Talking with Jordan

One afternoon, a student wandered into my office to talk about writing. Here's what happened:

Originally published in Connotations Press

Jill Moyer Sunday teaches writing at Waynesburg University, in addition to directing the Writing Center. Her apprenticeship to creative nonfiction began at the age of 11 when she discovered her father’s copy of Capote’s In Cold Blood on a pile of true crime magazines. Beginning her career as a magazine journalist in the ‘70s, she was schooled in the New Journalism, which naturally led her to creative nonfiction. Currently, when she’s not writing or teaching, you’ll find JMS in her office talking writing or at home with her family, who more often than not end up reading about themselves in her writing.

Jill Moyer Sunday interview, with Jordan Merenick

So tell a little bit about yourself professor. Did you always want to be an author?

When I look back, I realize that I must have always wanted to be a writer, but the moment I became aware of it was in a freshman English class. My professor pulled me aside and asked, “Has anyone ever told you that you can write?” Her statement changed my life. At that point, I was a nursing major. Now, when I ask talented young writers the same question, I’m honoring Sister Terry Coyne. I would have made a terrible nurse.
What was the first story you wrote?

My first story was actually a novella, I believe—although my memory might be adding pages to the actual script. I wrote it when I was very young about my cat, Patches, who loved to eat spaghetti. I wanted to send it to a publisher, and my mother humored me, but my dad asked, “Who would publish a story about a spaghetti-eating cat?”
How did you start writing nonfiction?

After finishing graduate school, I fell into a position at Pittsburgher Magazine. A friend who worked there called me about a paid internship, and I applied. The next day one of the staff writers quit. The editor, a burly, old-school news type of guy, called me into his office. “You can write, can’t you?” he barked at me. That day I became a staff writer. This was at the end of the ‘70s, and I was taking on a genre greatly influenced by the New Journalism. It was a magical time to enter the field, and I began to write creative nonfiction. Soon it was my genre.


Do you remember your first nonfiction piece?

I do. I wrote an article about the forgotten veterans of the Vietnam War, titled “Whatever Happened to G.I. Joe.” I interviewed so many veterans who had been rejected by American society, and, more importantly perhaps, by the American government. At that time, the government was denying the harmful effects of Agent Orange, refusing to pay healthcare charges related to illnesses caused by exposure to this defoliant. I was young, and the veterans’ stories were complicated and tragic. That project helped to form my style, my awareness, and my life-long interest in the underdog. This first piece won a Golden Quill.
 
Who influenced you in the nonfiction genre?

Truman Capote. Of course, there are so many others, and as I continue to read creative nonfiction, I am still influenced. Creative nonfiction is such an explosive genre in that there is much to learn. But Truman Capote set the bar high for me. I first found In Cold Blood on a stack of true crime magazines my father kept in the bathroom. I was about 11, and I read it without understanding so much. The power of his work held me, though, and over the years I’ve reread, studied, researched, and taught this piece. For all who choose to write creative nonfiction, it is the touchstone of the genre.
 
Who do you compare your writing style to it?

Oh dear. I dare not compare my work to those I admire. I do read Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, and Joan Didion for inspiration. Scott Russell Sanders, and Bernard Cooper, too. David Sedaris, Dave Eggers, Mary Clearman Blew. The list is long. I want to capture the extraordinary that lives daily in the ordinary. I hope to stick my finger in the reader’s sore spot, causing her to say, “Why, yes. That’s exactly what x, y, or z feels like.”


How do you normally compose your works? Is it spur of the moment? Or do you sit down and plan out what you are going to say in an outline format?

My writing isn’t spur of the moment. I do a lot of prewriting while I’m driving, in the shower, cooking dinner. Sometimes a line or an image snags in my brain, and I start there. I don’t really make an outline or draw bubbles of ideas the way composition handbooks instruct us to. I guess I just think, and the ideas grow. Once I sit down to write, I have to write, to get the ideas out, so I can think again, breathe again, live my non-writerly life for a while. Some of my children write, but the majority of my family doesn’t understand the invisible cloak I pull over my head when I write, so I write while the television plays in the background, and I’ve gotten really good at answering questions through my filter. When I think of myself writing, though, I see myself at a rough-hewn table in a storm-battered, cedar-shingled cottage by the sea, and I am alone.

