Imagine traveling 7,000 miles to give yourself into the care of two people - one whom you'd known for exactly five days and one you never met?

            That's what two young girls from Ethiopia did exactly one month ago when they came to our home.

            Imagine being thrust into the midst of a Wisconsin winter -- never having seen snow.

            Imagine everyone around you, except your younger sister, speaking a language in which you know one phrase: "I'm well, thank you." And like Abba singing Dancing Queen, you have no idea what that phrase means.

            Imagine living inside a house your house would have fit into five times.

            Imagine being given medicine - and blood tests and exams - simply at the will of strangers.

            Imagine going from Ethiopian orphan to semi-spoiled brat in one week.

Imagine mastering the most key phrases in the English language that kids need to know: "I'll be there in a minute ..." "More cookies?" and "I'm NOT tired!" and "I don't want to eat that!"

            Imagine feeling safe enough to have a tantrum, for the first time in your life.

            Imagine never having seen a closet or a toaster or a laptop or a freezer or a Popsicle or an indoor pool or a piano.

            Imagine taking all that in your stride, and, just thirty days after the first time you saw its red roof, spotting the place you live from the road.

Imagine, when the driver asks if you can see the house, answering, "Not a house. My home."

            Imagine knowing two people so trustful and brave. Imagine having the privilege of knowing them for the rest of your life.

     Cars and sweaters, chocolate and cologne. Diamonds and DVD's. Flat screens and flat irons.

     The selling season, it seems, will never end.

     First came the pre-pre holiday sales. The moment the pre-holiday sales ended, the holiday sales and now the post-holiday sales began. They'll be followed by the Valentine's Day Toyota Bash, the President's Day Premiere, St. Patrick's Day Lucky Diamond Dazzler Sale, the Spring Sell-a-thon, the Memorial Day Miracle Electronics Event, the Independence-Day-Freedom-from-Interest-Til-2012 Sale, the Labor Day for Less Preview ...

     And it will start all over again. Two months before Christmas, there'll be "early bird" specials. Two days before, there'll be "last-minute" special savings.

They'll all be the equivalent of gumbo - which is served with tomato sauce in a restaurant when the last of the sausage and fish is about to go out into the bins. It gets repackaged into some alluring and makes us feel as though their trash is our treasure.

     We can't resist. We can't stop the cycle. A new bow, a new bauble. A new pitch.

     Everything's on sale, all the time. Including us.

            Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication review service will close, I learned today.

            Editor & Publisher, the venerable magazine of the publishing industry, which sponsored Kirkus, closes its doors this year too, after 125 years of watch-dogging the watchdogs. Editor & Publisher was the great-hearted, no-prisoners giant of journalism, the place where cubs such as I was a quarter century ago once drooled over dream jobs.

There were jobs then, and a hunger for them.

There was news then - beyond speculation about the serial marriages and poignant deaths and addictions of celebrities, reportage beyond reporting as fact a pundit's opinion on something as hot and controversial as the hot-air balloon dad. It was the last, good time for the work I loved. At its end (and at its zenith) under Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher questioned weapons of mass destruction and the whole cant of reportage on the war.

Then there was the other Nielsen publication that went down just the other day - Kirkus Reviews. Ironically named for the gentle and elegant Virginia Kirkus, once the head of children's publishing for Harper, Kirkus Reviews published what the service considered to be bold and impartial reviews, but which were actually nasty and mean-spirited. The reviewers had their good days and the literary writers they venerated, except for those venerated few, literary writers mostly, the reviews revered.

While I'm sorry that eighteen people lost their jobs at Kirkus Reviews, those eighteen are responsible for more collective heartbreak than Warren Beatty in his heydey. Perhaps because the reviews were unsigned, the writers, whom many of us imagined to be frustrated authors, felt permission to run the gamut from fainting by damned praise to school-marmish sanctions to outright flaming, including barbed suggestions that the author of such intestinal contents might best serve arts, letters and the commonwealth by putting down the pen forever. Maybe they were Pulitzer Prize winners earning lunch money. Maybe they really thought they were warning people against spending that fatal $24.95 that would besmirch their intellectual lives forever.

