Day ONE of Five

I'm thrilled to be back...and thank you, Aggie, for the invitation. During my last blog-invite, I invited many authors to join me and discuss their books, and I'm hoping a few will come into our 'den' over these five days.

I'm hoping that Joyce Maynard will also join us for a few minutes this week. She's touring with LABOR DAY, which I gather was optioned for a film before it hit the bookstores, and she's booked day and night. http://www.keplers.com/book/9780061843402. I've been reading about her writing class taught at her place at Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala. Joyce graciously read with me recently in Marin. Her essay appears in my new anthology.

Yes, a new anthology! On 9/30, I was joined at Kepler's by five of the contributing authors and we had a wonderful time reading from, and signing copies of, THE FACE IN THE MIRROR: Writers Reflect on Their Dreams of Youth and the Reality of Age. (We signed a few extras, which are undoubtedly on the shelf awaiting loving buyers...and did I warn you that I've lost all pretense of subtlety?) You can imagine my excitement when MORE magazine's website named this book one of the 21 'must-read' books for fall/winter. http://www.keplers.com/book/9781591027522

Eileen Goudge is also in the anthology and joined me in New York a few weeks ago to read from her very funny and moving essay. Eileen is the New York Times bestselling author whose novels include THE DIARY, DOMESTIC AFFAIRS, WOMAN IN RED, ONE LAST DANCE, GARDEN OF LIES, and THORNS OF TRUTH. There are more than five million copies of her books in print worldwide. She will try to post, although she's also on the road. Her new novel, ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, is getting terrific reviews. http://www.keplers.com/book/9781593155346

This week we'll also be visited by Arabella Grayson (is that a name for a novel...or what?!), a writer who has lovingly put together perhaps the world's finest collection of African-American paper dolls...going back hundreds of years. Arabella had an exhibition at the Smithsonian and is completing a book. You'll be taken at once by the beauty and significance of each piece.

I'll extend an invitation to Malachy McCourt and perhaps he'll be able to check in and say hello. He's in the new anthology and mesmerized the audience at our reading in NY. Julia Glass is on book tour with the paperback launch of I SEE YOU EVERYWHERE (Anchor) and I'm hoping she'll drop in on Wednesday. We'll also discuss Jane Smiley's YA novel and a number of new books about to be released.

Thanks for reading the blog and please, let me hear from you. It's so much more interesting (and fun) if we have a give-and-take of ideas. I'll be checking in several times a day and will respond to all questions and comments.

Joyce Maynard Guest Post: Throwing Away a Screw Gun and Finding a Fictional Character

This week, I’ve been talking about the connections between my own life experience and those of the fictional characters in my new novel, Labor Day. I am not Adele, the single mother in Labor Day. But the experience of single parenthood is one I know well, having raised my own three children as a divorced woman for most of the years they were home.

I spent a lot of years grieving over the failure of my marriage to my children’s father, and regret at not having been able to provide for them the intact family I would have loved for us to be. And, like Adele, I remained haunted—too long, no doubt—by bitter feelings towards a man I once loved.

Most of the time, I was a steady, dependable mother. But it’s my job as a writer –and as a human being, I think—to acknowledge those less than heroic moments, when I became—for a moment or two anyway—someone considerably less than who I wanted to be for my children. Here is the story of one such night:

Seven years after I separated from my children’s father it was still hard going back to our old house. I knew that house so well, I could find my way around in the dark. I knew where the wild trillium came up in the woods out back of the garage and where the ladyslippers grew. I knew every knot in the floorboards.

After my marriage ended I moved to a small city, thirty miles from that house, and my children continued to spend every other weekend with their father. Sundays were designated my time to pick them up. Our children found some kind of rhythm, transporting their brown paper grocery bags filled with clothes from one house to the other and back again. But I'd rather have driven a hundred miles in any other direction, than make that particular trip.

Usually when I’d get to our old house, my former husband would be there, standing in the doorway. But one Sunday late last winter he and our older son had gone off with friends so I was only picking up our younger boy, Willy. And for the first time in ages, I stepped into my old kitchen.