 
What inspired you to write this piece?

I was really struggling with another piece I thought I would write for Connotation Press, and I was talking it through with another writer, a former student of mine, Sarah Hulyk (whose work appears in this issue), and in the middle of our conversation, I started talking about my youngest daughter’s worry about a prediction of an earthquake in San Francisco, where she lives. Sarah said, “Well, why don’t you write about that.” And so I did.


I understand from previous conversations with you that this piece went through several different versions?

Well, it wasn’t actually “The Earthquake Kit” that went through the versions; it was the piece I’ve been struggling with called “Finding Truman.” This is a piece about my discovery of my father’s copy of Capote’s nonfiction novel, but, as I tell my students, “the piece will show you what it wants to be about.” “Finding Truman” wants to be about my father and his alcoholism, but I’m not prepared to write it yet. In a piece I wrote about the writing of the piece (funny, huh?). I liken it to the black snake that often takes up residence in our garage, flipping away from me as I try to catch it.

 After reading this work, an obvious love of family comes through. Do you always write about your family? And how do they feel about this? Are they like, “No mom not again”?

I do tend to write about my family, a lot, though not just about my children. When you write creative nonfiction, you tend to see symbols and stories in every fold of family life, and, as a mother, wife, and daughter, I use what I know and see. My children are very supportive, and I’ll often get a text or email telling me they love what I’ve written. I think it helps that in writing about my family, I’m really writing more about myself and hopefully uncovering some universal human truths, so that while I am writing about Matthew, Andrew, Laura, and Rachel, I’m really writing about something much more. I think the “no mom” sounds more in my head than theirs, and I choose my material carefully. There are some things I will not write about because I understand the hurt it could cause. It’s a balance, you know?

 Now you’re also a professor of nonfiction here at the University. Do you find the same amount of joy teaching nonfiction as composing it?

Yes. I love what I do. When I am in the classroom, I feel like I’m a goldfish that’s been out of the bowl for a bit, and then I’m dropped back into my element, and I can breathe again. I was that girl who bought all of her school supplies before everyone else, and I still love the smell of paper. It’s just all about words, though. I love to write them. I love to read them. I love to bat them around with students.

 How do you go about teaching nonfiction to creative writing students, and how does your experience as an author help with your teaching of this genre to your students?

I guess we go about it the same way writers have been going about it since the beginning. We read, a lot, and we write, a lot. In between, we talk about it all. The process is an immersion technique. We drop ourselves into a vat of creative nonfiction, and then we analyze how the great ones have done it, and we apprentice ourselves to them. You’d have to ask my students, how, if my being a writer, helps them to learn this genre, but I look at us as a group of writers sharing ideas, successes, failures. They like to hear my stories, I think.
Are your students open to the nonfiction genre?

Many students come to me as poets or fiction writers, totally committed to their chosen genre. After some time of total confusion, they do embrace the genre, especially, with its limitless boundaries, as Mary Clearman Blew tells us, “as fluid as water.”


What are some of the emerging trends that you see in nonfiction?

One of the most exciting aspects of the genre is its malleability and continuous growth. Right now we are examining food memoir, graphic essays, and lyric essays. Who knows what will come next? In a work-shopping session this week, one of my students advised the author “just take a risk.” Risk-taking, hanging from the cliff by a finger—that’s what drives the trends in the genre.


Lastly, do you have any more nonfiction projects in the works?

I do. I’ve written short pieces all of my life, but now I’m surprised to find myself with three longer projects in development. One is a memoir/literary nonfiction novel called An American Failure, the story of my (along with my husband) attempts to live the American Dream, a dream for which all of the acquisition rules changed somewhere along our journey. The second is called Three-Fifths of a Life and is a collection of segmented essays about the women in my life—my mother, my daughters, my sister, and, of course, me. The last, untitled as of yet, is a food memoir. I’m including family recipes, along with the stories of the people who cook/cooked them. Some are dark; some are funny. Of course, I’m always blogging, and readers can catch up with me here.

History Lesson 101

The following tale took place in my classroom a couple of years ago and was recently published in the Winter 2012-2013  Journal of the Assembly for Explanded Perspectives in Learning (JAEPL). I haven't been able to get Joe out of my mind, so I thought I'd share him with you, too.

