Betsy Robinson

Paul wrote: "Hi Betsy,

Caught your cameo in Secaucus 7 today. Very cool. I hope you had a good time doing it.
I was surprised that the film held my interest after all these years. Some of the dialogue was awkw..."
Hi Paul, glad you enjoyed it. I had a great time doing it. A bunch of those people were my college time friends.

Hi Betsy,

Caught your cameo in Secaucus 7 today. Very cool. I hope you had a good time doing it.
I was surprised that the film held my interest after all these years. Some of the dialogue was awkward but, overall, it came across as more than just a product of its time.
I was also surprised to see an interview with John Sayles on the DVD in which he said that he didn't think that The Big Chill ripped off Secaucus. I always felt that Kasdan took the premise of Secaucus, slicked up the characters, gave them higher financial status, and ran with it.

Paul wrote: "Hi Betsy,

Thanks for the friend request. Good to know that we share a love for A Confederacy of Dunces and Percival Everett's books. Our opinions on Stoner differ, but that's ok. A number of my ot..."

Paul wrote: "Hi Betsy,

Thanks for the friend request. Good to know that we share a love for A Confederacy of Dunces and Percival Everett's books. Our opinions on Stoner differ, but that's ok. A number of my ot..."

Thanks for accepting the friend request, Paul. I grew up in Briarcliff Manor, NY, and I have friends around where you are. One of the actors in Secaucus (we share my one scene in that movie--a bar scene; I'm the girl who's not so bright) lives in New Paltz, and he has a new poetry collection out which is pretty good. I'm not a poetry reader, but I liked this little book. It has a sense of humorA Swindler's Grace. I look forward to sharing more Percival Everett with you. --Betsy

Hi Betsy,

Thanks for the friend request. Good to know that we share a love for A Confederacy of Dunces and Percival Everett's books. Our opinions on Stoner differ, but that's ok. A number of my other Goodreads friends love it, and that's part of why we're here - to share opinions.
Interesting that you grew up in the Hudson Valley. I've lived in the Hudson Valley for most of my life.
Also, I saw Return of the Secaucus 7 years ago in a theatre in New Paltz and liked it very much. I'll have to watch it again and see what my present day reaction is.
Happy reading (and writing).
Regards, Paul

Big Brother wrote: "Hi Betsy, thanks for the friend invite. Looking forward for the friend-invite. Love the dog in comment 65 below ."

We can name the dog "Loki"! Nice to make your acquaintance, Big Brother.

Hi Betsy, thanks for the friend invite. Looking forward for the friend-invite. Love the dog in comment 65 below .

Mike wrote: "Thanks for the friend invite the other day, Betsy. Looking forward to perusing your book shelves and future discussions. Happy reading in the mean time."

Same to you, Mike.

Thanks for the friend invite the other day, Betsy. Looking forward to perusing your book shelves and future discussions. Happy reading in the mean time.

James wrote: "Hey Betty,

Thanks for the friend request"

Thanks for accepting, James. --Betsy

Hey Betty,

Thanks for the friend request

I've added "Read Book" excerpts to all my books. Just discovered this nifty feature. I'm a little slow.

I took my dead mother, author of The Trouble with the Truth to BookExpo America this year, and I wrote about it: http://www.fiftyisthenewfifty.com/a-c...

If anyone is coming to BookExpo America, please visit me. I'll be manning the Editorial Freelancers Assoc. booth on 5/28 from 1 to 5. It's booth # 2732.

I watched an episode of Younger where the protagonist, who works in publishing, takes a book from the slush pile, reads it, likes it, shares a PDF with her book club, who then write about it on Goodreads! Where did the book cover come from? How come nobody asked the author -- whose name does not exist in this plot -- about permission?

Just published an essay on RewireMe.com. My Dogged Life. All about what I learned from my maltese Rosie, who used to be my mother's dog and therefore my sister, but then came to me, so she was my baby. Complicated relationship...

Just posted on Barnes & Noble's blog: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/tw...

A lovely review for my mother, Edna Robinson's novel at the Historical Novel Society: http://historicalnovelsociety.org/rev...

From The Trouble with the Truth: The beachfront was deserted and iridescent under the moon. We could hear our feet slushing through the sand and the soft splash of the water. The sand was still warm from the day’s sun, so I sat down on it and scooped great handfuls, letting it pour languorously through my fingers. Arthur stood, watching me.
15% off for first person who uses code MQ2QT5YV126YX at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-t...

