I’m getting down to the deadline wire for book four, spent yesterday giving a talk to fifty awesome eighth graders at the Gray New Gloucester Middle School in Maine (thanks to the ever-fabulous Michelle Guerard, AKA Ms. G)
Go Pats!
took my daughter Grace on college tours last week, got my website updates finished, figured out my Southwest itinerary for the book tour that kicks off March 29th (Seattle, LA, Corte Madera, San Mateo, Houston, and Chester, Vermont) and generally turned into a giant ball of confusion–and therefore hope it’s okay that I reproduce here my answers for a questionnaire for the Powell’s Bookstore website that went up this week.
Part I.
Describe your latest book/project/work.
Invisible Boy is my third crime novel chronicling the adventures of Madeline Dare, a foul-mouthed cynic with a dark and twisty worldview who still secretly yearns to be Batman when she grows up.
She’s now escaped both rust-belt Syracuse and the clutches of a gothically culty boarding school in the Berkshires, finally having clawed her way back to Manhattan. This is 1990 New York, pre-Giuliani and well before the Disneyfication of Times Square: it’s brutal and it’s sketchy and everything reeks of piss, but it’s still her spiritual homeland.
Her sense of relief is, of course, short-lived. She volunteers to clear brush in an abandoned Queens cemetery and discovers the skeleton of a brutally murdered three-year-old.
When she starts fighting for justice on this little boy’s behalf, Maddie gets slammed with the revelation of a gut-wrenching secret at the heart of her own fractured childhood, upending everything she thought she knew about her family.
I was tremendously honored that Tana French described Invisible as a book in which, “the victim isn’t just one person, it’s all the world’s broken and betrayed children, and the danger can never be safely locked away.”
Part II.
1. If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
They can call it whatever they want, but if it’s going to be an authorized biography, I insist that the epigraph be what my Sarah Lawrence classmate Ptolemy Tompkins posted as his Facebook status last weekend:
“The first rule of Wacky Childhood Club is that you must always talk about Wacky Childhood Club.” –Emily Zinnemann
This is mostly because I feel that quotation affords me some blanket forgiveness for the number of times I’ve been slightly lit at cocktail parties and launched into the story of my ponytailed dad showing up at my boarding school
unannounced one year for Father’s Weekend
wearing a t-shirt that said “FRY BRAIN” in red iron-on velour letters (gift from his fellow short-order cooks at The Neptune’s Net in Malibu),
his Marine Corps blouse (tie-dyed by these opium-freak bicycle mechanics in Marin),
boot-cut Levis belted with a ten-speed tire innertube (see above, opium-freak bicycle mechanics), and a pair of Gokey double-bullhide snake-proof boots held together with duct tape
—whereupon he proceeded to do continual massive bonghits while sequestered in the guest bathroom of the headmaster’s cottage over the next forty-eight hours, in between catching up with all the other dads he hadn’t seen since his days working on the floor of the NYSE or discussing Atlas Shrugged at The Brook.
2. What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
Since the series I’m writing is hugely autobiographical and there’s about a twenty-year time lag between when what I’m describing happened and the point at which I’m actually writing about it, I’m now stuck having to portray the guy I just divorced as the kind of person I would voluntarily hang out with (an attempted mental contortion at which I always fail miserably for at least three drafts, to my editor’s increasing despair.)
This means I can’t say anything about my former spouse’s o’erweening latter-day Rush-Limbaugh fixation, his increasingly delusional claims that we should mistrust The New York Times while keeping the faith with bloggers who still seem to keep discovering briefcases full of “proof” that Saddam Hussein was meeting with Osama Bin Laden at every third falafel joint in Baghdad throughout the Nineties,
or his wearing of camo army hats around Berkeley despite the fact that when he had to register for the draft back in college he gave his name as “Siddhartha Gautama” and his address as “under the Bo tree.”
But I’m not bitter.
I do, however, henceforth plan to give the whole fictional dating thing a VERY wide berth.
3. Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
Right now I am most totally loving the following from the sublime and lapidary Joshilyn Jackson’s forthcoming Backseat Saints:
Rose was the one who hooked Dana Ostrikes’s copy of Forever and took it to the Baskin-Robbins. With a smooth sleight of hand, she deposited it in Esther Jenkins’s purse. Esther was head dog in the small pack of homeschooled Pentecostal Holiness girls that marched through Fruiton’s tiny mall in formation, wearing a uniform of white Keds and long denim jumpers. The ends of their hair were ratty and fine. It was their baby hair, never once cut. They were a wedge of ignorance and virtue that pushed through the Fruiton Baptist kids in a viceless unit, except that every single one of them was addicted to orange-flavored baby aspirin. The weight of so much uncut hair gave them all near-constant headaches…. They probably had no more than an inkling about what went where before that book, but lucky for them, Dana had dogeared the sex parts.
At first glance it seems so effortless, but she’s made this entire rich world—complete and poignant, oddly but achingly familiar—unfold within what’s basically an aside. You never see any of these girls again (except for Rose), but so much of what the book is about resonates through that passage in this Joseph-Cornell-oblique kind of way. Right down to Rose’s hometown being almost “fruition,” but not.
The woman is a goddamn genius.
4. What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
My preferred shoes are an appallingly expensive pair of old-school men’s black Gucci loafers, purchased with a meaty swath of my first-ever royalty check. They’re social Kevlar/Kryptonite: I can wear them with my most blatantly ratty Goodwill-crap clothing and still strike a resounding chord of fear in even the most pompous Midtown maître d’,
which gladdens my tiny black heart.
As my alter-ego Madeline once said, “I wondered anew why some women were so desperate to wear ‘fuck-me’ shoes. I have long preferred ‘fuck-you’ shoes.”
If I’m going to pay the big bucks for footwear-subtext, I don’t want that subtext to be “OMG! I sooooo think I’m Sarah Jessica Parker!”
I want a shoe with gravitas, a shoe that says “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” in no uncertain terms.
(For more about shoes, my brilliant and witty pal Daisy James wrote a blog post about her recommendations for what I should wear on tour. She also did a killer list for Sophie Littlefield.)
5. Describe the best breakfast of your life.
I still yearn for the plate of red papaya chunks and large cup of killer-intense “kopi susu” (market-Indonesian for coffee with milk—literally “coffee with tits”) delivered free to our doorstep every morning at this funky Balinese guest house my sister Freya and I crashed in for two months in 1988. Seven bucks a night with a perpetual racket of geckos in the palm-frond eaves and a plethora of totally hot Swedish surfer dudes in batik sarongs: awesome.
Barring that, an H&H salt bagel bedizened with Barney Greengrass Nova certainly wouldn’t suck. Something wicked about the succulence of that salmon, in a “Modest Proposal” way.
6. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I spent my junior year at Trinity College Dublin because I had a bit of a Joyce fetish during the better part of my misspent youth. It took me less than a week to comprehend why he split for the Continent. On the bright side, the Guinness was excellent and cheap, I read The Basketball Diaries a bazillion times,
and I can still speak Hebrew with a County Kerry accent (useful amusement to proffer when you’re the seder’s token Episcopalian chick.)
7. Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why, or not?
Let’s just say that Mary McCarthy’s famously scathing summation of Lillian Hellman
(“Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the…”) in fact accurately describes all writers who’ve ever lived—not least Mary McCarthy.
Then again, I’m a writer and I’m writing this, which makes my assertion pretty much like that thing in the book of brainteasers from Stuckey’s you read in the station wagon’s way-back oubliette while driving across Iowa forever on summer vacation in third grade—the one where the generic cannibal chief in the hula skirt and Sioux headdress tells the pith-helmeted missionary dude that he’s allowed to make a single statement and if it’s a lie they’ll boil him to death in a big pot but if it’s the truth they’ll just shoot him with a poison dart.*
And can I just point out here that pursuing scenarios of this hypothetical ilk to their fullest ramifications can only ever end with a blinding ice-blue flash and a noxious bang before—hey presto!—there we all are swanning around on the bridge of the Enterprise in that dopy alternate universe where Spock has a beard. Again.
