I'm More Brilliant Than I Look

My fifth novel, The Sisters Montclair, has recently launched and I’ve been visiting a lot of book clubs.  I’m always slightly apprehensive at these face-to-face meetings, because I have the impression that Cathy Holton in Person, is somehow less impressive than Cathy Holton the Writer.  Looking around at the polite faces as I drone on about some event that colored my last novel, I often wonder if I’m on the verge of putting my listeners to sleep.

Flannery O’Connor once complained, when discussing an upcoming television interview, that she was afraid she’d stare blankly at the camera and utter such memorable lines as “Huh?” and “Ah dunno,” to the interviewer’s questions. I know exactly what she meant.  On the page, writers can make themselves sound witty and erudite.  We have the advantage of that most essential tool of good prose; the rewrite.  We can sit in a darkened room for days constructing and reconstructing one line until we get it perfect.  To a reader it may seem that our perfection is innate, a lucky coincidence of fate and natural-born talent, but I can tell you it’s actually the result of a great deal of hard work and determination.  It takes a lot of effort to be funny, or philosophical, or blindingly lyrical.  Any writer who tells you otherwise is bluffing.  There are few geniuses among us.  Most of us are just competent liars with a good work ethic.

At a recent book club meeting, an admiring reader read out several lines she had bookmarked in one of my novels.  

“Did I write that?” I deadpanned.   Much laugher.  (Occasionally, I can be entertaining.)

The truth is, I remember that passage very well.  I must have worked on it for weeks, rewriting, deleting, rewriting, circling back with a frenzied determination that only a true obsessive compulsive could appreciate.  But in the end, I wrote something that was good, something that I can be proud of for years to come.  A passage that makes me appear, to the casual reader at least, like something of a literary genius. 

Now if only I could rewrite my personal appearances. 

Last Bus to Crazytown

My husband and I are empty nesters. Our youngest child went off to college in the fall and last winter, anticipating this event, I did what any hormonally imbalanced woman would do.

I went down to the local animal shelter and adopted a rescue puppy.

And this is not just any rescue puppy, mind you. This is a rescue puppy with plenty of emotional baggage. (Think Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) It seems our shy puppy, only three weeks old, had been found huddling with his three siblings under a bush on Christmas Eve after witnessing their stray mother get hit by a car. One of the puppies had already died of exposure. The others were taken in by a loving foster mother who rose every few hours for three weeks to hand-feed these poor orphans.

We named him Yoshi, which means “good” in Japanese.

We were as anxious as any new parents might be to raise this one right. We bought every dog-rearing book we could find. We’d had dogs before when the children were small, Jack Russell “Terrorists”, my husband called them, but we’d been too harried and over-burdened as parents to pay much attention to the dogs.

Yoshi has a group of plush animals, his “babies”, that he sucks every night as he’s falling asleep, as diligently as my children used to suck their thumbs. He rides with us in the car, goes for long walks in the park, sits between us on the sofa at night watching television.

Worrying about his socialization skills, we took him to the dog park. He didn’t do well. He seemed horrified by these strange four-legged creatures that bounded over, intent on ramming their noses up his ass. He sat down abruptly and leaned against my leg, humiliated and confused.

Thinking he might find a better class of playmate, we took him to a local doggy daycare. The woman in charge, who my husband fondly calls “The Commandant,” stuck him alone in a room with a large, overly friendly Doberman. (She raises Dobermans, of course). When Yoshi squealed in fright at the slobbery advances of the Doberman, the Commandant claimed that he was a “fearful dog” totally unsuitable for daycare. “You have no way of telling with these mixed breeds,” she told me. “Why he’s the way he is.”

Did I detect a bias against mixed-breeds? Oh no she did – ant.

I insisted Yoshi be given a week’s trial. As far as I was concerned, he showed more intelligence than any of these over bred, muscle-bound, pedigreed dogs she seemed so proud of. Every morning Yoshi rose and when told he was “going to school”, pranced, tail-wagging with excitement, toward the door. Every day at naptime I picked him up from daycare, hopeful that he’d managed to make a few friends. On Friday, the Commandant crooked her finger and indicated I should follow her into the office. Yoshi was being expelled. He had only made two friends but they were in the little dog class and he was too big to play with them. The big dogs didn’t like him. He wasn’t a team player.

I came home with a lump in my throat, imagining Yoshi friendless on the playground. Sitting by himself at the lunchroom table. Not being invited for slumber parties at the more popular dogs’ houses.

“Never mind,” my husband sniffed. “We both know Yoshi is gifted. He’s too intelligent and sensitive for those other dogs.”

I blew my nose, pouring us both a stiff drink. “Do you think we should adopt again?” I asked . “So he won’t have to be an only dog?”

