Meghan Laslocky's Blog, page 3

“Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears”

Last winter when I was researching love and communism, a professor of Russian literature at Berkeley suggested that I watch a film called “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,” which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film way back in 1980. That poor DVD has sat next to our DVD player for MONTHS, and I finally settled in to watch it yesterday.

And…I was charmed by it. It was a sort of Soviet “Sex and the City.” Here’s the trailer:

“Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” is the story of three women and starts in 1958, when they’re young factory workers in Moscow, and fast-forwards to 1978. There’s traditional Tanya, who marries her very nice beau and has a happy family life; scheming but lovable Lyudmila, who stops at nothing to snag the heart of a famous hockey player (and pays the price…you know that thing about Russian men and drinking?); and Katerina, the sharp and ambitious one who starts as a factory worker, becomes a single parent, goes to college, and rises to become a very successful factory director.

The film is of course largely about finding one’s mate and heartbreak, but one of the things I loved most about it was how it portrayed every day life and even the class system, such as it was, in the former Soviet Union — mostly through interiors. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve never been able to visualize every day life in the U.S.S.R. I mean, I know it was bleak, I know people stood in lines a lot, I know there was  lot of despair and boozing and everyone worked in factories, but I didn’t have much of an idea what it actually looked like. In Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, I felt like I got a good look — street life, the relatively posh apartment of a well-to-do academic, the grim dormitory room the girls shared, a crowded family apartment, seventies decor done Soviet style. There was lots of red, cherry red — red curtains, red wallpaper, red shoes (oh, yeah, and I loved the costumes, especially the ones from ’58). I was mesmerized by it. And, of course it was particularly poignant now, given that the film was made nearly a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union. There’s even a prescient bit where a TV cameraman pontificates about how TV will be in the future. He doesn’t quite describe the Internet, but almost…

So, if you’re on the hunt for a foreign film that’s available through Netflix and offers a big ole slice of history and nostalgia, give it a go and tell me what you think!

 

 

Better than a hot bath and a long sob

To any woman hunkering down with her ice cream and/or her chardonnay to get through a break up, I’d suggest grabbing a blankie and curling up with “Lost in Austen,” a 2008 series (streamable on Netflix!) that plays with every well-read girl’s most robust fantasy: trading places with Elizabeth Bennet. (Don’t tell me you haven’t imagined Elizabeth and Darcy’s wedding night…you know you have and it was HOT.) Sure, “Lost in Austen” takes wild liberties with “Pride and Prejudice” that might offend the stiffest Austen purists, but the fact is the series is utterly silly in the best way and completely charming. I was grinning the whole way through and have watched it not once, but TWICE. This clip doesn’t adequately capture the series’ charm, but it will give you a taste:

Getting down to brass tacks, the swap requires that the modern heroine, Amanda, fend off not just a hilariously revolting Mr. Collins (and I mean REALLY revolting) but also, because of her devout respect for the book, Darcy himself. British TV star Jemima Rooper plays the insanely lucky but spastic Amanda; Gemma Arterton (shortly thereafter of Tess and Quantum of Solace fame) plays a winsome, macrobiotic Elizabeth;Downton Abbey patriarch Hugh Bonneville plays Mr. Bennet; and the lesser known but very cute Elliot Cowan plays Darcy. There’s even a terrific send-up of Colin Firth’s famous wet-shirted version, which if you’ve never seen it, is here:

Come to think of it, you should watch BOTH series with your chardonnay and/or your ice cream. And maybe throw in the version with Keira Knightley for good measure. A little P&P film fest should get you through at least five nights of heartbreak, and make you feel better, I swear!

If you need someone from history to hate today, let me introduce you to Giovanni Pietro Lion

In my last post, I covered the basics of convertites in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy: basically they were holding tanks for marginalized women.