A bitter taste rose in my throat, like what happens when you think you’re going to throw up, but you don’t. I stepped into the hallway and glanced at the bed where all three of our babies were born. I went back in the kitchen, ran my hand over the wood of the kitchen counter, where I must have prepared a thousand meals, and looked out the window, to an eery and beautiful streak of light from a full moon slashing across newfallen snow. I remembered another full moon night, when my husband and I had skated on black ice on the pond down the road, and another full moon night, when we’d fought so bitterly I paced the rooms of this house until dawn, lying down briefly next to first one of my sleeping children, and then another, unable to find sleep.

This wasn’t even close to the first time I felt that bitter taste: I had it the day seven years ago that I drove a U-Haul filled with my belongings down this driveway, the day I sat in a courtroom, hearing a guardian ad litem evaluate my performance as a mother. I could have risen from my chair and put my fist through a wall, that day. The surprise was discovering that years later, the wild rage I felt in the early stages of divorce seemed to have flared up again. Suddenly I felt the urge to paint graffiti on the walls, smash dishes. Although if you’d walked in the room at that moment all you would have seen was a 42 year old woman looking out a window, not saying a word.

Now comes the hard part of this story. On the kitchen counter lay my ex-husband’s screw gun. I picked it up and palmed it as if it were a 45. I put it down again. Picked it up and tucked it under my jacket and walked out the door.

Then, like a person in a dream, I saw myself raising my arm the way my two sons have taught me when we’re playing catch, and I let that screw gun fly. I watched it land in a clump of snow-covered bushes. I walked back into the house and called to my son. Time to go home.

By the time I got back to my own house, I felt sick with shame and embarrassment at what I’d done. Monday morning I tried to work, but all I could think about was this man I used to be married to, looking for his screw gun and realizing that it had disappeared the same night I’d come to his house when he wasn’t there. I saw his face, twisted into a mask of justifiable rage.

Just after noon I put on my jacket and headed out to my car. And as I drove it came to me that the worst thing about divorce is not what the other person does to you, or how he behaves, but the strange and terrible behavior divorce produces in your own self. After an ugly divorce, someone who used to love you reshapes his view of you into that of a hateful and monstrous person. That Sunday night I turned into her.

As I turned the final bend in the road leading up to my old house I saw with relief that my ex-husband’s car wasn’t there. So I walked over to the clump of bushes where I’d thrown the gun. At first I couldn’t spot it.

Then I saw the handle, just barely sticking up out of the snow. I dried the gun off on my shirt and carried it onto the porch, where I set it on a table. I didn’t put it back where I’d found it, because to do so, I’d have to enter the house. And it wasn’t my house any more.

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A post-script to this story. I am older now. We all are. I don’t throw screw guns any more. But I understand the deep sorrows in the hearts of a woman who would behave this way. Now I do something more constructive with my familiarity with those feelings: I write fictional characters who experience them.

And, in my own life, live a lot more peacefully.

Joyce Maynard Guest Post: Every Character Has Her Own Story

The other day in this spot I was telling you a little story about my son Charlie’s attempts, when young, to find me a boyfriend. (I want to clarify, I was single at the time. And Charlie was nine or ten.)

I told this story in the context of reflecting on my new novel, Labor Day, and the many aspects of a writer’s experiences and obsessions—large and small—that make their way into her work. Whether she likes it or not. Though if you ask me, it’s a wise writer who makes use of those pesky obsessions of hers. And my new novel is jam-packed full of them.

Case in point: The character of Eleanor, in Labor Day. Without giving away anything that would spoil the book for you, I can safely tell you here that Eleanor’s a fourteen –year-old girl our narrator (thirteen-year-old Henry) meets up with at the town library on Labor Day weekend, where—in the pre-Google days of 1987-- he has been sent by his mother to research Prince Edward Island, because she’s thinking maybe she should move there with her lover, the following week.

(O.K. This will make more sense if you read the novel. And of course that’s what I’m trying to inspire you to do here.)

