Lev Raphael's Blog, page 69
April 28, 2011
Is It Memoir or Is It Fiction?
Memoir scandals break out all the time: someone's memoir turns out to be highly fictionalized. But what about the opposite? How much fiction is really disguised memoir?
Over the years I've often been asked how much of my writing is autobiographical, and even people who know me have gotten confused.
My recently re-published first novel Winter Eyes is about the son of Holocaust survivors who've hidden their Jewish past from him and tried to bring him up in New York as a Polish Catholic.
Because the book was set in New York where I grew up, and because it focuses on a child of Holocaust survivors (which I am, too), it actually puzzled one friend whom knew a lot about my life. After he finished reading it, he said, "I didn't realize your parents got divorced when you were little." I told him they weren't divorced, though perhaps they should have been.
"And did your parents pretend they weren't Jewish?" I explained that of course they hadn't, and we'd even talked about my Jewish background before, more than once.
He wasn't done. There was a whole series of things he said he hadn't known about me, but those were all drawn from the life of the boy in the novel, not part of my real life. In each case, I explained the difference. After a long pause, he said, "No wonder I was confused."
Because I had woven in bits and piece of my real experiences, refracted in complex ways, he caught their scent, but those few traces of reality made him assume it was all true.
My novel Winter Eyes is emotionally real, an alternative reality. I wrote it imagining an almost completely different life from the one I had. So you could also call it a secret memoir.
My friend's confusion is especially strong with stories and books I've written in the first person, and people after a reading from one of those will invariably refer to "The part where you ..."
I reply, "You mean the part where he..." and they smile indulgently. It's happened not just in America, but at readings I've given in Germany. Years ago, I was annoyed, but I eventually learned to take it as a compliment. The narrative had seemed so real to the audience that people automatically assumed I was transcribing something from my own life.
The confusion reminds me again and again of the power of storytelling to move people so much that it seems it must be real -- even when it's fiction. I fell in love with that power way back in second grade. Reading authors as different as Isaac Asimov and Dumas, I started to learn and appreciate the gorgeous ways in which, as Robert Browning said, stories are "always old and always new."
Over the years I've often been asked how much of my writing is autobiographical, and even people who know me have gotten confused.
My recently re-published first novel Winter Eyes is about the son of Holocaust survivors who've hidden their Jewish past from him and tried to bring him up in New York as a Polish Catholic.
Because the book was set in New York where I grew up, and because it focuses on a child of Holocaust survivors (which I am, too), it actually puzzled one friend whom knew a lot about my life. After he finished reading it, he said, "I didn't realize your parents got divorced when you were little." I told him they weren't divorced, though perhaps they should have been.
"And did your parents pretend they weren't Jewish?" I explained that of course they hadn't, and we'd even talked about my Jewish background before, more than once.
He wasn't done. There was a whole series of things he said he hadn't known about me, but those were all drawn from the life of the boy in the novel, not part of my real life. In each case, I explained the difference. After a long pause, he said, "No wonder I was confused."
Because I had woven in bits and piece of my real experiences, refracted in complex ways, he caught their scent, but those few traces of reality made him assume it was all true.
My novel Winter Eyes is emotionally real, an alternative reality. I wrote it imagining an almost completely different life from the one I had. So you could also call it a secret memoir.
My friend's confusion is especially strong with stories and books I've written in the first person, and people after a reading from one of those will invariably refer to "The part where you ..."
I reply, "You mean the part where he..." and they smile indulgently. It's happened not just in America, but at readings I've given in Germany. Years ago, I was annoyed, but I eventually learned to take it as a compliment. The narrative had seemed so real to the audience that people automatically assumed I was transcribing something from my own life.
The confusion reminds me again and again of the power of storytelling to move people so much that it seems it must be real -- even when it's fiction. I fell in love with that power way back in second grade. Reading authors as different as Isaac Asimov and Dumas, I started to learn and appreciate the gorgeous ways in which, as Robert Browning said, stories are "always old and always new."
April 19, 2011
Bookstore Bingo Is Worse for Authors
The Huffington Post just ran another edition of the odd things customers say to staff in bookstores, but most authors can usually outmatch those stories.
When you start appearing in bookstores at the beginning of your career, you're worried about how you look, how you sound, if people are connecting with what you're reading, if you handle the Q&A with wit and substance. You're usually not expecting bookstore bingo.
Nobody prepares you for the fact that being out in public, you're exposed to all sorts of comments, and to questions you could never imagine asking an author yourself.
At one reading on my first book tour, someone aggressively asked me, "What does your book have to say to women?" I was so surprised, my reply was a feeble joke: "It says 'Buy me!'"
