Mother Talk and Word of Mouth

I'm off to Portland and Seattle for Mother Talk events, and I'm looking forward to meeting some writers I've only encountered virtually or telephonically thus far, and to speaking with the groups we'll be meeting over the next five days.

In the meantime, if you haven't already heard the news, an association of women authors called Word of Mouth has written a letter to Oprah appealing to her to bring back her famous book club. (Full disclosure: I have signed the letter, and I am a brand-new member of Word of Mouth.) The reaction has been interesting to follow. Jennifer Weiner puts the snark in her blog "SnarkSpot" with her surprisingly ungenerous take on the letter campaign (she suggests that instead of waiting for Oprah to save them, these women writers should write "more accesible books"), and MJ Rose counters by pointing out, "There is a correlation between TV exposure time and copies sold. There is a correlation between books being part of the conversation when they get a lot of media time and when they don't. I don't think the letter was saying anything more complicated than the club had an impact that is missing in our culture and that's a good thing to point out and that's why I, for one, was proud to sign it."

New stuff

We're running an interview with author Jennifer Lauck in which she talks about writing and motherhood and writing about motherhood:

Before I wrote Show Me the Way, an agent asked, "Are you going to be a serious writer or are you going to disappear into the abyss of motherhood?" I said I was going to be a serious writer, of course. I had been a writer for 20 years, why would mothering change that? Now that I am eight years into mothering, I see what she was asking. The day-to-day of mothering is so consuming that it's tempting to give yourself up to it completely. Still, I believe that I can be lost in the abyss of motherhood and be a serious writer too. It isn't a black and white choice because this isn't a black and white life. I write because I must and I mother because I must.

Alas, I have no time

I promised Andi I would be very helpful with this blog and then suddenly my work blew up and I am actually having to do something to earn my living. So I am waiting for my childcare situation to go from theoretical to practical (my little sister will be coming over and helping out) and trying to hit most of my deadlines.

In short, no time for Literary Mama blogging. Rats.

But here is this. It's furniture made from old books, which -- depending on the book -- might be a good use for them.

Me, I'm having book issues. We have a smallish house and like most of you reading this, many many books. We have shifted from vertical to horizontal on our shelves to take advantage of the extra height but there are still three or four boxes (and two or three grocery bags) of unshelved books in our basement. And there are books under the table that I use as a nightstand next to my bed. And my son's bookshelves are literally overflowing. And I have large stacks of random books on various flat surfaces.But what brought us to crisis is that my mom said I need to get her book collection out of her house or off they go to charity. All the Pearl S. Buck books she's been collecting since she was in her early 20s, all of the historical fiction that she read through my elementary school years, and all of the lush coffee table books that graced our living room during my growing up. I. Must. Have. Them.

So I sent my husband to buy brackets and 2x4s and we're shelving up one wall of our basement playroom. I think this will make a dent although we're sure to have at least one extra box at the end of it all and of course we are always getting more books.

I asked my mom when a person quits feeling greedy about books and she said for her it was when her kids were grown because she wanted us to have a library but now she doesn't need one as much. This makes sense to me. Plus since we're homeschoolers, I feel almost frantic about making sure we never lose anything that might be useful later on.

Amazonia

Everyone knows about the writerly obsession of checking your Amazon ranking on an hourly basis. Luckily, I don't have to go to the trouble of doing that anymore -- of actually opening up my browser and checking to see what my Amazon rank is -- because a kind and enabling friend built me a Konfabulator widget* that does the dirty work for me. It sits on my desktop, impassively displaying my Amazon rank number, which it automatically updates every 15 minutes. You know, just in case.

Still, sometimes I do like to visit my book on Amazon, just to check in and see how it's going, whether or not anyone's written a mean-spirited personal attack on me in the guise of a customer review, that sort of thing. The last time I checked in I discovered the SIP feature -- "Statistically Improbable Phrases" -- which seems to serve no purpose in terms of author obsession, though I guess now I can fret about how to raise the bar and come up with better SIPs for the next book (surely I can top grubby living! And our piano? Please! A baby could come up with something more statistically improbable!)

Yesterday I checked in and discovered that not only has Amazon revamped the page design for information on individual books, they've added some other interesting and/or meaningless features -- Concordance and Text Stats. Now when you check out a book's page, you can not only learn what so-called Statistically Improbable Phrases the book contains, you can also find out what its Flesch-Kincaid Index is and what the top 100 most frequently used words in the book happen to be. The Concordance and Text Stats for my book reveal that I used the word "mother" 305 times ("baby" came in second at 235 – not "shock," as you might expect, which had only 113 instances -- and Emi will be happy to know that her name shows up 60 times). I also learned the book sports a respectable Flesch Index of 57.9 and a Flesch-Kincaid Index of 10.4, though its Fog Index of 12.4 is troubling, as that indicates the book might be "difficult to read." Still, the manuscript appears to be only 10% dominated by complex words, and I'm sure readers will be reassured to learn that despite the fact that my average sentence contains 20.9 words, most of them are no longer than 1.5 syllables.