Now, here are some things you will learn about Eleanor, if you read my book. Her parents are divorced. Her mother has packed her off from her home in Chicago (a place where people wear cool clothes and listen to jazz) and sent her to live with her father in a New Hampshire hick town (that’s her concept of the place, anyway) so she (the mother) can have sex with her boyfriend all the time.

Eleanor’s got eating disorders (when she wants to eat, she sucks on her braid instead), and has drawn a line on her wrist that says “cut here”. She has come to the library to research her legal rights, in anticipation of suing her parents for inflicting psychological damage on her. She thinks maybe she and Henry should have sex, to get the whole virginity problem over with. Before much time passes, she’ll be stepping out of her polka dot underpants.

Henry—to his credit—is not so sure this is a good idea.

I will add that Eleanor will play a major role in my novel, in doing some serious damage to the lives of Henry’s mother and the man with whom she has fallen in love.

So where does the idea come from, for a character like this?

Here comes a painful admission: From my own young self.

I am not Eleanor. I wasn’t Eleanor when I was fourteen, either. I didn’t come from Chicago. (I’m a New Hampshire girl, in fact. Live Free or Die.) My parents didn’t get a divorce until I was grown. I didn’t have sex with any boys that year, or for a long time after. I did not contemplate cutting my wrists (though if you saw a picture of me as a teenager you’d understand I know a thing or two about eating disorders.)

But I know this girl, because I possessed some of her least likeable traits, myself, when young. And I will add that as a writer, I believe it is my job to locate compassion for every single character I bring to life on the page. Eleanor included. I’m not interested in books in which there are good guys (or girls) and bad ones. Just human beings, every one of them possessing flaws--longings and regrets, history and sorrows, hunger and obsession. Those things get us into trouble and sometimes—on rare and precious occasions, one of which occurs in my novel—they even get us out of it.

Eleanor is a meddler and a busy-body. As was I. (By the way, this is a trait all writers should possess. If you want to write good fiction, you’d better have inordinate interest in other people’s lives. Which I do. And in fact, if you are such a person, becoming a writer may be one of the best ways of keeping yourself out of trouble. Better to meddle with the lives of fictional characters than real ones.)

When I was fourteen-years-old, I developed a crush on my biology lab partner—a major bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, who had a girlfriend he wanted to break up with, only he couldn’t figure out how, and couldn’t handle giving up the sex. But this girl had nothing interesting to say to him, ever. And Joe (the name I’ll give him) was a smart and funny person who read books and liked talking to me. He may even have had a crush on me, back, actually. Only neither of us knew what to do about this.

So I created an imaginary girl for him. A little like me. A lot like who I wished I was. I told Joe I had this friend who went to a different school, who had seen him at a basketball game and wanted to meet him. Joe was instantly enthralled. I started delivering notes to Joe, written by this friend of mine. He wrote long letters back, pouring out his heart to her.

There was no girl, of course. The one writing the letters was me. Keep in mind here: I’m a writer, and even at fourteen, I could write a good letter.

The story ended badly, of course. Forty years later, I still think about this episode as one of the worst things I ever did.

When I was seventeen, I wrote a short story based on what happened between Joe and me. It won second place in the Seventeen magazine short story competition. That was my first published work of fiction. The following year I went off to Yale, sold an article to The New York Times, and got a book contract.

As for Joe, he married the bad news girlfriend. They had a baby with a heart problem who needed multiple surgeries and eventually died on the operating table. A few years later, driving down Main Street in our town, he hit a pedestrian crossing the street. The man died. I saw Joe only once after that, pumping gas, back in the days before self-service.

I did not say, as I was writing Labor Day, and when I created the character of Eleanor, that I was going to write about this dark and haunting piece of my own story, though I doubt a week goes by I haven’t thought about it.

But whether she’s writing fiction or non-fiction (and I write both), this much is true: a writer cannot avoid channeling the experiences of her life, the moments of deepest and sharpest emotion, good and ill. They crop up all over the place in our work, whether we like it or not.

Some people, talking to me about my novel, say how awful a person Eleanor was, how much they hate her. And of course I understand. But I also understand what made her do what she did. I know every character has her own story, and it is my job to understand each of them. It is my job to explore not only the heroic and beautiful aspects of human nature, but the painful and screwed up ones.