Bad reviews have never seemed entirely worth the candle. They might afford the writer that brief, intense head rush that only an expulsion of pure spite can provide. What function, really, do they serve? A critical review - one, for example, by Meg Wolitzer in the Washington Post -- that explains for readers and writers what a book might have been and where it missed, is a service. It gives the consumer a choice. A negative, sarcastic review could be construed as a warning: Don't go here! But I never believed a bad review was meant to save the consumer. It was meant to publicly scald the writer.

I know people who've gotten only great Kirkus reviews on their books, and I've received a few - about the same number as the number of second thoughts John Mayer gives a romance (please excuse the Lothario references; they're just so apt when it comes to callousness).

It's an odd day when we mourn the great heart of the dying giant of journalism, and simultaneously look around for just the right stake to drive through the heart of a nasty little gnome of an institution like Kirkus Reviews.

 

 

          

Do you have a Facebook account?

Most people have ... two. Sorry.

Do you "MySpace?" Do you "Tweet?" Do you get in your "medium" number of Tweets on Twitter each day? (It's five).

Are you LinkedIn?

Do you blog on Blogspot or do you use a Henchy platform on a 3.1 grayscale PD24 EVE interface?

Do you post your pix on Twitpix?

Do you FlipVid? Do you send your FlipVids to ALL or just to Advrogato, Bebo, Baroo, CafeChic, Daily Strength, Daily Booth, Daily Planet, Daily Buzz and WowowWow?

Do you podcast? In stu or out stu?

Is your e-mail subject grouped? Targeted? Do you have a Blaster?

Are you streaming?

Are you screaming?

The obligation to market under the guise of "friendship" or "community" is not just neither-nor (like a breakfast meeting or a working vacation), it's a time-sink, in the same way as buying a house with character is code for buying a house that will never work. It requires a big learning curve. It requires skills other than the skills you brought to the table. It requires all of us to be perky - or lewd, or world-weary or political - even when we're not.

"Social marketing" is a contradiction of terms that's going to have a backlash. Like a social-marketing Armageddon. I don't know what it will be. But I do know that, 20 years ago, my kids who are now graduating college had these little toys like Tamagotchis, digi-pets that needed to eat and nap and be let out three times a day or they'd end up with crosses over their little digi-eyes and wings on their little digi-shoulders, signifying that they'd gone to digi-heaven.

And I got so nuts that I would actually line up the Tamagotchis to tend them - until one day, I tended them with a hammer. I bought the children other things. Yo-yos. Drawing paper.

No one is going to do away with cyber tools. But up with my "social" obligations, I am right now fed. Maybe that'll change. I'll Tweet you in.

 

 

 

 

 

   

     I was on a TV show once, in connection with my first book. My first book is a book you don't know about and it can stay that way. Suffice it to say it was a memoir of infertility, which got a great deal of attention because no one knew what infertility was back then.
     One of the best parts of the publication was the book tour -- in which I was set down alone in different cities and had to find my way here and there. It was about 1986 and the media escort had not been invented yet. I had a baby son and a husband at home. That baby son is now 25; my husband died more than 15 years ago but that time was a singing time in my history. The thrill of having written something between two hard covers, with no expectations about what would happen to it, and meeting my agent, Jane Gelfman, for the first time -- these were once-in-a-lifetime thrills. Jane is still my agent, and my BFF, and remembers with a hoot her fear of what I'd wear when I told her that I would show up for the old Phil Donahue show in a "green suit." It was a raw silk blue-green square cut jacket and skirt; but I think Jane believed people from Wisconsin only wore jackets with names of bowling alleys on the back.
     The point of this is that I was on one of those TV shows with the Pointer Sisters. And from them, I learned the definition of elegance. Only one of them was really "pretty," but when they moved and spoke, they were the most graceful and seductive women in the world. Their sound was all new. Their style was vintage when vintage wasn't a brand. They were astonishing, bewitching. A great deal of grief lay ahead for them -- and for us all. But it was a singing moment.
     June Pointer, who died several years ago, cooked on that show. It was a dish she called "Peanut Butter Stew," which really was an iteration of Shrimp Creole. I've cooked it all my life, just the other night for two of my best friends.
     When June asked me if I wanted to taste it, I guess I hesitated (probably out of fear of spilling it). She said, "Go ahead. I'm not going to kill you." Then she smiled a sweet, wicked smile and added, "Not with food." The Pointer Sisters' song, 'Yes We Can, Can' supposedly is the inspiration for Barack Obama's campaign slogan. I hope so.

