Author Author

Look at how big that book jacket is over there!

Well, Cathy Alter deserves a big book jacket, and not because she’s a big woman (she’s tall, yes, but quite slender), but because she had a big idea and she ran with it. Why hadn’t someone else already hit on the idea of following a different women’s magazine each month for an entire year to see how it would change her life? I dunno, but the thing is, even if Cathy didn’t think of it first, she thought of it and followed through with it.

This, my friends, is a woman with moxie. She followed through with her idea through a year that could not have been planned if she’d tried. If you’d written the script of Alter’s life, you could not have written anything more perfect for her than what happened to her in real time (but more on that when we post my interview with her on Wednesday).

In the meantime: We’ve got ten copies of Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over available to the first ten readers to be selected at random from all responses who tell us which magazine’s advice you would follow if you had to choose just one.

My choice? Real Simple. I need to declutter everything!

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Read Part One of “Book Maven Interview: Annette Gordon-Reed”

BP: You also believe that Tom Jefferson brought up the sons he had with Sally to live out sides of his own personality and passions that he could not fully live out himself.

AG: His real love was woodworking. He spent most of his time with his carpenters, like Sally’s half-brother John Hemings and John’s apprentices. Tom made them sort of versions of himself that are not the exalted version, but if they were white as they were by VA law, carpenters, musicians, etc. They are a part of him, in a way, but it’s not the part that we focus on.

BP: Why do you think that people who deny Jefferson’s long relationship with Hemings do so? Is it good, old-fashioned racism?

AG: I am turning this over in my mind. There’s a puritan streak in the American consciousness, and Jefferson is one of our “pure” figures — or we want him to be that way.  For him to have had sex with a partner he wasn’t supposed to is problematic for many people on several levels, especially for those people who draw his power from the notion that he was celibate after his wife’s death — after all, women sap your wisdome and strength, and all that notion.

We all draw boundaries around our families. It just happens that most people care about their immediate families most, but in the case of Jefferson, his fame makes him loom larger. There’s a racist and a sexist aspect about denying Sally Hemings and her family’s influence in Jefferson’s life, but for the family, it’s about protecting that membrane, that boundary, around who is in and who is out.  In the case of this issue, I live a sort of 18th/19th century life; I don’t follow it completely. I had an interesting conversation with one of the Hemings-Jefferson descendants, who asked his great-grandfather if the whole story were true. The response? “Of course it’s true, but they’ll never prove it.” What you finally have is the people who show up, and speak up.

BP: After all of your research, how do you regard Jefferson today? How do you believe we all should regard him?

AG: He is one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, flaw and all. I just don’t think you can find an aspect of life in America that he did not have a hand in some way: slavery, race, women, agriculture, the arts, government…I find him a fascinating individual. I plan to write one more volume about the Hemingses, and then a biography of Jefferson that will be at least two volumes, maybe three.

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Please forgive the subject line; I couldn’t resist the Harry Potter allusion.

Yesterday over at that other blog of mine, I went on a rant. I’m not sorry I did,  and if I never read another article that dwells on the loveliness of publishing back in the day, I will not be sorry, either. We modern readers may be cursed to live in interesting times, but it is out of interesting times that the stories we love are made.

I was thinking about this the other day while I washed some dishes, which is not as incongruous as it sounds. The dishes in question are a bunch of beautiful old pressed-glass goblets that I bought in an estate sale once. The house in which the sale was held had an enormous picture window horizontally divided by six shallow shelves completely filled with goblets collected over the years. Who was this family? (Impossible to tell; they’d moved out, leaving a firm that specializes in this kind of sale in charge.) When had they started collecting these goblets, and why? Each glass had a meticulously lettered label on its base that included the name of the pattern and its original price, but nothing more.

As I carefully soaped and rinsed the goblets, and wondered about their backstories, I had to notice the various imperfections they have: trapped air bubbles in the glass, a slight lavender tint here, a tiny lean in the stem there… I thought: no one ever wrote a story about sheer perfection that was worth reading. It’s the chinks in the armor, the body broken, the yearnings that go unfulfilled that make us pay attention all the way to the end. Sometimes the ending is a happy one, sometimes sad, and more often — e.g., in real life — it’s just plain open-ended. I’ll never know the backstory to my goblets. But I can imagine one. And each time they’re used on my table, or at cocktail hour, or for milk (the Mini Mavens enjoy fancying things up occasionally), the story continues…

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It’s not every author who can discuss Pontrefact cakes and Yorkshire Gold tea (I’m a bit tea-obsessed this week), but Ross Raisin not only knows his native Yorkshire’s delicacies — he planned to serve them at his September wedding.

