Sara Paretsky's Blog, page 13
July 23, 2012
Cherry Picking Our Sacred Documents
Over the weekend, I heard from a man I went to school with almost 40 years ago. He made a fortune as a stockbroker and in retirement is active in right-wing politics, acting as a significant rainmaker for some high-profile Texas Tea Party candidates. Ralph, as I’ll call him, was miffed at a column I wrote for ChicagoSide sports, explaining why the current Cubs ownership makes me want to stay away from Wrigley Field. “Social Security and health care aren’t part of the core functions of government,” he said. “If people want health care, they should save for it, just as they should save for their retirement.”
This morning, as I walked to the lake with my dog, we passed a homeless couple waking up from a night on a park bench. We know each other by sight. The woman, who likes to pet the dog, only has five teeth, so it’s hard to understand what she’s saying. I’d been feeling grumpy, because in my comfortable home on my high-quality mattress I hadn’t been able to sleep. As the woman and I exchanged greetings and she fondled the dog’s ears, my first thought was, “Count your blessings.”
Callie in Lake Michigan
My second thought was how much happier I would be if I embraced Ralph’s point-of-view. Ralph is a born-again Christian, but he cherry picks his bible just as I cherry-pick mine. I tend to think of the petulant Cain demanding “Am I my brother’s keeper?” or the commandments to leave part of the harvest for the homeless to collect, and feel shame at where I fall short. Ralph tends to think of how he’s been washed in the blood of the Lamb and nothing else he says or does matters.
When I read the Constitution, I focus on the Preamble, which says we’re establishing the United States Constitution in order to “establish justice…and promote the General Welfare.” Ralph thinks the whole document is obsolete wallpaper except for the right to bear arms.
US Constitution
Gail Collins, on tour for her new book As Texas Goes, says no state is willing to let its citizens die by the side of the road. In fact, many states and many people are willing to do just that. Texas itself has decided to eliminate all Medicaid funding for clinics that provide family planning in an effort to get rid of Planned Parenthood in the state. Indiana, Kansas and Iowa have or are considering similar options. Women who haven’t been able to save as much money as Ralph, maybe because Wal-Mart and McDonalds don’t pay as well as manipulating derivatives, now cannot afford health care. Over a hundred thousand Texas women depended on Planned Parenthood for all their health care needs, not just contraception or abortion. In the effort to protect foetal life, these states are willing to sacrifice the lives and health of all the low-income women who live there. But Ralph knows this is the right thing to do. He’s so much happier than I am and I don’t think it’s all because of Jesus. If you know the poor have only themselves to blame for poverty, you can go to the beach with your dog and not worry about the woman on the bench with five teeth. It’s certainly true that I don’t do more for her than Ralph does.
A few years ago I was introduced to the CFO of one of Chicago’s biggest hospitals. He also said health care was a privilege, not a right. My granddaughter’s birth was lying heavy on my mind at the time. Her mother had a difficult delivery, and because my son’s firm didn’t cover obstetrical care, and he and his wife worked low-wage jobs, my husband and I paid their substantial medical bills. I asked the CFO what someone who didn’t have parents with savings should have done? Let the woman and child die? Become homeless? Our fight drew a crowd but other than entertaining the other restaurant patrons, we didn’t resolve anything. We both left convinced we were right, but I must say, it’s easier to be right and happy when you have a lot of cash.
My experience with the CFO led me not to get into an argument with Ralph, since neither of us was going to budge, but I will say he sleeps better than I do.
July 9, 2012
UK Edition of Breakdown
Breakdown has been published in the United Kingdom. The book is now available in all English speaking countries worldwide.
July 2, 2012
Deaccession
This is a year of deaccession for me. Libraries and museums use the word deaccession to mean gleaning from their collections. I’ve been sorting through clutter; two weeks ago I sent the Newberry Library 22 cartons of letters, manuscripts and miscellaneous papers. I’ve been going through books, and discarding clothes I never wear.
I just got back from visiting my beloved friend, the writer Dorothy Salisbury Davis. Dorothy has been an important mentor to me as a writer and a person for more than 25 years. She’s 96 now, and not strong, but her mind is as vibrant and tough as ever. I realized during the time we were together that she has been deaccessioning in a way that makes me think deeply about life and aging. Two years ago, she moved from the old farmhouse, where her husband, the actor Harry Davis, and she had lived for half a century.