Peanut Butter Stew

1 pound cooked and frozen shrimp, larger sized
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
1 small onion
1/4 pound of mushrooms-sliced
1 stalk celery
1 can diced tomatoes
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 6 oz can tomato paste
3 heaping teaspoons of peanut butter
1 teaspoon olive oil
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (or more, to taste)
Salt and pepper to taste
Garlic powder to taste

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil and saute the vegetables until the onions are translucent. Add all the other ingredients and heat through, simmering on low heat for at least 15 minutes. Stir frequently.
Serve over white rice, brown rice or quinoa.

     One of my friends has a grown who son just ended a big-deal love affair.
He was sad, and we were sad for him. He's a great kid, a bit on the flakey, dreamy side, but that's part of his charm. The girl, although slightly chilly for our tastes (we tend toward shouting and bear hugs) was intelligent, confident and pretty (although also in a skim-milk sort of way).
     I don't get mad at every girl who ends a relationship with one of my sons or my nephew or the children of one of my dear friends, who are virtually family to us. Some of the guys, as much as we cherish them as people, are not yet trophy material as boyfriends. Some have it coming. In other situations, the relationships just don't have the right configuration of cards and starts to point to a future.
     But this girl made me mad.
     When it got serious between her and the young man, whom I'll call Tony, they discussed one day getting married and eventually, having kids. That's when Tony's girlfriend asked him if he would mind having a genetic background check. She, after all, had good genetics: Her grandparents were still alive and her ancestors had died at great ages of predictable things. So, in fact, had Tony's.
     But Tony was adopted.
     Although he knew about his birthparents in a general way -- their names, their origins, their nationalities -- it had not occurred to him, in 25 years of life, to meet them, as, indeed, it does not occur to most kids who join their families through adoption. Suddenly, this was an urgent subject for Tony. Although his mother and father reassured him that curiosity was natural, they also were able to tell him that they did know as much about his genetic and medical background as his birthmother and her family and their physicians knew. With periodic updates over the years, Tony's family-now had learned from his family-then that the only medical issue was a problem with high blood pressure on the part of a paternal grandparent (who also, it must be said, was an Irishman with a special fondness for lager). As Tony's mom told me, "Everyone's grandfather has high blood pressure at some point, or low blood pressure, or something."
     However, Tony's girlfriend insisted he get in touch with his "real" mom and ask for some further screening, mainly because he has an unusual blood type. It was, she pointed out, the least he could do.
     Pretty soon, Tony's mom was in tears, wondering if she'd failed him in some way. Tony felt lousy for what was a quite natural identity question. And Tony's girlfriend kept insisting that she couldn't look at his parents and see what he'd look like in 30 years. She wanted to know what invisible characteristics their children might have.
     And my only question was, why did that matter?
     If you're in love, do you worry that, someday, your spouse might be a big-nosed 60-year-old guy? Do you worry that he might lose his hair or that your children might be allergic to penicillin? Of course, any kid who has a genetic issue usually knows that growing up. Families who have the gene for ALS or cystic fibrosis or other heritable diseases have a significant chance of giving it to their offspring and sometimes are encouraged to make a family other ways.
     But that's not always true.
     As the mother of many children, several through adoption and several through high-tech assisted reproduction, I know about as much about the genetic background of the children we adopted as I know about those who came to use through our own genetic pipeline. For example, my husband knows that his grandfather died from something a decade ago and it might have been Parkinson's Disease, but no one is around who really knows for sure. Sometimes, a genetic predisposition to a disease is huge: If I had known that my first husband's mom had died from colon cancer (instead of what I was told, "some kind of stomach thing") I might have been able to urge him to get the early testing that could have saved his life.
     My point is that sometimes, it's a crapshoot.
     And what makes me mad about Tony's girlfriend is that, while I can't be sure, I don't think Tony's girlfriend would have been so insistent if he hadn't been adopted. There's this weird presumption that people who were adopted have a black box of genetics that other people don't. Otherwise, why would so many people have asked me, at least a couple of times when I adopted a baby, if there was "insanity in the family." What a screwy question. Do only insane people have unplanned pregnancies? Are only insane people wise enough to realize that someone else might be a better parent than they?
     When people asked that, I'd always answer, "Not until now."
     And as for Tony's girlfriend, good riddance.