Well, what would you have said?
Someone else asked about that same book of short stories, "Why should I buy this book?" I was dumbfounded. I'd done a reading, I'd answered audience questions about the book and myself for half an hour, and this customer still wasn't convinced? A quick-thinking friend standing nearby said, "Well, if you count the number of stories, and check the list price, each story prices out at less than a dollar, and that's a pretty good deal, don't you think?" She did think so, and bought the book.
Someone else who sounded like The Situation came up to me on another tour for that collection and said that my stories seemed short. He wondered if maybe "they left something out at the factory." I assured him the book was printed as I'd written it.
It got more personal than that. Through a very odd chain of events, I ended up on the cover of my first book of short stories. Yes, that's me, back when I was lifting very heavy weights and had a lot more muscle on me. A fan came up to me and said I must have really nice armpits. Another said that he had found my book very inspiring and he read parts of it in the bathroom. He leered in case I wasn't following.
How did I respond to TMI at this signing? "Thanks! I really appreciate it!"
He bought another copy for a friend.
And then there was the guy who asked during Q&A if I was circumcized because I'd writtten about a Jewish character who wasn't.
I told him to ask my editor.
When you start appearing in bookstores at the beginning of your career, you're worried about how you look, how you sound, if people are connecting with what you're reading, if you handle the Q&A with wit and substance. You're usually not expecting bookstore bingo.
Nobody prepares you for the fact that being out in public, you're exposed to all sorts of comments, and to questions you could never imagine asking an author yourself.
At one reading on my first book tour, someone aggressively asked me, "What does your book have to say to women?" I was so surprised, my reply was a feeble joke: "It says 'Buy me!'"
Well, what would you have said?
Someone else asked about that same book of short stories, "Why should I buy this book?" I was dumbfounded. I'd done a reading, I'd answered audience questions about the book and myself for half an hour, and this customer still wasn't convinced? A quick-thinking friend standing nearby said, "Well, if you count the number of stories, and check the list price, each story prices out at less than a dollar, and that's a pretty good deal, don't you think?" She did think so, and bought the book.
Someone else who sounded like The Situation came up to me on another tour for that collection and said that my stories seemed short. He wondered if maybe "they left something out at the factory." I assured him the book was printed as I'd written it.
It got more personal than that. Through a very odd chain of events, I ended up on the cover of my first book of short stories. Yes, that's me, back when I was lifting very heavy weights and had a lot more muscle on me. A fan came up to me and said I must have really nice armpits. Another said that he had found my book very inspiring and he read parts of it in the bathroom. He leered in case I wasn't following.
How did I respond to TMI at this signing? "Thanks! I really appreciate it!"
He bought another copy for a friend.
And then there was the guy who asked during Q&A if I was circumcized because I'd writtten about a Jewish character who wasn't.
I told him to ask my editor.
April 15, 2011
Trapped in Classroom Hell?
I started my college teaching career as an adjunct back in the 1970s. I was a summer composition instructor in New York at Fordham's Lincoln Center campus and I didn't mind the small salary because I was living at home.
I'd attended Fordham and in my senior year had been mentored by two dedicated, gregarious, hard-working professors, unofficially inducted into the club. My mother and her father had been teachers, so being in the classroom was as much a dream of mine as becoming a published author.
I was thrilled as an adjunct to be doing every single thing connected to teaching, including grading papers. Even grading papers, I should say, since that's what most teachers complain about. It was all new and exciting, and I was lucky because I felt the world was all before me. The academic world, anyway.
Professor X, author of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower , was not lucky when he started his adjunct career. He was forced into it because he and his wife had purchased more house than they could afford and he desperately needed a part-time job to supplement the income from the government job he already had. He picked teaching, the only thing he says he could do with a "worthless" MFA in Creative Writing.
But just as he hadn't thought through his home purchase, he had only a dim understanding of what awaited him in the classroom. He expected his night students to be much better writers than they were, and also to benefit from his instruction more than they did. What he found was unprepared, under-educated students whose grasp of language was chaotic at best. The work they produced was marred by "yawning canyons of illogic and error."
Perhaps because he'd been an English major and in love with poetry, novels, and writing itself, he expected similar passion or at least curiosity in his students. It's hard not to think of the author as woefully unprepared in his own way, and he assesses himself and them as having screwed up in major ways.
Professor X, who's taught at a small college and a community college for a decade, is passionately depressing about his students' deficiencies and the problems of a culture that pushes people to college when they shouldn't be there. He's equally impassioned and a real downer about the difficulties of writing and writing well. Though he finds some joy in the classroom, joy and writing seem almost antithetical in his worldview. That's as sad a discovery for the reader as X's own discoveries about what his students don't know and don't seem able to learn.