In convertites, vulnerable, ostracized women were in essence concentrated under one roof — all the better to take advantage of, as the story of a Venetian priest named Giovanni Pietro Lion and his breasted flock illustrates. Lion was a confessor to the repentant

One of the best sources to fuel my nun obsession was Mary Laven’s Virgins of Venice.

prostitutes and “bad girls” at Le Convertite, a convent on the edge of the city that was dedicated to Mary Magdalene and home to about 400 reformed bad girl nuns — most of whom were, conveniently for him, young and beautiful. While Lion was publicly known for his scholarship and piety, in private it was a different matter: he’d molest the nuns during confession, claiming that he was only testing their goodness. If a woman resisted, then he’d imprison and beat her until she caved. Some of his victims reportedly killed themselves rather than give in. Lion even made the women parade nude in a covered boat house so he could choose the most beautiful ones. Nothing like a little strip show amongst the gondolas, eh?

For nearly 20 years, in the perfect ruse of a sociopath, Lion forbade that the women under his watch be confessed by anyone else.  Le Convertite was was basically his own private harem. Finally, he was exposed and condemned to public decapitation in 1561. The executioner reportedly struck eight times, but still his head remained attached to his head. One of the witnesses then tried with another four or five blows, and it finally took a guard with a knife to finish the job. One onlooker interpreted the grisly scene as just desserts: a quick decapitation was too light a sentence for “the most wicked man in the world.”

 

Breasted misfits

While I was researching my book, I became obsessed by nunneries. It turns out there’s plenty of good info out there, in English, on Italian nunneries from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance — particularly on how they were basically permanent storage lockers for unwanted or troublesome women.

This is a portrait of Sister Elena Anguissola, as painted by her sister Sofonisba in 1551. She was surely in one of the aristocratic convents, not a convertite, but isn’t it a beautiful painting? Sofonisba was a famous court painter in her time and led a long and happy life.

I wound up learning a lot about convertites – a particular type of  quasi-monastic institution that was home-sweet-home for all manner of breasted misfits. It seems that with respect to what anthropologists call “anomalous females” and social workers refer to “women at risk,” the guiding philosophy of the time was, “When in doubt, toss ‘em in a convertite.”

While no historical study I came across explicitly said so, I think it’s fair to assume that the convertites were more or less hodpodges of heartbreak. Orphans, widows, naughty widows,  runaways, women secretly married to clerics, adulterous wives, battered women, victims of rape and incest, and women who rejected grooms selected by their fathers were routinely sent to convertites.

Then there were the prostitutes. In cultures where men marry comparatively late and extramarital sex is taboo, like Italy at that time, prostitution thrives because young men are theoretically barred from having sex for years after they’ve hit puberty. But apparently from about the 12th century onward, many Christian cities officially encouraged prostitutes to become “decent women,” even establishing refuges just for them where they could spend the rest of their lives doing penance.

Some of these houses even encouraged these women to rehabilitate, leave the convertite, and marry. Transforming ladies of the night into poster girls for penance and conversion was a high enough priority that in 1198 Pope Innocent III issued a decree praising men who married ex-prostitutes. Presumably by the early 16th century, after Columbus’s crew imported syphillis by the barrel, that particular offer went out of fashion: Reformed or retired prostitutes who had the disease were often housed in their own convertites, like one in Venice that grew out of a hospital just for syphilitics (Incurabili) in the late 1520s.)

But convertites didn’t just provide permanent housing for fallen women, they also were a temporary housing option other women who weren’t necessarily “fallen” in the sexual sense but were for whatever reason “in transition.”  Within the walls of convertites one could also find  temporary guests, like women whose marriage negotiations were particularly tense (gee, doesn’t that sound like fun), long term boarders (like widows who could use what remained of their dowries to pay for room and board until they pegged out), and prisoners. Sometimes courts even enforced separations between husbands and wives by confining the woman to a convertite — a sort of mandated cooling off period.