    For 15 years and more, I've been doing the author thing and I love it.
    I love it except when I hate it.
    And I hate it right now.
    I'm about to go out on the road. Out there, it'll be isolated and cozy and large and festive. I'll see old friends I see only once or twice a year. I'll have cherished solitude to write and write and go deep into the new book I've barley scraped. I'll get time to work out and really sleep.
I'll be so lonesome I'll cry every night.
    For the past few days, I've done the mother thing. My children aren't used to it. They regard me as a benign transient, who brings them hotel cashews and chocolate witches and turkeys from the guilt kiosk at the airport. I bring them t-shirts from Dallas and Motown and Hollywood. But yesterday, I made cookies. Today, I made bread and meatloaf and chili. I played ring toss with my almost-four-year-old son, my youngest. "I'm running away from you," he said. He's always running, away from me. "Tomorrow I'll be four. I'll be big." Tomorrow, you will be bigger than I. You'll be 20 and I'll only be able to reach you by text message.
    This humble stuff -- making scrapbooks and gluing pictures into them, punching down dough, listening to music and crying over the sad bits -- is something my husband doesn't get.  
    For ten years a stay-home parent, he longs for adult conversation.
    Adult conversation isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Adults can whine as much as children do .. or more. They aren't as curious about the world and are pretty convinced they've seen most of it worth seeing or won't be able to see it after all because they can't afford it. Once, a woman told me that children represented everything she didn't like in people, that they were both boring and demanding. Now, this is not untrue: I'm not nearly as interested in Transformers (and .. weren't they transforming two decades ago when I first became a mother, also?) as my little kids are, or in YouTube as my big kids are.
    But their political analysis is, for example, fresh, unjaded and interestingly hopeful. Even my eldest still thinks we can, although he's not sure we will.
    When I call home at night from the road, I hear accounts of nothing much. Field trip was okay. Math test went as well as could be expected. Dad's mad at me for shoving dirty clothes under the bed. When I come home, my husband tells me the real deal -- who has a crush on whom, who had his heart broken, who's scared to try soccer, who really wants to give up swim team. He hears the bedside confidences I long for, and for which I am too tired when I arrive home, dragging my backpack and a suitcase that never gets entirely empty or unpacked.
For this, I am grateful and also resentful. This role-reversal junk isn't all it's cracked up to be either.
    Look, yeah, I chose this life. I love writing books and having them published, meeting readers and writers. I love it all.
    I wish there were three me's: One would have a romance so huge and poignant that I would check the telephone to see if it was operating.  One would leave tomorrow for Mexico and a project. One would make bread and scrapbooks every day.
    I'm a homemaker. I just don't make it home often enough.

 

            On a beautiful October New England day, I stopped at a garage sale (they are my undoing). A woman about my age was moving to California.

"Her kids aren't around here," explained the friend who was running the sale. "She's on her way. And she's happy. But us, not so much."

Everything was for sale. Everything.