He not only dilates at length about how difficult writing is, he also claims that all writers are afraid. Terrified, in fact. It's a dark assessment, and not every writer will agree, but you can't deny the power of this scathing report from the front lines. And you're likely to end up wondering as X does how Americans have come to view "college not as a consumer product at all, but as both a surefire, can't-lose financial investment, and even more crucial than that, a moral imperative."
I'd attended Fordham and in my senior year had been mentored by two dedicated, gregarious, hard-working professors, unofficially inducted into the club. My mother and her father had been teachers, so being in the classroom was as much a dream of mine as becoming a published author.
I was thrilled as an adjunct to be doing every single thing connected to teaching, including grading papers. Even grading papers, I should say, since that's what most teachers complain about. It was all new and exciting, and I was lucky because I felt the world was all before me. The academic world, anyway.
Professor X, author of In the Basement of the Ivory Tower , was not lucky when he started his adjunct career. He was forced into it because he and his wife had purchased more house than they could afford and he desperately needed a part-time job to supplement the income from the government job he already had. He picked teaching, the only thing he says he could do with a "worthless" MFA in Creative Writing.
But just as he hadn't thought through his home purchase, he had only a dim understanding of what awaited him in the classroom. He expected his night students to be much better writers than they were, and also to benefit from his instruction more than they did. What he found was unprepared, under-educated students whose grasp of language was chaotic at best. The work they produced was marred by "yawning canyons of illogic and error."
Perhaps because he'd been an English major and in love with poetry, novels, and writing itself, he expected similar passion or at least curiosity in his students. It's hard not to think of the author as woefully unprepared in his own way, and he assesses himself and them as having screwed up in major ways.
Professor X, who's taught at a small college and a community college for a decade, is passionately depressing about his students' deficiencies and the problems of a culture that pushes people to college when they shouldn't be there. He's equally impassioned and a real downer about the difficulties of writing and writing well. Though he finds some joy in the classroom, joy and writing seem almost antithetical in his worldview. That's as sad a discovery for the reader as X's own discoveries about what his students don't know and don't seem able to learn.
He not only dilates at length about how difficult writing is, he also claims that all writers are afraid. Terrified, in fact. It's a dark assessment, and not every writer will agree, but you can't deny the power of this scathing report from the front lines. And you're likely to end up wondering as X does how Americans have come to view "college not as a consumer product at all, but as both a surefire, can't-lose financial investment, and even more crucial than that, a moral imperative."
April 4, 2011
Do Writers Need an Agent for Success?
Huffington Post reports that a British literary agent just got sentenced to prison for cheating gullible, fame-seeking clients out of their money. His clients thought movie deals were in the works with big Hollywood names -- and who doesn't want to be famous as well as rich?
I've never been cheated by an agent, but remember in Moonstruck how Vincent Gardenia warns Cher not to go through with a second marriage? He tells her, "Your mother and I were married fifty-two years and nobody died. You were married, what, two years, and somebody's dead. Don't get married again, Loretta. It don't work out for you."
That's been my story with literary agents: it don't work out for me.
One agent was funny and charming and we had great chats, but my career only moved a bit forward over several years because an editor I admired approached me to switch publishers.
Another agent made me feel like I was caught up in a bad romance, never responding to my queries or telling me who was seeing my book. A third agent screwed up a book deal and a fourth offered me great advice for revising a book, but despite my doubts took it to New York in the middle of a publishing meltdown when panicky editors weren't buying.
A fifth agent kept sending a mystery of mine to editors who didn't like the genre, and then she left the business. After we signed, another agent relocated abroad and I wasn't convinced a long distance relationship would work out. Then there was the agent who turned weird on me and another client, for reasons that are mysterious at best.
I started my career at a time when the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't even have a career without an agent. And without an agent, you weren't really a serious writer. But experience has proven something different. Of my 19 books, most have been unagented and they've done as well as or better than the others; one has even sold about 250,000 copies and been translated into languages from Spanish to Thai, and an agent had nothing to do with its success.
When I told a novelist friend in New York about my agent history she assured me my saga was pretty typical: "It's just that most of us don't want to talk about it because we're too ashamed."
I've never been cheated by an agent, but remember in Moonstruck how Vincent Gardenia warns Cher not to go through with a second marriage? He tells her, "Your mother and I were married fifty-two years and nobody died. You were married, what, two years, and somebody's dead. Don't get married again, Loretta. It don't work out for you."
That's been my story with literary agents: it don't work out for me.
One agent was funny and charming and we had great chats, but my career only moved a bit forward over several years because an editor I admired approached me to switch publishers.