 

 I heard Joe before I ever saw him. Late on a Wednesday afternoon, I sat in my office, hunched over a pile of papers, becoming more agitated as the clock pushed toward five, rushing to finish a set of responses for my morning composition class. In the background, Joe’s high, reedy voice rose and fell in conversation with a professor from another department.

I refocused on the papers in front of me. Seconds later another conversation began…this time between Joe and one of my colleagues, just two doors away. A conversation with a visitor was not what I needed, and this fellow seemed to be working his way down the hallway. I remember thinking “if I pull the door closed right now, before he comes any closer, he won’t know the difference.” As I quietly moved the door into its frame, Joe’s words hung on the air.

The next morning, I rounded the bend from my office to my classroom, coming face to face with a short, trim man, his white hair cropped in military style. This had to be Joe. “Good morning!” I called out, anxious to make up for the click of my door against him the night before.

“Are you faculty here?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Are you teaching a class today?” Gesturing at the professional-looking camera hanging around his neck, Joe identified himself as a graduate of our university, on campus to attend his 50^th reunion. “I’m taking pictures for the Coast Guard auxiliary newsletter. Would I be able to visit your classroom?” Papers done, eager to be the ever-accommodating teacher, my conscience now slightly assuaged, I led Joe into room 321.

Joe told me a little about himself while we waited for students to settle in. After WWII, he’d come to our university via the G.I. Bill, and the changes on campus since then amazed him. “I didn’t recognize the place,” he said, as much to himself, as to me.

“It’s a coincidence that you’re here today,” I told Joe, just before he walked to a seat at the back of the classroom. “We’ve been reading and writing about WWII, the Holocaust really. They’ve just been to the Holocaust Museum on Monday.”

A few years back, a friend in the department and I developed a first-year shared-reading curriculum focusing on social justice issues. During their first semester, all of our students visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of their Fiat Lux course (Latin: “let there be light”), and the idea for our project came from a student comment during a  classroom discussion of their trip.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 “I’m just so glad that the Holocaust is over,” a young woman said. “It’s such a relief that nothing will ever happen again.”

Images of Darfur and the Sudan crashed against her statement. I responded by listing genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust, but I knew a list of names was useless. Over lunch, I shared my experience, and from that unsuspecting student’s words, a curriculum was born. Broken into three parts--Gazing into the Abyss, the Burning of Human Beings, and Watching the World Burn--the middle section is rooted in writing about the Holocaust.

My class, on the day Joe visited, had just finished reading from that section: segments of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus and Marione Ingram’s essay “Operation Gomorrah.” As a class, we’d been concentrating on eliminating the general from our writing, and these richly textured pieces helped the students to see complexities they hadn’t considered before.

We began class by discussing their visit to the Holocaust Museum earlier that week. I asked the students which exhibit took the Holocaust from a historical notation to reality. They told each other about piles of old shoes, covered with a blue patina of mold; about the boxcar, some hesitating to enter, some offering a prayer as they walked through; about the pictures drawn by children, the recordings of survivors, the silence of visitors. All of them mentioned the Tower Room, a room stretching upward for three floors of the museum, four walls covered with photos of the 3,276 Jews of Monastir, Macedonia, none of whom survived their deportation to Treblinka. The photographs, while submitted to the local Nazi regime for tallying purposes, are poignant signs of ordinary life stopped short—graduation and wedding shots, families picnicking on summer lawns.

“It could have been me,” one of the students shared.

“It could have been any of us,” someone responded.

“What if my father had been a Nazi?” a blonde, blue-eyed boy asked. “Would I have been able to turn against my parents?”

Granted, this may have been the most difficult class of the semester, as students confronted the reality of human betrayal. Our journey through the semester would eventually take us to a brighter place, in our research of people and organizations that worked against oppression.

