Story, Draft

The Story--

First, A note about the story: 

11/11

To Whom It May Concern,

The following is a short story or a novel exploration; it is a very, very rough draft (obviously)...  Right now, what I have is this:  some characters and their house.  What is on the following pages is what has spilled out of my head thus far.  What I need to do next is this:  I need to have something happen.  The story is about Ella’s parents and their profound, but messed up love for each other and also for Ella.  It is about their problems and how that they do not have the strength to transcend them due to their own weaknesses and mental unsoundness.  The story is about Ella and how she triumphs despite her loss (her mother’s suicide).  And the story is also about the characters’ relationship to Delia (Ella’s half sister, her father’s first daughter) and how she (Delia) shapes the rest of the family whether she is present or absent.  This is trying to be a story about what happens when there is loss…. I keep thinking that Ella, the main, teenage character is (or at least becomes)  “strong in the broken places” like Hemingway talks about. 

And here is the actual, thus far untitled story:

“Living here all together was so sweet.  Even when we fought.

 I felt like it would never end.  I’ll always miss it.”

-Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad

“I want to go up to them and say Stop,/ 
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,/ 
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things/ 
you cannot imagine you would ever do,/
you are going to do bad things to children,/ 
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, /
you are going to want to die.”

–Sharon Olds, “I Go Back To May 1937,” The Gold Cell

            The year my mother killed herself, we still lived in the tiny and white New Englander that my parents had rented forever from Ryder, one of my father’s oldest friends from his RISD days. The house sat snugly on three acres of meadow, a knuckle of spiny apple trees out front and four stained glass windows punctuating the house's old clapboards which bathed our inside rooms and hallways with violet and emerald light for the whole entire day and for part of the evening.

          Ryder came up from Manhattan with his wife and their two small boys once a year to look at the leaves.  They spent the week with us, helping with household chores that were too big for my mother to take on alone while Dad worked as many hours as possible at the pallet factory down the street from us; they helped us with cleaning the house’s gutters and also helped repaint the deck a rich slate color.  When they had finished for the day and my father drove up our driveway from his job--where the only day off was Sundays--we’d all sit outside under the stars.  Dad and Ryder would strike up an easy melody on their just slightly out of tune guitars, teaching us kids and our moms lyrics to their goofy, boyish songs, born out of their unaffected, childlike perceptions that belonged to their art school days when life was one big welding project, there were no mouths to feed, and every other person was a like-minded hippy or hipster.   "The stars, the moon, your smile in June," we would sing and laugh, feeling like forever was a good thing, and not that life had already passed us by.  

            My father did  miss his younger days though; there was no doubt.  When the guitars were put away and it was time to drive back to the factory, the poetry he lived in often disappeared quickly.  His college friends seemed to miss the old days as well, only his friends seemed less sad than Dad and also seemed older, too.  Dad’s friends, especially Ryder,  seemed, in my child and then teen mind like this: they are wearing ties to work and sometimes even to the dinner table on certain nights while eating with  certain company; they are talking about preparing for depositions and the stock market; they seem collected in their mannerisms, their speech, and in their home décor, choosing clean lines over comfort.  My dad: he is wearing a perennial flannel and worn Levis; he drinks beer on our over stuffed couch, letting a series of Rolling Rocks clatter collectively to the floor in his absent-minded way.  He does not expect Mom to pick these up, though she will.  My dad’s friends seemed to take care of their parents; one even purchased an immaculate cobalt colored stained cape on a popular, resort town’s just for his mother. My mother stared at this friend as though star-struck when he told us the details. 

            “I cannot have her forever sitting around at our summer place, right?  Cathy’d divorce me before the summer's half over.  This way she can just come over for dinner and watch the kids.  At her place”

             Sometimes my mom had to borrow money from her father for the rent. My parents could never seem to save up enough money to put on a down payment, and Dad was too proud to borrow or just plain accept a gifted down payment on a house.  My father owned one tie for funerals and weddings. Each time the tie resurfaced from its burrow, we had to watch youtube videos to figure out how to get it looking good or even normal, like a person who was not impersonating a straight person.  I was better at this task than my dad, but my mom usually was the one who got it the most normal 

looking, but only after watching the video about six. 

