Elizabeth Rosner's Blog, page 2
June 5, 2014
June 4, 2013
What We Talk About When We Talk About Disabilities
Here is a link to my latest essay/review of a brilliant debut novel by Susan Nussbaum, entitled GOOD KINGS, BAD KINGS. The novel won the Bellwether Prize (inaugurated by Barbara Kingsolver), and deserves even more acclaim yet to come. I hope you'll agree with me that this is truly the kind of book that can open your mind and change your life.
Link: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.ph...
Link: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.ph...
December 2, 2011
Holiday Readathon! Dec. 2-4
I'm participating in my first Holiday Readathon, Dec. 2-4, inspired by author and blogger Liza Wiemer on Goodreads. For this mini-challenge/giveaway, readers are invited to respond to author questions, with prizes....
Here is mine:
"Begin Again" is a repeating line in my novel BLUE NUDE, and a motto for my own perseverance in life. What's your motto?
A winner will be randomly chosen to receive a signed copy of your choice of paperback BLUE NUDE or THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
TO ENTER, YOU CAN:
Post a comment here.
Post a comment on my Twitter page: http://twitter.com/#!/elizabethrosner and answer by @elizabethrosner #Readathon.
Post a comment on my Facebook page, including the tag, Holiday Readathon: http://www.facebook.com/elizabethrosn...
This giveaway is open to the US, UK, and Europe. Ends Sunday, Dec. 4 at midnight PST.
Good luck, happy holidays, and don't forget to sign up for the Holiday Readathon at WhoRuBlog, aka Holiday Readathon Central!
Happy holidays to all!
Here is mine:
"Begin Again" is a repeating line in my novel BLUE NUDE, and a motto for my own perseverance in life. What's your motto?
A winner will be randomly chosen to receive a signed copy of your choice of paperback BLUE NUDE or THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
TO ENTER, YOU CAN:
Post a comment here.
Post a comment on my Twitter page: http://twitter.com/#!/elizabethrosner and answer by @elizabethrosner #Readathon.
Post a comment on my Facebook page, including the tag, Holiday Readathon: http://www.facebook.com/elizabethrosn...
This giveaway is open to the US, UK, and Europe. Ends Sunday, Dec. 4 at midnight PST.
Good luck, happy holidays, and don't forget to sign up for the Holiday Readathon at WhoRuBlog, aka Holiday Readathon Central!
Happy holidays to all!
May 8, 2011
August 2, 2010
July 23, 2010
The Forgiveness of Water
Twenty-five years ago, while an undergraduate at Stanford, I got a job on campus as a lifeguard, deepening a love of swimming and water that has lasted throughout my life. I took the duties seriously and studied the swimmers with professional vigilance, relieved at the end of each day that no emergency rescue had been required. But the greatest challenge of the job was standing poolside in a bathing suit with my body on display.
Work began in the locker room, where I changed into my Speedo and surveyed my reflection, assessing what would be on view for the next few hours. I was plagued by self-criticism. I imagined the swimmers judging my shape, until I made myself remember that I was there to guard their lives, not their fantasies. Later I performed my variation of the same ablutions everyone else did, showering and hair-washing, applying lotion and makeup-preparations for reentering the other world of walking upright on solid land.
One day I noticed a young woman with a sketchpad in the locker room. I'm an art student, a handwritten sign read. I'm here for the natural light and variety of forms. I hope I won't bother you. I was enthralled by the idea of looking at the room full of bodies in a new way. Undressing and bathing and redressing in a steady stream of movements, we were a palette of skin colors and shapes, a beautiful parade of muses. All the same and each unique: rounder or leaner, taller or shorter, full breasted or flat, with or without bellies, muscle tone. Amazed, I began to picture myself along with the others in my own simple perfection-not as an object measured against impossible standards, but only and purely myself, translated into lines and shadings on a white page. Here was a glimpse of what it was like to be gazed at in the name of art, used as inspiration for beauty, even me.
The artist, Diane, told me about life-drawing classes on campus and, to my own surprise, I asked if any models were needed. I wondered if this could cure the self-consciousness that tormented me. I hoped to learn how to be kinder to myself, replacing a practice of scrutiny and punishment with some renewed belief in the softness of flesh on bone, in the beauty of a curve.
I made the arrangements and went to the classroom at the appointed hour. I offered myself up: the only naked woman in the room. Nervous, terrified, delivered, exhausted. In my haste to dress at the end of class, I left behind my bathrobe. Afterward, I told myself how interesting it had been, how good for me, but I never found the courage to go back for the robe. I walked around campus as usual, but whenever I saw a student from that evening, I felt exposed all over again.
