In Deep: competition and other unhealthy impulses

Book + beer + boat = my kind of summer day

A couple weeks ago, my wonderfully talented friend Terra Elan McVoy invited me to join some other author friends of hers in celebrating the launch of her new book, In Deep, by sharing our own stories of when we got ourselves into something way in over our heads. As I mulled over the book, which is about a high school girl getting way too ensnared by her need to compete in every aspect of her life, it reminded me of the highlight of my own crappy teenage behavior, so I wrote about that for Terra here (it's the second entry on the page).

In Deep is an interesting, challenging book, and I felt it was important to talk about the ways in which I related to it. Other people might respond negatively to the book because the main character, Brynn, is "unlikable," but this book to me is an example of an unlikable main character who really works. Let's be clear here: Brynn is a little jerk. She cheats on her boyfriend without a moment's hesitation, and she does it with the guy her best friend is dating. She spends a lot of the book blowing off her schoolwork and blaming other people for her problems. A sweet, appealing character she is not. But what she is, is real, and honest, and complicated. She is also pathologically competitive, which is a trait that I personally happen to find fascinating (I put a pathologically competitive character in my own book who also happens to be a swimmer--as I said to Terra, I think that of all the elite athletes in the world, people who compete for wins where the margin is literally hundredths of a second have got to be the most intense of all). And I can relate to that competitiveness. Especially when I think back to how I behaved when I was sixteen: I was a hell of a lot more selfish then. I wanted to win at everything, including boys. And then I started to grow up and become a better human being--just like Brynn does in this book, in a really believable and heartbreaking way.

All in all, I think the character that Terra built in In Deep is fascinating. Brynn is a young girl obsessed with proving her strength, both physical and mental, and maintaining that strength at all costs. Through her, we see a glimpse of the extraordinary discipline and mental toughness that elite athletes have to possess, and the ways in which that same toughness can turn corrosive if it's not channeled the right way. Brynn is not somebody I'd particularly want to be buddies with, no, but I cared what happened to her, and got drawn into her story just the same. This book is a terrific study in exploring some of the more unsavory parts of human nature, and showing how they can ruin us if we let them.

Summer of Summer: The From-Aways, and some tips for steaming clams!

The opening line of my friend and agent sister-wife CJ Hauser's incredible debut novel, THE FROM-AWAYS, is so good that I can recite it from memory. "I have two lobsters in my bathtub and I'm not sure I can kill them." That right there is one of those powerful first sentences that both intrigues you and lets you know you're going to be in good hands as the story unfolds. Leah, one of the book's two narrators, has moved with her new husband from Manhattan to the small Maine fishing village where he grew up, in an attempt to dig down and create roots she's never had. Cooking lobsters, Leah feels sure, will be a shortcut to those roots, via a sacred local culinary tradition. "This is my plan: I will get blind drunk and then I will kill these lobsters," she decides. Except, she looks at their wiry antennae and spotted backs and can't bring herself to kill them.

The more I read, the more I've come to realize how easily I'm hooked by the power and uniqueness of an author's voice, and this book has one of the strongest voices I've encountered in a long time. Even though Leah and the book's other narrator, Quinn, have their own distinct character voices, they are unmistakably (and brilliantly) created by the same person. And the rest of the book is as good as the opening, as the two women dig deeper into their relationships and enmesh themselves in the town's problems. Nothing is pat in this book, nothing is tidy; the protagonists make bad decisions, and decent people do bad things with good intentions. It's vibrant and wise and wonderfully real, and brings its salty setting vividly to life.

The weekend after CJ's book was released, some other sister-wives and I ended up throwing a slightly spastic virtual dinner party on Twitter in celebration, and I decided to make it into an actual meal. Except, when I actually thought about it, I couldn't kill lobsters, either. I readily admit to being an absolute hypocrite here, because it's not that I have an issue with the eating of lobsters--I will eat the crap out of a lobster that somebody else has already killed. Can't do it myself, though. Nope. They have eyes.

Clams, though, are another matter. Steamed clams, plus drawn butter and cold beer, happen to be one of my top five favorite summer meals, and while I know they're just as alive as lobsters when they get put in that pot, they're a hell of a lot less sentient. Allen and I first attempted a clam steam over Memorial Day, with fairly poor results--the clams took forever to cook, and since we didn't want to overcook them, we were pulling them out of the pot as they opened, three or four at a time. I decided to try it again, and, with the help of my friendly neighborhood seafood shop, Fish Tales, I can declare my solo clamfest to have been a rousing success. Here are the critical things to keep in mind:

my Summer of Summer clamfest

1. If you can, buy the clams from a local fish purveyor rather than a chain grocery store--they will be fresher and better quality. On our first attempt, out of the six dozen we bought from the grocery store, about 20% of them turned out to be dead. When I bought them from Fish Tales, every single one of the four dozen clams was alive.