          Though visually and viscerally fascinated with the choices this man had, both my parents also held a minute buzz of disdain, feeling that their belief system led them to their own life which bumped up against poverty.  They had to look down on people with money; if they could not do this, then they were failures.   I remember visiting this guy’s mom who hosted a dinner at her impressive lake house.  I remember she was so sweet to her son and even kinder to her daughter in law, which made us all squirm, as we knew how much her daughter in law loathed her.   This place was a bargain, she’d tell us.  But even as a bargain, she'd say "my goodness, the cost of this place is more than twelve regular houses off the lake.  I wish my father were alive to see me here, to see how well things are going for all of us.”  And then she’d add with wonder how usually art majors like her son were penniless.  She meant no harm to my father when she said this, but I am sure it was difficult for my father to hear nonetheless.   

        

           "What did the necktie say to the hat?" My father would laugh.  I would answer, my mouth forced into a serious line to perfect the delivery, "You go on a head;  I'll just hang around." My mother would shake her fluffy hair at us, happy that we were assuaging her anxiety at whatever event we were off to.  Mostly, funerals and weddings often forced us to not only scavenge for Dad’s tie, but also propelled us to reluctantly conflated with her rich, stuck up parents who sneered at my father’s “career” at the factory and seemed baffled about where my mother could find a hairdresser or a copy of The New York Times in the sticks.           

            Because I loved my mother and because she was an addict and then a suicide and also because I lost her so young, you probably assume I remember the dark things more intensely than our happy times: the reason for why my mother, desperate to quiet her mind, took two consecutive Ativan prescription of my father’s, washing them down with a bottle of inexpensive, red wine.   It is true:  I do see our sad times from those days.  I think of them though without much clarity, with a fuzzy, distant uncertainty: my parents’ rabid fights which left behind broken dishes in the kitchen and holes in the dry wall of their bedroom; both of their stints at rehab, when I worried the state would place me in a foster home and the vapid characters my parents would begrudgingly invite to our home, trying to make the best out of the sad situation that was their mutual, court-ordered attendance of AA; my mother’s “extra-curricular” boyfriend who dealt pot, but shot speedballs and  who lived in a lean-to made out of sticks and indoor-outdoor carpet remnants located deep in our town’s conservation land (my mother’s boyfriend:  famous for showering at the Y and then sometimes at our house while Dad ripped apart pallets, also famous for driving in zig-zagged patterns down our long, country roads); and then there was my much older, half sister whose sporadic visits left my father with a sadness so visceral to him, he would shoot up for days in his closet office, leaving his works out, a jumble atop blood spotted song lyrics.

            I can still see him as though I am peering into a dollhouse, the wall only figurative for the house’s spectator.  I am looking at this father doll; he is so close, his mouth big and handsome covering strong, but crooked rocker teeth.  His hair is thick, matted like a dog in the woods.  Looking at him in this way: his fragility scares me; I could extend my arm, reach into the house, pick him up, look into his eyes, and then maybe I could save him, if only I didn’t crush him first.  Seeing him this way, inside of this house without him noticing, I see a situation: my sister is gone after a particularly draining visit and he is like a man you’d see in a Vietnam vet documentary, a picture of shell shock: those boyish, scared eyes, eyelashes that both girls and women alike coveted, boyish strength undercut completely by uncotrolled disaster; everything in him and around him broken and beautiful at the same time.  My father: nodding out in the kitchen, too scared to be alone, but too messed up for actual conversation, the shapes of his words overwhelmed by low sounding vowels that sound like moans.  My father, with his usually perfect voice singing his perfectly boyish songs reminded me of an old man with throat cancer on days like these. 

