Welcome to the hinterlands: a narrative nonfiction blog

death to the dandelion

I read this weekend in Blue Ridge Outdoors that an estimated 80 million gallons of pesticides are used each year to eradicate dandelions—a plant that is edible from roots to flower—from our yards.  Because we must have an unsullied vista of green grass.  That's the kind of depressing stat that makes you wonder if there's any hope for humanity.

At last, an app I could use

Now if only I had an iPhone....  From WebNewser:

The Associated Press debuted a 2009 AP Stylebook mobile application that is now available for purchase via the Apple App Store for the iPhone and IPod Touch.

Read more here.

...and that's why I don't read contemporary literary fiction

"There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it's still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag."  Lev Grossman in the Wall Street Journal

I find that life is depressing and difficult enough these days without committing my limited reading time to slogging through some door-stopper filled with unlikeable people dragging through hundreds of pages of dull misery before petering out in irresolution.

So I want to add here that I just finished reading, and thoroughly enjoying, Elinor Lipman's The Family Man (previously mentioned in "books on my list"), which was not filled with unlikeable people dragging through hundreds of pages of dull misery, and about which the Washington Post noted, “Just because something is ‘light’ doesn’t mean it’s not masterful.”

Pinto power

When I was growing up, mine was the poster family for the stripped-down economy vehicle.  We had VW bugs, Datsuns, Toyotas, a Chevette—if it was small and operated on a manual transmission, it was probably parked in our driveway at one point or another.  My own first car was a Plymouth Horizon Miser (manual, of course) that got more than 40 miles to the gallon.  (We did also have, for years, a Ford Econoline van, which wasn't so much "economy" but defined "stripped down."  It was a utility van with seats, and a three-speed transmission stick on the steering column and that's the monster I learned to drive on; being on the shortish side, I had to hang on to the steering wheel with my left arm to yank myself far enough forward in the seat to mash down the clutch and wrestle the always-recalcitrant shifter into gear.  Lemmee tell you, hill starts were fraught with excitement.  I still have nightmares about driving that thing.)

At any rate, there was a brief period when I was about 14 when my family had 3 Pintos.  The second-hand Pinto with automatic transmission and A/C was our luxury car, the first we'd owned that had either of those decadent features.

But here's a far better (second) life for a Pinto: "Scalding a Quarter-Mile in an Electric Ford Pinto" from NPR.

And speaking of EVs, I just found out that Alexandra Paul, actor and EV advocate featured in Who Killed the Electric Car (and kids, if you can remember this far back, once a star on Baywatch; she was the non-bimbo who looked like she might actually be able to save someone's life) is also an open water distance swimmer.  A kindred soul! 

(There's some weird cross-pollination between my passions going on here; it was my friend Bill, who lives in Highlands, NJ, former summer home of Gertrude Ederle, first woman to swim the English Channel, who alerted me to this NPR story.)

and now for the distaff side: Elizabeth Gilbert's new book

Last week we didn't envy Elizabeth Gilbert's ex-husband Michael Cooper (see, I told you this is how the poor guy would be doomed to be referenced) for the challenges of writing a memoir that seems likely to touch on the breakup of his marriage with Gilbert.

This week we're not envying Elizabeth Gilbert for having to produce a sequel for the eager readers of Eat, Pray, Love.

The best-selling magic of Eat, Pray, Love was the right story in the hands of the right writer, Gilbert's disarmingly frank, funny voice married to a story of ultimate fantasy wish-fulfillment: how I got to leave my old life behind, eat everything I wanted (Italy), find spiritual peace (India), and acquire a gorgeous lover who wanted nothing from me but to give me pleasure.

Now your publisher and your readers want you to make the magic all over again.  What do you do?  It's not like you can write  Eat, Pray, Love:II.   Apparently, Gilbert discovered that the hard way, "completely scrapping a 500-page follow-up," according to this NYT story.  That would put your spiritual peace to the test.

In the end, the book she's come up with, according to the NYT, is “Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage,” ... a memoir of a tumultuous year that came 18 months after “Eat, Pray, Love” leaves off, as well as a meditation on wedlock."

The NYT story goes on to note:

Given the phenomenal paperback success of “Eat, Pray, Love” — it spent 57 weeks at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list and has remained on the list — the new title will be watched closely by fans and publishing insiders to see if Ms. Gilbert has lasting power.