The full classroom had been too overwhelming. Still, something had begun. I found myself looking for a private modeling job. When I replied to an ad in the college paper from an artist named Ken, who was in search of a model, he insisted I call his wife, who worked at Stanford, to reassure me he was safe.
Unlike the experience of modeling for my peers in the classroom, the formality of Ken's studio helped further my sense that he was a professional. At first, disrobing, I pretended to be relaxed, and eventually the pretense became true. Ken made a series of sketches and photographs in preparation for a sculpture of my torso. Often I slept during the long reclining poses, but I remember the ache of holding my arms over my head while he photographed me from the neck down. Eventually, he began the sculpture-a nearly life-size block of clay that slowly and unmistakably took on the appearance of my nude body.
We barely spoke. Even before I really looked at his images of me, I thought about what the drawings and renditions might reveal; if someone else could forgive my imperfections, perhaps I could forgive my own. When I said I would be graduating soon, Ken gave me photographs of my silhouetted torso in black-and-white and color shots of the finished sculpture: front, back, and sides. I tried to see what he might have seen: contours and dimensions, a graceful and anonymous arc in space.
All these years later, the photos remain in my desk drawer, vivid and strange. On occasion, since working with Ken, I have searched again for some elusive reconciliation with myself by modeling for other artists. Each time, I have found a bit of reassurance in the artist's gaze. It's as if I'm being immunized against the diseases spread by magazine covers and movies. But I still struggle to make a more permanent peace with my body, the one I've been given and so often long to shrink or elongate or make closer to perfect. Even now, it's only the water that feels utterly welcoming and without judgment. Immersed, I am a self that is more than the sum of my parts. My edges dissolve. I float.
This essay first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, May 28, 2006.
Work began in the locker room, where I changed into my Speedo and surveyed my reflection, assessing what would be on view for the next few hours. I was plagued by self-criticism. I imagined the swimmers judging my shape, until I made myself remember that I was there to guard their lives, not their fantasies. Later I performed my variation of the same ablutions everyone else did, showering and hair-washing, applying lotion and makeup-preparations for reentering the other world of walking upright on solid land.
One day I noticed a young woman with a sketchpad in the locker room. I'm an art student, a handwritten sign read. I'm here for the natural light and variety of forms. I hope I won't bother you. I was enthralled by the idea of looking at the room full of bodies in a new way. Undressing and bathing and redressing in a steady stream of movements, we were a palette of skin colors and shapes, a beautiful parade of muses. All the same and each unique: rounder or leaner, taller or shorter, full breasted or flat, with or without bellies, muscle tone. Amazed, I began to picture myself along with the others in my own simple perfection-not as an object measured against impossible standards, but only and purely myself, translated into lines and shadings on a white page. Here was a glimpse of what it was like to be gazed at in the name of art, used as inspiration for beauty, even me.
The artist, Diane, told me about life-drawing classes on campus and, to my own surprise, I asked if any models were needed. I wondered if this could cure the self-consciousness that tormented me. I hoped to learn how to be kinder to myself, replacing a practice of scrutiny and punishment with some renewed belief in the softness of flesh on bone, in the beauty of a curve.
I made the arrangements and went to the classroom at the appointed hour. I offered myself up: the only naked woman in the room. Nervous, terrified, delivered, exhausted. In my haste to dress at the end of class, I left behind my bathrobe. Afterward, I told myself how interesting it had been, how good for me, but I never found the courage to go back for the robe. I walked around campus as usual, but whenever I saw a student from that evening, I felt exposed all over again.
The full classroom had been too overwhelming. Still, something had begun. I found myself looking for a private modeling job. When I replied to an ad in the college paper from an artist named Ken, who was in search of a model, he insisted I call his wife, who worked at Stanford, to reassure me he was safe.
Unlike the experience of modeling for my peers in the classroom, the formality of Ken's studio helped further my sense that he was a professional. At first, disrobing, I pretended to be relaxed, and eventually the pretense became true. Ken made a series of sketches and photographs in preparation for a sculpture of my torso. Often I slept during the long reclining poses, but I remember the ache of holding my arms over my head while he photographed me from the neck down. Eventually, he began the sculpture-a nearly life-size block of clay that slowly and unmistakably took on the appearance of my nude body.
We barely spoke. Even before I really looked at his images of me, I thought about what the drawings and renditions might reveal; if someone else could forgive my imperfections, perhaps I could forgive my own. When I said I would be graduating soon, Ken gave me photographs of my silhouetted torso in black-and-white and color shots of the finished sculpture: front, back, and sides. I tried to see what he might have seen: contours and dimensions, a graceful and anonymous arc in space.
