Clea Simon's Blog, page 7

I got to interview Jill Lepore!

Cutting and pasting from the Sunday Boston Globe. This is maybe a quarter of our conversation. She’s a genius! (Excuse the weird lines of apparent links – those are the ads that I couldn’t cut out.)

AUTHOR PROFILE

Jill Lepore has seen the inside of time

By Clea Simon

Jill Lepore, professor at Harvard University and author of “The Deadline,” a new collection of essays.STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD UNIVERSITY

The concept of a deadline is a complicated one for Jill Lepore. In addition to the obvious meaning — her new book, “The Deadline,” is a collection of essays written for the (mostly) weekly New Yorker — in the title essay, the historian explains the original idea of a “dead line”: the border around a prison outside of which escaped prisoners were shot. In the same essay, she recalls a more personal application: the inability of a dear friend to meet any of her own writing goals, or to have children, both of which Lepore was doing as her friend succumbed to leukemia, her own permanent deadline.

This may be the most moving essay in her substantial collection, but Lepore, Harvard’s David L. Kemper ’41 Professor of History, provides similarly multifaceted and readable deep dives into topics ranging from Constitutional originality to the #MeToo movement.

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History, all of it.

“I’m a writer who writes about the past,” said Lepore in a phone interview. “I am mostly interested in the relationship between the living and the dead, which is a way to think about change over time.”Get The Big To-DoYour guide to staying entertained, from live shows and outdoor fun to the newest in museums, movies, TV, books, dining, and more.Enter EmailSign Up

Along those lines, “The Deadline” is roughly divided between personal essays (“mostly elegies to the dead people that I loved”) and those dealing with “the American past,” as the historian puts it.

“A lot of what I’ve been working on lately as a scholar is the nature of written Constitutionalism, which is a really interesting relationship that the living have with the dead, and one that has a binding authority,” she noted. She adds that originalism has an intellectual place, but “as a Constitutional interpretation for judges to use as they think about the law and as a form of populism, it’s kind of wild and unhinged, and I think can be quite dangerous. So I’ve been trying to think through ways to investigate these problems of our time and to gain some historical vantage on them.”

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To that end, in the essay “The Age of Consent,” she unwraps the background of the Constitution, debunking its reputation as wholly unique by rooting it in documents ranging from Catherine the Great’s Nakaz (or Great Instruction) to the numerous similar proclamations popular across 18th-century Europe and Asia.

The collection draws from the past 10 years of New Yorker pieces — a period, notes Lepore, that has made history feel especially relevant to many readers. “Between the election of Trump and the pandemic and the daily evidence of catastrophic climate change, I think most ordinary people have a sense of living in an unusual historical moment. A kind of historical consciousness, a historicism, is fairly acute for most people, and it’s quite acute for young people who feel that they’ve walked into this doomed historical moment. I have found this really interesting, because historians are always thinking about where we are in historical time.”

It’s a perspective that isn’t always pretty. She likens the process of becoming a historian to something comparatively dark: a friend’s experience of dissecting a cadaver in medical school. “[T]here’s a feeling of joining a cult. Like, when you cut open a human body and explore it, you are joining a minority of humanity that has seen the inside of a human body.

“Becoming a historian is quite a bit like that, or it has always felt that way to me. That there’s an unseen inside to time that I think about all day. And when I talk to other people who are historians, we can share that strange set of perceptions. But what’s been weird about Trump to the pandemic to global climate catastrophe is that now everybody’s seen the inside of time. And that’s sad because it is actually mostly ugly.”

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And history, Lepore warns, doesn’t necessarily provide answers.

“When I started to collect these, it seemed to me the question that was haunting all of the things that I was writing was: Has it ever been this bad before? Has this ever happened before?”

But that question, she said, “rests on the assumption that if it had, we could look to the past and figure out how the dead dealt with it. That somehow there’s a message in a bottle out there, and the historian’s job is to set sail in the ocean and go find that floating, bobbing bottle somewhere in the sea and then bring it back to shore and say, ‘Look, here’s what we should do. This is what these people did, or we should not do what they did because this ended in disaster for them.’ And I just don’t think there are those answers in the past.”

What historical observation offers, instead, is a lens through which to view our own political movements, giving them a context that both illuminates and challenges our understanding of what we’re witnessing. In “The Return of the Pervert,” one of three new essays in the collection, Lepore dissects the complex nature of the #MeToo movement.

