March 10, 2014

Carol Wall, a wonderful childhood friend of mine, has written an extraordinary memoir called Mr. Owita’s Guide to Gardening. When it was released last week by Amy Einhorn Books, I read it right away and it has stayed in my mind and heart ever since.

A little background. We moved to Radford, Va. the summer I turned eight. Carol and her family were our backyard neighbors and she and I immediately hit it off. We both lived through our imaginations. Soon, the ditch in the alley between our houses became the Sacred River Nile, and the abandoned garage foundation next door became the Secret Rock Mine, where we’d pulverize rocks and keep the dust (precious metals) in jars. We happily spent most of our spare time together until my family moved blocks away. I was two years older than Carol and as children do, we drifted apart.

I moved and so did Carol, but we kept in touch through our mothers. Carol married at 20, taught school and wrote occasional articles for Southern Living. I was busy with journalism jobs and later marriage and family. I knew that Carol lived in Roanoke, Va. Her sister Judy found me on Facebook last year and told me that Carol’s first book was coming out, as was mine. Once again, I felt the kinship of storytelling that we had so enjoyed as children.

But our books are quite different. Saving Texas, a suspense novel, is fiction based loosely on my journalism background. Carol’s book is subtitled How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart. It’s a clear, insightful memoir that equally broke my heart and lifted my spirit.

Carol’s book explores her friendship with a Kenyan man who became her gardener and great friend. When the book opens, Carol has been successfully treated for  breast cancer, but thinks of herself as “damaged goods.” She’s angry, fearful and hurting and her friendship with Mr. Owita over the next few years soothes her soul. She learns from his enjoyment of each day and “gracious acceptance of the handicaps and afflictions life had brought him.”

The book unfolds with the suspense of a good novel. Carol’s cancer recurs, her parents’ health worsens and she gradually learns more about the sadness in Mr. Owita’s life. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s a beautifully crafted book that will keep you reading, guessing and hoping for the best.

Five years later, Carol is battling Stage Four breast cancer, and the complications from her latest round of chemotherapy will probably make it difficult for her to enjoy the accolades she deserves.

I suspect that “Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening” will be a huge hit, if the reviews so far are any indication. Buy it – for yourself and for Carol.

March 3, 2014

I’m reading The Goldfinch, the 771-page behemoth by Donna Tartt, and enjoying it immensely. Reading a great novel makes me think about why I read and what it means to be a writer.

First, I’m gratified that The Goldfinch has hovered at or near the top of most bestseller lists since its release in October 2013. Many books that make it to the top aren’t necessarily the best-written or the most interesting of the zillions published every year. When a finely crafted and compelling novel is also a commercial success, striving writers feel validation – and hope. Tartt’s novel, praised as Dickensian, is the saga of a 13-year-old boy whose mother dies in a terrorist attack at a New York City museum. He escapes, takes a famous painting with him and eventually becomes embroiled in the underworld of stolen art.

I’m fascinated by Tartt, who at 50 has produced three novels roughly the size and weight of doorstops – all great reads. Her stunning The Secret History debuted in 1992, followed by The Little Friend in 2002. According to Wikipedia, The Goldfinch originally was supposed to come out in 2008, but was published five years later.

That means Tartt’s three books were birthed at least ten years apart, which seems to me a very long time to carry such a heavy load. My debut novel, Saving Texas, smaller in scope and much more compact at 262 pages, took me two years to write and revise. It required another year to find a publisher, sign a contract and see it published. Three years is a relatively short time frame in the publishing world, but most writers find that the process occupies most of their waking thoughts and takes over their lives. The prolonged gestation of Tartt’s three books sounds almost unbearable to me.

Did she work on her books every day? Or, did she carve out long swaths of time when she wasn’t working on anything? It’s impossible to know, because she’s a writer who doesn’t talk about her work much. She did tell The New York Times a few months ago, “The odd thing about it is that it’s so long between books for me that the publishing world changes completely while I’m out, so that it’s like I’ve never done it before.”

I greatly admire her perseverance, but carrying a book on my shoulders for ten years would be too long a journey for me.

Feb. 24, 2014

Is the female protagonist of my crime novel a slut? Did I err by creating for her a messy personal life? I took these questions to a group of fellow writers this week in the wake of some puzzling comments by a book reviewer.

Some background and disclosure: My novel, Saving Texas, like many others released by small publishers, didn’t get an advance review. Its debut captured a gratifying spurt of publicity, but not the full review often posted on distributors’ sites to spur interest. So I commissioned one through a company that provides those services. The reviews are billed as candid and unbiased and if writers don’t like them, they can choose not to post them.

I was pleased with the result, except for some discombobulating comments by the male reviewer about my newspaper reporter-sleuth heroine, Annie Price.

The review says, “While Price evolves into a stronger, more intelligent woman, her initial portrayal as a good reporter who’s a hard-drinking, bed-hopping good girl at heart is dissatisfying. Price seems too smart and sophisticated to be careless and stupid about her personal life.”

That seemed simplistic and unfair. Annie, who’s thirty-six, is a problem drinker who sleeps with someone improbable after a traumatic loss. Her drunken one-night stand reverberates through the book and provides a major plot twist. The only other person she sleeps with in the novel is a state senator who’s separated from his wife. She believes that she loves him. She’s attracted to another leading character, but ends the relationship instead of consummating it.

Bed-hopping? Hardly. And hard-drinking doesn’t satisfactorily describe her drinking behavior. Hard-drinking evokes images of men who belly up to the bar most nights for convivial rounds with their buddies. Annie’s drinking isn’t a fun pastime or sport – it’s mostly solitary and veers close to alcoholism.

The reviewer also criticizes her relationship with the state senator, “a man she seems attracted to solely because of his looks and superficial personality traits.”

Well! Is it wrong or unbelievable that a woman would choose a man for his looks and “superficial personality traits?” Sounds like the kind of thing that men have been doing with impunity for years. People choose their romantic partners for a variety of reasons and women probably make as many mistakes in the realm of love and attraction as men. Aren’t we as writers supposed to create characters who are flawed but human? If our characters didn’t make bad decisions and find themselves in trouble because of them, it wouldn’t be a very interesting novel and our characters would be considered as flimsy as cardboard.

My friends, mostly women writers, agreed with my viewpoint. They liked Annie’s complexity and humanity. And they had a word for those comments from the reviewer – sexist.

Feb. 17, 2014

I was thrilled when it snowed last week – until the second day. That’s when I discovered that I really didn’t know what to do with a snow day anymore.

Growing up in Radford, Va., snow days were frequent and fun. Among my favorite things – sledding on a really steep hill a few blocks from my house, and ice-skating on a big pond two miles away. The coed ice-skating especially was fun when we were flirty teenagers. I was pretty good at it (the ice-skating, not the flirting, alas.) Fast-forward 20 years to Houston, Texas, when a female friend asked me to ice-skate at the Galleria, a fancy mall with a large ice rink in the middle and lots of hoity-toity spectators. Somehow, I’d lost all of my skills – and my balance. I was mortifyingly bad and felt like my pratfalls served as free entertainment for the high-end crowd, even their children. I tried one more time at a place with fewer spectators – to no avail.

The first day it snowed last week I just enjoyed the rare beauty. By the second day, I became a bit anxious. I hate cold weather and didn’t want to go out in it. But I felt like I should do something. I no longer had a child to play in the snow with, and my husband seemed more interested in getting his taxes done. I had plenty of writing to do, but kept getting distracted by the blinding whiteness through the windows. In the end, I just looked at it a lot.