The reason I find this food interest of Raisin’s so important is that he is a young (twentysomething) novelist with an MFA (from London’s Goldsmith College) who has chosen to set his first book back home when that home isn’t a particularly fashionable or fascinating place. He just makes it that way. By the time you’ve finished Out Backward, the seasons of a sheep farmer’s year will seem more important and more interesting than anything regarding the upcoming election (or perhaps I’m just tired of anything regarding the upcoming election, but I digress…).

This interview was Raisin’s first in America; he had just arrived from the U.K. a few hours earlier and was gearing up for his U.S. book tour. (Make sure you check out his extremely cool wristwatch.) For someone operating on very little sleep and experiencing jet lag, he was very charming; what must he be like fully rested?

Raisin and I discussed everything from strong Yorkshire tea (I told you I was obsessed…) to the change in his book’s title from U.K. to U.S. to his technique for developing the novel’s extraordinary language. I hope you’ll enjoy listening to this interview as much as I did conducting it.

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Continuing my conversation with Sarah Lyall from over here…

Please feel free to take a peek at my PW blog to get the first part of my interview with Sarah Lyall, London correspondent for The New York Times and the author of a new book called The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British. Sarah and I had a fun, relaxed phone conversation last week while she was in DC for some events. She was at the Hotel Monaco and said “It’s so nice to just recline during an interview; book tours are tiring!”

Lyall’s reporter’s eye notices everything from those aforementioned Parliament pubs to the differences between her own childhood and that of her two daughters, Alice and Isobel, 11 and 9 respectively: “They’ll roll their eyes and say ‘Mum, please says ‘trousers,’ not ‘pants’!”

While the Demoiselles McCrum are definitely “English girls,” their mother remains quite American. “When I’m away from the U.S. for a time, I miss the openness. There’s a sense of possibility in America, and people are much more straightforward than they are in England. You simply can’t take what they say at face value. “Sorry” or “I’m so pleased” can take on five different layers of motivation, depending on the person you’re addressing. Whereas people here in the U.S. strive to be happy, and are not embarrassed about it.”

But: “When I’m away from England for too long, I miss irony, and I miss people who joke. ” Lyall points out the homage of her book’s cover art to “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” the opening minutes of which were a weekly pastiche of animation, collage, and line drawing. Lyall also says that despite the American confidence in possibility, the English display a different kind of confidence: “They’re taught not to whine — to just get on with it. Remember, one of their role models is Margaret Thatcher, who essentially functioned as a man. It’s still pretty old-fashioned over there in some ways.”

Is “over there” Britain? Or England? “In the paperback I’m going to add some material that will examine English character versus British character further,” the author says. That might have something to do with her veddy English husband, McCrum. When I ask her how she dealt with including some of his personal anecdotes, she replies, “Very good question. I didn’t leave out whole topics, but I was more gentle than I otherwise might have been. He was so nice about the whole thing, totally a good sport, said everything was fair game.” (Even the point at which Lyall, during a domestic argument, hurls the insult at him “You’re emotionally autistic!” McCrum responds phlegmatically, “Yes, I am quite emotionally artistic.”)

“After all,” Lyall says, “I didn’t want to write a snarky, mean-spirited book.”

After speaking with her, I’m not sure if that statement is more American, or more British. Perhaps it’s a perfect balance of American natural kindness and British cultivated manners; a perfect cup of tea for a fall day.

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Hi everyone — you should have been able to watch my interview with Ross Raisin already, but technical difficulties have prevented its posting…for once, these are not my technical difficulties. Really, when the coding in a video stream is cranky, it’s noboby’s fault. We will have it live as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I have an exciting meeting today at WETA to talk about changes and improvements for this website. We’ve listened to the feedback we’ve gotten from our devoted handful of readers (someday it will be a slew!), and I can’t wait to share some new ways of highlighting books here. Thanks for reading, as always, and as they say in our parent organization’s broadcast world, please stay tuned…

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I tend to love novels with strong voices, misanthropes, and “loser lit,” so this week’s pick was a no-brainer for me. Out Backward is Ross Raisin’s debut novel, but there’s nothing first-timer about it. Raisin was born and bred in Yorkshire like his singular protagonist Sam Marsdyke, but (thank goodness) there the comparison ends. Raisin (whom you’ll meet a bit later this week in our interview) is smart, charming, and articulate — none of which descriptors could be applied to Sam.