Another agent made me feel like I was caught up in a bad romance, never responding to my queries or telling me who was seeing my book. A third agent screwed up a book deal and a fourth offered me great advice for revising a book, but despite my doubts took it to New York in the middle of a publishing meltdown when panicky editors weren't buying.
A fifth agent kept sending a mystery of mine to editors who didn't like the genre, and then she left the business. After we signed, another agent relocated abroad and I wasn't convinced a long distance relationship would work out. Then there was the agent who turned weird on me and another client, for reasons that are mysterious at best.
I started my career at a time when the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't even have a career without an agent. And without an agent, you weren't really a serious writer. But experience has proven something different. Of my 19 books, most have been unagented and they've done as well as or better than the others; one has even sold about 250,000 copies and been translated into languages from Spanish to Thai, and an agent had nothing to do with its success.
When I told a novelist friend in New York about my agent history she assured me my saga was pretty typical: "It's just that most of us don't want to talk about it because we're too ashamed."
March 25, 2011
Bookstore Bingo: Author's Edition
The Huffington Post just published another entertaining Bookstore Bingo of actual, amusing things people overhear customers say in book stores (Walmart couldn't be as funny, could it?).
But customers aren't the only ones who get things wrong in bookstores. Over the years, my name has been mangled by more than one bookstore employee introducing me at a reading or signing. So I've sometimes been Lev "Raffle" and Lev "Rafeel."
And when I toured extensively for my first book of short stories, its title was a landmine waiting to go off.
I had published the title story Dancing on Tisha B'Av in the anthology Men on Men 2 a few years earlier and chose that for the book because the story had generated a lot of attention from reviewers, plus it made it very clear that there was strong Jewish content to the collection.
Tisha B'Av is literally the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av and it memorializes the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 by the Romans. It's obviously not a day for dancing, but that happens in the story about a young woman professor coming to terms with her brother being gay.
I wasn't prepared for all the versions of the book's title I would hear on tour. Instead of asking me for help, some people went ahead and tried their best to make sense of the unfamiliar wording, so one bookstore publicist called it Dancing on Tisha B'Avenue. It was also scenically dubbed Dancing on Tisha Bay and the peninsular Dancing on Tisha Baja. I was introduced as having authored Dancing on Trisha B'Av (whoever she was) and Dancing on Toshiba back when people still thought Japan was going to buy up the whole country. The most creative version was Dancing on the Tissue Box.
After all these incidents, I decided my next book title would be easy to pronounce. My first novel, recently reissued, was the simple Winter Eyes .
I wasn't prepared when more than one book seller told me a customer had asked asked about "Lev Raphael's book on cars or something."
But customers aren't the only ones who get things wrong in bookstores. Over the years, my name has been mangled by more than one bookstore employee introducing me at a reading or signing. So I've sometimes been Lev "Raffle" and Lev "Rafeel."
And when I toured extensively for my first book of short stories, its title was a landmine waiting to go off.
I had published the title story Dancing on Tisha B'Av in the anthology Men on Men 2 a few years earlier and chose that for the book because the story had generated a lot of attention from reviewers, plus it made it very clear that there was strong Jewish content to the collection.
Tisha B'Av is literally the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av and it memorializes the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 by the Romans. It's obviously not a day for dancing, but that happens in the story about a young woman professor coming to terms with her brother being gay.
I wasn't prepared for all the versions of the book's title I would hear on tour. Instead of asking me for help, some people went ahead and tried their best to make sense of the unfamiliar wording, so one bookstore publicist called it Dancing on Tisha B'Avenue. It was also scenically dubbed Dancing on Tisha Bay and the peninsular Dancing on Tisha Baja. I was introduced as having authored Dancing on Trisha B'Av (whoever she was) and Dancing on Toshiba back when people still thought Japan was going to buy up the whole country. The most creative version was Dancing on the Tissue Box.
After all these incidents, I decided my next book title would be easy to pronounce. My first novel, recently reissued, was the simple Winter Eyes .
I wasn't prepared when more than one book seller told me a customer had asked asked about "Lev Raphael's book on cars or something."
March 14, 2011
Is It Time to Throw Out Your Books?
Soon after Amazon announced it was selling 143 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers, a writer friend with a new iPad told me she had gotten rid of five shelves of books. "They were so dusty! I hadn't even read most of them. Why was I keeping them for so long?"
It made me take a good look at my own unread books, one of which was a wormhole back to college. My girlfriend back then was in love with the Romantic poets, so one birthday I gave her a mammoth new biography of Shelley. Neither one of us bought hardcovers as a rule because they seemed so expensive, so it was a much-appreciated gift on several levels.