Then if a betrothal took an unexpected turn and all hell broke loose, convertites were also convenient repositories for women while the deal got sorted out. One story I came across features a young woman, Dorothea, whose fiancé, Vespa, led a band of men to snatch her back from the arms of another man with whom she’d run away. Vespa and his buddies placed her in a local government official’s house, where she insisted that she would only marry her boyfriend. So, she was packed off to the local convertite to contemplate her choice: Jesus or Vespa. Dorothea reportedly stalled as long as possible, making sure that everyone within earshot knew that “she would rather have any husband than become a nun.” Vespa eventually gave up and married someone else. The historical record is maddeningly silent on what became of Dorothea. My guess is that it didn’t end with “and she lived happily ever after.”

Then there were the situations which weren’t so much heartbreaking in the romantic sense, but still terribly sad and unhappy all the same. Juvenile rape victims were often sent off to convertites, though whether or not it was for their own protection or for punishment is often unclear. Consider one ten-year-old girl, Ginevra, who was gang-raped and lived at a convertite until adulthood, and a 13-year old girl by the name of Bella di Francesco who was raped by her mother’s lover and sent to a convertite; Bella’s rapist’s punishment included paying her dowry so she could later either become a nun or marry. (I’d venture that Rep. Todd Akin would argue that that was fair punishment for “legitimate rape.”) Then there’s the particularly ambiguous case of 16-year-old Lucretia Alvisi, who in 1531 was accused of an incestuous relationship with her father and of terminating a pregnancy. While her father was decapitated for the crime, she was seemly ordered into solitary confinement since 16 was, at the time, within the age of consent.

The most incredible convertite story I have to share is yet to come, though. Check back in on Thursday!

The master of heartbreak’s heart

One of my all-time favorite novelists* is Thomas Hardy. No one does heartbreak like he does, and if you’re a literature fan but haven’t yet read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, then you have yet to become a complete person, IMHO.

Thomas Hardy in 1893, painted by William Strang. (Source: The National Portrait Gallery, London)

So imagine my delight when I discovered in the course of my research that when Hardy died of a heart attack (how fitting!) in 1928, public and private claims over so venerable a corpse resulted in a remarkable compromise: a surgeon removed his heart, wrapped it in a towel, and put it in a cookie tin (but not before, the story goes, the cat got a nibble). Hardy’s heart was buried in Dorset with his first wife Emma, who had died in 1912, to at least satisfy in some measure his wish that he be buried with her. To satisfy the public, his body, minus his heart, was cremated and his ashes interred in Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey, where it bunks with the remains of Chaucer, Spenser, Dickens, Handel, and Laurence Olivier.

*Yes, I do know he was a poet, too, but poetry is not my thing. More on that in a different post.

Celebrity couples: the “huh?” awards

Like everyone else in our lovely country, I LOVE me a good celebrity bust-up story — so much that I have among my notes lurks  spreadsheet (yes, you heard me right, a spreadsheet) that is nothing but former couples, with notes and categories. As of now, this list has only four categories: “oldies but goodies,” “kinda cute,” “huh?”, “if only they’d had babies first,” and “ouchie.” I’m sure as time goes on and I revisit my list I’ll come up with new categories, and maybe you all can suggest some, too.

But now, I’d like to unveil my first list: the “huh?” awards, otherwise known as either “what the fuck was s/he thinking” or “ew” or “that’s just plain weird.” In some cases “that’s just plain weird” really equals = “that’s so logical it scares me.”

Here are my top-five “huh?” pairings:

#5: Andre Agassi and Barbra Streisand.

This makes no sense because they’re nearly 30 years apart in age, but then it makes sense because both would seem like total egomaniacs but are (reportedly) both rather delicate creatures. That said, Agassi said that “Dating Barbra Streisand is like wearing Hot Lava.” Probably better than being called sexual napalm, but still…

The Punisher and Hot Lava. (Source: Inside Tennis)

#4: January Jones and Ashton Kutcher…and Jim Carrey…and Brandon Davis?

