I’ve begun a new literary adventure, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the year to come. I’ll be translating the raucous biography of an incredible woman, Élisabeth de Gramont, from French into English.
Tabou in a nutshell.
Check out the new paintings by my sister, Weatherly Stroh.
Here’s what’s on my desk at the moment. What’s on yours?
BOOK REVIEW | All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 429 pages, $30).
Time to make room for a new biography in the bookcase. But where do I shelve it?
I just finished Book 1 of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Have you read it? It’s the latest thing in popular erotica, and I can see why. So why am I not rushing to dip into the second book?
Every Memorial Day reminds me of our big household paradox. My spouse and film production partner, Amy Gerber, is only three years younger than I am, and yet we are a generation apart. How about that for a slice of “This American Life”?
We all have our favorite French words to use in bed, and POSH wasn’t one of mine.
I was sitting around bullshitting with my pal, Wendy Pepper, like I always do. She was in her studio working on a new dress, reading an eBook, following a news feed, listening to a podcast, checking her email, touching base with a client on the phone, basically being creative. Then she turned to me.
“How are you going to promote your eBooks?”
I was like, oh.
One by one she switched off all other channels. I love it when I get the full intellectual benefit of eyes-on-me attention from my high octane friends. While I was still sitting there without a clue, Wendy leaned closer and said, “I AM your target reader. I read.”
You can imagine the roaring silence that accompanied this shocking American confession.
“Yes, read. As in books. Blogs, you name it. Yes, eBooks. And I would pay money for them. I’m even into the literary blogs. I hunger to know how the writer of today makes sense of his world,” said Wendy, very much in italics. She likes to tease me. “So how are you going to get my attention?”
Clearly by being a total screw-up, I realized. But instead I ventured out by stating the obvious. “Well in eBooks you don’t have the object. You have the machine, but not the tactile object, the talisman that will always harken to the book.”
And as the troubadour Jackson Browne put it so elegantly, “to love and get away before the walls have arisen, you’ve got to be free.”
But when your idea of a first novel is a five-part epic saga, you’d have to be me.
So I have some, shall we say, special experience in this area.
In the way of most marriages, TABOU and I had been together quite a long time before I really began to see my characters as living breathing beings, living lives on their own terms.
Beginning writers dream of This Magic Moment and wonder when it’s going to happen. Will they be driving through the Bridges of Madison County, when like a thunderbolt their characters descend like Riders on the Storm? And suddenly the novel they’ve been slaving over is Raptured, transported heavenward straight to Simon & Schuster?
That never happened to me. I think it’s because I was a helicopter parent, hovering over my children at the keyboard every night, pregnant with more, then listening to talk radio shows every morning where famous authors described the fiction process like the birthing process.
Aristotle gave Hollywood the three act structure. You know: a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back (and puts on a show!). Wants, acts, gets. Sure, it works. Yawn. How many of you will admit how boring and predictable this has become? Do
