Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 9

Let me call you… Mister

A friend mentioned the other day that she’d run into a novel set in the mid-19th century in which everyone addressed each other by their first names. All the time. Under every circumstance. It was driving her nuts; her interior historian kept being thrown out of the story. Wouldn’t there have been more formality? And if the author was fudging this aspect of etiquette, what else was she fudging? Or getting wrong? Or figuring just didn’t matter?

It would drive me nuts too. I’m a very forgiving...

Walk This Way

I walk–more or less–the way I drive. I stay on the right, pass slower moving people in front of me on the left, and do a lot of passing. I am not particularly patient about people who–for lack of a better term–walk while rude. I wish I were more patient–it would make me happy to be more virtuous. Buthonestly.

What constitutes walking while rude?

Walking in a group that spreads across the width of the street, forcing people coming up behind them to slow to a stop, and people coming in the opp...

Confessions of an Inadvertent Prescriptionist

So my daughter is home for the summer, bringing joy and great conversationsandtaking over my kitchen. I really enjoy both my daughters, butYounger Girl is such anemphaticpresence in the house that you really know she’s here. And we talk. Oh my God do we talk. And there are some tics in her language that drive me a little crazy.

Such as? “I’m really excited for this vegan dinner.”

The way I understand my language, the sentence above suggests that my kid is excited on behalf of the vegan dinner...

Parallax Views

There’s a lovely moment inThe Avengers(the movie, not the TV series of blessed memory) where Black Widow and Hawkeye are on Park Avenue just below Grand Central Station, fighting off hordes of scary aliens on flying Jet-Skis. They’re just about overwhelmed, but fighting gamely on, and Widow says, “This is just like Budapest all over again.” Hawkeyes quirks an eyebrow:“You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

That’s families right there.

My brother and I had different families. We grew u...

In Praise of Fanny Price

I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene inSense and Sensibilitythat turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the originalAusten is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and fun...

A Cautionary Tale or Two

When my older daughter was about three, we went to the park on a hot Spring afternoon. Usually I did not have her in a stroller, but because we were going to a particular park that was about a quarter-hour walk, and because I knew she would be totally exhausted on the trip back, I opted to put her in the little umbrella stroller (lightweight, easily folded, not one of those SUV-type strollers with trays and cupholders… in terms of parenting paraphernalia I was a minimalist). So I strapped he...

Whitehall

I ought to have mentioned this earlier, but: about a year agoI was approached (doesn’t that sound mysterious?) about becoming part of the writing team for a serialized historical story calledWhitehall, focusing on Charles II, his wife Catherine of Braganza, and his mistress, Barbara Castlemaine. Not a period I know well, and I was a little reluctant to take on something I’d never done before… and then I heard about the people who’d be on the team with me: series creator Liz Duffy Adams; Delia...

I Remember It as Clear as Day

Last time I was here, I talked about my earliest memory. I have long considered (because I’m a writer and my brain works that way) that it has some metaphorical connection to the person I became. And because it’s my life and my metaphor, I can say that. Years from now, when my life is being taught as a cautionary tale on millennial writers (as if), an educator can tell their version of what my life was, and why my mother going out to get lemons and leaving her 2 year old at home had nothing t...

My Mother Went Out for Lemons

What is your earliest memory?

Mine is from when I was somewhere between two and three years old. I’ve heard that it’s unusual to remember anything that early. So I’m unusual: when my mother was still alive I asked her if the following thing ever happened and (subject to the Rashomon effect of her recollection being different from mine) I can say that it did.

As a small child my family lived in the top two floors (or more properly, the top floor and an attic) of a brownstone on 11th Street in...

Be Like Joe

Joe and Julie

So there I was on Saturday at FogCon, hanging out with people (including BVC’s Kit Kerr, Nancy Jane Moore, and Laura Anne Gilman) and I got a call from my older daughter. A mother knows her child, and even at the age of almost-26, there’s a note Julie gets in her voice when Something Is Wrong. “Hi, Mom.” It’s hard to explain the tone: lower pitched, slower than usual, maybe a smidge of rue.

“Whassup?” I ask. I’m in the hallway, people are talking loudly, and, oh, yeah, the...