But, on this day, we still had to view a film clip from Sophie’s Choice. (If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, William Styron’s beautiful mix of American naivete and the residual effects of the Holocaust, put it on your list). The clip shows Sophie’s arrival at Auschwitz with her two young children. In a desperate plea, Sophie tells an SS officer that she’s a Polish Christian. He responds by offering her a choice of which child will be allowed to live. The clip ends with Sophie’s little girl screaming for her mother as the officer carries her away under his arm.                                                                                                                                                                                            

Pushing the button to start the clip, I remembered Joe. I’d looked back at him several times during class. He’d stopped taking pictures a while back, and he sat upright, with a deep look of concentration on his face.

The room was silent after the clip. I turned on the lights and honored the silence for a bit. “Well?” I asked. “Let’s put this all together. Reactions?”

Our recent class discussions examined the impossible choices represented in our sample of writing about the Holocaust. The students picked up that theme again, centering on the tragic resonance of Sophie’s choice and the implications for survivors, on the legacy of grief. Though the film clip is hard to watch, I’ve shown it so many times, led the ensuing discussion so many times, that I could predict the outcome.

Or, so I thought.

“May I say something?” Joe asked from the back of the room. The students seemed to have forgotten him there. One or two turned toward him.

“I was eighteen years old,” Joe began. “I was there.” The change in the classroom was physical. Every student—the majority of them just eighteen—moved, as if part of a rippling wave building momentum, adjusting their seats to look directly at Joe.

“My unit went to Auschwitz. We were one of the first at the camp.” Joe said. “It was…it was…,” Joe continued with a sob, raising his hands to cover his face, and the rest of his story became wet words wept into his hands. In that moment, history came alive in my classroom. Movie images faded away, and, for us, it was Joe standing at the gates of Auschwitz.

“Joe,” I began. My knowledge level plummeted, and I failed to find words significant enough. “Thank you for being there. Thank you for sharing with us.” The students nodded, almost in unison. One or two stopped to speak to Joe, and he was gone.

His presence was still in our classroom on Monday when we met again.  The students wrote about him, and many stopped by my office to discuss his visit. I told his story over and over again, knocking on colleague’s doors, ironically modeling Joe’s behavior on that previous Wednesday afternoon.

I could sense their withdrawal when I began my story. “Oh, that guy. I heard him in the hall, too,” was the universal reply. Some told me they also closed their doors, anxious not to be disturbed. But when I told them about Joe’s role in the liberation of Auschwitz, their faces changed, softening, welcoming the idea of my unannounced visitor.

As for me, I will always be rushing to finish a stack of papers, but Joe’s visit will stay with me for a long time. What did I learn from him? Lessons are everywhere, my friends. Sometimes history breathes. Don’t close the door. You might just miss it.

Reprinted with permission from JAEPL's wonderful editor, Dr. Joonna Trapp, Chair of Communications at King College.

Sunday, Jill Moyer. "History Lesson 101." JAEPL Vol.18 (Winter 2012-2013): 133-134. Print.

 

The Nada

Salvador Dali's Clock Explosion

Today, loss washes inside of me like the leftover milk in the bowl I carry to the sink. Each of my steps forces a thin skim of white over the bowl's blue insides. Sloshing precariously close to the edge of the rim, the liquid threatens to spill over, wetting my hands, my pants, my feet. If I'm careful, I can right the bowl and avert the mess.

I don't want to be careful, though. I want to send the bowl crashing, the muscles of my throwing arm stretching and flexing as the bowl splinters into jagged shards, the milk running down the wall in rivelets. As a young married woman, angry over something I can't even remember now, I hurled a bowl of chocolate pudding against our rented beige wall. The pudding stuck in clumps, sweet brown tumors holding their tremulous form until plopping onto the ruined dish.

I should make a gratitude list. I should reflect on the symbolic beauty of the flash of red bird against the bare branch. I should pull myself up by my damned bootstraps, and lay my face against the window glass to feel the sun's warmth.

Instead, emptiness wraps its arms around me, pulling my head close to its chest. "Fall into me," it croons, giving me the come-hither look I've come to know.

What's left are these: pale, still unformed eyelids that I couldn't save, no matter how hard I prayed; blue laundry stamps on white hospital sheets, rigor setting in; a cheap gray box marred by a spot of blood near the head; words--words I didn't say, words I shouldn't say, words I said; time wasted and measured and used up, flat now like Dali's clock; a woman I never knew crying for her children in the common room, rocking and rocking and rocking herself; meanness of spirit, you selfish girl, did you have to think so much of your sorry self?; so many souls scattered like grains of uncooked rice; pregnant moments on the edge of the sea, promise rising like ripples of waves touching my feet.

