Kimberly McCreight's Blog, page 120
March 13, 2013
Look What Came In The Mail!
February 1, 2013
One Part Mystery, Two Parts Magic
December 26, 2012
Thanks EW!
December 24, 2012
Good Things in Big Packages
November 30, 2012
Short Cuts
Cafe Idiot (Excerpt)
November 21, 2012
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 16, 2012
Behind the Book
For three months, I’d been faithfully taking my pre-natal vitamins, avoiding all unapproved foods and keeping my heart rate safely below 140 beats a minute. Yet, I didn’t really believe that my body would work—when called upon—the way health class had assured me it would. But there I stood in my squat, bathtub-less bathroom, a positive pregnancy test pinched in my already puffy fingers. And all I could think was: my God what have we done.
Once I got over the initial shock of being pregnant, I convinced myself that I would figure it out. I’d always been a quick study, and I wasn’t afraid of a little hard work. I’d been a lawyer and a writer and had traveled all over the world. I’d climbed a mountain and run a marathon. I’d learned to speak Japanese and taught myself to bake. If I could do all those things, then surely with enough time and effort, I could learn to properly care for a child. Surely.
And I did, eventually. I learned to care for two, in fact. I consulted books and wise friends and doctors, but mostly it was trial and error. It certainly has not been easy. There have been countless sleepless nights and voluminous tears—theirs and mine. So far, we have survived endless colic and reflux and trips to the ER for stitches. We’ve held our breath through first steps and first days of school and first best friends. I’ve changed countless diapers, bandaged endless scraped knees, assessed the severity of numerous head wounds and have been thrown up on more than I ever would have thought possible.
Of course, the physical demands—aggravating and exhausting though they sometimes may be—are actually the easy part. It’s being a mother that’s so very hard. Just the idea of being that person, to another living being, forever, gives me vertigo. And then there are the actual responsibilities being someone’s mother entails. I’m supposed to help my children grow into happy people. But what makes a person happy? Success, love, freedom? If I’m still trying to figure that out, how can I possibly teach my daughters? What am I to do when their fears terrify me? How can I make them feel loved unconditionally and completely in those dark moments when I’m not sure I like them very much?
And how on earth—in a world so filled with dangers, big and small—will I ever keep them safe?
More than once, I’ve turned a corner on the way to pick up one of my children and seen an ambulance parked in front of one of their schools. Or at least that’s the way it looks, from several blocks away, down a busy Brooklyn avenue. Every time, I tell myself that my child has not accidentally eaten one of those cashews that she is so allergic to or fallen off the monkey bars or choked on a carrot. No, my child is fine.
And yet, I always walk a little faster, eyes locked on the ambulance, until I can confirm that it’s actually just parked, off-duty. Perhaps, I worry because I’m especially fatalistic. But I don’t think so. I think I worry because, deep down, I know the truth: that there is only so much I can do to protect my girls.
My novel is told from the alternating perspectives of both Amelia and her mother Kate, to show how children—no matter how well-adjusted, no matter how well-loved—can be so easily singled out for abuse and suffer its inevitably heartbreaking consequences. Reconstructing Amelia explores how our children can get so terribly lost, despite the fact that we’re trying our best to keep them found.
November 9, 2012
Late Bloomer
For years, I was in denial.
No, I was not a writer, I told myself. I could not, would not be a writer. In college, I actually avoided anything having to do with writing lest I be tempted to entertain the possibility.
As the survivor of a tumultuous childhood, security was critical to me. I knew that no part of writing—not the doing of it, not the selling of it, much less the succeeding at it—was certain. So, I vowed, I would forgo that particular road less traveled, for a well-paved highway. I was going to law school.
Law school was really pretty interesting, too—the long talks about the injustice of stop and frisk procedures, the debates about flaws in FDA drug approval. And then there’s that crystal clear trajectory off it (back, at least, in those boom economic years): study hard + good grades = great job.
