Susan Conley's Blog, page 6

Dedication Page

When the advance copy of my book landed on the front porch, it came in a thick, cardboard envelope that I had to cut into with a bread knife because I couldn't find any scissors. Then I stood there at the kitchen counter with the book in my hands and was happy for how it looked—the round white bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and those slim, red chopsticks.

The boys ran into the kitchen from playing basketball in the basement. There's a low, metal hoop down there and they lunge towards it and do smash dunks over and over after school. So the boys were sweaty and thirsty but before I got them anything to drink, I held out the book to them. "Look," I said. "It's here."

And they stopped asking for orange juice and came towards me and hovered. We paged through it quickly together, and I guided us to the acknowledgements page. I wanted them to see their names printed there and for them to understand how much of the book was really about them. And about my fascination with the way their minds work. And about my fierce love.

I pointed to the part near the bottom of the page that says I wrote the book for both my boys—for "Thorne and his brother Aidan," is what the words say. They also say something more about how I hope I'll always be around to tell the boys how much. 

I'm often asking the boys if they know "how much." We don't say the love part in this code language. We just say "how much" which implies the rest. But Aidan leaned into my right arm and read the acknowledgements and then he said, "Mommy, you have to take that love stuff out. People can't read that. People can't read about how much you love us."

And that's when Thorne said out of nowhere, "Did you write this whole book about your breast cancer? Is that what this book is about?"

"I didn't write a whole book about my breast cancer. I wrote about you and Aidan and Daddy and China."

"Well can you take that out too?" Thorne asked. "Can you take out the how much you love us part, and the breast cancer part. Because people might see this. People might read this."

Then he flipped back to the beginning and the dedication page. It reads, "To Tony and Aidan and Thorne." I love this page. I love the economy and the restraint. I didn't say, "To Tony and Aidan and Thorne with love." I didn't say, "To my beloveds Tony and Aidan and Thorne." I only used seven words. Seven words for the entire constellation of my little family.

But Aidan was concerned now. Gone was his need for anonymity. Now he wanted credit where it was due. He said, "You should have written 'to your sons, Aidan and Thorne' Mommy. Because people won't know who we are. How will they know? You should have written, "sons."

"They'll know," I said and smiled at the boys and closed the book. "Anyone who reads this book will know who you are."

"They'll know we are your sons?" Thorne asked now.

"Absolutely," I said. Then Thorne pulled open the fridge door and got out the juice, Aidan reached for two glasses, and I stashed my book in the stack of cookbooks by the blender. Time for afterschool snack.

A Picture of Breast Cancer Care: One of Hope

Three and a half years ago my husband, Tony, and I and our two young sons moved to China. My husband is one of those fluent Mandarin speakers who speaks Mandarin like he's lived there all his life, and when he got the chance to open his company's office in Beijing, we jumped at it.

I've been a writer for as long as I remember and when we climbed on that jumbo jet to China and flew over the North Pole and down into the next hemisphere, I was already scheming on the book I'd write about our trip. It would be one part travelogue of our adventures in China and two parts parenting handbook of my successes and disasters as a mother in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language.

Once we'd landed in Beijing, I began to write that book—chapters about the boys and Tony and me eating dumplings and lighting fireworks and getting lost in the capital city's back alleys. But then I got cancer in China.

One sunny Tuesday morning, I was resting my fingers on my collarbone while I talked to my two boys about going swimming, and I knew something was not right—what were these marble-like things doing in my chest wall? I went straight to the international hospital in Beijing. My doctor there was a respected surgeon who didn't believe that these lumps of mine were anything to get worried about. He was dismissive. He said his biggest concern for me was that we would do a surgery to remove the lumps and they'd be benign and I'd be left with ungainly scars. I said I didn't care about scars. He just smiled and sent me home.

What happened next was a cultural collision in how to approach breast cancer. The Chinese doctor didn't want to do anything about my breast lumps, but when I called my American gynecologist back in the States, she coached me to drive back to that Beijing hospital and tell the surgeon I needed to get the lumps out. Which is what I did.