(I plant my feet firmly in the wet sand, grains whooshing out with the tide, throwing me off balance.
Still I fight not to fall, digging my heels deeper, though I lose, and I cannot breathe for the sand that plugs my nose.  The enormity of what has passed is too much, and I close my mind against the sum.)

Later, in the dark kitchen, I find myself pouring the milk into the sink drain and rinsing the dish with warm, clear water before setting the blue bowl intact on the counter.

Finding Truman



Photograph by Irving Penn, 1965



Truman,
are you there? Sometimes I hear
your next drink sloshing in the shaker,
small ice crystals frenzied in their swirl,
both numbing and greasing at once.

An olive, Mr. Capote?

Where does a mind like yours go
when a heart like yours ceases to beat?
If I breathe deeply enough,expanding my nostrils for maximum intake,
will one of the molecules expelled by you
find its way into me?
Will I then be breathing in a little of the Clutters,
a little more of Perry and Dick,
and some of the darkness you carried with you to the end?

Though I don't have 94% recall,
will you bleed through my pen,
creating havoc on my yellow legal pad?
If you could, Truman,
would you prime the pump for me?
Unleash the words clogging
my brain, help them drip and spread
into a pool of wonder on the page.
I'll see your reflection when I gaze upon it,
I promise.
In the meantime, Truman,
I'll continue to lead them
to the altar of you.

Break Out the Tap Shoes

Okay, so I'll admit that the classroom is all wrong. I'm teaching on the bottom floor this semester, in a squared-off white-block room primarily reserved for criminal justice classes. The residual vibes are hinky. When I enter the room, my mind seizes, all those shadow words about police procedure jamming my normal thought processes. My creative feelers are sticky from the nasty web in the doorway.

I'll also admit that the class is at 2:30. The grayed-out sky doesn't help. The students (and I) have too much to do.

But, come on...an eye roll? Really?

My class in the white-block room is called Teaching Writing, a course designed to help future teachers reverse the negativity many students feel about writing. My syllabus argues that words and ideas can change the world. I do believe in the transformative power of writing, just as Professor Keating does in Dead Poets Society. Mentally, I rip, rip, rip the formalist pages out of J. Evans Pritchard's Introduction to Literature. I throw my ideas about teaching writing into the air, hoping that they break open in front of my students' eyes, that at least one idea will be carried home to sprout.

Tonight I'm feeling like the room won.

Next week I'll go back, carrying my passion for writing like a disfiguring hump on my back. "Look at me!" I'll cry, just before I strap on my shiny black tap shoes.

Words for a New Year

The last really festive, on-the-town New Year's Eve I remember happened the year before my oldest son was born. And by festive I mean: party dresses in red and black silk, drinks in little bars all over Mt. Washington, dinner at a schmancy fancy restaurant overlooking the crisply-lit city, champagne toasts, noisemakers, and drunken kisses at midnight. I remember a heart-to-heart with my friend Elaine in the ladies' room just minutes after the clock struck 1983--heads together, we smiled at our reflections and the seductive promise of our pretty lives hovering in front of us like holograms.

The next year my son, Matty, was only two months old, so we stayed in, our little family wrapped up in the comfort of our tiny family room in the little Bethel Park colonial, and that night held new magic for us. We spent the next series of eves family style with friends, all of us balancing babies, toddlers, and paper cups. For a while, nothing seemed to change. Then, suddenly, we were on our own again, our children away or at parties, our friends opting to stay close to home, all of us on call just in case someone needed a ride home.

Tonight, finds me at home, still. High heels click on the bathroom floor above me; the shower switching on and off as my children get ready to meet the New Year. I will still have a kiss at midnight, but I'll probably be balancing a book along with my champagne flute.

If I can't be twenty-something, dressed in red silk, standing on the edge of my future, I'll be content to be this book-worm me, tome in hand, leaning against the love of my life, waiting for another year of our lives to begin.

Here's some of the books I read since the clock struck 2012. Just like the parts of my life, some will make you laugh, and some will make you cry. Cheers.