She hadn't known the book was out yet, was thrilled I got it for her. She quoted from the book all the time, but the only thing I remember her telling me is the wonderful come-on line Shelley used on a woman in a rowboat in Switzerland: "Shall we discover the mystery?"
Now that was hot. Poetic, but hot.
It's a line and a scene that's stuck with me for decades. Only I got it all wrong. Shelley wasn't on a lake or in Switzerland. And he definitely wasn't trying to bed his companion. He was musing about death. How do I know? Because when I looked for deadwood among my books, one of the first things I found in my bookcase of memoirs was Edward John Trelawney's entertaining Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author.
When I opened the faded paperback, I was shocked by the date of purchase I had recorded: 4/23/83. Read it or pitch it, I thought. Now. Well, once I started, I couldn't stop. It's filled with gossipy details about both poets, their ménages, their friends, and riveting accounts of how they died.
As the burly adventurer Trelawney tells it, Shelley and his friend Jane Williams were boating in the Gulf of Spezia near Pisa and the poet was in a dark reverie. He had "death in his eyes." But then suddenly, Shelley "raised his head, his brow cleared and his face brightened as with a bright thought, and he exclaimed joyfully, 'Now let us together solve the great mystery.'"
Jane Williams was married with children and rather than piss Shelley off and risk a scene that might swamp the tiny boat, she punted: "No thank you, not now; I should like my dinner first, and so would the children." Talk about grace under pressure!
I found this story even better than the one I remembered, or mis-remembered. Did my girlfriend actually say the line the way I thought she had? Is it possible she was misquoting her book? Or did she get it right, and over time the scene and the quotation morphed into something more intimate, something that reminded me of her wicked smile? And why did I neglect the book for so long?
More to the point, given how crammed my study is, and that I'm reading more and more downloaded books on my iPad, will I even bother with the other books I haven't read, or will I get rid of them along with their dust?
It made me take a good look at my own unread books, one of which was a wormhole back to college. My girlfriend back then was in love with the Romantic poets, so one birthday I gave her a mammoth new biography of Shelley. Neither one of us bought hardcovers as a rule because they seemed so expensive, so it was a much-appreciated gift on several levels.
She hadn't known the book was out yet, was thrilled I got it for her. She quoted from the book all the time, but the only thing I remember her telling me is the wonderful come-on line Shelley used on a woman in a rowboat in Switzerland: "Shall we discover the mystery?"
Now that was hot. Poetic, but hot.
It's a line and a scene that's stuck with me for decades. Only I got it all wrong. Shelley wasn't on a lake or in Switzerland. And he definitely wasn't trying to bed his companion. He was musing about death. How do I know? Because when I looked for deadwood among my books, one of the first things I found in my bookcase of memoirs was Edward John Trelawney's entertaining Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author.
When I opened the faded paperback, I was shocked by the date of purchase I had recorded: 4/23/83. Read it or pitch it, I thought. Now. Well, once I started, I couldn't stop. It's filled with gossipy details about both poets, their ménages, their friends, and riveting accounts of how they died.
As the burly adventurer Trelawney tells it, Shelley and his friend Jane Williams were boating in the Gulf of Spezia near Pisa and the poet was in a dark reverie. He had "death in his eyes." But then suddenly, Shelley "raised his head, his brow cleared and his face brightened as with a bright thought, and he exclaimed joyfully, 'Now let us together solve the great mystery.'"
Jane Williams was married with children and rather than piss Shelley off and risk a scene that might swamp the tiny boat, she punted: "No thank you, not now; I should like my dinner first, and so would the children." Talk about grace under pressure!
I found this story even better than the one I remembered, or mis-remembered. Did my girlfriend actually say the line the way I thought she had? Is it possible she was misquoting her book? Or did she get it right, and over time the scene and the quotation morphed into something more intimate, something that reminded me of her wicked smile? And why did I neglect the book for so long?
More to the point, given how crammed my study is, and that I'm reading more and more downloaded books on my iPad, will I even bother with the other books I haven't read, or will I get rid of them along with their dust?
March 1, 2011
Shame at the Oscars
Shame was all over the place at The Oscars: Anne Hathaway trying too hard; James Franco not trying hard enough; dead Bob Hope getting more laughs than the live hosts.
And then there was the parade of unflattering gowns and hairstyles, along with the yearly close-ups of losers who probably aren't thanking the winners for saying, "I'm so honored to be in this category with you. You're amazing!"
But shame is also a key to the evening's last award.
Justified scorn for the schizoid and boring evening has been accompanied by grumbling about The King's Speech. It's been dissed as "an unbuttered scone," "old-fashioned" and invidiously compared to other nominees. One film critic dismissed its fans as people entering the theater via the disabled ramp, on wheelchairs.