Then after one surgery in China, my family traveled back to New England and settled there for a summer of more cancer treatments. What I learned in the Sates was that there are amazing breast cancer oncologists, nurses, and surgeons in our country. They work in big cities at large cancer centers and in smaller communities and towns. I learned that cancer care could look differently than the way mine did in Beijing, and that the picture is a hopeful one. It's a picture about dialogue with our doctors and mutual respect and yes, even, inspiration. Because I was lucky enough to find doctors in the States who to this day still inspire me to be strong.

Many months later, after a mastectomy in the States and radiation and reconstruction, I went back to that book I'd been writing in Beijing—the one that was no longer a travelogue, the one that now had to be about breast cancer if I was ever going to finish it. I began writing again. And when I finished the book, I realized that even more than cancer, my book was about motherhood and about hope on any continent.

Who Invented Reading?

Last night at 8:15, just before my younger son, Aidan, fell asleep in his bed, he said, "One of my most favorite things to do in the world is read."

I was lying on his bed next to him, trying to help him choose what to dream about, and I nodded in the dark and smiled. Then I pinched myself. Because Aidan's words were the ones I'd been secretly waiting on these past years—words that were part of the whole sentences I'd been hoping to hear since before Aidan was born.

And all along I've been feeding him and his older brother, Thorne, books from a running reading list I add to and subtract from in my head. It's been an orchestration—an explicit series of calculated book moves to make my love of reading to rub off on them.

And it's already worked once. Thorne lies in bed at night now and travels far far away on the words of his latest novel. But I'd been working on Aidan lately.

"You get so focused," Aidan said to me then. "It's like you're IN the book. It's so relaxing."

One of the biggest surprises about mothering has been that I never know what my kids will warm to in the end—I've planned and schemed and filled their shelves with Frog and Toad and Charlotte and her web—but I've always known that reading still may not take for them. Because the act of reading, in the end, is a mysterious, personal thing. Some kids are pulled by the magnetic force of story. Some aren't.

I gave Aidan a kiss goodnight then, and I still couldn't shake my smile. He was a reader now. More than that, he was one of the converted. I stood up and began to ease my way out of his dark room. This has always been the trickiest part of bedtime—the moment he never wants to come, when the goodnight is final, and he's left all alone. But last night he laughed out loud in his bed.

"Who invented reading?" He asked me then. "Who invented the book? Actually," he said and paused. "Who invented the alphabet? Because that person is awesome."

Notes from the Road: Grant Street, San Francisco

Last week we were in San Francisco for two book readings, and Tony and I got up on Saturday morning and walked down Geary Street and then over to Grant and up through the shiny red gates that mark the entrance to the city's own Chinatown. 

Tony had his camera. He always has his camera. And I had my memories of downtown Beijing. We walked slowly—taking in the storefront windows with their enormous Buddha heads and carved wooden bonsai trees and chopsticks and Chinese lanterns. "Hey," I said out loud and pointed at the sets of majhong. "We could be back in Beijing right now." The entire block seemed to me like some smaller, cleaner version of Beijing's crazy Silk Market.

In the middle of the sidewalk there was an old man sitting in a lawn chair, playing the erhu—the long, thin, wooden string instrument Tony and the boys and I saw so often in Beijing. It's the one that makes that scratchy, high-pitched roving sound we heard in so many of the Beijing parks—a China soundtrack of sorts.

Tony walked right up to the erhu player and began taking pictures. Then the man paused partway through his song, and he and Tony talked in rapid fire Mandarin. I did what I often did the whole two and a half years we lived in China—I smiled and nodded and tried to pick up any words I could.

But these men talked too fast and covered serious ground:  How had Tony's Mandarin gotten so good? Lots of study. How long had the man been playing the erhu?  His whole life.

A woman came along then and announced herself in English. She looked Chinese, but didn't speak it. The other surprise about her was that she was on the clock—working as a talent scout. She had her eyes on the erhu player. "I'd like to hire him as extra for a Clive Owen spy thriller," she said and pointed at the unsuspecting musician. "We'll pay."

What happened next was a long exchange between the old erhu player and the talent scout, with Tony acting as translator. Or maybe Tony was acting more like the erhu's agent.  Because Tony was able to get the talent scout up to $300 a day for his new friend, the erhu-playing street musician.