Helicopter Parents

I’ll admit it. I am one. I raised three children and I tried to make their lives as happy and trouble-free as I could. Because I’m a good mother and I only wanted the best for them. I didn’t want them to suffer from bullies, mean authority figures, social events they weren't invited to, bad grades they occasionally made, sporting teams they didn’t make, all those traumatic events that characterized so much of my trouble-laden early life.

I just wanted my children to be happy.

And guess what? They’re not. As young adults, they worry about everything. They fret over every little bump in the road of life they encounter. A boss who treats one of them unfairly is a “psychopath.” A boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn’t return their affection can cause a month-long depression. A job that one performs diligently is suddenly eliminated in a down economy – how fair is that?

The answer, of course, is it’s not fair. Because life isn’t fair. My generation knew that. So why did we raise our children to believe that it is?

My husband recently read an article about administrators who are seeing waves of ill-prepared children entering college, children who’ve never made a bad grade in school, or been cut from a sports team, or had to arrange their own social calendar, much less done their own laundry or kept a check book. Children who’ve been protected from failure all their lives and so have come to expect that life is fair.

When I was a girl, I didn’t get a new bicycle just because everyone else on the street got one. If I made a bad grade in school, my parents didn’t call the teacher and request I be allowed to retake the test because I might not get into the right college. On the few occasions when they attended one of my basketball games, they didn’t call the coach afterwards to see what I could do to get more court time.

I learned that sometimes things work out and sometimes life sucks. I learned that failure means picking yourself up, trying a little harder next time, and going on.

And, hopefully, my children will learn that, too. Eventually. Once I stop hovering.

Marie Antoinette is Alive and Living on the Upper East Side

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a “Housewives” junkie. It’s my dirty little secret.

Having made it through “The Real Housewives of Orange County” (trailer trash on silicone) and “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” (entertaining but fake), I’m hooked, absolutely hooked, on “The Real Housewives of New York City.”

Is it me, or do the Housewives of NYC remind you of being back in high school? First, there’s Alex and her creepy, secretly-gay boyfriend (husband) trying desperately to break into the popular clique. I wanted to like Alex, I really did. She’s from the Midwest and she’s a graphic designer. But then there was the naked-on-the-beach St. Bart’s episode and all the talk about “au pair girls” and knowing the “right people,” not to mention the conversations with her children involving pretentious smatterings of French. And don’t get me started on poor Francois and Johan, those long-haired, French-speaking little darlings destined for a life of school yard bullying. How do you say please don’t kick my ass in French? Really, what are their parents thinking?

And then there’s Ramona, who likes to describe herself as “ladylike” and “classy”, while wearing a tiny bikini and engaging in martini-fueled horseplay around the pool in front of her humiliated thirteen-year-old daughter. Go mom. Ramona’s one of those people who says whatever she wants without any regard for anyone else’s feelings, and then seems genuinely surprised when it all backfires. She’s the girl in high school who tried to make you feel guilty for getting on the pill, who boasted she’d be a virgin when she married, who swore she wasn’t having sex with her boyfriend and later got pregnant her junior year.

Jill reminds me of the girl who grew up in a trailer on the wrong side of town but despite her humble origins, still manages to snag one of the rich boys. She wears her insecurities on her sleeve, only in Jill’s case it’s a Herve Leger sleeve. It gets a little old hearing her brag about spending $8,000 on a Birkin bag or complaining about losing her housekeeper as if it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to her; but then she cries when her daughter leaves for Paris or she mentions that her mother used to hound her about her weight when she was a girl, and I can’t help but feel sorry for her. (Is it just me or is Jill’s mother seriously scary?)

Kelly’s the cheerleader who’s always gotten by on her charm and good looks. But don’t cross her. Behind that pretty facade lies a borderline psychopathic personality. (Think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction). And really, the fake tan has got to go. (Not that I would ever tell her this, of course, not unless she was safely trussed up, Hannibal Lector style.)

And Bethenny? Well she’s my peeps. If she and I had gone to high school together, we’d have been good, good friends (as we say in the South). Bethenny wields sarcasm like a scalpel (“Cher called. She wants her outfit back.”) Despite her new fake boobs, there’s something real about her. I can imagine us smoking cigarettes in the girls’ bathroom, sharing a bottle of tequila out at the lake, or sneaking out of my window on a Friday night. (Not that I ever did those things, Mom. Really.)

And then there’s the Countess. LuAnn. Who I used to admire for her openness, before I realized that the openness was really just another side of self-conceit. If I had to place LuAnn in high school, I’d describe her as the self-absorbed Homecoming Queen. The night she corrected Bethenny for having introduced her to the limo driver as “LuAnn” instead of “Countess de Lesseps” I knew I was going to have a problem with LuAnn. The whole thing was so very Let-Them-Eat-Cake. This is America, and we don’t give a damn about things like titles, LuAnn, so get over yourself. Seriously.