But even before the Oscars, some reviewers praising the film could sideswipe it as "sentimental claptrap" and "middlebrow tosh."
No, it's not edgy like The Black Swan, but it's deeply disturbing and more complex than the naysayers understand or perhaps can admit.
At its heart is one of the most profound human emotions: shame. Shame is innate and in its grip we feel utterly exposed and worthless, plunged into a whirlpool with no escape. As shame theorists have noted, it takes various forms like embarrassment, shyness and guilt. It can motivate social outrage and change -- look at how much shame comes up in North African discussions of living under dictators -- but its toxic effect on self-esteem makes it a sickness of the soul.
That's what we see beautifully and unforgettably portrayed in The King's Speech: the power of shame to leave anyone, even a King, feeling flayed alive in public and in private -- hopeless, helpless, irrevocably flawed. Here the specific catalyst is stuttering which doesn't just cripple the King, but paralyzes people around him. Shame is contagious; watching someone else in the grip of this emotion can make you cringe and some people defend against it by looking down on the source of that shame.
Yes, there's plenty of humor in the film, but what it does best is highlight shame and show a man struggling to triumph over it. It may not be Moby Dick, but it's an amazing voyage all the same.
And then there was the parade of unflattering gowns and hairstyles, along with the yearly close-ups of losers who probably aren't thanking the winners for saying, "I'm so honored to be in this category with you. You're amazing!"
But shame is also a key to the evening's last award.
Justified scorn for the schizoid and boring evening has been accompanied by grumbling about The King's Speech. It's been dissed as "an unbuttered scone," "old-fashioned" and invidiously compared to other nominees. One film critic dismissed its fans as people entering the theater via the disabled ramp, on wheelchairs.
But even before the Oscars, some reviewers praising the film could sideswipe it as "sentimental claptrap" and "middlebrow tosh."
No, it's not edgy like The Black Swan, but it's deeply disturbing and more complex than the naysayers understand or perhaps can admit.
At its heart is one of the most profound human emotions: shame. Shame is innate and in its grip we feel utterly exposed and worthless, plunged into a whirlpool with no escape. As shame theorists have noted, it takes various forms like embarrassment, shyness and guilt. It can motivate social outrage and change -- look at how much shame comes up in North African discussions of living under dictators -- but its toxic effect on self-esteem makes it a sickness of the soul.
That's what we see beautifully and unforgettably portrayed in The King's Speech: the power of shame to leave anyone, even a King, feeling flayed alive in public and in private -- hopeless, helpless, irrevocably flawed. Here the specific catalyst is stuttering which doesn't just cripple the King, but paralyzes people around him. Shame is contagious; watching someone else in the grip of this emotion can make you cringe and some people defend against it by looking down on the source of that shame.
Yes, there's plenty of humor in the film, but what it does best is highlight shame and show a man struggling to triumph over it. It may not be Moby Dick, but it's an amazing voyage all the same.
February 14, 2011
Should Authors Avoid Bookstores?
Bookstores seem like the natural venue for promoting your book, right? I've had some wonderful events in bookstores over the years,* but they've been the exceptions.
Here's why authors should think twice about choosing bookstores for promotional appearances.
1. In my experience, most bookstores are better at selling books than they are at showcasing authors. They can't be consistently relied on to do good publicity or even do attractive, attention-getting displays. And you're always at the mercy of how savvy the particular publicist is. Worse than that, bookstores often schedule too many events on their calendars, and people faced with a reading every night often can't make a choice, or don't choose you.
2. Doing events for an author is hard work, and bookstores don't always appreciate what you do. Some of them take you for granted: you're just another writer on the publicity conveyor belt. But when an event has been set up specially for you at a college or a library, for instance, there's often more receptivity and better energy. On top of that, many non-traditional venues offer speaker's fees and pay your expenses if travel is involved.
3. Audiences can be spotty at bookstores unless you're really well-known. It's only at non-traditional venues that I've found a solid audience and usually better book sales. So where have I been speaking? For my latest memoir, My Germany : colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, Jewish book fairs, synagogues, churches, high schools, book festivals, reading groups, German/American cultural institutions -- even the Library of Congress.
4. There aren't enough bookstores for all the authors out there, but there are plenty of non-traditional venues to keep a tour going for longer than the first few months of a book's publication. I've been touring on and off since spring of 2009 for my memoir and am currently scheduled for events in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012. The book is being picked for course adaptations and is developing what authors hope for -- a long life.