There were formal dining chairs and photographs and tumblers and tents. There was a big heavy-duty KitchenAid Mixer and a snazzy blue couch I coveted and a lush leather purse from Paris I put back when I saw that it was going to cost more than somebody paid for it to fix the zipper. There was flowered china for ten and there were CD's and posters and silk-screened pillows of a young Justin Timberlake, in a room that seemed once to have belonged to a girl who'd been a teenager in the '90s and maybe had children of her own by now.

In a closet was a tiny frock coat, size 2, with a little woolen cap that tied under the chin, the kind that children don't wear anymore outside of movies, and a First Communion dress and downhill ski boots and a Patriots Pennant.

Among the jewelry, which included individual pearls rolled loose from their strings was a brooch enameled in some class with a cheerful portrait of Bob Marley. There were dozens of crosses, gold and silver and handfuls of pierced earrings, a few of which I picked up for my 13-year-old daughter.

When I wandered downstairs, there was more of the flotsam of a life - VHS movies, stacks of them, a Foosball table and one of those stereo systems with speakers as tall as a middle-school boy. There was a big cardboard box and in it were leftover invitations to a graduation, in 2004, and white-on-white plates embossed with a cap and a gown. When I opened what I thought was an empty scrapbook album, it wasn't. It was a scrapbook of someone's high-school memories - photos of a row of girls laughing in uniforms with toothpaste smiles ... and ribbons from cross-country meets, clippings about a play, an honor-roll card.

Where was the girl who went with these memories?

 And I turned away - not entirely happily, thinking of the boxes in my own storage room, boxes in which I've carefully folded the first Halloween costume, the Cub Scout shirt, the slim packets of just the very best papers from preschool through eighth grade, the innocent smiles, the mischievous ones, the hair that stuck up on picture day, the teeth in sealed plastic bags, like seashells ... I couldn't help but picture another garage sale. One I wouldn't be attending.

And I hoped that there would not be boxes such as these, whirled up by time like a cyclone and set down unawares, for strangers to touch.

It was a sewing box with a damaged hinge I finally bought, because I'm always trying to repair something, to not much avail. This was a nice big basket that came with reams of velvet cord and spools of thread. At home, I lifted out what I took for some bright bits of fabric, something I thought the younger kids might like to cut up one rainy summer day. But it was the top of a prom dress, narrow-waisted, peach-colored, strapless with a ruched bodice, all pinned but never sewn. Anyone can buy a daughter a prom dress. But it takes a special kind of love to measure and pin and take tiny tucks ...

I have a daughter who's only ten, dark-haired and elfin.

She'll never be very big, even as an adult. We tease her and say she'll have to ride to her prom in her booster set. And I have a close friend whose hands are never still, who's always knitting or sewing, no matter what else she's doing.  I can't re-shape the poignancy of the archaeology of life, what we keep in hopes that it will matter.

But I think that a peach satin top would look pretty with a black velvet skirt.

   
  People often ask me what the "theme" of my work is. Wow. If I knew what it was about, I might not have so much trouble writing it. But one common factor -- from The Deep End of the Ocean to my newest novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye is risk.
      
      People put themselves at risk. They put children at risk. They walk unawares and innocent into risk. Everyone is standing on the trap door. We simply have the gift (and it is a gift) of not knowing when that trap door will open.
      People who say that they have charmed lives made choices early on that led to lives remarkable in their lack of complication. If they are wise, they make choices in keeping with their own natures to try to approximate the lives they hope for.
      For example, Beth Cappadora is a creative person. She's also naturally reclusive, unlike her husband, who's happiest with people. To have an uncomplicated life, she probably should have had one child. She'd also had a rough childhood, notable for its losses, especially of her mother when she was no more than a child herself.
      So who can fault her for wanting three children and a bustle of life in her house when she had spent her own youth longing for that kind of loving family friction? Who can blame her for failing to understand that the tug between her life and her work might make her impatient and frustrated, despite how much she loved her children? Few people know themselves well enough, especially when we're young and make decisions that will have profound ramifications throughout our lives.
      Sometimes, trouble just comes. Sometimes, It's when people disregard the dictates of their own real natures and make choices that overwhelm them that they run into trouble.
      An acquaintance of mine, Ginny Sutherland, is a magnificent photographer (www.suthvid.zenfolio.com).It is she who took the image of the house on the website for www.onewritersplace.com, my teaching house and artists' residence.
      Last month, when the weather on Cape Cod still owed more to summer than fall, Ginny was at Nauset Beach when she glimpsed a father with a young child. As my own children do, the child was about to run into the ocean, despite the cold. But Ginny could see that, if the boy did that, he'd be in danger. She even spoke up -- and the dad replied that his child was a strong swimmer. A strong swimmer, even an adult, is, however, no match for a rip tide.
Long story short. The child did get caught, did get rescued through his father's speedy intervention.
      Ginny's picture is not so much about the story that happened that day but about our lives as we confront the things we want badly despite the consequences.
      This photo reminds me so much of my first novel and my most recent novel: In a sense, all the main characters are embodied by this image.