This girl has a history of very puzzling boyfriend choices. Ashton Kutcher I sort of get — they were both young and hot. I get why Carrey would date her but not why she would date him (not that there is anything wrong with him, but isn’t the age difference a bit massive?) And then girl loses ALL credibility by ever letting that oil slick near her lady parts.

#3 Jewel and Sean Penn

Apparently they had an affair back in ’95. Imagining the details is a bit like imagining a tabasco sauce and honey strewn across 500-thread-count sheets.

#2 Naomi Campbell and Prince Albert II

This is a pairing that just cries for an S & M joke. I like to envision her with just stilettos and a whip, and he’s wearing just his crown, crying out for more.

#1 George Clooney and Kelly Preston

“George, let’s just go home now and play with my e-meter.” (Source: Frank Edwards/Getty)

Even though we all know Clooney has a taste for women who aren’t exactly intellectual titans, and they hooked up nearly 30 years ago, I find it really hard to imagine him hooking up with a woman who would become (or already was?) a Scientologist.

Honorable Mentions

Kelly Preston makes it into the “huh? honorable mention category, too: she was once engaged to Charlie Sheen and broke it off after he accidentally shot her in the arm with a .22. She married Travolta a year later.)

Other honorable mentions go to: Rick Springfield and Linda Blair, Carrie Fisher and Dan Ackroyd (also engaged!), Diane Lane and Jon Bon Jovi, Daniel Day-Lewis and Julia Roberts (though that probably wasn’t that weird — I’ve heard she’s a huge reader and he probably is, too), Lenny Kravitz and Nicole Kidman (can you spell REBOUND?), Penelope Cruz and Tom Cruise (isn’t she smarter than that?), Angelina Jolie and Val Kilmer, and Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn (she’s a Dem, he’s a Republican…).

Am I forgetting anyone?

Yes, there is such thing as “forced divorce”

“Forced divorce.” It has a nice ring, maybe, but surely it’s an impossibility: no outsider can make a couple legally dissolve their marriage, right?

Not so fast, at least for those of us interested in time travel to ancient Rome. Then and there, forced divorce wasn’t as prevalent as arranged marriage, but it was a power tool brandished by the ruling classes – particularly by Octavian (63 AD -14 AD), later known as Augustus, the Roman Empire’s founder and ruler from 27 BC. Within his family, home-wrecking-as-power play resulted in family dynamics that were downright dizzying.

“Divorce for you equals power for me!” Image source: Till Nierman

Around 39 BC, Octavian divorced his second wife on the day she gave birth to their daughter, Julia; he then more or less forced Claudius Nero, an aristocrat who had supported Octavian’s rival Mark Antony, to divorce his wife, Livia (who was six months pregnant at the time!) so that he himself could have her and her powerful family connections. Three days after Livia gave birth to her second son by Claudius Nero, she and Octavian were married. (He was apparently in love with her, so we can only imagine that a three-days post-partum wedding night must have been, well, memorable.)

Decades later and after he became emperor, Octavian (now called Augustus) forced Livia’s first son by Claudius Nero, Tiberius (who was by now Augustus’ adopted son) to divorce his pregnant wife Vipsania and marry Augustus’ own daughter Julia, in essence consolidating power by marrying step-siblings. No matter that Julia had just given birth to her fourth child by her husband, who had just died and whom she was still mourning, and Tiberius was very much in love with Vipsania. Needless to say, heartache resulted:   As one contemporary historian noted, “The only time [Tiberius] chanced to see [Vipsania], he followed her with such an intent and tearful gaze that care was taken that she should never again come before his eyes.”