The erhu player was still unsure. He was a man who lived off coins and dollar bills tossed in a felt hat that he kept on the sidewalk near his lawn chair. "Where will I go?" he asked Tony, confused. "How will I find this movie?"

"We will come to you," the talent scout explained. "Next Saturday. All you need to do is be here. We will come."

Tony explained and the erhu player nodded. I thought it was fifty-fifty if he would ever find his way to any movie set—no matter how famous Clive Owen gets. And no matter how much the talent scout was willing to pay. The erhu player looked at Tony one last time, and then he said in Mandarin, "I am always here on Grant Street, playing my songs." And he nodded at all three of us and began playing his instrument again. The talent scout left, and then Tony and I turned and walked deeper into Chinatown. The erhu music followed us down the block like an old friend.

The Page 99 Test

This blog was originally published at The Campaign For The American Reader.

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." --Ford Madox Ford

Page 99 of The Foremost Good Fortune is one third of the way through the book. Which means the page lives in a chapter that is still cancer-free, and the book is still a journal of a great family road-trip—part travelogue and part parenting handbook of successes and disasters after my husband, Tony, and I moved our two boys to China.



But in just ten more pages the book paints an uncomfortable scene in an ultrasound room at a Beijing hospital when I begin to learn I have cancer. So what page 99 does is crystallize a few themes the book has been circling: mortality, family history, and candor with kids. On this page the boys and Tony and I have just seen where Mao's body lies embalmed in an enormous tomb in Tiananmen Square. We're back in our Buick minivan—partly fascinated by what the Chinese have done with their dead leader and partly creeped out.



And this talk about Mao's body and his death leads us all into a deep conversation about how my grandfather died and where he is buried back in the States. I don't know how my boys have connected the dots, but they see Mao's tomb and begin to think they have a handle on immortality. My younger son, Aidan, says that whenever we want to see my dead grandfather, all we have to do is drive to Vermont and "move the gravestone over" to take a look. So what I also do on page 99 is try to disabuse my kids of this notion. "It must be Mao's tomb that's sparked them," I write.



But first I get air space for a little dramatic monologue about my grandfather. Call it an ode. I never thought the man would feature so much in my book. But he had a huge laugh and an even bigger heart, and I think he helped make me the kind of writer who could move her family to China on the eve of the Olympics. So for this book of mine the Page 99 Test is an uncannily good fit.

Writers Read: Strength In What Remains

Writers Read asked me to write a guest blog on what I've been reading:

The book that I want to talk about is one that I read kind of by accident. I mean I bought the book. But that was at one of those airport bookstore kiosks when I was on the run last fall. How Tracy Kidder's beautiful, resonant stories even end up at LaGuardia is a mystery to me but there was one Strength in What Remains and I grabbed it because Borders was having a two for one book sale. It's not that I didn't want to read Strength in What Remains. I love just about anything Kidder writes.



It's that I knew the book would ask something of me and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to deliver. I'd just finished writing The Foremost Good Fortune — a memoir about living in China and getting cancer, and my head was full of white noise: book tour logistics and how to register for a Facebook account. So I sat in the blue bucket seat at Gate 23B and read the forgettable novel I'd just bought and waited for my plane to board. And when it did board, I stood up, gathered my things, and accidentally on purpose left that forgettable novel on the seat.



After take off, I needed something else to read. What finishing my own book had done was create this chatter in my head about book launches and to Twitter or not to Twitter and who could take my author headshot. Some of it was really silly stuff. Arcane. But stuff that can look like a big deal when you're in New York City meeting with your agent and your editor and you want your own little book to matter somehow.

So I took a big breath on the airplane and opened the first page of Strength in What Remains, and right away I was in deep. What the book did was clear out the white noise. Kidder's writing is so quiet and crystallized that it drew me in entirely and I was humbled. I forgot anything I'd been thinking about Facebook. I was enthralled and horrified with the story Kidder told. The tension and transparency of his prose kept me rapt—so much so that I still carry the book around with me now that I'm actually on my book tour. Kidder's book speaks of great, human atrocities and just as great reserves of strength and humanity. There is a kind of balance sheet. And the pure luck involved in surviving to tell the story is also staggering. I look at the book in my hotel room, and I still feel wonder at how Kidder was able to write it, and I also still feel awe for the people who live inside the pages.