2. But still, buy maybe a half-dozen more than you think you'll actually want to eat, just in case of casualties. Casualties include any clams with cracked shells, or any that simply never open after being cooked--those aren't safe to eat.

3. Do the cornmeal thing. When you're ready to eat your clams, one of the prep steps is to bathe them in cool water for 30-60 minutes, to prompt them to spit out any grit they have inside. I tried the suggestion I'd seen, of shaking a little cornmeal into the water to encourage the clams to spit, and it definitely seemed to work. Once they've sat for their assigned time, scrub the shells to make sure any last grit is gone, and then you're ready.

4. I prepared mine straight up--no wine or herbs in the broth, though there are plenty of recipes like that. The only flavor I added was to sautee a minced clove of garlic in the pan for a couple minutes before I put the liquid and clams in.

5. Put them all into a big steamer pot (I used my cast iron Dutch oven) with just a little bit of liquid at the bottom. I used about 3/4 of water for four dozen clams. They can all go in at once.

6. Cook them for longer than you think you need to. When we looked online, recipes were saying to cook them for 3-5 minutes... this is FALSE. The guys at Fish Tales told me ten minutes for my four dozen clams, and they were right on the money. We were used to steaming mussels, which literally only need about 2-3 minutes of cooking before they're ready, and which will quickly lose texture if they get overcooked. But clams have much thicker shells than mussels, so it takes longer for the heat to penetrate, and also their hold on their shells is stronger, so it takes more time for them to cook enough to release. Cause what happens, we learned on our first attempt, is if you start checking your clams after five minutes, you'll see a few ready, but the rest will need more time; and meanwhile you've just let a bunch of your hot steamy air out when you checked. Resist the urge to check. Let 'em steam.

7. Use salted butter to make the drawn butter. Recipes I saw said to use unsalted, but I far prefer the salty flavor, and it makes no difference in the mechanics of preparing the butter. (Boil it for a minute, let it cool undisturbed, and then skim off the solids without mixing them back into the clear melted butter beneath.)

8. Prepare copious lemon. I am a whore for lemon juice in all of its forms, and squeezing it over seafood is one of the most important forms. I don't like a delicate little spritz, I go to town. I got through 3/4 of a lemon all on my own with my clams.

So there you have it--possibly the world's first and only book review/clam steaming how-to. But in the Summer of Summer, these things go together.

And your tune for this post makes even less sense, unless you're my husband, his brother, or my sister-in-law. Paul Davis, " '65 Love Affair." Just substitute the word "clam" for "love" every time he says "65 love affair," and don't worry about it too much. It's summer. Enjoy your clams, everybody.

The Opposite of Love: a case study in "no two persons ever read the same book."

The Opposite of Love

As a writer, I thought I was pretty comfortable with the notion that every reader brings their own personality, and their own baggage, along with them to every reading experience. It makes sense--we're all different, so we will all absorb a creative experience like reading a book in different ways. We run every book we read through our own personal filter.

When an early draft of my book, The One That Got Away, was in its initial-feedback stage, mixed in among the helpful critiques I received was one that was such, in my view, a strong over-reaction to a very small element of the story that it seemed obvious the book had touched on one of that reader's personal sore spots. I mined the critique for what I found helpful, and shrugged off the hyperbole. It was a lesson in how sometimes reviews are much more about the reader than the book.

I had this experience again recently, from the other side of the coin. I had just finished Julie Buxbaum's The Opposite of Love, and as I often do with books I really respond to, I dipped into Amazon and Goodreads to see what other readers had to say. The type of comments I saw there:

"This is a refreshingly smart chick-lit novel."

"This is a novel about a young woman finding out who she is."

"This story is about a Manhattan attorney who breaks up with her boyfriend and then has to figure out what she wants from her life."

Which, yes. Absolutely. All of those things are true.

But what I didn't see as I skimmed the reviews, and I grew more and more surprised at its absence as I skimmed, was:

"This is a story about a young woman coping with the loss of her mother."