            My half sister, Delia, had schizophrenia and lived with her rich, maternal grandmother in another state, hours away from us.  The distance did keep her at a safe distance; however, it added stress onto the already stressful visits, and it added to my father’s guilt which was already about to break him where she was concerned.  She would come to our house once every two months for a long weekend.  She would leave her suitcase in the kitchen and it would stay there until me or my mother bought it into my room, where we had a twin bed set up for her.  For the whole visit, with the exception of meals we ate in the kitchen, she would sit in front of the television while my mother watched the clock and talked in a voice that sounded different from what I knew.  Misery and confusion rolled off of Delia while I sat next to her; I was half enthralled, half disgusted.  And I always grappled with the confusion I had which was this:  was she hideous or beautiful or neither, just regular?  I always wondered how the same blood was racing through our veins.  I was like my mother in almost every way: light with light blue eyes.  You could nearly see though my hair, ashy blond.  We are both waifs, my father could pick us up at the same time which he does on the weekends when he is not too tired from ripping up pallets in the factory.  He never did this on Delia’s weekends though.  In fact, in the recesses of my mind, it is hard to place Delia and my father in the same room.  I can see her sitting next to me, only speaking to complain about our house or my mother’s food, or our water pressure.  I can see her dark, solid limbs and longs hair that was pretty, but too thick somehow, looking like it would turn into dreadlocks if she had skipped brushing for more than half a day.   I can see her near my mother, looking so dark and solid in comparison.  Near my mother she is always scowling; and there is my mother with her pseudo cheer, exhausted just underneath the surface, almost grey, counting the moments to the visit’s end. 

            Delia was built in a solid way, but was also she was tiny in terms of height like her mother I’d seen once at a rest area, where we’d met to pick her up.  This gave her a matronly look, which she had had even as a young teenager.  I think it was weirder for my mother to have her in the house when she would see the two of us looking so very differently.  My mom would look with her head tilted as though puzzling out a crossword; Delia was oblivious, zoned out on reruns.  It was as though my mother were a desperate woman, looking for a clue, for anything, a sort of figurative glue that would turn the situation into a solution; she wanted to welcome Delia into our lives, for Delia had been in their lives before I had, but mother could not love Delia.  And not loving Delia made the guilt of my father’s inability to care about Delia in the way he cared about me unbearable. 

            It was when my father got laid off from his factory job that my mother said to him one night in their room, the walls so thin it felt like they were at the foot of my bed, “Sam I cannot have her here anymore.  You need to be here for Ella.  Delia's got her grandmother.  What does Ella have?  Ella needs you here."

            And it was true, I did need my father in a way that Delia did not.  She had a safety net, while I had my parents.  I was seven years younger than my sister who only seemed like a child, but was partly into her adulthood.  She needed our father, too; however, her need was insatiable.  In her teen years alone, she had visited more mental hospitals than my parents had visited rehab during their whole lives.  Her life, despite the fancy language lessons during high school, constant cruises, and endless shelves of fashionable, but overly girly clothes, was unpleasant.  However, her grandmother and litany of preppy cousins cushioned the space that was her tricky mind. The French lessons, her leased horse, the swimming pool felt stacked up in a neat pile next to my own life: the rented house full of broken poetry and parents who lived in a hopeless whisper. 

            When she no longer visited us, I was mostly relieved.  My mother breathed in a deeper way.  And my father, after binging on JD for a fortnight at the bar down the street, seemed lighter, too.  She was not our problem.  But somehow we could not erase her.  Like the violet and green brilliance that permeated our house, my sister was a ghost who could not be erased.  The spiny apple trees out front, my father hugging our bodies close to his for warmth, the way the three of us were like the knuckles on a one body’s hand now was flowered with just a little bit of guilt.  And I wonder now if it was this guilt that finally tipped us over the edge. 

            But when I look back, it is not her visits or even her ghost that I remember with any lucidity.  Gathering memories of Delia is a struggle, as they--along with the other, darkly sad times--that were at least in part responsible for my mother’s overly careless inability to take care of herself, are like shadows cast across a vibrant sidewalk chalked with a hopeful series of hopscotch rectangles.

             My mother could hardly take care of herself, never mind her supposedly beloved thirteen-year-old, eighth grade daughter.  But where she neglected me, I rose to take care of myself.  Her neglect made me strong where it broke me.  And what I remembered in my strength is now infinite.  Her short, but pretty, smooth fingers as she brushed her hands through my thick hair, her freckly skin polka-dotted more so on the left side, where her face and arm was exposed to the sun while she drove me to school, ballet classes I received through a kind scholarship, and art classes at the local, art center. I wish you could see her like I do now, still: my mother, smiling tiredly at my as my father impersonates the childlike, unaffected and adorable Jonathan Richman’s infamous song about being straight.  They adore his razor edge ideology, as it is the opposite from their own despite the fact they have me and want the world and the moon for my life.  Mom’s head is in her hands, her whole body bouncing happily with giggles when my father sings with mock seriousness, “Oh, I’m certainly not stoned, like hippie Johnny is.”