Interview At The Dog Lived (And So Will I)

This Interview with Teresa Rhyne for her wonderful blog "The Dog Lived (and so will I)" was first published there on March 6.

TR: Susan—Thank you so much for stopping by my humble blog. I've interviewed a few authors on this blog and the first question is always the same, so let's get started! We here at The Dog Lived (and So Will I) love our wine. What do you recommend we pour when we first sit down to read The Foremost Good Fortune? And what should we sip when we finish it?

 

SC:  When you sit down to read The Foremost Good Fortune you might start with a sparkling wine—Schrambsberg Blanc de Blanc. It was first brought to China by President Nixon in 1972 when he met with Mao. This wine is light and crisp and the opening of my memoir is a kind of travelogue and parenting handbook of successes and disasters that would go well with a really good sparkling wine. While you're finishing the book, and my family and I have come out of what I call the circus that was my cancer treatments, maybe a wine that is a little more complex is in order—like an aged Pinot Noir.

 

TR: I noted that on the first page of your book you mention a "legal career" (it's just slipped in there ever so quietly). Were you a lawyer? How did you make the transition from the legal field to writing? (And I'm not at all asking that because I've been a lawyer for twenty-five years…not at all…)

 

SC: I was never a lawyer. But I had dreams of a legal career. I went so far as to try being a paralegal in San Francisco straight out of college. I worked for a well-known woman trial lawyer who brought a lot of gender cases to trial. Fascinating stuff. I learned a whole lot. Then after two years I realized that all the writing I was doing as a paralegal was writing I was meant to be doing in a graduate creative writing program.

 

TR: As I understand it, when you left for Beijing with your family you had plans to finish writing a novel. How did that transition to a memoir about your time in China to a memoir that included your breast cancer experience? And…what's the status with that novel?

 

SC: That novel is alive and well. Knopf bought it as well as the memoir. The novel traces the life of a thirty-year-old woman from California, who comes to terms with love and with her brother's death in France. The plan is for the novel to come out fairly soon after the memoir. Moving from the novel to the memoir (and now back again to the novel as I complete another draft of it) has been a study for me in narrative arc. It's all storytelling—but the voice is distinctly different in each book, and in one I was limited by my experience and in the other I was only limited by my imagination.

 

TR: Can you share with us a little about your breast cancer? (What kind, what stage, how you found it… a lot of my readers are fellow BC warriors.)  Is breast cancer very prevalent in China?

 

SC: My flavor of breast cancer was early stage—I think technically Stage 1b. I had estrogen positive cancer and HER/2/NEU negative. The grade of my cancer was aggressive and there were several tumors as well as DCIS. The hitch for me was additional cancer found after surgery in the mastectomy tissue which led to a concern about clean margins. I did a course of radiation and then I went on a hormonal suppression protocol, which I will do for about 5 years.

I found my cancer myself—the tumors appeared as small marbles in my chest wall. The mammogram I had in Beijing did not indicate any cancer. It was the ultrasound in China that revealed the tumors, though at first they appeared as cysts, which was confusing to everyone involved. I know each of our cancer stories has its own unexpected turns. No two are alike. I am three years out now and feeling very healthy.

TR: You capture a tremendous amount of very vivid detail in your writing, and the photos on your blog (and in the book trailer) are gorgeous. Did you use the photos while you were writing? What techniques did you use to capture all the details? Did you keep a journal? (If you say it was all from memory…I'm just going to stop writing now. My memory was bad enough pre-chemo!)

 

SC: I am lucky to have a husband who is an avid photographer. So that has been a great thing in terms of having mental photos of the places I am writing about. But the way I capture detail in my writing is mostly through notes I take in a journal. My background, and that graduate school training I mentioned earlier, are in poetry. I was a poetry major in college and then again in grad school. I have taught poetry seminars and workshops for years at various colleges and schools. And I think that is where the eye for the details comes in for me. Poetry relies so much on that vivid image, and I was able to take that reliance on imagery in poetry and weave into the prose of the memoir.