All these years later, the photos remain in my desk drawer, vivid and strange. On occasion, since working with Ken, I have searched again for some elusive reconciliation with myself by modeling for other artists. Each time, I have found a bit of reassurance in the artist's gaze. It's as if I'm being immunized against the diseases spread by magazine covers and movies. But I still struggle to make a more permanent peace with my body, the one I've been given and so often long to shrink or elongate or make closer to perfect. Even now, it's only the water that feels utterly welcoming and without judgment. Immersed, I am a self that is more than the sum of my parts. My edges dissolve. I float.
This essay first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, May 28, 2006.
February 18, 2010
Getting to Happy
December 31, 2009, 12:29 am
Today is the last day of my 40s, and I’ll never be this young again. It’s the end of a decade that has included my happiest moments as well as my most pain-filled ones. Standing on the threshold of my 50th birthday, along with everyone else who is looking ahead as well as behind, I’m pausing to reflect on where I’ve been and what I’ve managed to learn along the way.
The year 2000 began with the sale of my first novel (part of a two-book deal even though I didn’t know what that meant: “Two books? But I only wrote one!”) and the very same year ended with the sudden death of my mother from breast cancer at the age of 70. The fact that my longest-held dream of selling a novel came true just in time for me to lose my biggest fan seemed a particularly cruel paradox. When my book was published in September 2001, and the first day of my book tour happened to land on 9/11, it started to look like the fates had a special message for me. Slowly I began to understand that none of these events were meant to be taken quite so personally. Things happen, good and bad, ecstatic and tragic, more or less at random. At least that’s what I told myself.
My novel hit a few best-seller lists, got optioned for a film, was translated into nine languages, and won a series of national and foreign prizes. Apparently I had choices: to grieve that my mother hadn’t lived to celebrate all of this with me? to wring my hands over the cancelled book tour, the dwarfing of my disappointments by the giant catastrophe? or to focus my attention on my extraordinary good fortune. I had written a well-received piece of work I could feel proud of, and I had money enough to live on for a while. I bought a little house in Mexico. I ended a relationship that had never quite found its way to solid ground, and considered opening my heart to someone new.
As if by magic, on the first Sunday in January 2003, I stumbled through a doorway into a gymnasium and changed my life. In that space filled with 150 people dancing improvisationally to a two-hour set of irresistible music, the long-lost joy of free movement reclaimed me. Having been a student of ballet, jazz, and modern dance for too many years to count, I was thrilled about being invited to ignore choreography or any prescribed positions. The liberation and inspiration have remained with me ever since, and I continue to practice the 5 Rhythms at least once a week (usually more) along with an extended community that has become a kind of family.
Another miracle happened in that gymnasium in 2003: I fell in love again. This new glass-half-full boyfriend helped me see, as I turned 44, that I had Gotten to Happy. (Coming from a long line of depressives, I found this was not so obvious. When my father called to wish me a happy birthday, I giddily told him I was glad to have been born. That made both of us happy.) Clearly I was living my dream life, complete with a book to finish that was essentially guaranteed publication, and a beloved partner with whom to share my joy.
The successes of Book #1 gave me abundant opportunities to travel, lecture, and teach. Completing Book #2 was challenged by publisher turmoil during which time I lost my devoted editor, but with his support and that of many others, I was able to send that book into the world in May 2006. Time out for the oft-repeated saga of a second novel “flop,” and my newfound happiness started to fray at its delicate edges. Not much later, my boyfriend broke my heart (details too painful to include here), and I endured something like a replay of my mother’s death as I faced the unavoidable truth about the impermanence in all things. I told myself I had another book to write, and I needed to learn how to live with inevitable loss.
Against all odds, my boyfriend and I figured out we needed to give each other a second chance, and as anyone who has returned to try again knows, the process is profoundly difficult and exquisitely rich, often at the same time. When you combine a glass half-empty with one that is half-full, you still have a glass that is at least half-full. You might even end up with a full glass, isn’t that right? Turns out that my renewed chance at love was the gateway to yet another unexpected crisis: diagnosed with breast cancer on my 49th birthday, new year’s eve 2008, I can say without exaggeration that this past year has been the most physically intense ordeal of my life. Surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, seemingly endless rehabilitation from the effects of the aforementioned treatments.
Have I mentioned learning how to be happy about retaining most of my eyelashes? About not throwing up from the chemo (and only from the reactions to anesthesia for the surgeries)? About slowly, finally, regaining the ability to reach overhead with my (dominant) right arm?
Does this count as happiness, I wonder? I thought I would surely know by now, but for the past year I’ve watched myself reach new depths of despair, not to mention fear and frustration. I’m still trying to find my way to completing the next novel (the one not under contract). I’m living with the threat of recurrence and with many new constraints on my lifestyle—the one I always thought was so healthy and positive. I’m learning that my time on this beautiful earth is perfect yet finite, that love can vanish and also reappear, that my body wants to heal itself, and that I have an astonishingly generous circle of family and friends.