Why is Amazon doing this? To give authors more to obsess about? Would anyone other than a book's author care about its Fog Index or percentage of word complexity? It's a bit odd to see my book dissected like this. I mean, sure, the word count game is one I played daily as I worked on the book – yippee! I broke the 30K mark! Wait, no, I edited a bunch of stuff out, now it's back to 25K! Damn! But seeing it there in black and white – "Sentences: 2,606" – is a strange thing. Really? Mother Shock is only 2,606 sentences? Somehow it felt longer. 2,606 sentences just doesn't sound like a whole lot. Is it? Does her book have more sentences than mine? Does that make hers better? Wait, quick, what's my ranking again?

But even more meaningless and intriguing than those statistics are the "Fun Stats," which report that my book contains 5,344 words per dollar, and that it's 5,392 words to the ounce.

Crap. I weigh about a million words.

* If you are an author with steely self-control, whose worth as a person is not tied in any way to your Amazon ranking, and you are interested in having one of these widgets for yourself, give me a holler. I'll hook you up!

How did I miss this?

Oprah has a whole page of writers talking about balancing writing and motherhood. It's a hobby of mine -- seeing how other writing women somehow manage to product readable work between diaper changes, sandwich making, and carpooling. No majorly new insights here (was hoping someone had a magical tip guaranteed to make it all swing easy) but it's nice seeing that even the most successful mama-writers struggle with the balance.

Our new blogger officially a Literary Mama

Just got word that Stephany went into labor on Tuesday morning: Luke David was born yesterday, a month before his official due date, at 9:02 a.m., and weighed in at 4 pounds 13 ounces. Congratulations to the proud parents! And Stephany -- welcome to mother land!

The Terrible Twos

More on writing frankly about one's children: I always, always, always look forward to Catherine Newman's weekly column about life with Birdy, her two-year-old daughter, and her five-year-old son Ben. Bringing Up Ben & Birdy is published every Monday on the commercial site ParentCenter and in my opinion it's the very best feature that site has to offer. Newman seems to hit just the right note between telling it sweet and telling it straight. This week she writes about Birdy's startling transformation from a baby with a sunny disposition into an extremely strong-willed toddler -- on the very day she turns two.

And that reminds me -- I've been meaning to pick up Newman's memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, for some time now. Must add it to the list.

Writing Frankly About Your Kids: Is It The Last Great Taboo?

There's been a lot of negative buzz online lately about Ayelet Waldman's new column on Salon, which she recently started after giving up posting on her addictively readable parenting blog, Bad Mother. I have to admit that at times I've been surprised, even taken aback, by just how much Waldman reveals but it's... interesting to note the vehemence of those who object to her writing frankly about her family and her battle with bipolar disorder. In some circles, it seems, writing about one's children is the last great taboo. I guess some people still believe that once you become a mother you should no longer admit to having feelings others might deem inappropriate. I can't imagine Salon readers being half as shocked as many of them appear to be in the Letters section if Waldman were writing a series of columns on, oh I don't know, sex with weasels or something.

Tales from the (Mother) Hood

Jennifer Niesslein and Stephanie Wilkinson, the editors of Brain, Child magazine, wonder why publishers seem to be backing off literary offerings by, for, and about mothers -- when sixty-eight percent of books are purchased by women.

At one point though -- say, around 2003 -- around we started getting discouraging notes from writers we know. How's the book coming? we'd ask. Not always so good. Agents were saying that they couldn't sell memoirs about motherhood anymore. Editors were telling agents that the field was saturated. One writer, whose then-agent shopped her manuscript around in 2003, told us, "One by one . . . the ‘pass letters' came rolling in. A couple editors said that it took them a long time to decide against the book because they liked it so much, which was some comfort, but a cold comfort."

When Miriam Peskowitz began shopping her part-memoir, part-feminist analysis of motherhood book around about eighteen months ago, she found an agent in a surpisingly short amount of time. A New York agent, no less, a father of three who said he thought her book would sell quickly. They took it to the big New York publishing houses--and promptly got shot down. "While I loved Ms. Peskowitz's ideas," said one, "I'm afraid the platform seems a bit too small for us." (Translation: we can't take a chance on an unknown writer who doesn't already have celebrity or a built-in readership on her side.) Said another, "I've enjoyed reading the intelligent and extremely well-written proposal . . . but our last foray into the field of intelligent, culturally informed, somewhat complex mothering books wasn't a great success."

New York literary agent Elizabeth Kaplan puts it more bluntly: "Publishers are done with momoir."