Which brings me back to the whole addictive quality of the show; the fact that I feel I know each of these women intimately and can like or dislike them accordingly. I’m a guilty voyeur. As Bethenny says, while watching from the sidelines of a tension-filled tennis match, “It’s like watching someone skin an animal alive.”

My husband always groans and leaves the room when he sees the show is on. But later, as I’m climbing into bed, he wants to know what happened on tonight’s episode. The hypocrite.

He’s as bad as Ramona.

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Scarlett O’Hara

Seriously, y’all.

My daughters, raised on semi-militant feminism, have no idea what it was like growing up in the sixties and seventies. Female role models, at least for Southern girls who came from “good people”, tended to run along the lines of Homecoming Queen, Cheerleader, President of the Home Ec Club, Miss Snellville Beach, or for the truly big dreamers among us, Miss America. My own gentle Southern mother, a former Miss Crisp County, watching once as I, in a fit of sullen adolescent rage beat a long line of boys for the church table tennis championship, remarked in despair, “Can’t you ever let the boys win?”

No, mother, I cannot.

Part of my adolescent angst was due to the fact that I couldn’t find any female role models out there who I thought were remotely like me. I was an outcast, an anomaly. Raised on Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Marcia Brady I was taught that girls should be (a) pretty, (b) sweet, (c) self-sacrificing, and (d) smart, but not too smart. Certainly my own mother was a shining example of these virtues (except for the last one, she was smart as a whip but kept it to herself.) I, on the other hand, could not manage any of them. I had a bad temper and a tendency to curse like a mafia don when crossed. I was competitive at sports. I spent very little time in front of my Miss Clairol Lighted Make-up Mirror (a gift from my hopeful mother), preferring a pair of faded jeans and one of my father’s old shirts to the tailored pantsuits that were popular in those days. A voracious reader, I had a tendency to be overbearing and opinionated in a classroom setting. I couldn’t have been more miserable or insecure.

And then a wondrous thing happened. I picked up a copy of Gone with the Wind, and my life changed forever.

A true feminist would perhaps find little in Katie Scarlett to admire but to a girl like me she was a godsend. Yes, she was vain and deceitful and selfish, but those traits made her real. She wasn’t some lace and sugar confection meant to be put up on a pedestal and admired from afar; she was down and dirty and cunning as any male.

When I announced my new-found literary ideal that night at dinner my father, an old-school Southern gentleman who never cursed around my mother and I, looked up from his plate and said, “Scarlett O’Hara! Scarlett O’Hara was a ...bitch!”

My mother looked at my father in shocked dismay and said, “Lamar!”
My two brothers snorted and elbowed each other like a couple of frat boys.
“Melanie Hamilton is the true heroine of that novel,” my father said.
“Melanie Hamilton is an insipid milk-toast,” I replied.
“Leave the table!” my father roared.

I knew then that I was on the right track.

Here are the things I learned from Scarlett O’Hara that I have tried to pass on to my own daughters.

1. If you truly want something, go out and get it.
2. Don’t expect a man to make you happy.
3. Be self-sufficient.
4. Don’t waste your time worrying about what small-minded people think.
5. Don’t fear challenges in life; they build character.
6. Don’t be afraid to show people who you really are.
7. Embrace your true nature; your faults as well as your virtues.
8. Never give up on love.
9. Always be hopeful for the future.

So go ahead, label me. Call me a smartass, tell me I’m foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, poorly-dressed. Call me a bitch.

Frankly, sir, I don’t give a damn.

The Literary Life

As a teenager, I used to imagine my future life as a writer. I imagined myself twenty years into the future living in a cottage overlooking the Irish Sea, dressed in a pair of silk pajamas, a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, churning out novels that brought me international acclaim. I imagined a life of quiet seclusion, my only interruptions the daily mail drop, bags and bags of letters from adoring fans who would be content to worship my literary genius from afar.

Fast-forward thirty years to the hard, cold reality of my life as a writer. (a) I’ve never been to Ireland, (b) my fan mail arrives in the form of occasional emails that I’m always thrilled to get, (c) I spend most days dressed in a pair of baggy sweatpants and a stained t-shirt, and (d) I never write clutching a cigarette and a martini (well, not a cigarette anyway).

Writing is no longer about living a life of quiet seclusion. With the advent of podcasts, web sales rankings, and televised book reviews, it’s all about marketing, baby. Image has become just as important as substance. The cult of Youth and Beauty has finally infiltrated the publishing world.

Take a look at the cover photos of some of the writers on the best-selling lists and you’d swear they just walked off the pages of Vogue. Even the literary writers (although done up in tasteful black and white, of course), manage to look youthfully arrogant and, well, fabulous. My son, a Photoshop Wizard, assures me that, with a little work, he can make me look fabulous too.

