Gutsy Writer: The Photo

Here's the picture of novelist Lionel Shriver promised in the previous post. Her books have the kind boldness that you'd expect of someone who, at age fifteen, changed her name to Lionel from Margaret Ann.

Lionel Shriver: One Gutsy Writer

Recently I've fallen in love with the work of novelist Lionel Shriver. So has much of the rest of the world. I wish I'd known about her novels long ago.

With her seventh and eighth novels, she has finally gotten big-time attention: bestsellerdom, a huge feature in The New York Times, book tour of New Zealand, etc.

NB: big success came with her 7th and 8th published novels. And she said her former agent refused to handle the seventh one and so she sent it out herself.

A+ for ENORMOUS PERSISTENCE. (Also, for quality in writing, insights, and plots.)

The two books that have finally brought her much-deserved attention are We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Post-Birthday World.

Both these books feel so honest that they seem skinless, exposing bare nerve endings.

I went to hear her read a week or so ago at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books (turns out she spent much of her youth in my town and I interviewed her father a time or two for The Raleigh Times.) I asked her if she'd always been so bold as a writer or had she developed that courage over time.

She seemed genuinely baffled: "That's what writing is for," she said, "to SAY THE UNSAID." She wondered aloud: What are other writers doing? (boldface and caps are all mine)

And another thing: as the Times pointed out, she isn't exactly groveling over success. The head on the story: "After Lean Times, Prizes and Not One Apology." The Times referred to The Guardian (she lives in England) as saying that she had "violated the British law of self-deprecation by boldly declaring that she had WANTED HER BOOK TO WIN" the Orange Prize, which it did indeed win.

Do we ever really believe that someone doesn't want his or her book to win?

From henceforth I hold her work (including the PR wing) before me as a shining example, and will post here in the next couple of days a picture I took at her Quail Ridge reading.

On Taking a Stand

Be bold, but be impeccable.

I heard a speaker at a seminar last spring advise that. I think it was Katie Orenstein, a writer of op-ed opinion pieces among other things. She attributed the line to her mother-in-law.

It's a fine piece of wisdom, if you're inclined to be impetuous.

I spend too much time on impeccability. Quadruple-checking does me more harm than good. I'd like to work out a good balance. Oh hell, a perfect balance--that's what I'd really like.

Make It Legible

Last week a "room redesigner," Julie Tomlin of Raleigh/Cary, spent three and a half hours in my office and when I returned in early afternoon, the place had been transformed.

She didn't add anything or take anything away. Instead, she shuffled and restacked and consolidated, and now it seems as if the room has come into focus. And I feel as clearly located and defined as if I were sitting on top of a float in a parade.

A doctor I know has the clearest handwriting I've ever seen. It's like an architect's printing. He said he made it that way on purpose. It was a way to say: here I am, here's what I'm prescribing, and I stand by it.

I don't think doctors' reputedly messy handwritings are by design a way to hide. But it has crossed my mind before that my own might be a form of privacy. Nobody's every going to be prying into my bits and pieces of handwritten journal. It wouldn't be worth the effort to decipher.

All of which is to say that: making things clean and clear is a way of declaring one's self. Of standing by who and what we are.

Big Two-Hearted River

That's a Hemingway title and I think it fits.

A week and a half ago, my brother Franc had a scary bout of heart bypass surgery. Today we learn that my other brother (and Franc's identical twin) Harry has to have the same operation. Tomorrow morning.

Harry's doctor has the advantage of knowing about Franc's identical heart. That will probably mean one less incision. Also, Harry saw up-close the shape Franc was in during the days just after the surgery, so he knows exactly what he's in for. Otherwise, it'll be the same--attaching him to the heart-lung machine, cutting open his chest, stopping his heart, sewing in new vessels taken from pieces of vein in his arms, the whole terrifying miraculous ball game.

It'll go fine. Franc's doing well, so Harry will too. It cannot be otherwise, their lives and hearts are so entwined.

Here are a couple of pictures of them, working at the house they built with friends on the NC coast. Not good photography, but this is the best I have available this minute, and now is when I'm posting. Franc on the left, Harry on the right, .