Now that's the sort of talk that makes people who assign motherhood-themed book reviews nervous. We started digging.

Women Writers: Dull? Depressed? Domestic?

This story is more than a week old but I've still chosen to link it now because it's of particular interest to women who write about mothering. The Guardian recently took British writers Ali Smith and Toby Litt to task for characterizing the work of many women writers as "dull, depressed and domestic" in their introduction to New Writing 13, a collection of literary fiction they co-edited. Writers including AL Kennedy and Ursula K Le Guin -- and Ali Smith and Toby Litt themselves -- respond here, here, and here. Thanks again to Andi for the heads-up.

Video Game Babies as Demanding as Real Ones

This Belgian commercial uses a zippy video game format to warn teen girls about the drudgery of mothering a newborn. It reminds me of the new baby feature in The Sims. I must have had at least three simulated babies taken away by a simulated child welfare worker before I understood just how much attention the baby was supposed to receive from its simulated parents. (That is, constant attention... to the point of physical collapse.) And I was in my 30s when I first played the game. Here's hoping I clue in a little faster with my own real baby. Thanks to Andi for the link.

Welcome

Welcome to the Literary Mama blog. For the time being, I’ll be your guide -- even though I guess I don’t yet strictly qualify as one of the "literary mamas" around here. Not just yet. My due date isn’t for another five weeks. But when that day does (finally, finally) come, I feel pretty sure that I’ll fit right in. I’ve always tried to read my way through everything and this pregnancy stuff has been no exception.

When I got pregnant for the first time -- it must have been around two years ago now, although I’ve lost track -- the first thing I did was rush out and buy a stack of books. I bought the standards, of course, like What to Expect When You’re Expecting, The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy, The Mayo Clinic Complete Book of Pregnancy and Baby’s First Year, and child development books, certainly, like The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About The Mind and What’s Going On In There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life. I read thought-provoking, often disturbing socio-political commentary like Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions and Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood but also more personal offerings like Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, Lauren Slater’s Love Works Like This, and Andi Buchanan’s Mother Shock. I devoured the excellent magazine Brain, Child. And when I miscarried that first time, I went straight back to the bookstore for a copy of Toni Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility. That particular book, with its implicit, crazy, laughable promise that fertility is something that can be controlled, saw me through three more miscarriages. Still. Books, even when they fell short, or at least fell short in my case, helped to buoy me up. So did, especially, the writing of women I discovered online, voices encountered on sites like this one and on blogs like Chez Miscarriage.

It was only when I’d started researching adoption -- at the time I’d just made my way through Karin Evans’ The Lost Daughters of China, Kay Ann Johnson’s Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, and Nancy McCabe’s Meeting Sophie, A Memoir of Adoption -- that I found out I was pregnant again. As this particular pregnancy progressed successfully from first trimester to second to third, I reflected on the time of the miscarriages. Often made exhausted, weepy, and slow-witted by pregnancy hormones, I tried to write, fumblingly, about what had happened then and about what was happening now. And as I tried to pin things down in words -- these fragile little floppy, half-winged arrangements of sound and letters not big enough, not powerful enough to carry the emotions and experiences I want them to describe -- I believed, with relief, that I’d never again go through such dramatic swings from euphoria to despair and back again.

I was wrong. A month ago my husband’s mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in her sleep. She was only 59 years old. I have never seen a more terrible sight than David’s face as he shouted "What!" and "No!" into the telephone that had woken us from sleep at 4:30 in the morning, as he hung up and crumpled back onto the bed. I hate that horrible black telephone now. Every time I see it I want to smash it to bits and bury them under the melting snow and the rotting leaves in the backyard. The fifteen minute drive that morning from our house to David’s parents’ place was the longest drive of our lives -- and we’ve driven clear across the country from British Columbia to Nova Scotia with an old, sick cat wailing in the front seat between us.

The day after the funeral, tired of spending almost a week cooped up inside the airless, empty house receiving mourners, David, his father, and I found ourselves standing fuzzy-headed and bleary-eyed in a bookstore. We went first to the shelves of books that are supposed to help you deal with death. We stared at the spines of On Death and Dying and I Wasn’t Ready to Say Good-Bye. Then we went to the shelves of books that are supposed to help you deal with new life. We stared at the spines of What to Expect the First Year, Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, and Maternal Desire.

David’s father burst into tears. "She was so excited about the baby," he said. It’s true. She was. And somehow -- impossibly but also certainly, of course -- through all the grief and the worry and the anger, we still are. Of course we are. But I know better now, I think, this time, than to believe that the worst is over, that things will get easier. The worst isn’t necessarily over, things won’t necessarily get easier, and all those books full of all those words won’t necessarily help. They won’t necessarily help – but, for me at least, they are necessary.