The back story: http://www.tipsonlifeandlove.com/self...

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg:
I slept comfortably on two child’s single beds pushed together, covered by one blue and purple and yellow and orange butterfly quilt. I had lost most of my clothes in Mrs. Mendelson’s fire, so I stored my meager wardrobe in a small maple armoire.

From The Trouble with the Truth: Sometimes we would have enough room there for all the stuff. But most times, living room chair space was yielded for crates of Dresden china and Danish glassware and stacks of original editions supported by ornate silver candlesticks and clocks and gilt-framed nudes and landscapes and Chinese flowers.

The Trouble with the Truth: It's impossible to hold in one tiny human brain.

I wrote The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg because I needed a good laugh. I got laid off from my editing job when the recession hit, and I needed a story to channel all the emotions I felt: resentment, hurt, anger, etc. Writing this book was completely exhilarating and fun. Here's me when I'm writing.

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg:
“Yes,” said Don Pedro, looking at me from his doorway.
“How do you do?” said I. And when he didn’t answer, “I have a weight problem.”
“You are very fat,” he said, gesturing for me to come into his house.
The doorway opened into a sunny, plant-filled parlor decorated with earth-toned art that I assumed he had brought from Ecuador. This was not what I had expected.

From The Trouble with the Truth: When you were dead, you didn’t know you were dead. And then, though we didn’t say so, we both thought of our mother, who neither of us could remember, and all of a sudden we were holding hands.

Q: Zelda McFigg, I understand you are relentlessly promoting your new memoir, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg. Why on earth should people spend their hard-earned money on fiction?!

A: Dearest Idiot, To answer, I will defer to a fellow thespian, auteur, and original thinker, Mr. John Waters:

"Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. And don’t let me ever hear you say, ‘I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.’ Fiction is the truth, fool! And for goodness sake, read Zelda McFigg."

Now guess which part of that is fiction.

From The Trouble with the Truth: “Catherine, won’t you please sit down?” my father said. “It may be quite a wait.” She perched on a corner of the sofa, grasping its arm with clawed fingers. Her cheeks looked like cement. “Try to relax, Catherine,” he said more kindly.

"We are the one part of creation that knows what it's like to live in exile and that ability to turn your face toward home is one of the great human endeavors and great human stories." —David Whyte
15% discount for first person to enter code RCSFQ1VV9FLTP on http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-l...

25-yr anniversary of Edna's death—from Editor's Note to The Trouble with the Truth: The visions of my mother perched on a black iron chair with a quilted back, in the upstairs “study” of our custom-designed Ed Barnes house, are burned into my childhood memory. The flat-roofed, square-box, unheatable construction, with huge picture windows, no curtains, and a kitchen the size of a closet bore no resemblance to the traditional homes on our dead-end street.


Life changed, jobs changed, sickness came, and on March 26, 1990, my mother succumbed to leukemia and emphysema. She never got to publish this novel, or the one she was working on when she died. She left all her manuscripts to me…

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: My mother, who was a morning person, never understood my waking fear. As far back as I can remember I’ve had it: At the buzz of the alarm clock, I’d be electrocuted into consciousness, my heart in my mouth.

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: “We have caramelized onion brie en croutes, crab cakes, and lamb kibbeh on warm pita bread,” said Dean Pruitt, pointing to a setting of sterling silver platters on his sideboard. “And please help yourselves to drinks. You must be parched after the drive.” Donny, Templeton, and Peggy crowded around the sideboard filling their plates, while I held back, observing as a mentor should.

From The Trouble with the Truth: The photograph album of my memory is monotonous: First, me—skinny, stringy-haired at various ages, but always pale with fear—standing in front of some strange woman’s desk, offering a progressively dirtier, more cluttered card of transfer. Then, me—in a party dress, hostess at a birthday party—smiling emphatically into the half circle of my small guests, whose faces I had seen once before in my life. My father’s recipe for blending us quickly into each community was to throw a birthday party for Ben or me, and invite our whole class the day after we joined it. Some years Ben and I celebrated as many as four birthdays apiece.