I mean, maybe if you want to know whether or not writers are liars—accomplished or otherwise—you should ask a former Lehman Brothers executive or a closeted Republican senator with “a wide stance”
or, God help you, a good tax lawyer. Anyone else, instead of a writer. Especially a writer on deadline.
Because we poets and prose-hounds lie like rugs. We lie like Astroturf and wall-to-wall carpeting. We lie like faux-hardwood laminate flooring from IKEA, for chrissakes. In our sleep.
Or do we?
Oh, the mendacity!
* The missionary said, “I will die by being boiled to death in a big pot” so they couldn’t actually kill him, since if that’s a true statement they had to take him out with a poisoned dart, which obviously makes what he said a total lie once they did…. And, yes, I only know that because I totally peeked at the answers printed upside down in the back of the book. I also suck at algebra.
Part III:
Five Books That Best Explain What it Was Like Being a Little Kid at the Heart of the Counter-Culture in Late-Sixties California:
1. Living On Earth, by Alicia Bay Laurel
The commune handbook of choice, with tips on everything from why it’s important to use LOTS of incense when you’re cremating friends at home to optimal methods of organic delousing and surefire ways to craft weather-proof fashions out of second-hand army blankets and old tires. Bonus: a really good recipe for “Digger Bread.”
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Nothing captures the mid-Nixonian zeitgeist like Thompson’s “wave speech” at the end of chapter eight, which reads in part:
[…]You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
3. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
Purportedly the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl who died of a drug overdose in the late Sixties, Go Ask Alice was my very favorite childhood read. I first raced through it when I was eight years old, and I’ve reread it an average of once a year since.
When I was a kid, the cool grownups all got stoned, only narcs wore ties, and Republicans were the people who drove down the freeway in their Cadillacs throwing just-emptied bourbon bottles out the window while they told jokes about poor people.
Alice totally got all of that, especially after she ran away to Haight-Ashbury.
Still today, I think of her as the big sister I never had—even though she was probably the pastiche of some snarky Williams guy working at Prentice-Hall, patched together from a few issues of Seventeen and some chick he sat next to at a Jefferson Airplane concert.
I don’t care. Alice is family.
4. A Child’s Garden of Grass, by Jack S. Margolis and Richard Clorfene
From the original jacket copy:
“When you finish this book you will know all there is to know about the use of the weed from first joint to final effect.”
Includes two recipes for “Grass Tea”: the kind that makes you throw up, and the kind that doesn’t.
5. Be Here Now, by Ram Dass
“That’s it, then you’ll know, that’s the whole trip man, and you gotta get in there, in that state of knowing man, to be really free, but you cant think about it, because then you wont know.”
Right on.
And here’s a bonus thingie… I remember being in the audience for this (my first and last time at Esalen–the whole hippie thing cured me young of any interest in public nudity):
Okay, guys… your assignment for today is to pick one of those seven questions above and throw me an answer, okay?
Back to hanging out with the arson investigator in Boulder in 1995 (fictionally). Please wish me luck!
What a fun post, Miss Cornelia!
I’m of course going to answer the question about shoes (my retirement home may be a box at the corner of Powell and Market, but I’ll be well dressed, dammit 😉 My current favorite pair of shoes has gray uppers and lime green lucite heels. It’s the lucite that makes them special, of course – if they had little fish swimming around in them, it would be even better……
Gray uppers and green lucite heels? SO COOL!!!! They sound very Forties Ferragamo.
Great collection of questions and thoughts, my dear.
A favorite passage from another writers’ work? How about this one from E.L. Doctorow’s new book, Homer and Langley.
"We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours."
Somehow, Louise, that reminds me of the Woody Allen joke that’s in Annie Hall, I think–about the guy who goes to his shrink and complains that his uncle thinks he’s a chicken. The shrink says "have you told him he’s not?" and the guy says "We would, but we need the eggs."
I’m pretty sure I have dated some fictional characters; unfortunately, they’re all out of Cheever and Updike or Irving, not a novel with a cover like the one you posted, Cornelia, and not out of a Lee Child or Robert Crais book. Not that dating an action hero/anti-hero would be a good thing–you’re far too likely to end up as collateral damage so the hero can move on to a new relationship in the next book. The guys I dated (back in my single years) were probably voted "most likely to own ten suits" in their high school yearbooks, not "most likely to blow things up while saving the world from bio weapons." Although there was a fighter pilot or two when I was in the Air Force . . .