        I have memorized the year my mom left this planet the way my third grade self could see multiplication facts in the camera of my mind, penciled hurriedly with excitement.  For me, even as a little girl, math facts were like prayers that were not fantasy or a just an idea; they were prayers that had real answers every time.  Like the magical math, I can see my mom’s last year on earth the same way I know my own face in the bathroom mirror.  I can feel her last living twelve months in a physical way, the way I know how my own teeth feel each moment--and each moment after this one--in my very own mouth.

             I read something years after my mother died when I was pregnant with my own daughter:  When a mother gives birth, her cells are inside of you, and your cells are still inside of her. When she is carrying and loving you during her pregnancy they are in you, and you are in her.  Then, after you are in the world on your own, next to her, coloring a picture of a star, you are also still inside of her and she is inside of you, too.  Each mother holds the cells of her children after they leave her body.  These cells are like tiny tattoos of your soul on her heart. 

            My mom had a tiny Polish box filled with mementoes from her girlhood and in this box she also saved my baby teeth.  My cells stayed inside my mother, until that year she took her life, like the baby teeth in the Polish box.  When she left this earth, I wondered if I was literally lighter on this planet, my cells less numerous.  The etching of me she carried inside got snuffed out, unseen, unheard, and unknown except to me and my father, and maybe other people, too, if they ever thought of us. 

            I can still see her Polish box, round and orange with tiny black, brown, and green detailing sitting on the top of her dresser though it now sits on my own holding not only my baby teeth, but now my daughter’s as well.   

            I can see this box vividly, as I can see other details in our little, rented house of my childhood:  All of my art work is hung almost professionally, though my parents have little money for small things, even like frames.  It is displayed mostly in the hallway where our stairs led down to our kitchen; and it is overlapping sometimes just slightly in frames resting on the tops of the bookshelves in my father’s office and in the hallway that met the stairs.   Every time I climbed the stairs to do my homework or go to bed, I could see my progression as an artist.

             I worked mostly with charcoal and Cray pas, but sometimes I experimented with other mediums.  I adored the idea of hand colored photographs.  There was I did collaging, too.  I would paint oceans of grey and green and blue hues and then tear these pages, sometimes for hours past the middle of the middle of the night, and then glued these oceans into shapes that were precise little houses.  These houses seemed better than our own, sturdier, less poetic, but sharper architecturally.   The collages were from middle school, as were the hand color photographs.  The charcoal started when I was maybe eight.  I remember the art teacher showing them to us, and she worried more about the mess than the product.  Recanting the teacher’s anxiety to my mother, she laughed sadly, remarking, “That’s public school for you…” 

            My dad’s factory job and my mom’s inability to find work as a nurse because of her drug felony could not place me into the private, alternative private school they dreamed of in their minds.  As a result, whatever grades I brought home were perfect.  If I failed English because I wrote poetry refusing to apply the assigned meter, my parents believed I was a subversive genius.  If I excelled, as I always did in my art classes and seemed to do in math as well, adoring the rules of algebra, which felt as perennial and true as tiger lilies, my parents knew that my genius was pulling up the idiot IQ of the  “other” more “common” kids whose brains certainly would have rotted without my presence.

            I remember the morning best, the whole house still and hushed with only our sleepy murmurs to each other like far off crickets in a damp, just lit meadow.  I would stagger down the painted white stairs that glistened under my artwork and the light of our stained glass windows.  Barefoot, I would walk across our sticky kitchen.  My mother was a late riser on her own, but my father and I were morning people, so she always pulled her body out of bed.  She had trouble talking so early, but she always made coffee for dad, tea for me.  As I sat in my chair, Dad would greet me like we were pals from another lifetime, recently reunited, “Good morning Cowgirl in the Sand!” My father’s green eyes held mine, and he smiled. 

            I felt sad for my father almost every morning back then, for he was a welder by trade and was an artist, too, our yard punctuated by his innovative butterfly and bird sculptures made from metal scraps found by the factory’s trash bins.  I hated that he went somewhere he hated everyday, and I hated that there seemed very little I could do about it.  He also was in a band, the band sometimes changed, as his buddies, like my dad, were always in and out of rehab, but there was hardly ever a time when people weren’t coming over to jam with my dad.  He was usually the singer, but occasionally played bass, too. 