Dorothy and Harry’s old farmhouse
She moved into an assisted living facility, which she has treated as a new stage on the road, rather than a situation to be fought against. She had to stop driving, which was among her passions, but she said she doesn’t miss her car, as she thought she would. She doesn’t miss the house; I confess I do. She husbands her strength for the things that truly matter to her.
It frightens me, the thought of unweaving myself from the many threads that connect me to the Now, and it frightens me to watch her do it. Yet here, as so many times in the last 25 years, I listen to her, hope I am learning from her, hope that when my ride up the escalator is drawing to an end, I will know what to hold, what to let go, and let those things go with her grace.
June 13, 2012
That Was Then, This is Now
My mother’s father died when she was sixteen; I never met him. He was a doctor in Roodhouse, the small town in downstate Illinois where he grew up. During World War I, he was sent to the Rockefeller Institute in New York to do war work–what, exactly, I’ve never known. After the war, he returned to Roodhouse. As the Depression struck and unemployment rose, his patients became unable to pay him; he took payment in canned goods, or in the occasional duck or chicken, but he never turned anyone away because they had no insurance.
In 1935, he Mayo Clinic invited him to join them in Minnesota; he was apparently a very good doctor indeed. He turned them down because that would have left his small town without medical care.
In 1937, he had gallbladder surgery. Three days afterward, an old man in town slipped and fell on the ice. My grandfather went out to look after the old man, couldn’t find anyone to help lift him, and carried him into his home himself. The strain so soon after abdominal surgery was too much for my grandfather’s heart. He died the following week. He was 49 years old.
I thought about him recently. I turned sixty-five earlier this month and have learned to my chagrin that the doctors I see for a thyroid disorder, the mammographer who looks at the lumps in my breast, and the gynecologist who discusses them with me, do not accept Medicare. If you opt out of Medicare, your patients are responsible for the whole bill–the patient, or customer as we prefer to call them–can’t submit the bills to Medicare herself. My gynecologist explained that medicine was a business these days, not a service. No one’s asking her to accept a jar of tomatoes in lieu of payment, but then, that would be ludicrous when you’re running a business, not providing a service.
Maybe if my grandfather had realized that, he’d have lived to see my mother graduate from college. But I don’t think we’d feel quite as honored to be living in his shadow.
Always another way to think outside the box
June 7, 2012
Harold Washington Literary Award
Near South Planning Board gives Sara Paretsky 2012 Harold Washington Literary Award. Previous recipients include Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood and Saul Bellow.
June 6, 2012
Indemnity Only
January 2012 marks V I Warshawski’s 30th anniversary. Bantam has issued a special e-edition of Indemnity Only with a special introduction by Sara Paretsky. Click here to order.
Breakdown is on sale everywhere. Click here to see what reviewers have to say, and to buy the book.
April 23, 2012
Darraugh Graham Rebrands Himself
The Board of the company formerly known as “Continental United” spent a great deal of money on an image and branding consulting firm in order to come up with a new name. At the recent shareholders’ meeting, a number of shareholders were appalled at the high seven-figure fee paid to come up with the name name and image. However, the unveiling of Calliope Inc., and the free-flowing Krugs, reconciled even the most parsimonious in the crowd. Kudos to Nadja Hahne for the winning entry, and a nod to The Bag Lady for having the acronym. Both will walk on in the upcoming V I novel.
Calliope in Flight
Those who know Darraugh Graham well will not be surprised at the creativity and flexibility lying underneath his starched collars. Some of the names suggested by our image consultants were equally wonderful and powerful, but unfortunately had already been taken by other corporations. Thanks to all who helped out.
Nadja and Bag Lady, please send your emails to viwarshawski@mindspring.com.
March 29, 2012
On Weapons
Shortly after publishing my third book, I met a private detective who came to a reading at Kate's Mystery Books outside Boston. The detective told me her practice is a lot like V I's: she did homicide investigations for clients who were being railroaded by a judicial process that liked to pick on the first convenient African-American they encountered. She said she didn't expect fiction and reality to march in lock-step, but there was one thing she thought I should change. In my early books, V I always had her Smith & Wesson with her. Kate's detective told me that was a mistake.