Ah, Laura… the thing I love about that cover art I posted (which I just noticed) is that the hero’s and heroine’s hair are windblown in the OPPOSITE directions. That’s pretty snappy, IMHO.
oh, cornelia. I just….i just love you, that’s all.
All the luck in the world, darlin
xo
Cornelia, your ex sounds like a twin to my first husband. My condolences, but congratulations for getting shet of him.
Favorite breakfasts:
Chocolate croissants and espresso in Paris, every morning I could manage it. There were other bits to each day’s repast, but the core never changed. Sigh.
Second favorite: Typical English breakfast, cooked for me by a dear friend who invited her "American friend" to stay with her in northeastern England. Eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, sausages, bacon, and juice. I could barely move afterwards.
Sophie, I ADORE YOU. And can’t wait to see you!!!
And Karen, I love the sound of both of your breakfasts, if not your first husband. Wasn’t it Gloria Steinem who said, "George Bush reminds every woman of her first husband"?
Snort.
I am totally loving the phrase "getting shet of" right now. *Snort* indeed.
Writing about ex husband(s). Easier when you’re planning to kill them (in the book, of course.) Ah how lovely to think of ways they could die a thousand deaths. However, when one has children together…
Really like your knew web page.
Judy, my dollink, I so very much owe you an email, and I hope I will get to see you in Cali? Hugest hugs to you….
Book tour?
Details, woman — DETAILS.
Brett, for you:
HOUSTON
April 15th, 7 p.m.
Murder by the Book
2342 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77005-1512
(713) 524-8597
So get your taxes done EARLY, okay?
I don’t know if writers are better liars than other people. Just more interesting ones.
Great post!
In honor of the 50th anniversary of "To Kill a Mockingbird," I’m reading it yet again and chuckling at nuggets from the musings of Scout like "I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year" and "She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl."
Dear Murderati: Please consider coming to Cincinnati on your book tours. This area is consistently awarded a top five spot in the "most literate city" listings, and we boast lots of bookstores, plus one of the most-used library systems in the US.
The airport here (which is actually in Northern Kentucky) is sometimes (although that’s changing) pricey to fly into, but good surrounding cities are Columbus, Dayton, Louisville, Lexington, and Indianapolis, also good stops on book tours.
Just saying.
We will bring our visiting teenage grandaughters to see you at one of your signings in the LA area.
Shoes. Since my feet are left over from the age of the megafauna, I’m really happy with my Timberline loafers these days.
Ah, Karen, if only it were up to us to decide where we go on tours, unless we are paying for them ourselves which I so cannot afford. I would come to Cinncinnatti to see people AND to go to the amazing Gap outlet just over the Kentucky border.
And Tom, I would love to see you guys in LA, and your loafers, too!
Hi, Cornelia,
whenever I’m on the computer, I’m usually listening to music… ..when I like a particular song I will isten to it over and over ..especially if it speaks to what I’m writing at the time(weird, i know).
it also so seemed to the part about your dad…which throws up a helluva mental picture, btw.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6Tngwarkzw
As my alter-ego Madeline once said, “I wondered anew why some women were so desperate to wear ‘fuck-me’ shoes. I have long preferred ‘fuck-you’ shoes.” CR
I liekd this and filed it awayfor later use,.the thought , not the line itself.
I look forward to reading INVISIBLE BOY..and much luck on your tour.
take care, kit
George Thorogood, heavy guitars, bikers…just seemed to fit with your dad, for some reason , is what I meant to say.
Thank you, Kit. IRL Dad is kind of about the reggae, but the heavy guitars kind of fit too.
Well, since ““The first rule of Wacky Childhood Club is that you must always talk about Wacky Childhood Club." –Emily Zinnemann”, I have no choice. My biography would be titled, How She Became the Crazy Cat Lady or She’s not Weird, She’s Eccentric.