I am Eleanor, in my novel. I am also Henry. Also Adele. I am even Frank, and I am a woman who loves Frank, and a woman who broke Frank’s heart, and one who mended it.

If I tried to be all of these people out in real life, there’d be a name for my psychological disorder, and it would not be a good thing to be. But I go to these places only in my head, and on the pages of my books. So the name for me is a writer.

Joyce Maynard Guest Post: The Dream of a Second Chance

I remember one time, when my son Charlie was around nine, and we were living –my three kids and me— in the not-very-big New Hampshire town we’d moved to after my marriage to their father had ended. Charlie had come with me to the supermarket that day. As the guy at the cash register was adding up our purchases, he’d recognized me from some book jacket, I guess, because he started talking with me about my writing, and how much he liked my books.

After I paid, and we were heading to the car, Charlie nudged me. “That guy might be a good boyfriend for you,” my son told me. “You should let him know where we live.”

There were a few problems with this idea—the first one being that for reasons nearly impossible to explain to my son, this particularly friendly and well-read supermarket checker was almost certainly gay. (How to explain this to a nine year old? All I came up with, when Charlie asked me how I knew, was the observation, “Well, he’s just so….nice.”)

But our conversation, and my son’s hopeful and well-meaning efforts to fix me up with the man at Hannaford’s revealed a deeper issue: the idea that a nine-year-old boy would feel responsible for locating a boyfriend for his thirty- seven-year-old mother.

He did this because he loved me and wanted me to be happy, and because he knew I would have loved to have a little romance in my life, and I didn’t. Then there was this, I think: if someone else stepped up to the plate, to become the man of the house, he might have felt less weight of responsibility on his own young shoulders.

The original title I gave to my new novel, Labor Day, was The Man of the House—and one of the reasons it came to me, I know, was that I knew well (as did my three children) what it was like to live in a household where no such person exists. I was a single mother for most of the years I raised my kids, and though I am a very different person from the single mother in my novel—and my sons (both in their twenties now) were different boys from the fictional character of Henry-- the themes I explore in Labor Day are ones I knew well: Longing for romantic love. The dream of a family. A parent’s responsibility for a child. A child’s, for a parent. The fear of loss. The dream of a second chance.

For Henry, the surprising event, one hot summer day at the start of a long Labor Day weekend, of meeting Frank, the man who will embark on a love affair with his mother, Adele—inspires painfully conflicted emotion. As a boy whose own father has largely disappeared from his life, he’s drawn to this man who fixes the car and offers to play catch with him and—most importantly—makes his mother happy. But he’s scared too: that with Frank on the scene, his mother may abandon him.

“All this time I’d been picturing how now it would be the three of us together, like when we played catch in the yard, only really, it was going to be the two of them,” Henry thinks. “And me left behind.”

I had no idea, when I started this novel, where my characters would end up. But I have this faith—learned over my many years of writing fiction—that if you bring a character to life on the page, he will take on a life of his own, and lead you where you need to go. Once Henry started telling his story, and I started writing it down—almost as if I were transcribing what he had to say, more than inventing it—the story unfolded before my eyes. I know why I wrote this novel more swiftly than any other I’d written: Because I had to find out, for myself, what happened.

I should add here that though the story appears to be coming from the perspective of the boy, the person who is telling the story is actually Henry, twenty years later, looking back from the perspective of an adult, on the events of that one extraordinary weekend that changed, forever, the lives of three people—himself, his mother, and Frank.

From a personal perspective, my own children are also grown and off living their own lives now. My son Charlie—the boy who so tenderly attempted to set me up with our supermarket checker—is twenty seven now, and living in Brooklyn, where he works with children helping them write and record hip hop songs, and performing in a band. His brother is twenty five, and working in Los Angeles. My oldest child—my daughter—is a counselor with kids in our home state of New Hampshire.



A few years back, I dedicated my memoir, At Home in the World, to my daughter. Labor Day is dedicated to my sons. Whatever it is I know about the hearts of thirteen year old boys, I learned it from them.

Joyce Maynard