Or, to put it another way, can she make bestseller magic all over again?  That's a mighty tough standard for "staying power."

The naked book

Some book jackets are things of beauty.  Others look like they were cooked up on a junior publicist's lunch break, and it's hard not to think the book would probably be better with no jacket at all.  Authors often have little or no input or say into how the work you have (one hopes) loved and labored over ends up presenting itself to the world.  Sometimes, you don't even get to see the  jacket design until the publisher delivers your box of author copies. 

Three hardcover books this fall are eschewing the dust jacket altogether: "cover art is not printed on dust jackets but instead stamped directly onto the boards that hug their pages," per this article in the New York Observer.

This seems like an obvious idea that was a long time coming, although I could swear I've already seen hardback books using this approach.  Possibly art books? 

annualists: a year and a book

Julie & Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, a year of this, a year of that:  the how-I-spent-a-year book now has a name,"annualist."  This article from the BBC defines annualist as an adjective meaning "Journalistic work where protagonist endures ordeal, usually for year, then writes book about it."

Notes the article:

...there is something about these year-long ideas that entices publishers.

"It is like pitching a movie in one sentence," says [Graeme] Neill [of The Bookseller magazine]. "It's interesting to talk about and it makes for very readable, straightforward copy."

If there's an up side to your ex-wife's best-seller...

Apparently, Elizabeth Gilbert's ex-husband, Michael Cooper, has sold a memoir of his own, Displaced, scheduled for release in fall of 2010.  According to Sunday's NYT book review, it's supposed to be "a book chronicling his side of their breakup and his own 'search for purpose' in the Middle East and beyond."

I am a fan of Gilbert's The Last American Man, a lively and insightful piece of narrative nonfiction, and I like Gilbert's writing.  Still, I imagine that for the ex-husband it can't have been pleasant to have Eat, Pray, Love, his former wife's tale of leaving their marriage and finding spiritual peace and romantic/sexual fulfillment (also, a lot of good food in Italy) vault to everywhere-I-turn-it's-there best-sellerdom.  And a movie in the works to boot!

Bound to rankle, wouldn't you say?  Rubbing salt in the wound. 

But now he has his own book in the making, and from a publicity POV he has this going for him--as an article in the Guardian notes:

Public interest in Cooper's side of the story is likely to be enormous. Eat, Pray, Love struck a chord with many readers, the vast majority of them women, in part because it did not flinch from personal disclosures. That potentially creates a market of millions.

"Readers have connected so strongly with Gilbert's book that they will probably see this book too in a very sympathetic light. People clearly want to know about the men in her life," said [Carolyn] Kellogg [of Jacket Copy, the book blog of the Los Angeles Times].

We do not yet know, of course, how or whether he will weigh in on the subject of the marriage's dissolution, but I fear he is doomed to being identified in reviews and other coverage of the book as "Michael Cooper, ex-husband of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love" (with possible additional reference to "the movie starring Julia Roberts"). And of course in every interview he's going to be asked about his reaction to Gilbert's book and its success.

From a writer's perspective, it would be a tough call whether or not, were I in Cooper's place, I'd include in my book a chapter or two on the now all-too-famous end of my marriage. I think I'd go for the elliptical reference and focus on my own story:  "When my wife left me, I was angry then sad then decided to go to the  Middle East."  Well, I condense, but you get the point. 

However, the business of the book business is to sell books, and I'm willing to bet that the marketer's perspective is that, like it or not, riding Gilbert's coat-tails is the way to sell Cooper's book, that "I'm the guy Elizabeth Gilbert left" is Cooper's "platform."  The gazillion women who read and loved E,P,L are, as Kellogg noted in the Guardian quote, a big, ready-made market for Cooper's book.  But Cooper will have to be very careful in how he writes about Gilbert and the breakup in the book, so he doesn't risk alienating the E,P,L-loving first readers of his book, who, in these days of Twitter, could sink Cooper's book almost before it hits the shelves.  I don't envy him his writer's challenge here--it's hard enough to write without all those considerations hanging over your every word and paragraph.

So I think I'd still focus on my reactions more than her actions.  ("I didn't want her to leave.  I didn't want her to sell the house because with it would go the dream I thought we shared and the future I still wanted to believe we would have together."  etc.)