And then it hit me: that was my baggage. My sore spot. The reason that what stood out to me about the book was not the Manhattan-attorney part or the smart-chick-lit part or the self-discovery part was that all those parts got caught in my filter. What made it through the filter, what felt to me like the purest essence of the book, was the theme of loss. How it damages us, how it haunts us, how it hurts us, long after we think it should still be able to. How we try to protect ourselves from it.

What's fascinating to me is that both my take on the book, and the take of readers who focused on the storyline more than the theme, are accurate. All that stuff is there. But because, like the book's narrator Emily, I lost my mother young, I was quite literally sobbing with recognition at the specificity of the heartbreak that's there on the page. Like Emily's bitterness and frustration that, fifteen years after her mother's death, she feels as though her mother has been reduced to little more than a series of photographs and anecdotes that have gotten worn from re-use, because there are no new photos and no new memories, and countless tiny memories not strong enough to make an impression have simply faded away. I live with that exact pain, so to stumble across it in someone else's book was extraordinary. And to me, Buxbaum's exquisitely rendered portrayal of Emily's loss, and her obsessive need to imprint her living loved ones deeply onto her memory to prevent them from disappearing when they eventually leave her behind, was the heart and soul of this book.

Yet, many other people didn't feel that aspect as deeply. They've never experienced it, so they have no way to know how true it is. Maybe they skimmed over those passages, to find out what happened with Emily's job or her boyfriend. And that's valid, too. But if we accept the idea that fiction is at its best when it reveals the truth of life, then that is where this book shines so beautifully.

My seven favorite books of 2013.

Book tree from the window at Literati Bookstore - please buy from them!

They have a website! It is so easy!

Yes, my seven favorite books. No, seven is not a nice civilized, complete-feeling number like five or ten. It's a little arbitrary. But when I compiled the list of books I read this year, and thought about the ones that really touched me and amazed me, that glued themselves to my hands and made me postpone meals and bathroom breaks and subway stops, well, it was seven. And so here, in no particular order, they are:

GONE GIRL, Gillian Flynn. You guys have all heard about this book, and for good reason. It's extraordinary. I will confess to being one of those for whom the ending was not entirely satisfying, somehow, but it doesn't even matter--I have never read a book so utterly compelling in its tension. Spectacular book.

BLACKBIRDS, Chuck Wendig. I first discovered Chuck via his blog, where he delivers road-tested (you can tell by the mud stains) writing and publishing advice, and I grew interested in his novels through the sheer force of his personality. Having read his craft advice gives me an interesting--and slightly voyeuristic--perspective on his fiction ("oh, here Chuck is deliberately abusing his characters like he's always telling me to do!"), but also gives me a heightened appreciation for the skill on display in his writing. BLACKBIRDS is the first installment in his urban fantasy series about Miriam Black, a young woman whose pyschic gift--experiencing a vision of the time and manner of a person's death when she touches them--has corroded her existence and forced her into a life of unsettled drifting. Miriam is a wonderfully drawn character: tough yet compassionate, opportunistic yet loyal to her own asymmetrical code of ethics, and this twisting story of her misadventures with dark places and darker people is wonderfully atmospheric and addictive. (And, a quick FYI: THE CORMORANT, the third book in the series, was just released today.)

CRIMINAL, Terra Elan McVoy. I loved this book for two reasons. First, Terra's writing is tight and fierce and compelling; and second, it made me think. I love fantasy and historical novels and all the attendant blood-letting and general abuse that often accompanies them, but when it comes to fiction with a contemporary setting, I will be the first to admit that I gravitate toward stories that take place in my own sphere of life: Privileged, Well-Adjusted Middle-Class-hood. As I worked my way through CRIMINAL, I felt a mounting frustration with the main character, Nikki: she's needy, and spineless, and she heaps one horrifically poor decision on top of another as the story continues. And then, finally, it clicked. She truly doesn't know better. Terra has created a heartbreaking portrait of a young woman raised with so little love and so little self-esteem that she risks everything to protect the brutal man she loves, simply because she is so starved for affection that his sporadic attention feels like the only worthwhile thing in her life. Nikki's story is all the more sad by virtue of how very believably Terra has rendered it.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my dear friend Liz this summer, where I mused aloud that I couldn't understand how people could still become involved in meth use, even after seeing its catastrophic effects on other people around them. Liz, who is one of the most compassionate and thoughtful people I know, turned to me and said, "Because some people were never brought up to believe that their lives were worth anything at all."