            My father was not a nine to fiver by nature; he was a definite free spirit artist confined by the family life burden we forced on him without meaning to.  We would have encouraged him to leave if we had thought he would have listened, but he loved us more than life itself, so it would not have mattered what we said.  We lived so far in the woods it was impossible to find high paying union work.  “And in this economy, really, “ my dad explained to me once, “even if we moved closer to the city, in some sketchy as shit triple-decker, it would do us zero good.  They’re constantly union busting these days.”  Watching my handsome, artist dad, a dreamer if there ever was one, stuck inside at a factory—even on Saturdays, especially on Saturdays--broke my heart each and every morning.  

Castle

I just finished Jennifer Egan's gothic literary novel, The Keep.  If I think of heaven I think of it in this way:  it is always autumn there and it is the nineties.  I look the same way that I did when I was nineteen, men's Levis sliding down my babyish hips, long blonde hair.  The difference will be that I wear smart looking eyeliner and a bra that helps.  When I am in this always autumn heaven, I am writing, and I am writing better than, but in a similar way to Ms. Egan.  All I know is that I need to show and not tell.  I need to stop with the modifiers.  I need to get to hate point, to start where the story starts, to stop with the over explanation.  and I need to fucking write.  I know what good writing looks like, but I have no idea even how to imitate it.  Sucks.

I do not want to get too deep into my description of the novel.  I loathe book reviews.  I am sitting here trying to imagine The Keep, its tower, it's windows, its edges, turrets, and all that.  And I am now remembering Berto.  I am the real 19 again and I am living with a creepy 42 year old due to scratch the fucked up itch that is my ever so fucked up daddy issue.  He makes, in terms of money,  what I make now.  Mind you, today I am not even working.  I get a teensy bit of cash for being a mom from the babbydaddy.   Berto made about 20 grand, tops, in those days as a tutor and busker on his odious instrument.  And he would exclaim, upon learning that a colleague, friend or peer made 50K or whatever that he wanted to ask them, "What, do you live in a castle?"

Berto was not the sort of boyfriend you'd bring to meet your friends, as he'd prolly already hit on them in some sort of creepy way.  He had he worst titty fetish I've elver come across, which was prolly linked to not growing up.  I seriously have never met such a breast obsessed dude.  And for those of you who know me at all, I was not the girl for Berto.  I am still so ashamed of that relationship.  What I wanted then, and still want now is an adopted father, the kind who will stop my night terrors.

Don't you dare fucking laugh, but this is my dream relationship:

In the blog I am trying to boycott, this idiotfuck, Disclosure write of Go Go Rach, and her rightfully stressed out response to the pseudo academic MA, "Therapy is needed."  I would argue to him, "Personality is needed, Douche,"  But it is not worth it.  But, this lame as fuck response popped into my head as I posted my sick as sadness picture of the teeny bopper movie and shameless admission of this blog author's daddy complex.  Um

Berto and I lived in a rural tenement; however, in my mind, its windows, the hand hewn beams, the wooden floors... All of it equaled a castle.  I still believed in "the program" back then.  Interestingly,
in some ways, it kind of worked...until it didn't.  I realized living with Berto took more out of me than I ever had imagined possible.  He was so hateful underneath what only appeared as mentally ill and partly perverted.

He had a castle sticker, a sparkling one, that he put on his throat losenger tin.  I bought him this sticker after he told me how he felt about people who made a normal amount of money.  I can see it there, in between by the clutch us in his used car that smelled like every kind of health food you could imagine, but mostly of garlic.  I can hear the tin opening.  I can see his long fingers.  I can remember what it was like to feel you had a future so brilliant you could afford to emotionally mutilate yourself with a mentally ill boyfriend.

The castle of Berto's imagination would be some sort of lefty, green-as-fuck hastily put together commune compound deals.  Think the commune on Lost.  WACO without the guns.  Maybe something that Michael Rapunzel of Western MAssachusetts would have built, with his, um, fifth thousand a year.  That commune, but nicer, more nineties.  The scared cult of daddy.  This, below, but much, much nicer, with a mote.

Here is what I imagine the castle looking like from the Keep.  I have very few fantasies of Europe.  If any, I dream of going to Sweden, alone, most certainly without the boys.  I would rent a clean room (think minimal, Raymond Carver, Hemingway...), and I would walk and write.  I would also visit middle class family's houses so I could peer into their bookshelves and admire their castle-looking chimney.