And then, just ahead or right around the release date of Cooper's book, he should do a personal essay piece somewhere like Salon that's ruefully tongue-in-cheek about the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position of writing your own memoir when you're contemporary literature's most famous ex-husband.  

Crossing stories with crossover appeal: new nonfiction

Because it's summer, I've been hanging out over at my other blog (OpenWaterSwimming) and in the briny deep.  What did I do on my summer vacation?  I swam across the Chesapeake Bay.  Again.  (In the skinny part—4.4 miles—in the Great Chesapeake Bay Swim.  It's kind of a Channel Swim Lite.)

However, three new works of narrative biography washing up on our summer reading list promise suitable crossover appeal between my literary and aquatic selves. 

The first—and I'll allow that the connection is tenuous—is a biography of Lord Byron, Byron in Love: a Short Daring Life by Edna O'Brien.  How is this relevant? you may ask.  Because putting aside his dissipation, his incestuous love affair with his half-sister, and his early death from what Kathryn Harrison in a review in the NYT succinctly calls his "course of sybaritic abandon," there was that time when he allegedly swam the Hellespont (and now you can too), AKA the Dardanelles, the narrow strip of water separating Europe from Asia.  Was there independent verification of this swim?  Does Lord Byron, given his general habits, strike you as man ready to tackle a several-mile swim in strong currents?  (Well, no, now he certainly doesn't since he's been dead some little while. But I mean at the time.)  I'll let you be the judge.  Whatever his swimming skills, he seems otherwise to have been a fairly unsavory piece of work.

So we turn now to a brighter spirit, the enterprising young Gertrude Ederle, subject of not one but two summer-release biographies, bringing the total to three Ederle books in the last 18 months.  Something of a trend here.   In 1926, at the age of 19, American Trudy became the first woman to swim the English Channel, arriving home to wild acclaim and a ticker tape parade in NYC.

For your reading delectation we have:

America's Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation by Tim Dahlberg, Mary Ederle Ward, and Brenda Greene.  No reviews yet for this August release, but here's the publisher's synopsis:

America’s Girl is an intimate look at the life and trials of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 not only became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, but broke the record set by men. The feat so thrilled America that it welcomed her home with a ticker tape parade that drew two million people. This fascinating portrait follows Ederle from her early days as a competitive swimmer through her gold medal triumph at the 1924 Olympics, to the first attempt the next year by Ederle to swim from France to England in frigid and turbulent waters, a feat that had been conquered by only five men up to that time. This is also a stirring look at the go-go era of the 1920s, when the country was about to recognize that women not only could vote, but compete on an international scale as athletes. At the height of Prohibition, Ederle’s triumph over the formidable Channel was a triumph for women everywhere.

Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World by Glenn Stout, and a starred review from PW:

In 1926, 18-year-old Trudy Ederle fascinated and inspired millions around the world when she became the first woman successfully to swim the English Channel. With great storytelling, sportswriter Stout (series editor of The Best American Sports Writing) chronicles Ederle's singular accomplishment and its significance for the future of women in sports as well as the tremendous challenges for any swimmer who would dare traverse the waves of the channel. At age five, Ederle (1908–2003) suffered permanent hearing loss, which made her reticent and shy; at age 10 her father taught her to swim. The ocean opened to her like another world, and she loved the feeling of floating and swimming in its vastness. After lessons at the Women's Swimming Association, Ederle developed her gift and emerged as one of America's fastest swimmers, earning a spot in the 1924 Olympics. Disappointed by winning only a bronze medal, she quickly turned to the challenge of swimming the English Channel—difficult due to its strong tides, winds and currents—and after an initial failure, Ederle conquered the channel on August 6, 1926. Stout's moving book recovers the exhilarating story of a young girl who found her true self out in the water and paved the way for women in sports today.

 and finally, the early entry, 2008's

The Great Swim, by Gavin Mortimer (no subtitle, but a one-paragraph synopsis on the cover, an interesting alternative to the subtitle-that-gives-away-the-whole-plot, with which, I have been known to complain, too many narrative nonfiction books are unfairly burdened).  Here the starred review is from Booklist:

In 1926 four American women—Gertrude Ederle, Mille Gade, Lillian Cannon, and Clarabelle Barrette—competed to do something no woman had ever done: swim across the English Channel. Tabloid newspapers promoted their favorites, and the public was enthralled, eagerly  embracing the opportunity to put aside their worries (it hadn’t even been a decade since the Great War). Mortimer draws on a variety of source material, from people who were involved in the competition to contemporary  news reports and personal diaries, and the picture he paints from that material evokes an episode that, even though it took place eight decades ago, seems strangely familiar and contemporary. As in all the best narrative nonfiction, the text works back and forth in time, portraying the lives of the swimmers and providing vivid detail about the era, which spawned the nation’s first wave of national sports heroes (Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, et al.). The book can be read as the story of a sporting competition or as an exploration of our timeless fascination with celebrity. Either way, it’s an absorbing and inspirational saga in the Seabiscuit mold

Feeling all grown up? Enter the Real Simple essay contest.

Candidly, I'm still waiting for this moment, but if  you've had that "Well, now I'm a grown-up for sure" epiphany then put it to paper and send it to Real Simple's second annual Life Lessons Essay Contest, which offers  a $3000 cash prize plus a trip to NYC and more. 

From Real Simple:

The Life Lessons column, which reaches more than two million readers monthly, has featured noted authors such as Mary Gordon, Jane Smiley, Ann Patchett, and many others. We invite all non-fiction writers to submit their work for consideration and potential publication in Real Simple, in the company of these distinguished authors.

The topic of this year’s essay is: When did you first realize that you had become a grown-up? Whether the experience was difficult, funny, easy, or bittersweet, share your lesson and you could win.

The winning essay is scheduled to appear in the April 2010 issue of Real Simple magazine. The winner will also receive a $3,000 cash prize; roundtrip tickets for two to New York City, hotel accommodations for two nights, and tickets to a Broadway play; and lunch with Real Simple editors.

To enter, please send a typed, double-spaced submission of no more than 1,500 words, preferably as a Microsoft Word attachment, to lifelessons@realsimple.com. The contest is open to legal residents of the U.S. who are 19 or older at the time of entry. It began at 12:01AM this past May 1 and runs through 11:50PM on September 7, 2009. For complete contest rules, please visit realsimple.com/lifelessonscontest.

The truth about writers

Was someone spying on my workday? 

Books on my list

I'll be updating this post regularly to note books that I'm interested in reading for one reason or another.  If/when I read one of the books, I'll also post an update.

Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead by Peter Manseau.  Who can resist "a global odyssey in search of the 'dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends' belonging to saints and other sacred figures." (Joshua Hammer, NYTimes Sunday Book Review 05/31/09

Driving Like Crazy: [subtitle too long to bother typing] by P.J. O'Rourke.  What can I say?  I shouldn't, but I can't help myself.  I find O'Rourke very, very funny despite the fact that I can't abide his politics.  Or as Neil Genzlinger writes in the 5/31/09 NYT book review, "Sure, he's responsible for the impending death of our race and planet, but at his best...the guy's hilarious."

The Family Man by Elinor Lipman.  This one's fiction.  I'll  start reading it in the middle, no doubt.  But a "screwball plot" social comedy is what I need. (Read this one.  Definite thumbs up.)

Rodale's Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (various editors), Understanding Perennials  by William Cullina, and Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting up Small Bathces of Seasonal Foods by Euginia Bone.  Because I hope that someday I might have the time to do any of these things.  Because scratch me and you find the child of 9 or 10 who in the early 70s dreamed of becoming a hippy homesteader in Vermont, with a peasant blouse and hair down to my waist, wading through fields of sun-drenched wildflowers.  (Then my mother gave me a modern homesteading book and the section on castrating goats rather gave me pause. Also, I really don't like winter.)  In the meantime, if at the end of the growing season my progress (native plants in the ground, soil incrementally improved, wisteria and English ivy fought to a temporary draw, surprise annual return of black cohosh) outweighs my regress (see: wisteria, English ivy, maddening squirrel compulsion to bite off the branches of oakleaf hydrangea), then I try to take the long view of things and recognize that I have done something, at least.  Also, the birds, chipmunks, toads, worms, and squirrels, plus the occasional snake and rabbit that show up (but not together) all seem to approve.