When it comes to promotion, it's not enough to have crafted a great book. You need to figure out what your target audiences might be, where to find them, and how to reach them. And you need to think outside the box and target venues other than bookstores to find the stages where you can shine the best and have the most impact.
That's even more important, now that Border's has gone bust. Who's next?
*Indie stores that come right to mind: Everybody Reads, Aunt Agatha's, and Schuler Books in Michigan. In Germany: Magdeburg's Evangelischer Dom-Buchhandlung & Goettingen's Deuerlich.
Here's why authors should think twice about choosing bookstores for promotional appearances.
1. In my experience, most bookstores are better at selling books than they are at showcasing authors. They can't be consistently relied on to do good publicity or even do attractive, attention-getting displays. And you're always at the mercy of how savvy the particular publicist is. Worse than that, bookstores often schedule too many events on their calendars, and people faced with a reading every night often can't make a choice, or don't choose you.
2. Doing events for an author is hard work, and bookstores don't always appreciate what you do. Some of them take you for granted: you're just another writer on the publicity conveyor belt. But when an event has been set up specially for you at a college or a library, for instance, there's often more receptivity and better energy. On top of that, many non-traditional venues offer speaker's fees and pay your expenses if travel is involved.
3. Audiences can be spotty at bookstores unless you're really well-known. It's only at non-traditional venues that I've found a solid audience and usually better book sales. So where have I been speaking? For my latest memoir, My Germany : colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, Jewish book fairs, synagogues, churches, high schools, book festivals, reading groups, German/American cultural institutions -- even the Library of Congress.
4. There aren't enough bookstores for all the authors out there, but there are plenty of non-traditional venues to keep a tour going for longer than the first few months of a book's publication. I've been touring on and off since spring of 2009 for my memoir and am currently scheduled for events in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012. The book is being picked for course adaptations and is developing what authors hope for -- a long life.
When it comes to promotion, it's not enough to have crafted a great book. You need to figure out what your target audiences might be, where to find them, and how to reach them. And you need to think outside the box and target venues other than bookstores to find the stages where you can shine the best and have the most impact.
That's even more important, now that Border's has gone bust. Who's next?
*Indie stores that come right to mind: Everybody Reads, Aunt Agatha's, and Schuler Books in Michigan. In Germany: Magdeburg's Evangelischer Dom-Buchhandlung & Goettingen's Deuerlich.
Bookstores Aren't Always the Best Places for Authors
Bookstores seem like the natural venue for promoting your book, right? I've had some wonderful events in bookstores over the years,* but they've been the exceptions.
Here's why authors should think twice about choosing bookstores for promotional appearances.
1. In my experience, most bookstores are better at selling books than they are at showcasing authors. They can't be consistently relied on to do good publicity or even do attractive, attention-getting displays. And you're always at the mercy of how savvy the particular publicist is. Worse than that, bookstores often schedule too many events on their calendars, and people faced with a reading every night often can't make a choice, or don't choose you.
2. Doing events for an author is hard work, and bookstores don't always appreciate what you do. Some of them take you for granted: you're just another writer on the publicity conveyor belt. But when an event has been set up specially for you at a college or a library, for instance, there's often more receptivity and better energy. On top of that, many non-traditional venues offer speaker's fees and pay your expenses if travel is involved.
3. Audiences can be spotty at bookstores unless you're really well-known. It's only at non-traditional venues that I've found a solid audience and usually better book sales. So where have I been speaking? For my latest memoir, My Germany : colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, Jewish book fairs, synagogues, churches, high schools, book festivals, reading groups, German/American cultural institutions -- even the Library of Congress.
4. There aren't enough bookstores for all the authors out there, but there are plenty of non-traditional venues to keep a tour going for longer than the first few months of a book's publication. I've been touring on and off since spring of 2009 for my memoir and am currently scheduled for events in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012. The book is being picked for course adaptations and is developing what authors hope for -- a long life.
When it comes to promotion, it's not enough to have crafted a great book. You need to figure out what your target audiences might be, where to find them, and how to reach them. And you need to think outside the box and target venues other than bookstores to find the stages where you can shine the best and have the most impact.
*Stores that come right to mind: Everybody Reads, Aunt Agatha's, and Schuler Books in Michigan. In Germany: Magdeburg's Evangelischer Dom-Buchhandlung & Goettingen's Deuerlich.
Here's why authors should think twice about choosing bookstores for promotional appearances.
1. In my experience, most bookstores are better at selling books than they are at showcasing authors. They can't be consistently relied on to do good publicity or even do attractive, attention-getting displays. And you're always at the mercy of how savvy the particular publicist is. Worse than that, bookstores often schedule too many events on their calendars, and people faced with a reading every night often can't make a choice, or don't choose you.