And I thought all you had to do to be a best-selling writer was write a good book. Silly me.

Byron had a club foot. I’m pretty sure if he wanted to make it in today’s media-saturated publishing market he’d have to do something about that. My new novel, Beach Trip, is set to launch in May and I’m already feeling the pressure for a makeover. I’m thinking fifty pounds, a jowl lift, and a professional teeth-bleaching at the very least.

Forget ghost-writing; the trend of the future will be for ghost-doppelgangers, younger, more attractive actors to fill in on the media circuit for aging, fabulous-challenged writers.

One of my daughters, who looks exactly like I did twenty (okay, thirty) years ago, would be the perfect fill-in for me. I told her with my talent and her looks we’d hit the best-seller lists in no time, we’d be a shoe-in for Oprah and Good Morning America. She thought the idea demeaning to women (she’s currently taking a feminist literature class and has lost her sense of humor.)

Besides, she’s twenty-one. She looks like a goddess. What does she know?

Yes, We Can

I’m watching the news this morning about all the hoop-la over Obama’s upcoming inauguration. Should he tone it down, given the economy, or should he throw down in a big way, given the historical significance of his election? Should Michelle wear designer duds or shop at Target? As if the guy doesn’t have bigger things to worry about!

I have to say, though, despite all the bad news coming from the television anchors (have you ever noticed how these people seem almost gleeful as they deliver their forecasts of doom and destruction?), I have this inner feeling of optimism. I have this gut feeling that everything is going to be all right.

Call me crazy, but I miss the days of Bill. Bill Clinton could sell a double bed to the Pope. He could sell you chicken shit and make you believe it was chicken salad (to paraphrase another of our fine Southern presidents, LBJ). And maybe that’s what this country has been missing for the past eight years. A president who could make us believe, really believe, in chicken shit.

Not that I’m lumping Barack Obama in with Bill Clinton. He has something of Bill’s calm, unflappable demeanor but in Obama it’s more an air of studied resolve, of steady determination to see a job through.

I was never quite sure if Bill, despite his obvious intelligence, was seeing the big picture. Obama’s grave countenance the evening he celebrated his historic win in Grant Park, tells me he does see the big picture, and is approaching what history may call some of our country’s darkest days, with the requisite combination of courage, boldness, and tenacity. And somehow, despite all the bad news, this comforts me.

Maybe it’s because I read history. Maybe it’s because I know that, during those moments of extreme crisis in our nation’s history, we’ve always managed to produce a leader who helps us rise above failure, division, and despair. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Barack Obama?

Miracles happen every day. If we believe.

Damn, That Girl Can Write

Anyone who reads my novels knows I love dark humor. The darker, the better. And no one does dark humor better than the British. I discovered Hilary Mantel years ago while browsing through an out-of-the way bookstore. I read Everyday is Mothers Day, followed by the sequel, Vacant Possession. The novels revolve around Muriel Axom, the hulking, psychopathic, idiot savant daughter of a medium trying to eke out a living in a crumbling English middle-class suburb. Muriel is a truly evil character and yet also strangely compelling and childlike. It’s a testament to Mantel’s ability as a writer that she can create a character who evokes such strong conflicting emotions. Slowly, patiently, and diabolically Muriel plots her revenge on people who have been cruel to her, including her own mother. Her transformation in Vacant Possession, set against the staid, bourgeoisie background of the Sidney family, is by turns grotesque, horrific and comic.

Mantel is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including The Orange Prize for Fiction (Beyond Black). She is a fine writer but she’s not for the squeamish. Her novel, The Giant, O’Brien is the story of an Irish giant who exhibits himself on the London curiosity circuit in the 1780’s. Charlie O’Brien is also an Irish storyteller who entertains the human oddities he travels with, the dwarfs, bearded ladies, prostitutes, and pinheads. At eight feet tall, he’s a celebrity of the circuit, but he’s also begun to grow again, which means he’s dying. It’s at this time that he comes to the attention of John Hunter, the brilliant Scottish anatomist who determines that he must have the Giant O’Brien’s skeleton for his collection. The novel is slim, but Mantel manages to capture in her spare language the essence of the eighteenth century, with its cruelty, hypocrisy, and dawning preoccupation with scientific research. It’s the story of two remarkable men, set against the dying of the old world, and the birth of the modern age.

My favorite book of Mantel’s, however, is her autobiography Giving Up the Ghost, which can be enjoyed by everyone. It’s one of those books that, as a writer, I can so clearly relate to, pages where she describes what it’s like to be an imaginative child, a storyteller, an introvert in an extroverted world. She also describes what it’s like to be an intelligent woman, an academic, in a man’s world of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Her lifelong struggle with endometriosis, her misdiagnosis and subsequent battle with the medical establishment over her own body, are conflicts women everywhere can relate to.

Kudos, Hilary. You go girl.