I shall digress into one of my most enduring childhood memories. We, my mother and I, had just moved to a new town and I was determined to be a popular little girl. (fourth grade) To that end, I had secured the MOST popular girl for a sleep-over. All my aspirations were dashed and my pariah-hood ensured when my very drunken, very naked mother staggered downstairs to the kitchen where we were sitting, the little red-head and I. Mother then plopped/flopped down in a chair and proceeded to pee.
Peppermint Patty decided she might not want to stay after all and called her mom to come get her. When Mother answered the door to her mom, she was still naked, but had clutched a bright yellow coat to cover her nakedness. Nothing could cover the smell of Scotch.
Perhaps we can take you to dinner while you are here????
As I read this post I am listening to the radio and the song as I was reading was "White Rabbit". Berkeley rules. Those five books? Like McGuffey Readers for the Bay Area.
I LOVE the shoe story. I’m a femmy fuck me heels person, but it has nothing to do with Sex in the City, I just like the balance challenge. Well, and a few other things. I have a pair of vintage high high high Chanel black patent leather heels that I can wear ANYWHERE, in any state of intoxication, and have, people are amazed that I can walk so well, but I can. Good shoes are just built. There’s nothing like them.
Can’t wait to read INVISIBLE. So exciting!!
Happy Equinox, everyone!
Ah, Mary Lynn, you have a childhood after my own childhood’s heart. And dinner always sounds great.
Alex, I am into the heel thing occasionally, but I like them to be more bitch than femme. Or at least be thigh boots. And happy happy equinox back atcha!
Geez, Mary Lynn. My own childhood memories of my drunken dad sitting around the house in his underpants doesn’t hold a candle to yours.
Honey, we are all living proof that women are like tea bags–they get stronger when left in hot water!
The first two quotes that sprang to mind are from John Irving (a favorite writer and fellow New Hampshirite)…not examples of lyric craftmanship, but more mottos to live by: "You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed," and "Keep passing the open windows."
Favorite shoes always seem to be my Teva flip flops…my reward for growing up in NH, but now living in sunny New Mexico…
Best breakfast of your life: Guava jam smeared on warm out-of-the-oven Hawaiian sweet bread along with half a papaya with a squeeze of lime and a cup of freshly ground & brewed 100% Kona. The ocean view didn’t hurt….
Close second is a mondo breakfast burrito – eggs, potatoes, cheese, thick cut bacon and New Mexican red and green chile wrapped in a fresh flour tortilla…enjoyed while wrapped in a blanket in front of the morning campfire and watching the sun rise over the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
For me, memorable meals are inextricably entwined with the setting!
and I’m waiting for Invisible Boy with increasing impatience!
Erin, you and Pari just HAVE to rub in the New Mexico peppers… damn! Really pretty decent Chinese food here in NH, but not so much on the authentico Mexican front In that true Southwest way. I can get an enchilada and a halfway decent soft taco (which is a huge leap forward from East Coast even ten years ago), but they don’t have that distinction between Tex-Mex, New-Mex, and Cali-Mex quite down.
NICE Irving quotes… I didn’t realize he was behind "keep passing the open windows."
I am big on the guava juice, here, for a little smidgen of Hawaii. Extra important in February.
Cornelia, I think I told you last year, or before that–who’s counting, that we were from the same family. Just because you spell it Read and I spell it Reed doesn’t mean we aren’t kin. <G>
Karen, drunk or drugged parents of any degree are really hard on the kids. I’m sorry you had to grow up with it, whether or not he had his undies on.
Um Cornelia . . . it’s not "Mexican" it’s "NEW Mexican" down here <g>.
Are you coming to NM for LCC? You’d better. I’ve got so much educating to do . . . especially after your NH experiences.
As a wine-drinking female tax lawyer who is really a superhero, or private dick, deep inside – my God, how I love this blog. And your wonderful multimedia posts, Cornelia, which made me go find, and love, your writing too.
I’m also SO pleased to find another women in our small but confident tribe of serious shoe wearers. I prefer what I call "lawyer shoes" – tassled loafers, but the Guccis are so much nicer. Never was much of a high heel gal….wondering if I can get away with Frye boots with my suits….
Lovely stuff, again. Toodles until next time.