I am so lucky. Who knew? I get to re-discover happiness again and again.
GOOD NEWS FOOTNOTE: Blue Nude will be released in paperback on September 14, 2010 (Simon and Schuster).
Today is the last day of my 40s, and I’ll never be this young again. It’s the end of a decade that has included my happiest moments as well as my most pain-filled ones. Standing on the threshold of my 50th birthday, along with everyone else who is looking ahead as well as behind, I’m pausing to reflect on where I’ve been and what I’ve managed to learn along the way.
The year 2000 began with the sale of my first novel (part of a two-book deal even though I didn’t know what that meant: “Two books? But I only wrote one!”) and the very same year ended with the sudden death of my mother from breast cancer at the age of 70. The fact that my longest-held dream of selling a novel came true just in time for me to lose my biggest fan seemed a particularly cruel paradox. When my book was published in September 2001, and the first day of my book tour happened to land on 9/11, it started to look like the fates had a special message for me. Slowly I began to understand that none of these events were meant to be taken quite so personally. Things happen, good and bad, ecstatic and tragic, more or less at random. At least that’s what I told myself.
My novel hit a few best-seller lists, got optioned for a film, was translated into nine languages, and won a series of national and foreign prizes. Apparently I had choices: to grieve that my mother hadn’t lived to celebrate all of this with me? to wring my hands over the cancelled book tour, the dwarfing of my disappointments by the giant catastrophe? or to focus my attention on my extraordinary good fortune. I had written a well-received piece of work I could feel proud of, and I had money enough to live on for a while. I bought a little house in Mexico. I ended a relationship that had never quite found its way to solid ground, and considered opening my heart to someone new.
As if by magic, on the first Sunday in January 2003, I stumbled through a doorway into a gymnasium and changed my life. In that space filled with 150 people dancing improvisationally to a two-hour set of irresistible music, the long-lost joy of free movement reclaimed me. Having been a student of ballet, jazz, and modern dance for too many years to count, I was thrilled about being invited to ignore choreography or any prescribed positions. The liberation and inspiration have remained with me ever since, and I continue to practice the 5 Rhythms at least once a week (usually more) along with an extended community that has become a kind of family.
Another miracle happened in that gymnasium in 2003: I fell in love again. This new glass-half-full boyfriend helped me see, as I turned 44, that I had Gotten to Happy. (Coming from a long line of depressives, I found this was not so obvious. When my father called to wish me a happy birthday, I giddily told him I was glad to have been born. That made both of us happy.) Clearly I was living my dream life, complete with a book to finish that was essentially guaranteed publication, and a beloved partner with whom to share my joy.
The successes of Book #1 gave me abundant opportunities to travel, lecture, and teach. Completing Book #2 was challenged by publisher turmoil during which time I lost my devoted editor, but with his support and that of many others, I was able to send that book into the world in May 2006. Time out for the oft-repeated saga of a second novel “flop,” and my newfound happiness started to fray at its delicate edges. Not much later, my boyfriend broke my heart (details too painful to include here), and I endured something like a replay of my mother’s death as I faced the unavoidable truth about the impermanence in all things. I told myself I had another book to write, and I needed to learn how to live with inevitable loss.
Against all odds, my boyfriend and I figured out we needed to give each other a second chance, and as anyone who has returned to try again knows, the process is profoundly difficult and exquisitely rich, often at the same time. When you combine a glass half-empty with one that is half-full, you still have a glass that is at least half-full. You might even end up with a full glass, isn’t that right? Turns out that my renewed chance at love was the gateway to yet another unexpected crisis: diagnosed with breast cancer on my 49th birthday, new year’s eve 2008, I can say without exaggeration that this past year has been the most physically intense ordeal of my life. Surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, seemingly endless rehabilitation from the effects of the aforementioned treatments.
Have I mentioned learning how to be happy about retaining most of my eyelashes? About not throwing up from the chemo (and only from the reactions to anesthesia for the surgeries)? About slowly, finally, regaining the ability to reach overhead with my (dominant) right arm?
Does this count as happiness, I wonder? I thought I would surely know by now, but for the past year I’ve watched myself reach new depths of despair, not to mention fear and frustration. I’m still trying to find my way to completing the next novel (the one not under contract). I’m living with the threat of recurrence and with many new constraints on my lifestyle—the one I always thought was so healthy and positive. I’m learning that my time on this beautiful earth is perfect yet finite, that love can vanish and also reappear, that my body wants to heal itself, and that I have an astonishingly generous circle of family and friends.
I am so lucky. Who knew? I get to re-discover happiness again and again.
GOOD NEWS FOOTNOTE: Blue Nude will be released in paperback on September 14, 2010 (Simon and Schuster).