The Sandcastle Girls, Chris Bohjalian
      I just finished this beauty, a heart-wrenching love story set in Turkey during the 1915 Armenian
      Genocide, as discovered and revealed by the lovers' surburban American granddaughter. Details
      of box cars crammed with starving Armenian women forshadow the coming Holocaust, as
      German officials (then allies to Turkey) marvel at the inhumanity of the "situation." Against the
      bleak desert backdrop, the war's victimization of women is etched on the reader's mind.

The Middlesteins, Jami Attenberg
       A dysfunctional family is set spinning by a father's divorce from a brilliant, but
       domineering mother who won't stop eating--a searing portrait of family love and disgust, an
       examination of how we nourish or starve each other in relationships. As I
       read The Middlesteins, I couldn't help but think about a lesson hard learned in my life...once
       they're gone, they're gone.

Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley
        A writerof historical fiction feels a strong pull to New Slains Castle at Cruden Bay in Scotland,
       where she is compelled to write (channels?) the story of an ancestor who was involved in a plot
       to reinstate King James.The plot parallels the two women's lives in modern day and 18th-century
       Scotland. As a writer, I enjoyed reading about Carrie's process, especially that "other-worldly"
       connection to information that somehow appears in my brain.

 

In Between Days, Andrew Porter        
     An incident at college involving a middle-class couple's youngest daughter, Chloe, rocks the
     entire family. This beautifully-written novel forces us to examine the power of white versus    
     Muslim in America, frightening us with the results of blanket prejudice and loss, leaving us to
     wonder about our own racism and what lengths we must go to to find hope.

The Hypnotist's Love Story, Liane Moriarty    
     Combine a well-meaning stalker, her ex and his young son, and a hypnotist for a sometimes
     funny, sometimes sadly revealing of human nature read. Moriarity balances her characters
     well, equitably revealing both warts and halos...even of the stalker, as she enters the hypnotist's
     kitchen to make her a batch of muffins. The question really raised here involves the
     consequences we must face when we casually move on, in effect, discarding a human being from
     our lives.

        
Heading Out to Wonderful, Robert Goodrick         
     Charlie Beale settles down in small town America after his return from WWII. All around
     good-guy, Charlie falls victim to greed and lust, becoming the town outcast--tragic chronicle
     of America's spoiling from within. Goodrick is Faulker without the page-long sentences.
     Equally haunting, Heading Out to Normal exposes the greedy center of American life that
     threatens to consume us all. Picture Jay Gatsby in the midwest without the parties.

Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness
         The second in Harkness' All Souls Trilogy, this book takes us from present-day New England to
         Elizabethan London, where Diana Bishop  and Matthew Clermont (witch and vampire)
         continue their hunt for Ashmole 787, an illusive manuscript that contains the secrets of
        "creatures" (witches, vampires, and daemons). Note: we meet Christopher Marlowe as a
         daemon! Harkness seems to have found a better balanced pace for her plot in this second
         volume.

The Beginner's Goodbye, Anne Tyler
        Anne Tyler is today's best popular novelist at navigating the shadow's of the human heart. In this
        short work, almost a novella, Tyler introduces us to Aaron, a vanity publisher who has long
        struggled with a physical infirmity, but who now is devastated by the loss of his wife Dorothy--
        sturdy, practical, Doctor Dorothy. When Dorothy begins to appear in Aaron's life once more his
        journey begins again.

      
The Street Sweeper, Eliot Perlman
        Complex characters bring together the American Civil Rights movement and the Holocaust in
        this lyrical novel. The tension is palpable from the first chapter as we meet Lamont Williams, a
        man recently paroled from prison, who struggles to keep his job as a sanitation worker at a local
        hospital. A novel full of surprises, Perlman's words wrap us in the hope and devastation of the
        human condition.

      


The Rebel Wife, Taylor Polites  

Set in the in the aftermath of the Civil War, The Rebel Wife is both suspenseful and thought-provoking, as Augusta Branson,

former Southern belle married off to a seeming carpet bagger,

must survive by her wits after her husband dies from a mysterious illness. Polites offers insight into the turmoil and betrayal that must have been the reality of the South shortly after the end of the war.

