Betsy Robinson's Blog, page 3

A Remarkable Story of Altruism

We need a critical mass of the LOVE in this piece. I’m just the messenger. The guy I’m writing to came to me almost 30 years ago, and I’m passing him on to you.

The Story of an Unknown Saint

LEARNING TO THRIVE primer — Free PDF

I published this trauma-healing primer, inspired by Mary Trump’s book The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal.

In my experience a lot of traumatized people do not really understand that they’re traumatized or, if they do, that it is a physiological condition.

This is a 9,000-word primer on recognizing your own trauma, along with some resources. It is available on Kindle and BN Nook for 99 cents, but I really want to give it away. My hope is that anybody who is suffering chronic bouts of fear/fury (two sides of the same coin), anxiety, depression, or numbness will find it.

Free PDF on author’s website

3 Novels I’ve Loved in 2023

Shepherd is a fairly new book-finding site that is trying to mimic the experience of browsing in a bookstore and running into someone who waxes poetic about a book they can’t stop talking about. This book lover tells you in personal detail what they loved about the book and how the book made them feel.

Shepherd invited me to recommend my three favorite books read in 2023. Honestly, I can’t choose favorites. But I did choose three books that I love for personal reasons that also inform my own writing. And I got to mention one of my novels that I think embodies a lot about the books I recommend.

Here’s the link: Shepherd

Antisemitism Is in the Fabric of World Culture

In an editorial meeting at a spiritual magazine I used to work for, owned by a church, a senior editor proposed we do a feature on all the special knowledge about money known by Jews—have a Jewish writer do it. I gasped. So did another female Jewish editor. She was kinder than I was in her explanation of why this was not a good idea. I wanted to kill the guy. He was dumbfounded by “our” problem with his idea, but finally he gave it up.

Antisemitism is in the fabric of world history. It lurks in places you’d never expect it. The stereotypes, the belief that all of “one people” are one way—although the people who think this would laugh if you put them in such a category: all white people, all Christians, all women/men/children, etc.

People’s stereotypes and extreme ignorance of this history of antisemitism, and therefore the experiences of Jews—religious Jews and people like me with no religious or cultural upbringing, but whose faces tell their heritage—remains astounding to me. When you assume that people are monsters for wanting to defend themselves, when you blame people whose children were butchered in front of them, whose families were abducted, you are being unknowingly directed by antisemitism.

I keep thinking about my first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove,. When I wrote it in the 1980s, I had no idea it would age and therefore morph as I have. First, it was a novel about war, then trauma, then seeing all the beautiful colors in the world, and in this particular moment, about the experience of being a person bombarded by other people’s misconceptions of them.

My mother would be 102 today. I just read a letter she wrote to her brother in 1942 where she waxes poetic about a man she wanted to marry (not my father). “Don’t let his last name fool you—” she writes, “he’s one of us.” Code that Jews know well, whether you grew up in the religion or not.

New Essay on Next Avenue

I'm so pleased to have a new essay on Next Avenue. "Finding My Mother's 'Talk' in Her Handwriting."

Editor Julie Pfitzinger did a stunning job with the layout. Excerpt:

People say too many words. The talking heads on the news shows I'm addicted to, turning each event into "breaking bombshells!" Everybody on social media. Me.

That's the worst. The spasms to myself about what I did wrong, whatever is my frustration du jour, my judgments about what everybody else is doing — like talking too much. Too much talking is why I write. To get it succinct.

Read more at the linked title.

2 New Hilarious Novels

I wish you could embed videos. Alas, you'll have to click the link to see my video review of these two books:
2 New Hilarious Books

Enjoy!

Review & Complaint: Leg by Greg Marshall

Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew from It (Abrams, June 2023) by Greg Marshall

What an explosively entertaining memoir! Raucous, ribald, and really well written. I’ve been reading a lot of history full of pain and statistics, so Greg Marshall’s memoir was a welcome and uplifting relief.

One complaint: the cover art of a perfectly proportioned naked man bugged the hell out of me. It was chosen by Lithub for a list of best covers for June 2023, but I would love to hear from others who have actually read the book — a book whose title is about a badly distorted leg and a lifetime of experiences that are affected by that.

(By the way, I felt the same ire about the original hardback cover of Susan Jane Gilman’s equally hilarious novel The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street — a pair of elegant ankles — when a major character feature is the protagonist’s damaged leg/ankle. This cover was changed (because of the outcry?) on the paperback and the hardcover is no longer listed on Hachette’s website.)

Leg’s cover design, as noted by Lithub, is striking, but imagine how much more striking it would be if it accurately portrayed what’s inside this fabulous memoir about having Greg’s leg and body’s condition willfully kept from him, being gay, and being part of a family that made all that, as well as cancer, dying, and ALS hilarious!

Not only is the perfectly proportioned man given in front view, but he’s on the back cover in rearview, and as if to put a button on the lie, there is a gorgeous well-muscled leg on the spine.

I protest this design and, having worked as a managing editor of a magazine, can imagine the endless meetings discussing it: “We can’t show a real crippled body and leg — people won’t buy the book; they’ll be turned off or shocked. Focus groups have shown people may say they are accepting of differently abled people, but when it comes to spending money, after seeing an image of one . . . !”

Have the balls (yes, big balls also make several appearances) to match the cover to the daring, irreverent, explicit interior. Trust the reading public to be intrigued and want to read it even more. (If somebody is turned off by an accurate cover, they would probably not be a happy audience for this fabulously original work.) Because I liked this book so much, every time I picked it up, those pictures felt like an insult, and I can only imagine how a person with a disability would feel.

