Liza Rodman's Blog, page 3

Writing and Fear

Writing is a terrifying experience. Or rather, getting your writing published, is terrifying. Your words, after all, expose you in many ways, revealing your intellect, the degree of your research, and most of all, your ability to simply write. And when you bare yourself to the world, you are inviting critique, which all too often is criticism.

When I was writing my first book, Savage Summit, about the first five women who climbed K2, the world’s second highest mountain on the Pakistan/China border, it was exhilarating but frightening. I remember when I told my sister the proposal had sold to HarperCollins, she was the one who burst into tears. I did not. I knew better than to celebrate.

You see, I’d already been on two expeditions to the mountain, the first being a brutal experience with a dysfunctional, abusive, and sometimes downright dangerous team – somewhere between Lord of the Flies meets Animal House, or maybe Bevis and Butthead. All by way of saying, several of the men on the team (and it was almost all men) reminded me often that I was #1, a woman; #2, from the East Coast, which made me somehow suspicious; and most damning, #3, not a climber, and so presumably was unqualified to write a book about them. I tried to explain to the worst offender on the expedition that Sebastian Junger was not a deep sea fisherman, that Truman Capote never massacred a family, and that Tom Wolfe never flew to the moon; it was called research. This man would hear none of it, and ridiculed me and my presence on the team the entire four months of the expedition. It was exhausting and soul-crushing and I returned to the States knowing I couldn’t yet write my book about the women of K2 because I now had too much sadness and anger, and I knew it would corrupt the story.

It would take another expedition two years later with a group of dear friends to cleanse my psyche and enable me to finally write the book. However, when it was published in 2005, I waited in dark terror for the climbing community’s damning review. But it never came. Bullies, as you know, back down when challenged and my having barreled through their bullshit and written the damn book in spite of their condemnation, was confrontation enough. The book received rave reviews, but the process had been ruined for me.

By the time I was close to finishing my second book in 2010, Last Man on the Mountain: The Life and Death of an American Adventurer, I was elated. It tells the story of Dudley Wolfe, the first man to die on K2 in 1939, and the process of digging into his life was just shy of glorious. I loved every minute. In addition, I had gained enough gravitas in the mountain writing community (again, almost all men) to know that no boorish climber was going to take issue with my research – after all, I was the who had found Wolfe’s skeleton on K2. How’s that for bona fides?

It’s been twenty years since that first devastating and debilitating expedition to K2, and I still harbor its cruelty. But that emotion has been somewhat diffused through the long lens of two decades so perhaps I can finally take a deep breath and dive into writing the saga. If I do, watch for a title something along the lines of, “The Dark Side of the Mountain: One Woman’s Story of the Expedition from Hell.”

It’ll be a blockbuster!

JJ leaving K2 Base Camp, August 2000 (photo credit: Jeff Rhoads)

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At Home Boston’s Outdoor Exhibition

​The Boston Book Festival has launched a citywide writing project, At Home Boston, to capture slices of everyday life — the ordinary to extraordinary — during these unprecedented times.

It was a privilege to have my essay, “Oldest Friend”, selected as part of an outdoor exhibit during this year’s virtual Boston Book Festival. If you’re in the area, stop by Downtown Crossing to read this and other compelling stories about Bostonians living in, responding to, and surviving this pandemic. It promises to be one of this year’s most thought-provoking, socially distant events.

The outdoor exhibit at Downtown Crossing runs through October 25, 2020. Learn more.

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Beginnings: The Purple Pen

On a cool May morning, my phone rang. I was many miles from home, housesitting for a friend, tending to her cats, a single pink geranium she had nursed through the winter, and trying to write. And by trying to write, I mean staring out the window. 