The Lost Saints of Tennessee, Amy Franklin Willis
       Ezekiel Cooper and his family (a passle of siblings, including a mentally-handicapped twin
       brother and his fire-hearted southern mama, Lillian) provide the emotional backdrop for a
       modern novel of the south, full of angst and healing. Think male version of The Divine Secrets
       the Ya-Ya Sisterhood  (Rebecca Wells) or Prince of Tides (Pat Conroy).

American Dervish, Ayad Akhtar

       The coming of age story of young Hayat Shah, an American boy living in the suburbs with his  Pakistani parents, this novel focuses on the arrival of Mina, the beautiful friend of Hayat's mother who comes to live with his family. Mina takes on the role of religious tutor, teaching Hayat about the Quran. Confused by the power of his emerging sexual identity and what he perceives to be morally right, Hayat betrays the lovely Mina, essentially condemning her to a miserable

existence.

Prayers for Sale, Sandra Dallas
       A home-spun tale of women who struggle to survive the physical hardships, weather extremes,
      and constant loss that exist in a 19th-century Colorado mountain mining community. Dallas
      bookends the life cycle with two predominent women: Nit, the 17-year-old bride who knocks
      on mountain matriarch Hennie's door after seeing Hennie's yard sign offering prayers for sale.

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
      A love triangle begins simmering between three Brown college students beginning in the 1980s.
      Madeline, the lit major researching the Victorian marriage plot; Leonard, the beautiful and
      brilliant science major, locked in the early stages of bipolar disease; and Mitchell, the religion
      major, all-around good guy in love with Madeline. Masterfully written, we are invested in all of
      Eugenides' characters as they rise and fall with and without each other.

 

 

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
       If you haven't read Gone Girl, put it at the top of your list. Set aside the block of time you'll need
       to read 432 pages of this rollercoaster of a novel about "until death do us part," this rock'em
       sock'em robot word fight, this labyrinth of plot and suspense. Just remember this, when you open
       the pages of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, remember: nothing is what it seems.

Facebook Ghosts

The news came in a public place.

"Let me just make one quick call," I told my daughter, Laura. Leaning our heads together over the small table at Panera, we'd been laughing over something funny, the particulars lost to me now, one last day together before she flew back to her separate life in California. She left the table for a minute, for a napkin, some ice? I don't remember now. I made the call, and Laura found me, head in hands, mascara pooling on my fingers. The familiar settings of Panera-- the upholstered booths, the rectangular tables, the people with cups in hand--all blurred and faded from my field of vision.

"Mom? What's wrong?" she asked, dipping her face in front of my bowed head. Poor girl--I'm sure she thought the worst about one of our family members, so undone was I.

It took a while for her to understand. A friend was dead, not because cancer had eaten her from within or because a car took flight. This friend chose her end.

We'd known each other for 30 years, two women in an original band of friends long dissolved by betrayal and divorce. Somehow, we'd stayed connected, rising and falling in and out of each other's lives over the years. We took different paths, me to marriage and four children--her to seeking love in all the wrong places, a quest by a dangerous and willful beauty.

The stories I've heard about my friend's death must surely be incorrect, I think. I want to ask Elaine: did you hear what they're saying about you? I want to tell them: there's no way that the glorious woman who once told me, when I was in a rough spot, "you know, Jill, God cares for you. He holds you in His hand. Don't you ever despair" is the same woman who cut the tendons in her right wrist one week and hanged herself the next.

Still, she seems to be gone. In the weeks after her death, I typed her name into the "search for people, places and things" bar on Facebook, just in case. I clicked through her albums, running my mouse over her image like a caress. In some photos, her head is thrown back in gleeful laughter, sun bouncing off of her blonde hair. In others, she looks straight at the camera--a "take me as I am" glint in her eyes.

One day, a curious post appeared in the midst of the "I will always remember you"s and the "I know I'll see you again"s. This one read: "I know you are all right now. Thank you for that." Oh, how I wanted the story behind that post. I thought about "liking" it and adding a comment: "Please message me and tell me how you know she is all right!" Somehow writing about her, around her, through her on her own now lifeless page seemed wrong, so I moved my finger away from the Enter key. I'll probably check again.