Kate's detective said that she herself owned a handgun, had a permit, was a pretty good shot, but she almost never carried a weapon, even though she routinely found herself in some of Boston's crummiest neighborhoods and projects.
The reason? She said you unconsciously escalate conflict when you are carrying a weapon. It's as if your unconscious mind is itching to pull the trigger. When she left her weapon at home, she said she found more creative ways to resolve problems.
I think of that advice often, and never more so than in the wake of Trayvon Martin's murder. Whether a skinny kid in a hoodie really posed a threat to a big man in an SUV is something we may never know. But we can be pretty sure that if George Zimmerman hadn't been carrying a gun, he would have stayed in his SUV. Maybe the police would have come, maybe they would have roughed up a kid for wandering around a gated community while black, but Trayvon would still be alive.
Armies and governments follow the same psychology. Hard as I petitioned and prayed for peace in the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, I knew that once George Bush had deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and millions of weapons to the Persian Gulf, his trigger finger was itching so painfully that nothing would keep him from shooting first.
If George had kept his personnel and weapons at home and let the UN inspectors do their job, we would not have 4400 dead American service men and women, 31000 with terrible injuries, 110000 Iraqi civilians killed and many millions left homeless. We would have the $3 trillion we've spent on this war to use for schools, roads, and maybe even health care.
Unknown U.S. Soldier in Iraq
Right now, I think it's a pretty hopeless battle to gain a modicum of control over weapons of destruction, mass or otherwise, in the United States. Every time you take off your clothes in the airport, remember that the NRA has battled relentlessly not just to allow George Zimmerman a conceal carry permit, but to make sure anyone on a terrorism watch list gets a free pass on owning and carrying a weapon. The Patriot Act puts more controls on looking at what we read than on what we shoot.
Toilet in Utah wounds man whose concealed weapon went off
Perhaps we will read more such uplifting stories in the future.
And state legislatures believe the only controls that should be legislated are on women's vaginas. Cry, my beloved country.
March 15, 2012
Sara Paretsky Day at the Chicago Public Library
The Chicago Public Library declared March 14 "Sara Paretsky Day." They made a wonderful event of it, putting up posters in all the branches, and getting Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to issue a formal proclamation, which declared that V I Warshawski and I had made a major contribution to the city of Chicago and the world. It was very cool, and also a little embarrassing, because I know I'm also the person who nags my husband and doesn't always hang up my clothes or who cruises the Net when I should be writing.
Inside the Chicago Public Library
Here was the best part: John Mahoney and Amy Morton from Steppenwolf did a staged reading of the first chapter from Indemnity Only, the first novel I wrote. I can tell you that Amy Morton is V I Warshawski. The words sound way better when she reads them than when I write them, and I have a new fantasy, that I can persuade Disney to do a TV series and that she would agree to play V I.
Rick Kogan, who is the most generous and thoughtful interviewer I've known since the late great Studs died, did a Q & A with me on the stage, Steven Albert from the Court Theatre brought my husband and me and some friends drinks at dinner afterwards, and a good time was had by all.
My thanks go to Craig Davis and all the staff at the library, and to the publicity team at my publishers, G P Putnam's, who worked together to make this wonderful event happen. And a big thanks and bow to Amy Morton and John Mahoney. It thrilled me to the core to share a stage with them.
March 11, 2012
Name That Corporation!
Did the first Breakdown contest frustrate you because you had to be a U.S. resident with a Facebook page? Here's your chance to enter and win no matter where you are on the planet.
You could be a winner
V I's most important client is a man named Darraugh Graham. He played a central role in the novel Blacklist, and a major supporting role in Body Work. Darraugh is the CEO of a fuzzily-imagined conglomerate which I called "Continental United," after doing a name search to make sure there was no such company.
Guess what? There is now a company called Continental United, the merger of those two big airlines. Rather than deal with lawyers and correspondence and all that time-consuming tsuris, I've decided to rename Darraugh's company.
Darraugh is a good guy with impeccable manners. The company name needs to imply something international, but not be tied to a specific industry, since V I's needs to get inside information about different industries changes from book to book.
Come up with the best new name for Darraugh's company, and you will get a V I commemorative flashlight, along with a signed copy of Breakdown.