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“The #MeToo movement is many things,” she explained. “It’s a squirrelly political protest. It’s part of a political movement. It’s a social media campaign. It has legislative outcomes with regard to criminalization of certain kinds of acts of harassment and violence against women and sexual assault. It is also a moral crusade. And the female moral crusade has a really elaborate and actually mostly distressing history.”

It’s a history that bears some scrutiny for what it says about the status of women in the past. “One of the reasons that women’s political activity is written out of political history is because political historians don’t recognize the female moral crusade as a political act. But it is a political act. And before women had the right to vote, a moral crusade was really the only way to engage in politics.”

Historical observation, for Lepore, also offers insight into our shared humanity. “I think there’s an extraordinary amount of illumination in the past,” she said. During the first month of the pandemic, she read Daniel Defoe’s 1722 “Journal of the Plague Year,” an account of the bubonic plague.

“I found it unbelievably moving that the experiences he was describing, looking back at London in 1665, were ones that I was having and that my world was enduring,” she said. “But it didn’t tell me what we should do.

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“The past is not an instruction manual. But I find I like thinking about other humans and how they deal with things because generally they screw up and so do we. And that actually is a form of solace and comfort.”

Clea Simon is the Somerville-based author most recently of the novel  “Hold Me Down.”

Announcing BAD BOY BEAT and THE BLUE BUTTERFLY

I’m so excited about this and it’s finally real! This week, I e-signed the contract – and my new publisher did too. And so it is official: Both my THE BLUE BUTTERFLY and THE BAD BOY BEAT will be published by Severn House, which is now the genre imprint of UK giant Cannongate Publishers. In fact, I’ll be reunited with my old editor, Rachel Simpson, who had left Severn before the merger – and has now returned as the acting editorial director of the imprint! 

A little bit more: I wrote The Blue Butterfly in a rush. It’s not a typical mystery, but rather a he said/she said about a toxic relationship between a beautiful artist and the striving doctor who adores her. But as these things go it deals with such issues as the sexualization/fetishization of female artists, the outdated gender expectations shared by both men and women, and some other nasty (and sometimes sexy) stuff and it ends in a very bloody fashion. Needless to say, I love it. I used this manuscript to shop for a new agent – and I knew Anne-Lise Spitzer was the right one when she responded with “I can’t believe you killed [name redacted]!” in one of her first emails. Not, “Well, the market right now…” or “Your profile supports…” or anything. She responded like a reader, and I loved her for that.

But when Butterfly failed to sell on its first round out, I began to give up. It was too weird. Not a typical whodunit. A heroine who is relatable (to me, at least) but not “likable.” Besides, by then I had started to write a fun, fast, but much more straightforward amateur sleuth, featuring a newspaper reporter on the police beat whose own shady history and taste for “bad boys” is both an asset and a possible hindrance on the job.

I had such fun with this one!

In fact, I was pushing Anne-Lise to abandon Blue Butterfly and just sell the more commercial Bad Boy Beat, when she explained that her goal was to find an editor who would take them both. Who would get me as a writer, and with whom I could have a long relationship. Months went by … but then she ran into Rachel at the London Book Fair and they started chatting – and on July 28 (the day after my birthday!), she told me we’d had an offer! And that Severn sees Bad Boy as the start on a new series (my dream as well). We even have temp pub dates, with The Bad Boy Beat scheduled for May 2024 and The Blue Butterfly tentatively on the calendar for November 2024, depending on whether this will conflict with any next Polis book. Because, yes, there may be more magical witch cats in my future! If my editor at Polis agrees, I’ll keep doing those. His tardiness drives me crazy, but I love my magical cats. (And, yes, the newest – TO CONJURE A KILLER, which has been bumped back to November – is now up for pre-order. Pre-orders are one of the factors that convince publishers to continue series, so if you like cat cozies, please consider!)

To Conjure a Killer!

Kitten season can be murder…

When Becca spies a tortoiseshell kitten dodging traffic and chases the tiny tortie down an alley she doesn’t expect to find a dead body. But that’s only the beginning of her troubles in the upcoming TO CONJURE A KILLER, the fourth in the Witch Cats of Cambridge cozy cat mystery series.

So excited to have this book ready to go! I’m reading page proofs now – you can imagine how Becca’s three cats, Harriet, Laurel, and Clara, are reacting to the newcomer! – but you can pre-order TO CONJURE A KILLER now! (This link takes you to Amazon, but if you’d prefer to support a local independent bookstore, you can pre-order from IndieBound here.)

(P.S. Pre-orders play a major role in alerting bookstores and libraries about which books to stock and sell. Publishers also watch pre-orders to see if they should continue series like the Witch Cats of Cambridge. So if you think you might want more books like To Conjure a Killer, please consider pre-ordering!)