 

TR: You mention on your blog that you found yourself walking the path between poetry and memoir. Wow. I find this to be a gorge and there's no walking it! (Writing Poetry scares the beejeezus out of me! But I'm loving writing a memoir.) Can you tell us more about that? Your memoir is not in rhyming stanzas or iambic pentameter, so I'm all confused.

 

SC: Okay. And I know. Poetry can be aloof. It can be scary! But here is what I think:  narrative poetry is actually, as Mary Karr said so wisely not that long ago, memoir's first cousin. Both forms are interested in tracking a story. Both forms are trying to translate experience and to do it an authentic way. Both forms need to rely on description and image. I started in poetry and so it doesn't scare me. But I get how it alienates a whole lot of people! One of the things I often do when I am leading a poetry workshop is try to demystify poetry, so that all we are reading for in the stanzas is the delight of the language. We are not trying to "solve" some secret mystery.

 

TR: I usually end with a dog question that is generally something along the lines of "why don't you have a beagle?" But I assume there wasn't a dog with you in China. So we'll just go with, "is there a beagle in your future?" 

 

SC: Oh this is actually a sad question for me. There may be a beagle in my future because the boys and my husband, Tony, and I adopted a rescue puppy last fall from Alabama and she didn't make it. She was sick upon arrival and though we tried to get her through, the virus she picked up in the Alabama soil was too strong. So talk of dogs is very much on the table right now. Which kind of dog? Maybe a beagle! Thanks so much for your great questions! Happy wine. Happy dog. Happy reading.

The C-Word

I was eating dinner with a gallery owner here in Portland, Maine, named Lyla—burritos at a place called El Rayo—when the topic of breast cancer came up. It often does these days. Partly because I was diagnosed not so many years ago, and mostly because the c-word has been very big all fall. You'd have to be living in a hole underground not to notice all the pink ribbons. Or the Laura Linney t.v. series. Or the NFL's pink helmets.

I'd just ordered my first margarita when Lyla said, a propos of little, "I will never get breast cancer because I don't have that kind of energy."

Energy? I wanted to yell at her. What energy? You don't get breast cancer from energy.

But every amazing woman I've met with this disease can't stop asking herself what did cause her cancer? Maybe it was the occasional cigarette I smoked in college? The beer I drank? The contraceptive pill I took for six months junior year until I stopped because it made me sick? The plastics the experts say are playing havoc with our endocrine systems?  Or grapefruit? Some researchers think it's citrus. Or estrogen. Or estrogen and citrus. Or stress. Everyone blames stress.

I meet people—kind mothers at dinner parties, and the occasional nervous dad on the sidelines of a soccer game, who think breast cancer is just a chronic illness now. They say well-intentioned things like, isn't it great that breast cancer is treatable. And what a relief that you can cure it in 2010.

And you can. Kind of. But sometimes this disease stops at nothing. And the only cure for breast cancer that I know is the tally of the years I've been able to outrun recurrence. In that way it's like so many cancers. On my amazing soccer team of doctors the number they bat around is ten—as in, "in ten years you breathe easy if you're cancer free." But still.

Mine could be a sleeper cell cancer that wakes up fifteen years later. All of this is to say that breast cancer can take the floor out of the house you live in and ask you to start over on the ground. And then ask you to get it together and go to your seven-year-old son, Aidan's, school piano recital.

And so I do go. Because how many years do I have left to listen to the song called "Sleigh Ride" that he's been practicing incessantly all fall? He was five when I was diagnosed. And just before we leave for the recital he asks out of the blue if he's going to get it. "Get what?" I wonder.

"Breast cancer," Aidan says. "Kids were making posters today at school with pink ribbons on them for breast cancer."

And I try to hide my surprise. All this awareness is a good thing. But it can also make for tricky conversations at home. "No," I say. "You're not going to get it."

Then Aidan puts his blue parka on, opens the back door and asks one more question. "Is breast cancer going to kill you?"

I stand there, trying to pull the zipper up on my own coat, wondering whether this disease ever really lets go. But there are statistics, and they are on my side.  "No," I say, like I have many times before to him. "It's not going to kill me." And I look him in the eye.