Images matter. If we don’t see it/them/ourselves in artistic representations, it is foreign — even to the people who live with being “different.”

Originally published at Notes from a Crusty Seeker

New Essay on Salvation South (the New Yorker of the South)

I love editor Chuck Reece’s title and dek (line that follows a title) for my essay on Salvation South. I hope you enjoy it.

Take Off Your Shoes and Be Quiet

A meditation retreat shouldn't make you angry, right? But if it does, maybe you should simply wait, just a little longer.

Read it free here: Salvation South

(In my opinion, the writing and editing of Salvation South, at the hands of editor Chuck Reece, are in a league with the New Yorker. Take a look at some of the other articles as well.)

Thank You, Maggie O'Farrell and Michelle Obama

I'm thrilled that my essay "Walking Alone--Dangerous or Heroic?" is published in the spring issue of Canadian magazine Prairie Fire.

There were two inspirations:

In her wonderful memoir Becoming Michelle Obama wrote that if you didn’t see your own story in the cultural narrative, tell it. I’ve never seen my story in the cultural narrative. This is it.

The structure of this essay is stolen from the brilliant Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am . I took her bits and reduced them further to essay size.

Thank you, Prairie Fire!!! Thank you, friends, for reading this if you feel so inspired. It's not online, but you can buy it here: https://www.prairiefire.ca/current-is...

The Truth about Edna Robinson and The Trouble with the Truth—on the 33rd Anniversary of Her Leaving Her Body

It was February 2013. I'd been freelance book editing since losing my magazine job—on a day christened "Bloody Wednesday" in NY publishing—just before Christmas in 2008. Freelancing is a feast or famine deal, and I'd had close to a month of famine when a voice in my head whispered, "It's time. Pull Mom's manuscript out of the closet."


In 1957, when I was six, my mother, Edna Robinson, had written a short story called "The Trouble with the Truth." After it was published in the 1959 edition of the New World Writing book series, selected as one of the "most exciting and original" stories of its time by editors who had previously introduced the work of Samuel Beckett and Jack Kerouac, Edna's intensity became impenetrable. I remember watching her burrowed in her study typing. Why was she so mad, I wondered.

She wasn't mad. As a writer, I now understand the intensity. She was working her story into a novel of the same title. And when that novel was optioned by Harper & Row . . . and then dropped simply because it was about a single father with two peculiar children in the 1920s and '30s and To Kill a Mockingbird had occupied that territory, I believe something in my mother died.

When I first read The Trouble with the Truth in the 1970s, I loved it. The writing was gorgeous but I thought it needed some work. I wanted to talk about it, but Edna wouldn't discuss it. However, now it was 2013, Edna was dead, she'd left her manuscripts to me, and I was an unemployed book editor.

I pulled the crushed brown box out of the bowels of my closet and I'd barely begun to read the still-gorgeous prose on the old typewritten pages, when I realized this was a complete waste of energy. I was going to work on it, so why not read as I typed? And as soon as I began to do that, I realized there was a more efficient way: read as I edited and typed. And as soon as I began to see the timeline and fact glitches and all the undeveloped emotional underpinnings of the story, I decided to read as I doctored, typed, and yelled at Edna.

And I swear I heard her laughing. This was our dynamic when we were screenwriting partners: I'd yell, she'd laugh, I'd fix the mess, she'd write gorgeous lyrical circles around my straight-forward prose stage directions, and I'd say, "Thank you."

As an editor, one virtually views a work from inside the author's head. So as I read the 1957–59 manuscript, I, who was now old enough to be my mother's mother at the time, was living through her 36–38-year-old mind. But there was way more.

As a book editor/doctor, I was completely involved in the mechanics of correcting the problems, but I was also my mother's daughter, experiencing a mind-blowing expansion of understanding and compassion. Although the book is fiction, there are autobiographical aspects. And it was through the undeveloped parts that I got to know my mother more intimately than I believed possible. Through Edna's often unacknowledged subtext and all the unresolved areas, through aspects that were seeded but ungerminated, I got to know what she was afraid to acknowledge to herself: shame, jealousy, and a most complicated embarrassment about the fact that she had faith. I fixed, I doctored, and, I like to believe, healed. And I felt good.

But I also was afraid. What if Edna was displeased? Yes, she's dead, but I've had many experiences of her presence; was it all right to change her words, reveal emotions that I believed she'd chosen to ignore—and who was I to make such a judgment? Of all my revisions, the most troubling to me was a significant change to the ending. Edna's conclusion about the finality of death seemed to contradict the profound truths that preceded it as well as the afterthoughts that followed; but would she approve of the revised conclusion: that death is not necessarily the end?

It wasn't until months after finishing the project that I realized that Edna not only condoned the change but had rewritten the ending with her own actions: Shortly after her death, a clear glass marble (we each carried one in our change purses to signify the other) dropped out of nowhere—it wasn't there and then it was—turning my life upside down and decimating any embarrassment I might have held from my agnostic/atheist upbringing about believing there is more existence than we can see or comprehend.

I'm glad that my editor's head prevailed. The book is multi-leveled, fully alive, and best of all, published. I trust Edna Robinson is enjoying it.

* * *
The Trouble with the Truth was published by Simon & Schuster/Atria/Infinite Words in February 2015. You can read the complete story of the appearance of the marble and see a photo of Betsy and Edna Robinson at my website.

The Trouble with the Truth