particularly Jewish anymore, but I still use dark comedy in my everyday interchanges and in my novels. I'm not bragging when I say some pretty smart people have said I'm the funniest person in New Orleans. It's not an accolade everyone strives for. Particularly in a city that skitters close to losing its sense of humor on a daily basis lately.

I want to know I'm funny wherever I go; I want to go onto the back page of The New Yorker. But for as long as I can remember, I've never been able to define what humor is. Reviewers say mine is full of irony and a "can't believe she said that" quality. I know that, but I don't understand it. I want to stand in front of crowds and hear the laughter. I want readers to tell me they laughed out loud when they read my books. There's just one problem. I'm not a big laugher, so I find it hard to believe I make other people laugh. If I send an e-mail, and the response is "LOL," I figure that person is a liar. I can count on one hand the number of times I've read anything in the past year that made a happy whoop come out of my depths. And I never roll on the floor.

Maybe that's the nature of humor: it's best when the clown doesn't know it. And this clown never LOL, much less ROFL.

Post-traumatic reading disorder

Before the Great Cataclysm of 2005, I was a non-reader. By that I mean that I read no fiction. I'd explored my reasons, and I'd come up with two. First, reading fiction had been ruined for me by being a reviewer for Publishers Weekly for seven years. PW requires word-by-word documentation of every fact and opinion. There was no fun left in reading. Second, I felt that other writers' voices would creep into my prose if I read their work. I wanted to be fresh and pure.

And then came Katrina. After the storm, I had no mail delivery for several months, and when mail started up again, it was all first-class. No magazines. Few bookstores and no libraries were open, but then I didn't read fiction, so that was manageable. Even newspaper was hard to come by: with no home delivery, I had to drive to a box for a copy each day.

The upshot was that every scrap of paper with writing on it was a treasure. If I owned a piece of writing of any sort, I felt obligated to read it in its entirety. I became a strange sort of reader: starved for printed material, I consumed anything placed in front of me. When my sister bought a copy of The New Yorker on a trip, I read every word. Nobody reads every word of The New Yorker--at least not in the parts of the world where another issue will arrive in a week.

I still feel that same obligation to read what's placed in front of me. Today my friend Sarah gave me a copy of The DaVinci Code along with some of the furnishings I'd loaned her after the storm took her house. I owned the book now, so I felt I had to read it. But after about ten pages of pedestrian prose, I said to myself, Hey, cut it out. I wasn't having fun, because I still have PW Syndrome and read too critically. And the last thing I'd want when I'm writing is to have another author's style seep into my work. Especially that style. I'm putting it in my giveaway pile. I'd rather be a non-reader than an omnivorous one.

Nine hundred eighty-one words

I love that tool icon that scrolls down to "word count." It was designed for the anal-retentive, or obsessive-compulsive. Or maybe just for the hopeless writer who wants math on her side. The way I write a novel is, I pound away until I get to 80,000 words, and then whatever I have is a book.

I've written 981 words. So I'm past the one percent mark on a new novel. Way past "I need a very high fever," my first line. It's a complete prologue. And as any writer who writes beginning to end knows, setting the stage is bigger than just three pages. It's pasting the roadmap inside the front cover.

What was my impetus? Dare I say hope? All the scary, beyond-my-control publishing cataclysms seem to be taking place beyond the life of my April-release novel. I keep my star publicist. Distribution is uninterrupted by Chapter 11. "Having written" that book might not be unbearably painful. I needed a worst-case scenario to see that bad scenarios aren't as bad as they could be.

So I can start another one. That means I can do what I do. I write. It feels good. If I find by May that "having written" is once again worse than bamboo shoots under my fingernails, I will jettison this new and untitled novel. So far it's only on diskette. Not even on my hard drive. Definitely not on paper. Gone with the flick of a wrist.

But I wasn't going to chop down another tree

I'd been saying I wasn't going to write another book. Early last week, without my consent, a cast of characters came to me in my sleep. That's the way I start. I love them enough to live with them for six months, so I can write another novel.

But I'd said that I was giving up writing, that the "having written" part of the process was too much for me, that unless my experience this spring with A Little Bit Ruined was as dreamy as it's been promising to be, I was never again committing to a book.  As it stood when my dream produced the infrastructure of a new novel, A Little Bit Ruined had what no other book of mine has had. A break-out hook: the first literary Katrina novel. The full force of the publicity department at Avalon. And my pure inner tranquility. This was the cliche that wasn't going to happen: the tree would fall in the forest and make a resounding noise.