Hold Me Down a Mass. Book “Must Read”!

Absolutely thrilled to find out that my HOLD ME DOWN has been named a Massachusetts Center for the Book “Must Read“! This wonderful list means my psychological suspense novel is a finalist for the MassBook fiction award, which will be announced in October. In the meantime, I’m celebrating!

Mass Book AwardsThe Massachusetts Book Awards recognize significant works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s/young adult literature published by current Commonwealth residents.

Submissions open each Fall and customarily close at the end of the calendar year.

The 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Awards (2021 pub date)

The Awards will be announced in October 2022 as we open the call for the 23rd annual awards. Judges are reading from the long-lists (“Must Reads”) in the following categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Middle Grade/Young Adult Literature, and Picture Books/Early Readers. We did not receive a sufficient number of translated literature submissions to make an award this year.

Fiction Must-Reads

The Smash-Up by Ali Benjamin (Random House)
Love Like That: Stories by Emma Duffy-Comparone (Henry Holt)
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
Something Wild by Hannah Halperin (Viking)
The Human Zoo by Sabina Murray (Grove Press/Grove Atlantic)
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki (Viking)
An Ordinary Wonder by Buki Papillon (Pegasus Books)
Phase Six by Jim Shepard (Alfred A. Knopf)
Leaving Coy’s Hill: A Novel by Katherine A. Sherbrooke (Pegasus Books)
Hold Me Down by Clea Simon (Polis Books)
The Summoning by J. P. Smith (Poisoned Pen Press)
The Playwright’s House by Dariel Suarez (Red Hen Press)

Nonfiction Must-Reads

The Black Church by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Penguin Press)
Believing by Anita Hill (Viking)
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown/Random House)
White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland by Dick Lehr (Mariner Books/Harper Collins)
Extraterrestrial by Avi Loeb (Mariner Books/Harper Collins)
The Free World by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (Random House)
Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint (Graywolf Press)
Travels with George by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)
Rationality by Steven Pinker (Viking)
Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training by Adam Stern, MD (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle (Penguin Press)

Poetry Must-Reads

Against Silence by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Everything by Andrea Cohen (Four Way Books)
Floaters: Poems by Martín Espada (W.W. Norton)
Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Pelted by Flowers by Kali Lightfoot (CavanKerry Press)
The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim (W.W. Norton)
Vanishing Points by Gary Metras (Dos Madres Press)
Cutlish by Rajiv Mohabir (Four Way Books)
I Wish My Father by Lesléa Newman (Headmistress Press)
Uncertain Acrobats by Rebecca Hart Olander (CavanKerry Press)
Sole Impression by Barry Sternlieb (Codhill Press)
Tremors by Cammy Thomas (Four Way Books)

Middle Grade / Young Adult Must-Reads

The Dreamcatcher Codes by Barbara Newman (Green Writers Press)
Fat Chance, Charlie Vega by Crystal Maldonado (Holiday House)
When All the Girls Are Sleeping by Emily Arsenault (Delacorte Press/ Random House Children’s Books)
Atlantis: The Accidental Invasion by Gregory Mone (Amulet)
Welcome Back, Maple Mehta-Cohen by Kate McGovern (Candlewick Press)
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo (Dutton/PYR)
Picturing a Nation: The Great Depression’s Finest Photographers Introduce America to Itself by Martin W. Sandler (Candlewick Press)
The Wide Starlight by Nicole Lesperance (Razorbill/PYR)
Red, White, and Whole by Rajani LaRocca (Quill Tree Books/Harper Collins)
The Valley and the Flood by Rebecca Mahoney (Razorbill/PYR)
What Comes Next by Rob Buyea (Delacorte Press/Random House Children’s Books)
Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (Putnam/PYR)

Picture Book / Early Reader Must-Reads

Caution! Road Signs Ahead by Toni Buzzeo. Chi Birmingham, illus. (Paulsen/PYR)
Bubbles . . . Up! by Jacqueline Davies. Sonia Sánchez, illus. (Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins)
Dandelion Magic by Darren Farrell. Maya Tatsukawa, illus. (Dial/PYR)
Don’t Hug Doug by Carrie Finison. Daniel Wiseman, illus. (Putnam/PYR)
Be a Tree! by Maria Gianferrari. Felicita Sala, illus. (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
Saving American Beach by Heidi Tyline King. Ekua Holmes, illus. (Putnam/PYR)
When Langston Dances by Kaija Langley. Keith Mallett, illus. (Simon & Schuster)
The Secret Code Inside You by Rajani LaRocca. Steven Salerno, illus. (Little Bee Books)
Walrus Song by Janet Lawler. Timothy Basil Ering, illus. (Candlewick Press)
Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge by Ray Anthony Shepard. Keith Mallett, illus. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Dream Street by Tricia Elam Walker. Ekua Holmes, illus. (Anne Schwartz Books/ Random House Children’s Books)
Bear Outside by Jane Yolen. Jen Corace, illus. (Neal Porter Books)