Flash forward to 1976…

This, of course, is the stuff of which awesome TV is made. Way back in 1976, the BBC produced a fantastic version of I, Claudius (a story told from the perspective of Livia’s second son, played by Derek Jacobi), and while it seem clunky to today’s viewers, if you take some time to settle in with it, it’s incredibly juicy…and young Patrick Stewart even has a role! Here’s a great bit in which Livia first dangles the idea of Julia before Tiberius, and he memorably retorts: “Mother, I’m a happily married man! Julia doesn’t interest me; she wouldn’t interest me if you hanged her naked on the ceiling above my bed…” (Skip ahead to 1:25 if you’re so inclined…)

(N.B. This is just a taste of the kink in I, Claudius  – there’s also the AWESOME moment when young Caligula shares 200-year-old gay porn with his elderly uncle Tiberius, and Tiberius says, “It was very thoughtful of you,” as if Caligula had brought him a warm peach pie.)

And then back to the first century AD…

Needless to say, Julia and Tiberius were not happy together, so it’s no surprise that they never produced an heir, which was kind of the point of the whole exercise. Julia was later accused of adultery and banished by Augustus to a desolate island. She is said to have written in her memoirs of that period, “My time here is horrid, there’s no wine to ease my stress and no lesser class people for me to make a ridicule of them.” She’s rumored to have been starved to death after her father died and Tiberius became emperor.

But under Augustus, forced divorce wasn’t just a game the whole family could play – it was policy for the populace. If a woman was discovered committing adultery, there was no “working it out” – her husband had to divorce her and she was punished with banishment to an island by the state, just like Julia was (no special privileges for women of the ruling class in that department). There was also no turning a blind eye – if a woman was a known adulteress and her husband didn’t prosecute her, not only did the state see to it that she was punished, but her husband would be charged with pandering. Basically, he was prosecuted as a pimp.

So you think forced divorce is a thing of the past?

I know you want to think that such a thing couldn’t possibly exist in this day and age, but it does, and one could argue that the U.S. healthcare system is our Emperor Augustus. When one spouse faces a health crisis that could wipe them out financially (or already has), more than a few couples have had to divorce so that the ill one can qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. In “Until Medical Bills Do Us Part,” New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about a woman he knew, (“M.”), who was advised by hospital staff and a social worker to divorce her very ill husband ASAP so her husband would be cut off from her assets and rendered destitute; then he could qualify for Medicaid. Only by divorcing her husband could this woman support him through the process of dying from dementia and not be left destitute herself. According to the article, 62 percent of bankruptcies are connected to medical bills, and what I call forced divorce are not unusual in situations like this.

Talk about heartbreak!

As Kristof wrote back when the article was published in 2009,“M. still helps her husband and, quietly, continues to live with him and care for him. But she worries that the authorities will come after her if they realize that they divorced not because of irreconcilable differences but because of irreconcilable medical bills. There were awkward questions from friends who saw the divorce announcement in the newspaper.”

You might think this is a stretch, comparing Octavian power plays from over 2,000 years ago with modern healthcare policy, and I’ll admit that maybe it is. But when you think about it, maybe our society is even worse than that of the Romans on this front, even though people aren’t forced to divorce the way the Romans were (for us it is at least technically elective). Tiberius and Vipsania were unusual in that their marriage (or at least his side of it) was rooted in love, but that was unusual. Presumably most marriages that were dissolved for political reasons then were arranged unions in the first place, so emotionally it was no great loss. But now, we live in an era that celebrates love marriages, so when they are dissolved because of the influence of an outside power like corporate healthcare, it’s far more of a violation and presumably results in far more heartbreak.

We’re so smug with respect to our antecedents; we, after all, do not cheer wildly as gladiators slaughter each other in the ring, nor is poisoning family members or political rivals the custom of the country. But maybe we shouldn’t be quite so righteous: 2,000 years after Tiberius and Vipsania, greed can still colonize love.