Fuck, do I love those; and I have only seen them in Swedish design blogs, like this blog where I have spent hour after hour lusting with an intensity that seems foreign to my bod:  http://dosfamily.com/all-home-tours/

I will find a castle/chimney/wood-stovey-thingy later.

As for the castle in my mind, and prolly yours, too:

I had such a terrible day today.  The rain crucified me.  I was running on empty.  I was astounded by her--Jennifer Egan's--articulation of addiction.  Though I was low and depressed all day, her articulation, her poetic ability to fucking GET IT--stayed with me all day.  It seemed to punctuate--to pierce--the lowness of the day.  Yesterday, Mr. Z's big day was good.  He was so terrific when he came home from his day.  All I could think of as I listened to his low manly voice and concentrated on the circular, unjaggedness of his Polish baby boy cheeks was the song Pink Moon.  That lullaby melody, Nick Drake's perfect, harmonized sweet voice.  My perfect boy on his first day of being older, going to the place where there are no more babies.

In the novel, The Keep--I have tried to get to this and I am in such a tangent spiral--the female protagonist is a meth addict, not an opiate addict, like me.  However, her description made perfect sense to me. During this shitty as fuck day, I hung onto certain parts of her novel:

     Egan's character is using here:


I smoked my fist pipe with Seth. I knew the stuff was bad, but I was so tired of being the cop, begging and raging at him, throwing pampers in his face when he walked in the door.  I wanted to be on the same side again.  So I smoked with Seth one afternoon when the girls were napping, and oh my God, I can only think about this for a minute of every part of me will turn into a mouth wanting more; the sexiness of it, fucking Seth like wild for the first time in months, going on even when the girls started to whimper an bang on the door.  The looking out of the window and seeing the world shake itself to life: the heavy trees, the sky.  And I was bak on top.  We were going to make it, Seth and I.  The voice in my head was back again, telling me to write stories, too may to write down or even tell from one another.  


And she is not here:


And after all the horrors, the searches and arrests, after losing Corey and those dark blank months in the hospital, after all that I was relieved just to be alive and clean and have my children back, the two that were left to me.  I moved carefully, like the world was made of glass.  I got the job at the college and finished my BA and started a master's in writing.


But even with all that, which I was grateful for and knew full well I didn't deserve, I can't exactly say I was happy.  Relieved yes.  Lucky, yes.  God yes.  All that.  But I thought happiness only came from getting high, and I was never dong that again, never, ever, even if it meant not being happy one more day in my life. 


And she falls in love and realizes that this feeling is like being high; she is happy again:

The excitement that rocks through your body when you're a kid like lust does when you're a grown up: just pure excitement--for Christmas, for grape Kool-Aid, for playing in a treehouse--I felt all week long as my teaching night got close.  I started reading again, finishing a novel every few days.  On my lunch break I'd sit outside at my picnic bench and listen to traffic, those big loops of sound, and behind it I'd hear something else, barely there, so shadowy I tried not to scare it away by paying too much attention, but I knew the voice was back.  

In my memory, the character talks about how teaching is like a high, but when I just went bak to my kindle, I do don't see it.  But I was so outta my mind with identification while reading that I was speed reading.  I am pleased and calm and confident about this:  If I were still in AA, I would be thinking I "got her disease" and I'd be thinking my fucking disease knew her disease.  I'd utter that it is "the blue that knows you, it knows where you live, and it is never going to forget" echoing the Kate Braverman story I read in high school straight outta The Best American Short Stories.  But now I realize:  She used and so did I.  I get the whole feeling of being blown away that comes from getting loaded, whether your deal is meth or opiods.  And I totally get her , as she is literary; she discusses her addiction and her writing voice as if they are nearly one n the same, which is so fascinating.  What I am writing here, and what Egan depicts through her character seems so real it is almost tactile; I feel it viscerally.  Being at a meeting, and hearing someone, even if they're literary like S.P.: it is bullshit.  It is the epitome of inauthenticity.  Interestingly, Braverman writes about this same inauthenticity in AA in her latest book of stories, Small Craft Warnings.  I love seeing her progression as a writer and as a person in this way; I was completely impressed.  I did wonder how much of my own experience I was bringing into my reading.  But this is what we do as readers.  We read autobiographically, or at least many of us do.