Translated Literature Recommendations

forthcoming

Hilary Mantel’s “Learning to Talk”

If you know me at all, you know I love Hilary Mantel. It was an honor to review this new (old) collection of autobiographical stories, in large part because it was so much fun to dissect what she did with language. Also, I love the illustration that Eva Vazquez did for The Boston Globe it’s bigger and cooler than this)!

BOOK REVIEW

In short pieces, Hilary Mantel recalls her difficult past

By Clea Simon Globe Correspondent,Updated June 23, 2022, 6:42 p.m.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/06/23/arts/short-pieces-hilary-mantel-recalls-her-difficult-past/?p1=BGSearch_Overlay_Results

BOOK REVIEW

In short pieces, Hilary Mantel recalls her difficult past

By Clea Simon Globe Correspondent,Updated June 23, 2022, 6:42 p.m.

Flashbacks

Went to hear the musician John Doe last week. Wonderful songwriter with a deep baritone like velvet – I’ve never heard “Everybody’s Talking at Me” covered so beautifully. Anyway, I ended up chatting with another fan and it turns out she works at the Globe and when a third fan sat near us, I realized we all knew Doe and his first band X from different eras. That prompted me to dig up these two pieces. The first, published in Salon in 1999, was already a look back to when I first experienced X in their heyday, the early ’80s. The second, See How We Are, I posted here in 2008. Time flies. …

Eat this songClea Simon remembers seeing X for the first time.By CLEA SIMONPUBLISHED FEBRUARY 3, 1999 12:26PM (EST)

t’s funny, isn’t it, how you can never really explain what a song means to you? I was thinking of this the night the X reunion came to town, and I was waiting for them to come onstage. I was thinking of how much this band means to me, or more accurately, had meant to me 15 years ago, when I was in college and the Los Angeles group with its rapid-fire punk roar was as new and as raw as everything to me. I was waiting for the show, anticipating the rush, and I started looking around at my friends, people who had come into my life in recent years and made it warm and whole. And I was wondering how this music hit them, how it fit into their lives and their memories. And if they could ever know how it fit me. I stood there in the darkness anticipating certain lines that had reverberated between my ears years ago, waiting for my chance to once more scream out what at the time had seemed like the only honest statement possible. “The world’s a mess, it’s in my kiss,” ran one refrain, the two singers howling in despair and desperate love. “Last night everything broke,” ran another in flat declaration of the scraping-by of urban life. What else could I add?

Those songs — that album, “Los Angeles” — came out during my first year away from home, coming to my consciousness as I finished my freshman year, and they hit me like oxygen, like tequila, the way all things intoxicating and thrilling do when it’s all new to you, when everything in life is pretty much your first time. Yes, I’d had sex already by the time I arrived in Cambridge with my trunk full of books and my parents in tow, and I’d done almost as many drugs by then as I was ever going to do (although I certainly didn’t know that then nor would it have been my choice). But this was different. This was life on my own. Communal living, sure — first in a dorm, then in a succession of group houses, summer sublets and the kind of awkward shared situations where you find yourself asking, one morning, “Is this strawberry jam house strawberry jam, or is it personally owned?” and the next stealing your roommate’s shampoo because it’s Pantene and smells so much nicer than your own Suave Ultra. But life, without parents, without the years of expectations and memories that had defined me. This was the real

You ever get the feeling that the rocks by your stoop are so beautiful you want to lick them? That you could just grab the tree branches and eat their new leaves whole? Yes, we were smoking a lot of hash then, in my college years, but the euphoria went beyond the buzz. I’d come from suburbia, a nice enough place in its way, but now I was in the city (a quiet bookish and occasionally leafy city, it is true). I wanted to experience all of it. 

Sugarlight, we’re addicts. Why do you think we came?

He’s pasting gold leeches on my arm …

he’s open throated.