Simple, straightforward, safe.And after three years of my nose to the grindstone (with numerous abandoned novels tucked safely in my drawer), I was awarded my prizes upon graduation: a eighty-hour-a-week job with an excellent corporate firm and $150,000 in law school debt. Oh yes, and the sinking realization that I’d have to be a lawyer now, for real. And for the rest of my life.
Three months in, I quit my first job as a lawyer when I had to go into work a couple hours after completing the New York Marathon. But I still had all those law school loans, oh yeah, and that blind terror of uncertainty, so I joined another firm. It was a vast improvement. Except, of course, for the whole having-to-be-a-lawyer part.
Two months into the new firm, I was coming to accept that I could no longer outrun myself. I was not a lawyer. Not deep down. No matter how much I wanted to be. No, I was destined for a much bumpier road, like it or not. Luckily, I was still only twenty-eight years old. It wasn’t too late to be brave.
So while working those eighty-hour-weeks, I started waking at 4:00 a.m. to write short stories that weren’t very good. I did that for two years, taking online writing classes, asking friends for feedback, tentatively telling people I wanted to be a writer. Trying it all on for size. Praying for a sign.
That sign came when my then-fiancé was offered a one-year transfer to London. I was lucky enough to be able to take a leave of absence, defer payments of my loans for the year and pack my bags. If I can write and sell a book within the year, I told myself, then that will be that. And if I can’t then that will be that too: I’ll put my writing dreams to bed, for good.
I kept at least part of my own bargain. I took writing classes and went to readings and loved living in London. I finished my first book in six months. Two months and fifty query letters later, I had an agent. And I thought to myself, what was I so scared of anyway? This isn’t going to be that hard after all.
That was in June. Of the year 2001.
Reconstructing Amelia, my fifth novel written, was sold with the help of my fabulous third agent, just this past February. Eleven years later. Luckily, the part of my own bargain that I never could seem to keep—even when I seemed crazy, even to myself—was the part about giving up.
November 2, 2012
Eight Minutes
We live an eight-minute drive from thriving, eclectic Red Hook, Brooklyn. A place with funky restaurants, cute shops and Baked, a bakery with some of the best brownies in the City. Red Hook has industrial loft apartments and an offbeat mix of new and old Brooklyn. It’s a place, were I younger and much cooler, I’d want to live.
But on Monday night, the mere eight-minute drive between our apartment and Red Hook might as well have been eight hours.
Red Hook was within the evacuation zone and was completely flooded by Hurricane Sandy. Residents were displaced, businesses ruined. Lives upended. Our favorite, fantastically suburban-sized Fairway—the one with an amazing view of the New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty where my daughters and I have eaten French toast many weekend mornings—is now closed. By one account, it was flooded by over seven feet of water. There is no word yet on when, or if, it will re-open.
We also live a mere 4.5 miles from lower Manhattan. 4.5 miles through the Battery Park Tunnel that looked like the raging Colorado River by late Monday night. The tunnel that remains, five days later, filled with water.
With no traffic, we are a 15-minute drive to Staten Island, a place that has faced some of the most devastating destruction. A place where some poor mother lost her two babies when they were ripped from her arms as she tried to save them from floodwaters.
And yet, our neighborhood, only a stone’s throw away, escaped the storm largely unscathed. We had many downed trees in Prospect Park and a few more on side streets, some crushed cars and broken glass. But that was really it. And all because, we were lucky enough to be perched high on a hill, far above the storm surge.
Our community is collecting supplies and making meals and trying to do our part, as we move on in a surreal bubble of relative normalcy. We are running out of gas and we have no subways and often no way to work apart from hours long waits for packed shuttle buses. But these are tiny things. They are nothing.
Our hearts break for the very many of you who are not lucky enough to have such minor inconveniences to complain about. For those of you who have lost loved ones and homes and businesses and memories. Those of you who must somehow find the strength to be brave for your children, to give them some stability amid the chaos as you begin to rebuild.
And so as you beg for FEMA and the Red Cross to arrive, as you plead for electricity, or for your heat to be turned back on as temperatures plummet, know that you have not and will not be forgotten. Not by those of us who are eight minutes away. Not by those who are eight hundred.