Reading in 2011

This is an ongoing list that I try to edit at least once a week.  I should try to date what I 've read, when I have read it.  I should also be working to keep some sort of reading journal.  I need to read like a writer and write like a reader.  This is something I told those fifth graders.  How Ralph Fletcher o me. It is raining today (Oct. 2, 2011) and I am writing, reading, and watching Mr. Z (my middle school aged son) and the old man watch the games.  They are watching, snoozing on the island coach pillows bed n the middle of the floor while I have the coach. Our cat, our adorable Miss Meow Meow is walking back and forth, trudging, on the wicker sofa, now stripped of its cushions, as they are serving to pillow, to snuggle the men.   I have to pee.  I am lazy.  I have clothes rotting with mildew at my house.  I have a borderline rapid landlord right now who I am ignoring.  I have not looked at my email in nearly a week now.  I am falling down into a silly tangent, a spiral of boringness.  Back to my list.  The world is peaceful.  Here is a singular, beautiful idea, and it is a notion that allows me to survive in this world:  

There is always something else to read.  

Here's what I've read, online books, Internet blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc. aside.  Well, this is what I can remember.  Usually, I have read twice as much.  I need to get offline and get back into the literary world, as I feel like I am wasting my life.  But maybe this is a good thing.  Perhaps reading what I want to read is better than reading at books, forcing myself through classics like I did in my twenties.  Life is way too short to read dull fucking Willa Cather, and Sarah fucking Orne Jewett for fuck sake's.   I do need to go to the library to see what I actually checked out this year.  I just have a horrible memory in this way, I truly cannot remember what I've read.  I need to become a less passive reader, as it is really all *slippping* a way..

Jennifer Weiner books of 2011:
(I cannot help myself; I recognize that she is the epitome of silly chick lit.  And--yes, yes!--I also       realize that women are not marshmallow peeps!)
Fly Away Home
Goodnight Nobody
The Came You
The Guy Not Taken (1/3 of the book, had to put it down.. Was she serious with this shit?  Wow. )
(3)


Jennifer Egan books, all of them:
The Invisible Circus
The Keep (Oct. 2011)
Emerald City
A Visit from the Goon Squad (Spring, 2011)
Look at Me (Sept. 2011)
(5)


The Two Fucking Amazing Books by Elissa Schappell:
Use Me (Oct. 2011)
Blueprints for Better Girls (Oct. 2011)
(2)


Maybe the best book I've read thus far:
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann (Spring 2011)
(1)

Alice Hoffman, whatever she wrote this year...
The Red Garden (Spring 2011)
(1)


And here are the rest:

• Sarah's Key, Tatianna (?) Idiotfuck (So fucking lame.) (Summer)
• Bossypants, Tina Fey (Tina, You're funny almost all the time, but when you're not, yuck!) (Summer)
• Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (Spring, 2011)
• Tiger, Tiger, Margaux Fragoso (Summer 2011)
• Gossip of the Starlings, Nina De Gramont
• Family History, Dani Shapiro (Winter, maybe February?)
• Freedom, Franzen (Jan. 2011)
• Her Last Death, Suasan
• Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
• Falling in Love with Natassia, Anna Monardo
• The Help, Katheryn Stockett (July 2011)
• Down and Out in Murder Mile, Tony O'Neill (Winter 2011, January, February or March))
• A Life Gone... , Wayne from the Internet (memoir-y book by rehab surviver...)
• The Bitch Posse, Martha O'Connor (10/11)
• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (10/11)
• Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins(10/11)
• Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Plan to read tomorrow!) I actually have not read this yet (10/11)
• The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt (Fall 2011) (almost all read)
• Swim Back to Me, Ann Packer (October, 2011)
• Josie and Jack, Kelly Braffet (October, 2011)

(20)

(Oct. 8, 2011: 32 total)