On publishing a book: THE FEAR

My friend Nate Johnson has a book coming out a month after mine does, and he recently posted about what he calls “Don’t Screw This Up” and what I think of as THE FEAR. Writing a book requires its own particular tussle with one’s ego, but in some ways you’re so busy and so engrossed that you don’t have time to let the prick of fear electrify your armpits. But now that the manuscript is done and I’m working more and more on publicity and facing the prospect of doing something that is fundamentally an anathema to me (that is, talking about myself and what goes on in my brain), I’m fucking petrified. Behind the hours of building my Twitter following, reading through outtakes of my book to figure out what would make attractive blog posts, and thinking about who to beg for a blurb is a mighty stack of scared shitless that only threatens to tower ever higher between now and January.

I’m someone who can barely toot my own kazoo, let alone my own horn…and believe me, it takes courage for me to even say THAT (because, you know, kazoos can be so terribly loud). I’ve never been down for fabulizing myself or anything else aside from other people’s books that I adore or a pair of really fantastic boots. Rather, my skill set is more in what my friend Frankie calls “awfulizing.”

A couple of writer friends and people in the publishing industry have assured me that what I’m going through is totally and completely normal among debut authors, so maybe if I just get it out and list at least some of the potential awfuls, I’ll not only help myself but someone other writer who is shaking in their boots as their literary due date approaches.

The Tiers of Fear (in no particular order)

Fear #1: I’m a fraud. Nope, even though I’ve read about, thought about, and studied heartbreak intensively for a few years now (and wracked up a few years mired in the experience), I know nothing about it, and someone is going to call me out. Someone either loud, prominent, or improbable (or all three) that I either worship or hate. Some days in my head my most raging critics are, I kid you not, Roger Ebert and Ann Coulter.

Fear #2: I can’t write. Despite the fact that I’ve been assured that I can in fact write reasonably well, and that I’ve won awards for my work, and that other writers whom I respect have said I’ve got chops, they’re all lying sacks of shit.

Fear #3: I will accidentally plagiarize. Have I picked through my manuscript repeatedly like a mama orangutan looking for nits in her baby’s fuzz? Has a kick-ass copy editor/fact-checker done the same and dutifully kicked my ass when I didn’t attribute enough? Yep. Did I in fact perhaps OVER attribute, to the point where it’s distracting? Maybe. Yet still, I have literally lost sleep worrying if I’m going to get slapped with a massive lawsuit for not replacing the term “pink cheeks” with “rosy cheeks” in a section where I’ve rigorously paraphrased because I had only one source. (When I shared this particular potential awful with another writer friend working on a book, he said, “Yep, I have dozens of pink cheeks phrases circling like vultures.”)

Fear #4: I will come off like a total idiot in interviews. I’ll babble incoherently, and every phrase I utter will be festooned with more “um’s” and “uh’s” than sprinkles on a cupcake decorated by a two-year-old. Worse, someone will ask me a question and I’ll either not know the answer or give the INCORRECT answer. Seriously, Fear #4 is like the Gong Show on repeat in my head.

Fear #5: No one will interview me at all. The Little Book of Heartbreak will come out and my publicist will never email me asking what my schedule looks like and can I fit in a chat with someone who is a professional talker-to-of-interesting-people. In fact, the book is so unremarkable that even my friends won’t want to chat with me anymore. At social gatherings I’ll be herded into a corner, gagged with duct tape, and dumped behind a baby gate.

Fear #6: No one will buy my book. Let me explain that this fear has multiple prongs. First, there’s the ego prong: if The Little Book of Hearbreak flops, then I’ll impale myself with a thousand kabob skewers because of the few passing moments I’ve had when I’ve actually believed that it was worthwhile and that every page, as I suggest in the book’s introduction, might make make heartbroken readers feel a tiny bit better. Then there’s the financial prong: Every author dreams that their book will be a best-seller and assure them that if they manage their profits wisely, they can maybe do something that’s been thus far out of reach, like buy a house or tuck away some cash towards retirement or send their kids to private school or trade in the 10-year-old Subaru. But the reality, so I’ve heard, is that many best-sellers don’t even make the authors that much money (which means that it really is all about ego). The fact is, if my book doesn’t do well, I will in fact have lost money on it because I turned down other much higher-paying work while I was writing. (I just did the math on this, and my generous estimate of how much I will have made per hour off my advance in researching, writing, and promoting my book? Trust me, it’s way, way, way below minimum wage.)

