George Hodgman's Blog, page 9
March 18, 2015
I just received word that Bettyville is #9 on the New York Times Bestseller list...
I just received word that Bettyville is #9 on the New York Times Bestseller list which will appear a week from Sunday. This is a total thrill and unexpected. I wanted to post this here because I truly owe it to all of you. YOU MADE THIS BOOK FOR ME. You encouraged me from the start, you responded to the material, shared with friends, and then, my gosh, you set out to sell the book and you did. I am incredibly grateful to you. You have given me one of the nicest days of my life. I bow to you and your generosity. I am especially grateful to the people of Paris and Madison, Missouri. I may have pushed you out of your comfort zone on this one, but you gave me your love and support. There's no place like home.
Now we have to stay on the list and I have to find a way to share this with my mother without her killing me. Months ago, when I told her about the book, she said very little beyond, "You're going to have to pay taxes on that money." Now we both may have gotten more than we bargained for. Thank you all again so much.
Now we have to stay on the list and I have to find a way to share this with my mother without her killing me. Months ago, when I told her about the book, she said very little beyond, "You're going to have to pay taxes on that money." Now we both may have gotten more than we bargained for. Thank you all again so much.
March 17, 2015
Hey L.A. Please come to Book Soup Wednesday night.
Hey L.A. Please come to Book Soup Wednesday night.
March 16, 2015
Comin' home soon.
Comin' home soon.
I'm in the Bay Area for two days--tonight at Book Passage in Corte Madera, then...
I'm in the Bay Area for two days--tonight at Book Passage in Corte Madera, then tomorrow night in San Francisco. If you're around, please come out, tell friends, share this with Californians. I'd love to meet you and thanks very much.
March 15, 2015
This is something I wrote about Bettyville for Amazon after the book's selection...
This is something I wrote about Bettyville for Amazon after the book's selection as the March Spotlight title. It makes some points I have wanted to get out there. Thank you.
A Place to Hold Your Life: George Hodgman on Memoirs and "Bettyville"
Our spotlight pick for Best of the Month this month is George Hodgman's humorous and affecting Bettyvillememoir, Bettyville, which documents his unintended, and indeterminate tenure as a caregiver to his aging mother. It also, as Hodgman explains here, serves as a time capsule of sorts, containing the memories he holds most dear.
I never thought I would write a memoir, never considered myself up to the task of self-revelation. It never seemed to me that my struggles in the world were worth airing. I’m still not sure they are. Bettyville came out of a different kind of need altogether. Not really the need to speak. I wanted a place to save everything I have loved most of all.
As I got older, as my life was changing, I found that much from the past was slipping away, things I was simply unprepared to lose: pictures from my childhood (the once green streets of our little country town), scenes carried in my mind that were fading (my mother as a secretary in St. Louis waiting at a streetcar stop; my father and I on a misguided fishing trip; my nearly blind grandmother driving me home through falling snow in the middle of the night during an emergency).
I realized I no longer remembered all the lines of funny conversations that occurred in my family. Who else would ever recall my great uncle’s typewritten record of his visits to the bathroom? (June 24th, noontime: complete evacuation). A summer drought threatened the survival of my grandmother’s fifty-year old pink roses that had long bloomed in our yard. Precious objects, including a set of tiny figures—two Chinese children purchased by my father for my mother on a business trip to Chicago—showed cracks. My mother’s life was dwindling down to days. Memoir, I have discovered, is more than the refuge of the narcissist or victim. It is a magic box where you can store all the beloved things that are so difficult to part with. It is a place to hold your life, to save what might otherwise be lost.
My mother has dementia and lymphoma. In 2011, I came home—from New York City to Paris, Missouri—to help her and found that this deeply stubborn and highly independent woman, always on the move, had lost her driver’s license. My recollecting, the flood of memories that began the book, started when I began to recall how fast she once drove, speeding down the highway to take me to school in the mid-sixties. We always listened to the radio, to a DJ named Johnny Rabbit on KXOK St. Louis. For all these decades I have heard the words to the songs we sang along with as she hit the gas. I felt so sophisticated and grown-up when I learned the lines by heart.
But it was not just the lyrics and our voices I thought of when those songs began to play again in my mind. It was the sunny days of American innocence, something sweet that has been lost, the world of my parents and their friends who had built all the little houses in all the little towns after the second World War, the generation who built their businesses bit by bit, worked at Rotary benefits and chicken barbecues, gave money to church, cared about the upkeep of their yards and gardens and streets. They are gone now. The towns where I grew up are crumbling. My world is so much different than my parents’. My choices would never have fit the contours of their conventions, but I can appreciate what Bettyville was. My book is, for me, more than a record of the years when I struggled to help my mother maintain her health and dignity. It is all the things I have cared about in this world and my feelings about my parents’ time and all that I miss about the days when I grew up in their old America where a little boy and his mother sped across the plains and my father stood at the mirror in the bathroom, singing Nat King Cole.
I am so grateful to have been given a way to preserve it all.
A Place to Hold Your Life: George Hodgman on Memoirs and "Bettyville"
Our spotlight pick for Best of the Month this month is George Hodgman's humorous and affecting Bettyvillememoir, Bettyville, which documents his unintended, and indeterminate tenure as a caregiver to his aging mother. It also, as Hodgman explains here, serves as a time capsule of sorts, containing the memories he holds most dear.