Yet I think, like me, that you’ll swept up in Sam’s narrative and unable to stop reading the train wreck that is his life. Sam left school after an “incident,” and at 19 works on his family’s farm and interacts with more sheep than humans. As Sam’s rural environs grow increasingly gentrified, a big-city family moves in nearby (”next door” doesn’t really apply in North Yorkshire), and the teenaged daughter becomes one of Sam’s obsessions, to a bad end.

While the “bad end” is easily predicted, Raisin paces his book like a thriller, so it doesn’t matter. However, it wasn’t the suspenseful pitch of the book the grabbed me; it was Raisin’s way with language. Sam may be a strange and solitary youth, but he’s not stupid. His glib way with vocabulary, melding made-up words with Yorkshire dialect, makes Sam’s book-length monologue nearly hypnotic.

We’ve got ten copies of Out Backward to give away to the first ten readers who share their favorite summer vacation read with us; don’t forget to check out our Giveaway Rules. Thanks for reading!

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If you landed here from my Other Blog, thanks for clicking through. If you haven’t read that one, here’s my “prequel” post, which may amuse you. Basically, I waited a while to read Curtis Sittenfeld’s “American Wife,” and tore through it this weekend in one day.

It really is that good.

Here’s the summary: Just before the end of her husband’s second term as President of the United States, Alice Blackwell, nee Lindgren, reflects on and tells the story of her life, beginning with her childhood in Riley, Wisconsin, and finishing with her most recent activities. As many media sources have discussed, the novel is quite clearly an imagined telling of current First Lady Laura Bush’s life and times; in fact, that’s so clearly the case that the novel is prefaced with a note reading: “American Wife is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady. Her husband, his parents, and certain prominent members of his administration are recognizable. All other characters in the novel are products of the author’s imagination, as are the incidents concerning them.”

However, I think the disclaimer should have read a little differently. Sittenfeld might have warned us all that this work of fiction can cause severe mental dislocation, convincing readers that they are actually sitting and reading in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Each decade of Alice Blackwell’s life is rendered with such exquisite and accurate detail that time travel doesn’t seem out of the question.

This is important, because Sittenfeld has created a strong, consistent voice for her narrator, but without the chronological verisimilitude, Alice Blackwell’s reasoned locutions would fall absolutely flat. That is not a criticism. I believe that part of Sittenfeld’s genius as a novelist lies in her ability to balance tensions. Blackwell’s voice could not and should not be otherwise, but her convictions and actions would make less sense without context.

I would love t say that I savored this novel. Sittenfeld writes beautifully, and the book is full of the kinds of scenes you want to remember and share with other people, including a fascinating subplot reaching all the way to the final page that makes you rethink everything you’ve ever known about the First Lady upon whom the novel is based. However, I couldn’t stop reading.

Let me also say that I found the book terribly, terribly sad. I thought Alice Lindgren Blackwell’s choices were dictated not by wisdom and love, but by circumstance and circumscription. I wish Sittenfeld had been able to put a finer point on that aspect of her title character’s life; she tries to, especially in the early pages, but it gets lost in the examination of Alice and Charlie Blackwell’s marriage.

Here are links to some other reviews of American Wife:

In the New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates says that as a “portraitist in prose,” Sittenfeld is “not Francis Bacon but more Norman Rockwell.”

Meanwhile, Michiko Kakutani actually takes the opposite stance (what a surprise!), concluding that Sittenfeld uses the novel’s end to her own political purposes.

Susan Salter Reynolds of the LA Times thinks that the book has something in it for every American female.

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For anyone out there still reading, I’m back! My apologies for over a week without posts; I was on a long-overdue vacation (last summer I wasn’t able to take one). I’ve got lots of stories about reading to share, but I wanted to write a quick post to let you know that this week’s intended interview has been moved to next week for an excellent reason: WETA.org has just relaunched with a wonderful new look and feel. Check it out when you have a moment, and please share your thoughts. You can email me any time: thebookmaven at gmail dot com.

I hope all of you had great Labor Day weekends, preferably with a book in hand. I’ll be back soon to share some of my vacation reading finds.

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