I don’t think I asked for pain. Some people do, I know, but I think I really had had my fill — two crazy siblings, one of whom would take his life two years later, had made my home life as scary as I could want. Scarier than either of my parents could deal with, certainly. So much had been experienced, and so much more smoothed over — the screaming, the ambulances — that I didn’t need to look for more trauma to imprint myself with independence. I was looking, instead, for validation of my experience. Like so many of my colleagues (as I would find out years later), the pretty perfect girls who cut their arms in order to feel themselves alive, in order to witness their own blood, I needed something loud and angry that would give voice to the screaming in my head, those cries remembered and suppressed. I needed music that was faster and harder than the screaming to siphon all that out, to take the pressure off. To reassure me that, yes, it had been real. It was still real. I was real.

I needed punk music to free me from my own constriction. From, as I put it at the time, suburbia. I found, in the lyrics of bands like X, that anything could be plainly said. Everything could be said.

No one is united

all things are untied

perhaps we’re boiling over inside

they’ve been telling lies …

This was a good thing, a profound thing. But waiting that night for X to come back, I found myself wondering how it translated. The best one can ever hope for, after all, is similarity of experience. You get by taking it all on faith. That your best friend also heard that song the night she found her boyfriend in bed with the neighbor. That your buddy who fucked the British guitarist tuned it in on the radio when he walked out, at 3 a.m., after eating whatever was left in her refrigerator and not saying goodbye. 

Someone clean to chew on

a wife that no one likes …

And I stood there, humming to songs that the DJ wasn’t playing, and I told myself things are better now, so much so, and yet there was something from that time I wanted to recover. And so I told the friend standing by my side how much I loved the song I could hear in my head. I sang her the lyrics, even played a little air guitar and trilled out a drum fill, but it didn’t work. “You don’t have to answer me, you don’t have to call me back,” I tried singing to her. I could hear the keening harmony, insistence of guitar played so loud and over and over the night my housemate cut his wrist. “Your phone’s off the hook … but you’re not.” I could still feel the exhaustion, and the practical thoughts that took over — that cold water would be best for the blood on the wallpaper, that the rest of the mushrooms were in the freezer in case we wanted to flush them, in case calling the cops became a necessity. If the bleeding started up again. If he woke up crazy again. I told my friend once again about that night, about that long sleepless night before X first came to town, about my housemate’s crisis over his sexual identity and the odd calm competency, learned from my crazy home, that surfaced once he had come down and gone to sleep. I told her about cleaning up blood. But all she heard was a story and a song sung off-key. That was years before, life was so much warmer now — I had my friends right there, people closer to me than I’d ever thought I’d have. But I missed something: Call it urgency. I wondered if hearing this band again would take me back, would take all of us back, and if we would meet in that fast, high wail. I waited for the show to begin.

CLEA SIMON

Clea Simon is a copy editor and radio columnist for the Boston Globe. She is the author of “Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings” (Penguin).

Felonious felines and other animal crimes

So lovely to see my cat mysteries merit a mention in this smart Crime Reads piece by the great Martin Edwards!

Furry Friends and Fiendish Plotting: On Animals In Detective Fiction

Hold Me Down on Book Bub

Reader reviews are the best – And, yes, I do read what folks post on Goodreads, Amazon, and Bookbub! This new review just blew me away! Thank you, J.E. Barnard.

J.E. BarnardAuthor@jaynebarnard

Recommended and rated this book 4 stars

Hold Me Down Clea Simon Book Details

This is NOT the usual cats-n-cozies mystery we’ve come to expect from this author. In this novel of women’s suspense, an aging rock star’s gig at her old band-mate’s memorial service-slash-benefit-concert brings back familiar faces and fractured memories of life on the road. The past is at once poignant and unapologetically raw, raucous, and raunchy. Concerts and parties, long blurred into a drug-and-booze-filled kaleidoscope, begin to come back into focus. This book could be a straightforward trip down a fictional Memory Lane but it’s so much more: an interrogation of celebrity-worship, the music industry, the fractal nature of memory and the essential question of whether we’re really who we think we are.

Left Coast Crime, Malice Domestic, and more

The crime fiction community is back, and I’ve been taking part! In the past month, I’ve been in Albuquerque for Left Coast Crime and Bethesda, MD, for Malice Domestic. I’ve posted more photos on social media and will be trying to tag everyone.

In the meantime, I’ve got some book news pending. So happy to be working with literary agent Anne-Lise Spitzer of the Spitzer Agency and hope to be able to share the results soon… Stay tuned, and please stay in touch!

If you’ve been trying to reach me…

Hi folks!

I’ve just learned that the “contact me” form on this site hasn’t been working. My apologies!. Please try me again if you haven’t heard back from me!

My apologies,

Clea