And then forces way beyond me started spinning counterclockwise. The distributor PGW went into Chapter 11. Avalon was bought by Perseus, which owns Counterpoint, which was founded by Jack Shoemaker, publisher of the imprint now doing my books; Jack obviously is no longer with Perseus. Nobody in publishing knows what will happen with any of these players. Least of all me. But with a book going to the printer this week, I might have hard copies that won't be sung and won't be sold.

It might not make a sound.

"Literary scene" is an oxymoron

Yesterday was a day for drawing ambiguous conclusions. See: I'm already on the way to oxymorons...

I went to my therapist, my first session of '07, the year in which I launch many literary works, and I sat on that couch and contorted my body and strained my muscles and determined finally that I could have no expectations. "I will not do anything this year; I will be something," I said. I would not define myself in terms of my work.

And then I came home to talk to my agent on the phone about first serial rights. He had his plans. I dutifully wrote down what he said, and when I reported our conversation to my daughter, I told her instead how much weight his baby girl had gained. No fantasies.

The doorbell rang, and it was my friend Billy, who never comes all this way uptown. He felt it was easier to deliver an article in the Wall Street Journal, a feature about William Boyd. The article said many things, but I plucked one passage from it. "Mr. Boyd keeps his distance from the London literary scene, which he makes sound like an oxymoron. 'Novelists are not gregarious as a group of people,' he says. 'A roomful of novelists is fixing with tension and suspicion, whereas a roomful of actors is fun.'"

"Ah, Billy," I said, "I'm going to be like you now. I'm not going to do anything." "Wu wei," he said on parting. "It's the taoist concept of non-action." Billy is a reader, not a taoist. Believing would be an action.

It was author Chris Wiltz's birthday, so I phoned her. She was having a good birthday, in part because she was writing well. We talked for two of her birthday hours, up and down and all around the writing and having-written dilemma, especially about being a writer in New Orleans, about being on the periphery of the so-called literary scene here. If there were a real literary scene, it would be filled with people like her and me--and we would be staying home. An oxymoron. She's happy because she's immersed in her storytelling. I'm going to be happy telling nothing. Doing nothing.

Wu wei.

"I love to write; I hate having written."

“I love to write; I hate having written.”

The first time I heard that concept was over two decades ago. I know how long ago it was: Harlan Ellison was in New Orleans, and not only was George Alec Effinger alive, he was still my friend. My one degree of separation from Harlan. Anyway, Harlan was going to do his shtick, of sitting in a bookstore window and writing a short story. Of course he liked writing better than having written. He could have been banging out the bible like a monkey.

I’m trying to sort out writing versus having written now. Because it occurs to me as I reread my blog that no one looking at it would have any notion that I have three major book projects coming out this spring. A short story in an anthology, the paperback of one novel, and the hardback original of another. The last of these might be a big deal; it’s probably the first literary Katrina novel.

And I’m anticipatorily terrified. Promotion is rough for agoraphobics. Reviews are scary for anyone sensitive enough to put words on paper. And being midlist isn’t a lifetime fantasy. This is what “having written” is all about. It’s what happens if a person “writes.” Unless she’s J.D. Salinger and puts it all in a drawer. But I’ve instructed my daughter to have “posthumous doesn’t count” engraved on my tombstone. So if I get brave and start to write, the day will come when I will have written. Scary.

I think in that spirit I’ll take the comment capability off my blog..

It's the day after. The feedback comes to me by e-mail instead. And some of it sayst hat a blog is the one chance where readers talk among themselves in front of the writer. Writers are nothing if not voyeurs. I can't resist.

I need a very high fever

I'm not coy. A person has to have self-esteem to be coy, and as my shrink would be the first to tell you, I'm bone dry in the self-esteem pan. So it's not as if I'm writing these blogs hoping that I'll hear a lot of clamoring of, "Oh, please, oh, please, you must write." I'm just thinking out loud--and probably speaking for that handful of fiction writers who are stymied by post-apocalyptic New Orleans. I should amend that: I'm speaking for the handful of sensitive writers. I've heard from the city's highest authority on books, who has to remain nameless, that a lot of crap is ready to pour forth from vanity presses. I can see it now: writers from elsewhere trying to write first-person accounts of being trapped in attics and calling their neighbors on cell phones. No verisimilitude: the towers went down on Day Two. I was here, and I know what is true. I know that when you wade through water up to your armpits, sometimes the water is cold; sometimes it's warm, sometimes you hit tangles of grasses, sometimes curbs.

Having said all that, I think I'll be able to write. But I'll write at the rate the city recovers. So far I have my opening sentence. "I need a very high fever." In my mind I have a jumble of what follows, just as I'm sure the recovery authorities have a lot of jumbles. I guess the difference is that my book will have an ending. Assuming it comes before I go.