October 8, 2011: I am reading Catching Fire and The Sisters Brothers this weekend, but I am not sure that I will finish both.  I have to have the latter read by the end of next week... Bt I am so much more compelled to read the first, as that series is even more amazing than ppl say it is.  I am blown away that those adorable, little fifth graders were reading it!  No wonder they were whipping through all their work to get to the other said... The side of freedom, when you can read what you want!  At this point it looks as though I am reading 2.7 books a month.  My goal is four books a month.  I think my time spent online, reading blogs, short stories and the like dips into my time a great deal. Of course, if I am reading, then, this should be great, it means I am still reading, right?  Bu tI like the idea of reading full novels. And I generally read literary fiction, um, Jennifer Weiner aside (though Amazon begs to differ from me on this... I dunno, depends on how liberal I am feeling about judging literature...) O get to me goal, I need o get up to forty books by the end of this month.  This means I need to read thirteen books in the next three weeks and two days; this is twenty-three days.  Almost one book per two days.  I want to enjoy what I am reading, and I want to read less passively.  Fuck, I think I might be getting  migraine.  i wonder if it is light, chocolate, yelling at Mike, being irritated with Mr. Z my adorable, but spoiled little dude.  Fuck if I know. Maybe it is the television? 

• I am in the middle of my old undergrad professor's book about teaching writing, the one that focusses on digression and even discusses The Catcher in the Rye (Note: the old man and Mr. Z are planning on reading the latter together)

What I Abandoned:
The Gary Paulsen, Alaska Book (Whatever it was fucking called, Winterdance or some shit...)

Black and White, Dani Shapiro (I hate her writing voice and feel that if I met her, she'd own Talbots clothing and treat me like I was poor white trash.  She irritates me.  Whatever.)


What I Started and Think I May Return To:
Crazy Town: Money, Marriage, Meth
The Leftovers, Tom Perotta
Twilight of the Superheroes, D. Eisenberg
The Collected Short Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through...
Gone with the Wind
Tender is the Night

Miss Peregrine's Home for...


I also read countless short stories that are the free samples from acclaimed literary magazines, like Tin House.  Sometimes I read not so acclaimed lit mags, some of which are online only, like that silly noir shit that I do not even like, it just interests me for some reason.  This time seems wasted, as it is only a way to deaden my senses; it is not a way to actively figure the world out in any way.

Here is what is in "the pile":
Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick
The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt
That Was Then, This is Now, S.E Hinton
The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton
The Room, Emma Donahue  Abandoned.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender  Abandoned, boring...
Peyton Place and A Return to Peyton Place, Grace Metalious (check spelling)


What I am looking forward to...

• The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugines
• The New Alice Hoffman novel
• The new book of short stories (9/11) by Melanie Rae Thon--On second though, she is almost too lyrical for my current taste.

I feel like I read constantly, as in: all. the. time.  It is weird then, that I seem to be averaging less than three books monthly.  Part of this is that I watch way, way too much television.  Also, I read many , many short stories that are soon forgotten.  I need to start tracking these, too. Perhaps I should just list them by author, as I often read several by the same author and then get stuffed with tht author.  My list would look like: SHORT STORIES BY AUTHOR: Eagan, Schappell, Boggs,m whoever, yep, her him, etc. I dunno.  How do I account for the articles, too? For example, I am trying to find everything that Elissa Scappell has written, and some of her stuff is true; it is an essay or article.  This would not count.  I should track it all, right?  Again, dunno.

Here we go.  Here are the short stories found online:

• Boggs chick who teaches English at the fancy (?) private school
• Find the many, many others, like the story written by the amateur about h e TA who disappears
• The Alaskan writer, Melinda Moustakis (found in the Alaskan Quarterly and in Storyglossia)

Also, I should try to include an entry on each piece that has affected me.  For example, for the Egan novel, the Goon book, I should include the letter/email I never sent to my stepfather.  Maybe I should include the letter Mom sent me after ignoring me for weeks about how she identified with the shame memories.  However, the shame memories, what she said, that could have been from just reading the reviews.  My mother is too stupid to really read anything unless it is for her book group, filled with teachers who are the anti intellectual, or a western or some fucking thing.  I read so many more books before the Internet.  But I will say this:  I read a lot of stupid books back then, too.   Now that I get my stupid fix from the Internet, maybe the quality of book I read is better?  I dunno.  Really, who am I kidding?  I read amazing stuff in college, Bahktin, Rabelais (well, I pretended to read Rabelais, whatever. I read lit fiction now, but nothing that is too challenging.  I should challenge myself more, read more Virginia Woolf or read at least one thing by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I have never, ever read a fucking thing by him.  What does that even say about me?