All these comments are about the same book and character :

From The Trouble with the Truth: As he took a mouthful of the highball Hubert had just delivered, my father’s face went humorless. I invited Louise to come with me to the kitchen to get some ice cream. “Darling, do make it a smallish portion,” her mother called after us.

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: Walt Edelman was shorter than I, a gnome-like thing with over-sized bleached teeth protruding from a flaccid, ever-flapping behemoth mouth. Imagine that over-rated ingénue Julia Roberts’s mouth on a four-foot boy with an under-sized cantaloupe head, topped by spiky, over-processed brown hair and tortoise-shell eyeglasses. This is what I had to contend with every day in seventh-grade English class. Is it any wonder I lost control?

From The Trouble with the Truth: I'd endured one-and-a-half long months of invisibility and discontent when, as the temperature—and I—approached a broiling point, I came to a momentous insight: I knew what was wrong with me. I was almost fifteen, yet still had not experienced a love affair!

I have always wanted to own a bookstore. I worked in one during high school. I have transcended my bias against the amazonians and have used their tool to finally have my dream: a teeny tiny shoppe. Betsy's Books : books by authors who write funny, well, movingly, authentically, or are just plain entertaining

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: Donny was to be at his dean’s residence in Trumbull College at twelve o’clock…“If I’d have known I’d be stuck in a stinky car for five friggin hours, I wouldn’t have come,” announced Peggy as she pushed open the door. “What is this, a friggin castle? Is this where you’re going to live, Donny? Why don’t you get a place off campus so at least we can have some privacy when I visit? God, my skirt is all wrinkled. Where is the bathroom?”

From The Trouble with the Truth: When anyone asks me where I’m from, to save time, and because we lived there the longest, I say Winding Hill. We lived in a stark, square, white stone building with twenty rooms—ten huge and ten tiny—set on a plateau halfway up Winding Hill Road, like an enormous headstone.

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: Principal Appleton was also the shop teacher, and his office served for both positions … His desk was an ongoing construction that shop students added to during the first class of each new year. “Watch out for the table saw,” he warned, directing for me to take a seat.

Some really fun questions in this interview at AndiLit: What role, if any, did books, writing, and reading play in your childhood? What is the hardest writing critique you ever received? How did you respond?

From The Trouble with the Truth: “The picture had been about a very poor, beautiful maid (Loretta Young—uniforms by Adrian) who falls in love with the very rich, handsome son of her employers (Robert Taylor—referred to three times by other characters as “the scion of a wealthy industrialist”) and the difficulties (there were four of them) they have in readjusting their social inequality. The theme of the vehicle was that Robert Taylor photographed very well smiling, but that Loretta Young looked best smiling through tears.”

Zelda McFigg, star of The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, finally attracts the audience she craves!

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: “I soon learned that job opportunities for ex-temp/ex-thespian/ex-prop mistress persons were few, so, ignoring my antipathy for children, I gratefully accepted the post of part-time hall monitor in the Moose Country Middle School System.”

From The Trouble with the Truth: “I whispered that my brother and I, and a sister, had been welded together before our birth. Ben was bigger than I was since our sister and I were so weak from fighting with him to get free, that when we had broken off, we had to be stuffed back into our mother.”

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: “Posthaste and predawn I vacated my emergency shelter at the Crappy Motel (not its real name), leaving an IOU along with an extremely apologetic note, and I used my remaining funds to purchase a bus ticket to the northern regions where talk was minimal, housing much cheaper, and the main industries were snowmobiles and moose.”

From The Trouble with the Truth: “A family of males—dominating or unprotective as they may be—was no blessing to a female intent on magnetizing the attention of other males—males who would value her for who she really was.”

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: “All right, class, will you please step down from your desks and windowsills?” I implored my third period class. “Be seated please!”

These look like our TV in 1958 when Edna Robinson wrote The Trouble with the Truth. First person to use code KGKQ9V2EE1B93 on BN.com will get 15% off the book. On your mark, get set: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-t...

From The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg: After eight years of temp work to pay for my own tiny apartment and my no-longer-free acting classes with Matilda’s ex-boyfriend; after a string of successful performances as all manner of creatures and sentient inanimate objects in the ex-boyfriend’s experimental avant-garde showcase (no pay) theatre productions; after acting daily in this adventure called life, I just knew I was ready for Broadway.