2. Doing events for an author is hard work, and bookstores don't always appreciate what you do. Some of them take you for granted: you're just another writer on the publicity conveyor belt. But when an event has been set up specially for you at a college or a library, for instance, there's often more receptivity and better energy. On top of that, many non-traditional venues offer speaker's fees and pay your expenses if travel is involved.
3. Audiences can be spotty at bookstores unless you're really well-known. It's only at non-traditional venues that I've found a solid audience and usually better book sales. So where have I been speaking? For my latest memoir, My Germany : colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, Jewish book fairs, synagogues, churches, high schools, book festivals, reading groups, German/American cultural institutions -- even the Library of Congress.
4. There aren't enough bookstores for all the authors out there, but there are plenty of non-traditional venues to keep a tour going for longer than the first few months of a book's publication. I've been touring on and off since spring of 2009 for my memoir and am currently scheduled for events in the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012. The book is being picked for course adaptations and is developing what authors hope for -- a long life.
When it comes to promotion, it's not enough to have crafted a great book. You need to figure out what your target audiences might be, where to find them, and how to reach them. And you need to think outside the box and target venues other than bookstores to find the stages where you can shine the best and have the most impact.
*Stores that come right to mind: Everybody Reads, Aunt Agatha's, and Schuler Books in Michigan. In Germany: Magdeburg's Evangelischer Dom-Buchhandlung & Goettingen's Deuerlich.
January 18, 2011
My First Love Was a Library
I fell in love in first or second grade visiting our local library. On 145th Street in New York, it was a gorgeous, imposing building designed by McKim, Mead and White, but I didn't know its history until recently.
What I did know was that I felt excited, privileged and awed every time I passed through its portals, and believe me, it did not have doors, it had portals. It was, after all, designed to look like an Italian palazzo. Nobody told me that, but I felt as far away as Venice every time I wandered along its endless shelves as the light streamed in through massive windows. I felt a similar sense of awe seeing Venice itself for the first time, decades later.
The library was a place of peace and complete freedom for a boy living in an angry home. No librarian ever told me a book was too adult for me, and neither did my parents. Which meant I could browse the shelves with no restrictions.
Each week I brought home a small pile of books I subsequently devoured, and I was especially fond of biographies and history, two genres that fascinate me even more now that I'm middle aged and have my own biography and see myself in history.
All those books nourished me and inspired me. I wanted to write, too, and I wanted to have a book on those shelves some day. Here again, I was very lucky. Starting in grade school, my teachers and my parents encouraged my writing.
Yet with all that reading of library books, I still watched plenty of television. It was actually reading that interfered with my school work, not TV. Whatever I brought back from that amazing library was almost always more interesting than what we were reading in school, where I was often bored and too talkative. Nowadays, of course, they would probably give me Ritalin.
I got another gift from that library: being read to at story hour. It was the pleasures I derived from that and from having my mother read to me at home that partly fuel my own joy when I do a reading today, one of the best parts of being an author on the road.
Samuel Johnson wrote that "No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library." I can't agree, at least on a day when I'm feeling good about my career, because my own public library filled me with hope, knowledge, and dreams.
What I did know was that I felt excited, privileged and awed every time I passed through its portals, and believe me, it did not have doors, it had portals. It was, after all, designed to look like an Italian palazzo. Nobody told me that, but I felt as far away as Venice every time I wandered along its endless shelves as the light streamed in through massive windows. I felt a similar sense of awe seeing Venice itself for the first time, decades later.
The library was a place of peace and complete freedom for a boy living in an angry home. No librarian ever told me a book was too adult for me, and neither did my parents. Which meant I could browse the shelves with no restrictions.
Each week I brought home a small pile of books I subsequently devoured, and I was especially fond of biographies and history, two genres that fascinate me even more now that I'm middle aged and have my own biography and see myself in history.
All those books nourished me and inspired me. I wanted to write, too, and I wanted to have a book on those shelves some day. Here again, I was very lucky. Starting in grade school, my teachers and my parents encouraged my writing.
Yet with all that reading of library books, I still watched plenty of television. It was actually reading that interfered with my school work, not TV. Whatever I brought back from that amazing library was almost always more interesting than what we were reading in school, where I was often bored and too talkative. Nowadays, of course, they would probably give me Ritalin.
I got another gift from that library: being read to at story hour. It was the pleasures I derived from that and from having my mother read to me at home that partly fuel my own joy when I do a reading today, one of the best parts of being an author on the road.
Samuel Johnson wrote that "No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library." I can't agree, at least on a day when I'm feeling good about my career, because my own public library filled me with hope, knowledge, and dreams.