with best hopes,
Jackie Mitchard

             I know that I learn more from negative reviews of my books than I learn from positive reviews of my books.

            What I will avoid next time, or more of what I may build in, often comes in a backhanded compliment, offered more in sorrow than anger ("Jacquelyn Mitchard is a better writer than this pitiful heap of words would seem to demonstrate. Even her characters deserve better than this dumb story ...")

            The fact is, what I learn, I often already know.

This is a secret I keep with myself.

If a book has sketched over a point ... or, conversely, gone too deeply into self-indulgent verbiage in some part of the plot just because I like those words, and that character, and how she thinks .. I already know that. I just hope no one else will, you see.

The only thing I really mind about bad reviews - I haven't had many, actually, for No Time To Wave Goodbye - is the part in which the critic speculates about why I messed up. She rushed it ... or She was trying to write like Ruth Rendell which is something she should forget trying to do ...

In fact, despite that I already know, and despite that it may seem that I was trying to do something else, I actually was doing my best. When you're doing your best, even if you know you haven't quite nailed it, it hurts to know you've done it publicly. However, rushing usually is not the problem. When I get things wrong, it's not a matter of time. Given five years, I probably couldn't have done that particular thing any better.

It would, however, be fun to try. Lorrie Moore, who's a friend of mine - although we seldom stand on the steps of the same federal building as writers - is a professor in the city where we live. That doesn't give her much time to write but what she writes is, of course, cherce. Magnificent. Lorrie Moore often is called the maestra, the short fiction writer of my generation. Her delicate and wonderfully received novel, A Gate at the Stairs, now on the bestseller list near the top (where my novel is near the bottom) was 15 years in the making. Many of its segments appeared, in other forms, as short stories in The New Yorker. But to get it just as she wanted it, she gave herself ... a generation. Jane Hamilton (The Short History of a Prince) also is a friend. She adheres to the five-year plan when writing a novel. Many, many writers I know write the entire book before they'll even allow an editor a glimpse at it.

That's not how I do it.

Am I too insecure, financially and emotionally, to stay away from readers more than a year? Or at the most, two? Maybe I am. I want to come back and share what I've written again and again, even if it might not be precisely perfect.

It's such a lonely job.

I like to know I'm on the right road instead of whacking around somewhere off in the underbrush. And I suppose I also like the pats on the back.

            I have friends who think that their books are perfect. When they are completed, they think that they couldn't possibly be any better. I have other friends, equally writers, who would give anything to go back in and to have another whack at a story. To me, this would be like regressing one of my children to the age of eight and having another whack at raising that one to be ... like, less selfish. Or more tolerant. Or better at piano. (The more I write this, the more it would seem that this is not a half-bad idea.)

            Only one friend of mine sort of hates her books, as I do, by the time that they are written and feels as though the emperor has no hard covers....

            However, this person, who once had the courage to stand up at a luncheon in front of hundreds of people and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I truly hate this book..." is a person I admire.

            By the time they are published, I don't really hate my books (except one).

            By the time they're grown, I'm not disappointed in my children, either.

            Probably, however, they could have been better.