I never thought I would write a memoir, never considered myself up to the task of self-revelation. It never seemed to me that my struggles in the world were worth airing. I’m still not sure they are. Bettyville came out of a different kind of need altogether. Not really the need to speak. I wanted a place to save everything I have loved most of all.
As I got older, as my life was changing, I found that much from the past was slipping away, things I was simply unprepared to lose: pictures from my childhood (the once green streets of our little country town), scenes carried in my mind that were fading (my mother as a secretary in St. Louis waiting at a streetcar stop; my father and I on a misguided fishing trip; my nearly blind grandmother driving me home through falling snow in the middle of the night during an emergency).
I realized I no longer remembered all the lines of funny conversations that occurred in my family. Who else would ever recall my great uncle’s typewritten record of his visits to the bathroom? (June 24th, noontime: complete evacuation). A summer drought threatened the survival of my grandmother’s fifty-year old pink roses that had long bloomed in our yard. Precious objects, including a set of tiny figures—two Chinese children purchased by my father for my mother on a business trip to Chicago—showed cracks. My mother’s life was dwindling down to days. Memoir, I have discovered, is more than the refuge of the narcissist or victim. It is a magic box where you can store all the beloved things that are so difficult to part with. It is a place to hold your life, to save what might otherwise be lost.
My mother has dementia and lymphoma. In 2011, I came home—from New York City to Paris, Missouri—to help her and found that this deeply stubborn and highly independent woman, always on the move, had lost her driver’s license. My recollecting, the flood of memories that began the book, started when I began to recall how fast she once drove, speeding down the highway to take me to school in the mid-sixties. We always listened to the radio, to a DJ named Johnny Rabbit on KXOK St. Louis. For all these decades I have heard the words to the songs we sang along with as she hit the gas. I felt so sophisticated and grown-up when I learned the lines by heart.
But it was not just the lyrics and our voices I thought of when those songs began to play again in my mind. It was the sunny days of American innocence, something sweet that has been lost, the world of my parents and their friends who had built all the little houses in all the little towns after the second World War, the generation who built their businesses bit by bit, worked at Rotary benefits and chicken barbecues, gave money to church, cared about the upkeep of their yards and gardens and streets. They are gone now. The towns where I grew up are crumbling. My world is so much different than my parents’. My choices would never have fit the contours of their conventions, but I can appreciate what Bettyville was. My book is, for me, more than a record of the years when I struggled to help my mother maintain her health and dignity. It is all the things I have cared about in this world and my feelings about my parents’ time and all that I miss about the days when I grew up in their old America where a little boy and his mother sped across the plains and my father stood at the mirror in the bathroom, singing Nat King Cole.
I am so grateful to have been given a way to preserve it all.
March 14, 2015
Although I have posted about them before, I want to tell you again about two boo...
Although I have posted about them before, I want to tell you again about two books out now that I adore and that you will, too. Amy Scheibe's novel, A Fireproof Home for the Bride, is an engrossing, old-fashioned novel that is completely transporting. It features a heroine whom you will not forget. My mother has read it three times. Get it. Also: Kevin Sessums's I Left It On the Mountain, a memoir that I have on tour and which I have kept on my bedside for months. It is about his journey, the incredible struggle and learning that comprise a hard-knock life. Amy's Emmeline and Kevin's Kevin will be your friends. I am proud to know these two authors and bow to their talent and generosity.
My little dream: Bettyville becomes a movie, shoots in Paris MO, brings some mon...
My little dream: Bettyville becomes a movie, shoots in Paris MO, brings some money in and everyone gets to be an extra or something. Just my little dream.
March 12, 2015
I've been getting a lot of great responses to my Fresh Air interview. You can li...
I've been getting a lot of great responses to my Fresh Air interview. You can listen to it at the link below.
And to learn more about the book, visit http://bit.ly/1CZPkqQ
A Writer Moves To 'Bettyville' To Care For His Elderly Mom
www.npr.org
In 2011, George Hodgman visited his mother Betty for her 91st birthday in Paris, Missouri. When he saw she needed care, he left Manhattan to live with her. But she still hasn't accepted that he's gay.
And to learn more about the book, visit http://bit.ly/1CZPkqQ
A Writer Moves To 'Bettyville' To Care For His Elderly Mom
www.npr.org
In 2011, George Hodgman visited his mother Betty for her 91st birthday in Paris, Missouri. When he saw she needed care, he left Manhattan to live with her. But she still hasn't accepted that he's gay.
After hearing the NPR episode, I got some really nice emails from Conservative f...
After hearing the NPR episode, I got some really nice emails from Conservative folks who said, "We don't hate gay people." I am aware of that. I don't consider the Conservatives I know hateful. But, because they are focused on issues that concern them, I think that they miss the actions of some they support: those who express their anti-marriage stands in the most hurtful ways, those who would allow gay people to be denied service in restaurants and medical care, those who would legalize the right for gay people to be fired for being themselves honestly on the job, those who would allow damaging conversion therapies to destroy the very selves of children struggling to be themselves. The attack rhetoric used to defame and disrespect other humans trying to live their lives. Children will listen and there is an impact on kids trying to find the truth of their lives. Ben Carson, being gay is no more a choice than being heterosexual but that's not the point, really. The point is that in America it is a choice that people should be free to make. Don't support the politics of divisiveness and hated.
March 11, 2015
I am on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross today. It felt very personal and made me ne...
I am on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross today. It felt very personal and made me nervous. I had to spend a few hours at Donut Planet after.
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