I was ten years old when I “wrote” my first book in a college-ruled notebook, with a short, round purple pen. I wrote so many pages I developed a flat, oval-shaped callus on the inside of my middle finger that was smooth to the touch. And ever since, I’d been trying to write another one. In those early days, I spent most of my time in the back seat of my mother’s car. Her road trips were commonplace, and that purple pen and I clocked a lot of miles. I don’t remember what happened to that first story, but 50 years later I was still thinking about it. Did I throw it away, or did my mother? We seemed to be inextricably tied together by the disappearance of that notebook.  After all, it was in my boredom in the back seat of her car in 1969, with the radio blasting and the sound of the engine revving every time she stepped hard on the gas to pull out to pass another car, that I first realized I could imagine words, remember them, and later write them down. I could hear them in my mind the same way I still sometimes randomly hear the Lord’s prayer, in its entirety. And I could do all that, just by staring out the window.

May 2018

So, the ringing phone startled me. The house was quiet except for an occasional thump from the two cats Dash and Dev, on the floor below, racing each other across the dining room, looking for treats they may have missed from the night before. I don’t usually answer my phone when I am writing, (or who am I kidding, at all, if I can help it) though something that day, nudged me to break my own rule. Jenny’s name came up on the screen. A longtime friend. Another writer. A moment of relief. I pressed answer. 

During our call she asked about The Babysitter (her title for my project). I told her I’d abandoned it. Moved on. The structure had dogged me for years and I’d given up. I was working on another book. Jen resurrected the project with just one question. “What would you think about collaborating on it and finally getting it done?” It was like a moment of grace. Angels singing in the background. I quickly agreed before she could change her mind. That was 2018. Now, here we are, three years later with a finished book, waiting on the runway. Waiting for time to stand still and the impossible to happen. Waiting to launch. 

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There’s your book!

I found what I think is the first diary I ever kept and judging by the boy’s name around which I drew red hearts every time I mentioned him, I’m guessing I was about 11 or 12 at the time. It has a green faux leather cover and one of those little square “locks.” I remember keeping the key for years, thinking it actually protected my secrets, first from my sister who would have read it out loud at the dinner table to mortify me, and second from my mother who would have corrected my grammar and spelling. You see, we come from literary stock. Her father’s family started Publisher’s Weekly, one of my great grand something or others wrote an entire 24 volume set of encyclopedias, and my grandfather himself became an English teacher who drilled “a preposition always takes an object” into us long before I knew what it meant. So, I guess it makes sense that never questioned wanting to be a writer. 

The Authors, Northampton, MA 1979

I don’t know that I ever made a conscious choice to write non-fiction; what I do remember is a college professor ridiculing my writing as “purple prose.” While she brought me to tears at the time, I am grateful because she steered me away from a frustrated life struggling to be the next Stegner or Hemingway – ridiculously impossible goals, and shoved me toward the rewards of research and the clean, clear words of journalism; “Just the facts Ma’am.” 

But never in my professional imaginings did I think I would ever blend my love of the craft with the love of a cherished friend. But here Liza and I are publishing the “The Babysitter” – a truly collaborative effort of memory, research and writing.

When she told about her chilling story of having been babysat by a serial killer while a young girl in Provincetown, I immediately exclaimed, “There’s your book!” But, she was still processing the revelation of who Tony Costa, her benevolent babysitter, really was and struggling to put the jumbled, jagged memories to paper. And no wonder. It’s a hell of a saga — all the more staggering because it’s her saga. How to write a memoir interlaced with a true crime story? How to separate herself from the heartbreaking abuse she suffered while maintaining a writer’s objective lens on the facts? How to find the courage to reveal some very dark secrets while preserving her and her family’s privacy? 

In the few years after she told me of Tony Costa, I watched her battle those seemingly contradictory goals. Then, one day while I was digging for my next subject worth telling, I realized I already knew of one. The Babysitter – it had what every great non-fiction book needs: a dynamite core story within a larger historic happening. And if you’ve got complicated and compelling characters to boot, it’s a writer’s dream. 

I called her in early 2018 and offered to help her write the book, if she’d have me. Her response was pure Liza. She cried.

“I didn’t dare ask you,” she said, her voice quavering.

And as I say, here we are. Celebrating its completion. It’s been a magical, challenging, enriching process. Every writer should have the gift of such a project and with such a partner.

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