I'd Tell You But Then I'd Have To . . .

I rarely tell people I am a novelist. It invites those dreaded questions. What's your book about? I have this great idea for a book--would you write it and we can split the royalties? You know all THOSE questions. I usually tell people I am an actuary. Lately, I've been thinking of switching my career to "theoretical physicist" but then I am afraid someone will ask "What's that?"

Of course, I have four kids . . . and a couple of them tell people what I do, despite my asking them to say I am an actuary. So then I meet parents of their friends. "Oh, your Baby Girl's mother . . . she tells me you're a writer."

"Um . . . she said that? Oh . . . sort of. I work from home."

How's that for sufficiently vague?

But lately, despite my best efforts, acquaintances are finding out what I do. And a funny thing has happened. More and more, I think people realize that I am a writer and ALSO that I appear to listen very well--to observe them. And if they know me for long enough, they realize I remember EVERYTHING. And NOW, some people start to tell a story and stop and say, "Okay, you can't put this in one of your books."

People now have "off-the-record" conversations around me!

I just crack up. Even if I "use" something, it's usually blended and changed in such a way that no one would recognize it. But it's just very funny how my being a writer affects conversation.

In fact, in my work in progress, someone has to go interview someone else, and the interviewer is told, "Don't take notes. People think twice about talking to people when someone is taking notes." And it's true. I'm not a true journalist, but I am there taking mental notes.

Has this ever happened to you? Of course the opposite happens too. Sometimes someone doesn't STOP talking and says, "You have to put this in a book someday."

When I tell stories, I usually just say, "I'd tell you what really happened . . . but then I'd have to . . ." You know the drill.

Thoughts?

The Path to I Do

I read this every single Sunday.

I get my cup of coffee before church, and sit down and read it while it's quiet around here (if such a thing even exists . . . quiet in this house is relative). If I go on vacation and miss a week of it, because it's archived at the NY Times, I go back and read the week I missed.

So why? Why do I read it? If you met me, I doubt you would say I am a hopeless romantic, though I am hopelessly, impossibly sentimental. I cry at Kodak commericals. I cry reading this every Sunday. I cry when my kids write me goofy notes like "I luv U, U R the best mom, don't be crabby" (I get said notes once a month if you get my drift, and if any of my kids are reading this, that explains my homicidal mood this a.m.--but I digress). In general, I cry at anything sentimental--and I don't even have to KNOW the people involved. My kids once made me watch that show Extreme Home Makeover, and I had to go get a BOX of tissues I was crying so hard. I can go to a total stranger's wedding and weep all the way through it. People are so full of hope at weddings, it's contagious.

But as a writer, what I love is that the stories in the Times each Sunday capture two things. One is that there is someone for everyone. That all our foibles and neuroses and the delicious things and not-so-wonderful things that make us human somehow find a match in someone else. And two, as a fiction writer, I love the stories, the way the Fates conspire to bring two souls together. The "how we met" stories. Two people each on their own path who somehow manage to meet and survive to become a couple. When I look at The Roofer, which isn't a romance by any stretch, it's a miracle that Ava can even try to form a relationship. Yet people seem to have it in themselves to try for love. Or the Fates seem to insist on it.

Fate? Maybe. When I met my significant other, I hurled a steak at his head through the window of a kitchen pass-thru because his sous chef had burned my best customer's steak. In my defense, I wasn't a Buddhist then. I was a single mother who had been so broken by one man's possessive streak that I thought I would suffocate. But somehow, this guy I hit with a steak made me laugh. From there, we went on a date, at which he said he wanted to marry me. Which was enough to make me run the other way. It took a couple of years, multiple proposals, three rings, and a dress for me to finally agree. I found a VERY nice wedding dress in a formal dress shop, off the rack, sample sale, and thought, "If I ever was going to be so utterly INSANE as to CONTEMPLATE getting married again, I would wear THIS dress." I came home with the dress. I called him at work and said, "If we're going to do this, let's do it in a month before I change my mind." We found a preacher, an inn to have it at, and a place to do pronto invitations. All within one week, which is insane. The inn had a cancellation. The cakemaker said he could do it. The preacher was a relative who offered to drive up and hitch us. And right until I actually walked in the inn, it was never a sure thing. Had my best friend from high school not physically gotten me into a cab, I would probably not have four children right now. In fact, I was so unsure I could go through with it, I didn't even have flowers for my hair and bought some on the way, pinning them into my hair in the rearview mirror of the cab (with a very nice cabbie, whom we tipped well for putting up with me doing my hair in his cab).

You don't have to write romance or romantic comedies to appreciate the stories of people's lives. That's what makes most of us writers. So, do you collect stories of people and the fates like I do? Do people and their stories fascinate you? Do you think the Fates intervene?

Everyone Has a Story

As a fiction writer, I am fortunate in that I have lived a really full life, complete with family members who really should have their own reality show. Not kidding. Eccentric relatives, LOUD relatives, crazy but lovable people all around . . . and I've packed a lot of living in my years--some of it unhappy--divorce and unhappy marriage, a life-threatening bout of illness, high-risk pregnancies (baby#3 was born with me having a catheter inserted into my heart while in labor--and I went on to try for baby#4). But even the sad and difficult and grief-filled parts of life are fodder for fiction.

When people meet my family--boisterous and funny and a little left of criminal at times--they say how lucky I am. "They sure give you stuff to write about."

But that's where they're wrong in a way. I once met an aspiring writer who told me he had lived a timid, quiet, shy, boring life. "Nothing to write about," he told me. "I've been a scientist all my life. I never even got married."

But he was wrong--because even in THAT there is the story. Maybe, in my own take on living life fully, it is a tragic tale of a man afraid to love or a man afraid to take risks. Maybe there is tragedy in the man (not him but some hypothetical man) burning with resentments and filled with pessimism and a life unfulfilled. Or the man who has sat in the same armchair for twenty years, drinking himself into a stupor. Or the wan who tossed his wife and children away for a chance on what he thought was love--and gambled wrong. In these lives of quiet desperation, there are stories.

In the lives of the man who packs my groceries and the woman I meet at the park who secretly loathes her mother-in-law, there are stories.

We all have them. The key, as writer, is to pull them out and write about them.

I am lucky in I have a bold life. A reckless, wonderful life that I can draw on. But everyone has a story. Don't you think? Do you listen to the stories of others or just imagine them? Do you draw from others' lives? I'm curious!

Peace,
E