THE LOVE WARS, L. Alison Heller. I will skip a longer description of this one since I already wrote a full review here, but suffice it to say, I adored this book. I'm counting months until Alison's second release, THE NEVER NEVER SISTERS.

WHY CAN'T I BE YOU, Allie Larkin. The heart of this book. The warmth, the vulnerability, the unadulterated charm. The mistaken-identity plot felt, at first, like it was going to lead me into a tale of wacky hijinks and supposedly-comical misunderstandings, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. The critical point here is that Jenny, the main character, goes along with the mistaken identity of Jessie because she is so unbearably fatigued with her own bleak life. Jessie's friends offer a heady dose of warmth and humor that are absent in Jenny's own colorless existence. With a light and empathetic touch, the book offers a wise lesson on the meaning of family--sometimes it's not the people you're born to, but the people you choose.

ELEANOR AND PARK, Rainbow Rowell. I started this book last week, on the recommendation of several friends, and by the end of the third chapter it had marched right up and stolen my heart. I only put my Kindle down to pee. This story of first love is tender and piercingly bittersweet, but never saccharine, and perfectly calls to mind that incandescent wonder of the first time you discovered the way another human being could make you feel.

FOREVER, INTERRUPTED, Taylor Jenkins Reid. From the opening words of this novel, I loved it. I also hated it. I hated it not because there is any flaw in the writing or story (there isn't) but because I knew it was going to make me cry ugly, hiccuping tears, and that is exactly what it proceeded to do. It is a beautiful love story, unraveled alternately in the present and in flashback, and it's made all the more moving by the fact that you know from those very first words that one of the lovers is doomed. This story is a painful and yet ultimately hopeful take on life after loss, and the way love transforms us even after the person we loved is gone.

Review: The Love Wars

Confession time: I love chick lit.

Why is this a confession? Well, when I dove into this mysterious, murky-bottomed pond known as The Publishing Industry and started splashing around, talking about the kind of books I most enjoy reading, I innocently thought "chick lit" was what they were called. The collective response from blogs, articles, agent bios, etc. was a solemn head-shake and the whispered words, "oh no, we don't call it that anymore, dear." Chick lit, I learned, was Dead. Stories about youngish, generally urban women with intriguing professional challenges and enticing love interests had become the Genre-That-Must-Not-Be-Named; if you were gauche enough to name it, an apparition would appear in the sky in the shape of a stiletto-heeled pump with a serpent's head popping out of the vamp.

So imagine my delight when I saw an essay by a new debut author, L. Alison Heller, in spirited defense of chick lit: its warm, relatable characters; its humor; its unapologetic attention to womens' relationships with their friends, their families, and their lovers. Alison included two of my all-time favorite novels among four of her own, so I knew I had to give her novel, The Love Wars, a whirl. And what a terrific read it is!

The main character, Molly Grant, is a matrimonial attorney for a rapacious corporate law firm. Her boss foists off an unwanted new client consultation on her, with instructions to dispatch the client, Fern, as quickly as possible: Fern's ex-husband, whom she is seeking to sue for custody of their children, is the CEO of a well-known corporation, and the last place Molly's firm wants to be is sitting across from him in a court room. However, once Molly actually meets Fern, dumping her is easier said than done--instead of an overprivileged witch like most of the wives she works for, Molly finds a burdened, desperate mother who would give anything to keep her ex-husband from continuing to turn their children against her. And after none of the other attorneys to whom Molly dutifully refers Fern are willing to return her phone calls, Molly makes the daring gamble to take on the case herself--she just has to keep her bosses from finding out.

It's a compelling plot, driven by Molly's compassion and moral outrage. And Molly herself is a deeply sympathetic heroine, struggling to live a life that makes her proud, in the face of the relentless grind to which the big-firm work culture subjects her. She's smart, and excellent at her job, which is a refreshing change from some of the ditzier heroines of chick lit lore. For that matter, the whole book is full of bright and dazzlingly accomplished women, even if some of them I didn't like very much--I didn't like them, but I respected them. And I enjoyed the fact that I respected them. But my favorite thing of all about Molly is that she's funny--as in, mischievous and witty, not ha-ha-I-tripped-over-this-Chihuahua-and-spilled-my-cocktail "funny." Humor is the thing that makes me sit up and take notice, whether in a book, or a blog, or even a new person, so I was delighted to find The Love Wars so full of it. There is a  love interest, too, which evolves organically throughout the story; ultimately, the ending of the book is satisfying because it feels earned on every level.

All in all, I loved this book, and I can't wait to read more of Alison's work!