Fear #7. Because no one will buy my book, my agent and editor, both of whom I adore, will never speak to me again. I’ll be a has-been that never was.

Wow. That feels better. Back to work now — you know, not screwing this up. Just as Nate wrote, “This is a big chance, I’ve got to make the most of it.”

On letting go of library books

For nearly a year now, the little cubby off our kitchen (also known as my “office”), has had stacks of library books all around its edges, like margins, many of which I borrowed from the UC Berkeley library. Books on attachment theory, biographies of people as disparate as Brahms, the Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg, a drop-dead phenomenal book about a doomed interracial love marriage in early 19th century India, and so on. These loaned titles have bunked with my own copies of books like Madame Bovary, an encyclopedia of Morrissey and The Smiths, and really obscure books like “A Perverse History of the Human Heart,” a pretty violent tome that includes lots of stories about people eating human hearts. For a year, these books have been my sustenance.

When I finished my manuscript a few months ago, I thought I’d be quick to return the borrowed books, but I wasn’t. Each time “overdue notice” appeared in my inbox, I renewed, and renewed, and renewed, even though my work with them was done, done, done. Part of that was anxiety over whether or not I’d have to check something in the manuscript, yet again, but once the final edits were done, I didn’t have that excuse anymore. I just couldn’t let them go. I think it’s because they so defined who I’ve been over the past year. Without Rosa Luxemburg and Brahms, at least in bound paper form, I feel naked and a little bit purposeless.

Today I finally packed them all up to return home: one bag for the books that went back to the Main library, one bag for the those to go back to the Education/Psych library, one to the Music library. It finally felt okay. And then, just as I was about to drop off the first batch, I got some news that made me cry. I can’t say what it was, but now, a few hours later, it feels fitting that I was shedding tears as I sent Brahms and Rosa and their companions from my office back home. Fitting that I was actually crying about something else.

 

On the first glimpse of my book…as a book

Just two days ago I got a sample of what the designer of my book has come up with for the interior pages. I don’t think I have ever been quicker to open a PDF, and I think I emitted a little gasp when I saw what she’d come up with: it’s gorgeous. Elegant, dignified, crisp. I’ve never met or even spoken to the book designer, but it’s as if she crawled inside my head and was able to see what I — lacking as I am in any artistic skill or visual vocabulary — wanted all along. It’s just so very pretty, and I think that is so reflective of what I’m trying to get at in The Little Book of Heartbreak: that there is beauty in loneliness and even disappointment.

Like any first-time writer (or so I expect), seeing my words — mine! – laid out in book format for the first time was, well, pretty damned magical. It made me feel real. Sure, for years I’ve made my living writing, but only in the past months have I really felt like a writer I always wanted to be: disciplined, hardworking, creative, and very, very determined. Seeing that person, that work, “made real” by design fills my lungs up, makes me stand straighter, more sure when speaking. It feels that transformative.

And then, there’s the writing. All along in this process, I’ve fussed that I simply didn’t have the time to craft the book in the way that I wanted to. I started writing in September, and I finished in March, which means I wrote a 240-page book in seven months. That was terrifying. I was working so fast I had no perspective, all I could think was, “this has got to be utter shit.” But now, seeing at least some of my writing laid out in book format, not having read it in a few weeks, I gave a sigh of relief. It’s really just fine, and there are turns of phrase that I’m even quite proud of. Most importantly, it reads like me, and the content reflects who I am: random, curious, a bit off-beat. It’s eclectic, just the way I wanted it to be. Seeing it now, I can rest assured that no other book out there wanders from ancient Greek love magic to inter-racial love in early 19th century India to Morrissey. The Little Book of Heartbreak is an oddball, just like me.