Where We Find Our Breast Cancer Care Does Matter

Here's a link to a spot-on essay about breast cancer care at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. This is an anecdotal account of the step by step process of early breast cancer treatment. In this case, a kind and insightful husband chronicles the experience of his wife so that others like us can read about what a good first visit to the breast cancer center could look and feel like.

What strikes me most about this piece is that it's a reminder to all of us and our partners that we're entitled to inspiring, empathetic doctors and nurses. And that great breast cancer care exists, with extraordinary doctors and nurses.

There are amazing breast cancer oncologists, nurses, and surgeons all over the country out there in big cities, small cities and local towns. This piece is just one sampling of how our care can look. And it's a hopeful picture.

 http://faceofamericawps.com/blog/

Icebergs

This piece was originally published in Downeast Magazine: Icebergs

When I was ten years old, I lived in an old white farmhouse in Woolwich across the street from a wide stretch of the Kennebec River. The year was 1976. Spring came and the ice pack began to thaw and creak. My friend Mary and I made our way down the riverbank to find an iceberg to climb on top of. Back then Woolwich was a town dotted with wooden capes and saltboxes flush with the road, full of people who'd never left Maine and others who'd had to leave and then made it their life's work to get back. These were stubborn, independent people who when Jimmy Carter asked them to turn down their thermostats, they went further and installed woodstoves, grew root vegetables, bought sheep.

My father was a fourth-generation Mainer who married a city woman from away, and then convinced her to buy a falling down house with a sheep pen and a woodshed and trees out back as far as the eye could see. No one I knew in that town had any intention of ever leaving. Except maybe Mary and me.

The iceberg we decided on was shaped like the state of Texas. We clambered on it at low tide in snow boots and jeans, and stood there waiting for the water to come, hoping Mary's mother wouldn't see us out the kitchen window. It was the start of a time in my life when I hoped for my "real" life to begin somewhere else — anywhere away from our quiet farmhouse and the endless fields and the river and its icebergs shaped like the fifty states I wanted to travel to. I was convinced something bigger was going on, I just wasn't sure where.

Mary said she thought we'd float all the way to Canada. I thought we might freeze to death. The ice beneath us was rippled and ridged and crunchy. It cracked with its own secrets. I wanted an escape, but I didn't have a death wish.

"Mary," I said when the tide turned and the current quickened. "We can still get off." The berg was just picking up momentum. "We can still jump!" I'm not sure she answered. What I do know is how important it was to her to stay on longer than me.

I crouched on the iceberg's edge until I knew if I didn't abandon ship, I'd never make it back to shore. When I jumped in, the river rose to my neck. I screamed and swam hard and then Mary was right behind me. We got to shallow water and walked slowly against the current, teeth chattering, more afraid of the punishment we could see in the form of Mary's frantic mother, making her way down the embankment, than the cold.

Years later, I went to graduate school in California and wrote stories about Woolwich and that powerful river and the town float we'd all jump off in summertime. I liked California. But the surprise was that I missed the Kennebec more. I missed Maine almost like a person — like someone I could reach out and touch. So after I married a man I met in San Francisco, and we'd had two baby boys, we moved back to the northernmost state.

This time I lived in Portland and got a job teaching writing at a correctional institute — poetry workshops for incarcerated teens. There were rules: the writing class met in the library with chairs bolted to the floor so no one could throw them. I brought the pens, and I left with them so no one could misuse them.

I also carried things from the Maine woods with me: a leaf, a pinecone, a rock, and a piece of shell. The boys liked writing poems about nature. They led with their hearts. Some of them couldn't read out loud well and the others volunteered to read for them. I sat and listened and wondered what mistakes each of them had made to land there in that low-slung correctional building.

One of the older boys was named Michael, and he read a poem about a girl he'd met back in his high school. There was a sunset in the poem and wildflowers and music. It moved well and rhymed. He called it "A Maine Love Song." When he finished, Michael said, "I'm just waiting for some magic carpet to get me out of this place."

I smiled at him and nodded and understood. But I'd never been locked up. Who was I to tell him I knew what it felt like to want to be somewhere else? So I told Michael he could be a writer some day. He was seventeen, and what I wished for him then was just more time — the chance to make some mistakes that wouldn't matter to anyone. The kind that involved climbing on icebergs at low tide and then panicking and jumping off.