Another brief rant on the issue of likable female characters

As these posts attest, I've been hung up on the "likability" issue for years, even before Claire Messud brought the issue to the fore in 2013. What Messud made spectacularly clear in the now-famous interview is that readers seem to judge female characters as "good" or "bad," depending on whether one would want to be friends with them. Male authors--and their male characters--aren't subject to the same norms. Men, in fiction if not in life, just have to be interesting.

A more recent book, Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train, has a lot in common with Messud's The Woman Upstairs. And while the latter is classified as literary fiction, and the former a thriller, I think their similar titles tell us something. The main characters of these stories are "shadow women," existing in the periphery of society and of our notice. That's because they don't embody normal expectations at least for white, middle-class women: they've failed to become wives and mothers, as well as, to some degree or another, in their careers.

I would point out, however, that in both these stories, it's the first failure, to marry (or stay married) and produce children, that seems to pain both women more. Their envy of women who have achieved this status seems boundless, and produces rage and recklessness. And that's why both novels, to my mind, still subscribe to the conventional notion of the "likable" female character. Ultimately, they validate traditional notions of womanhood by showing how awful it is for women who have tried desperately, but can't manage to attain it. Ultimately I believe we're meant to pity these characters and be grateful that we've escaped their fate--assuming we either have or at least desire what they don't.

Mind you, I liked both these books quite a bit, especially Girl on the Train. But for an antidote to their conventional mores, I might recommend Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, where the female protagonist is simply ragingly selfish and vengeful--but also intelligent and anything but passive.

Or, if you don't think not craving kids and marriage automatically makes you a villain, try The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick--the real-life story of a woman who never really wanted either, and has lived quite a fulfilling life, thank you very much.




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California Bookstore Day at Village House of Books

Saturday, May 2 is California Bookstore Day. Authors are fanning out all over the state to meet and greet readers and support independent bookstores.

I'll be at Village House of Books, Los Gatos, 11 a.m. through 12 p.m.



Visit their blog to meet all the visiting authors. Here's the little piece I wrote about publishing Bigfoot and the Baby.

Feeling ideas

In their salute to Russian literature yesterday, the NYT Book Review asked their Bookends writers the fascinating but awkwardly worded question, "What Makes the Russian Literature of the 19th Century So Distinctive?" About Dostoevsky, my personal fave, Francine Prose writes, "Dostoyevsky’s people seem real to us, vivid and fully present, even as we suspect that no one ever really behaved as they do, flinging themselves at each other’s feet, telling their life stories at extraordinary length and in excruciating detail to a stranger in a bar."

I still like the explanation that apparently comes from one of Dostoevsky's own characters in A Raw Youth, a book I have never read. This character says that he "feels ideas," a condition that applies to many of Dostoevsky's people--at least to the men (the women seem to just plain feel). It's true that in real life, we rarely see people driving themselves to actual madness over what God really wants from us, or why there is evil, or how we can contribute the most to humanity during our short time on earth. But maybe they should.

Such characters also inhabit Iris Murdoch's novels, which is probably why I've gone a bit nuts for her, too. What I love about these characters is that they deeply care about ideas, about morality, about thinking and meaning. Ideas and morality aren't abstract concepts that one contemplates instead of living. For these people, thinking is living. That probably seems rather foreign, in an American context particularly; but in these novels, ideas are life blood. Thinking makes us more human, and more alive--not less so.

Pints & Prose in Fairfax tonight!

Join Lindsey Crittenden, the Tuesday Night Writers, and me for Pints & Prose at Peri's Bar in lovely Fairfax, CA! Festivities start at 6 p.m.

Another good grad school memory: Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin

For several months I've been too scattered to do much other than tweet, write the occasional blog post, and--oh yeah--do my day job. But now I'm thinking about resuming work on my third novel, while Novel the Second seeks a home. I was about 40 pages in, last time I touched it, and it's at least partly inspired by what scholars have called the first American novel: Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown.

The cool thing to realize about this novel, first published in 1798, is that it's about a ventriloquist who drives a man to murder his family by making him think God is speaking to him. Yep, the first American novel is a (sort of) paranormal/religious/serial-killer thriller, which reflects fears of democracy and the "voice of the people." It's great stuff, and the prospect of revisiting Wieland is exciting enough to get me back in the writing chair. Religious nuttiness + ventriloquism. What can go wrong?

I see my book-in-progress as a combination of this and Gogol's "The Overcoat," set in a comparative literature department--just by coincidence.



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The evolution of Jackie Majesky

This is a blog hop, y'all. I'm taking the hand-off from Shelly King, whose debut novel, The Moment of Everything, came out this month from Grand Central. It's a funny and quite touching story of a Silicon Valley geek who finds her true calling--and family--at a used bookstore. Buy it at your favorite indie shop!


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Now, here's an introduction to the main character of my novel, Bigfoot and the Baby. I should note that neither Bigfoot nor the Baby is actually the main character, but they are both significant characters. And you could argue that the novel has three main characters, since at various times we're inside the head of Jackie, her husband Kyle, or their daughter Katie. But I consider Jackie to be the lead, since she's the one who (I believe) undergoes and also brings about the greatest change.

I've been told she's not the easiest character to like. She certainly would be a difficult friend to have, which is possibly why she doesn't have many, at least at the novel's beginning. She's fearful, judgmental, grandiose, a little desperate. When the novel opens, she has recently latched onto an apocalyptic brand of Christianity as a way of channeling her unfocused fear and sadness, and she's trying to convince her family that the end is nigh. But they have other priorities, which she cannot understand for the life of her.

Is Jackie like me? In all but the religion, well, yes. I gave her some of my worst qualities (amplifying them, I hope, beyond their normal measure). But I also gave her a lot of my hopes--to do something important with my life, to make the world a better place, to love and be loved, fully and sincerely. And I have a lot of sympathy for women who feel they were somehow born in a place that was too small for them--who tried to do what they thought was the right thing, only to find it wasn't the right thing for them.

Jackie's world does get bigger, in a way that's currently impossible in the universe we inhabit. However, what really matters is that Jackie grows a bigger heart and a much wider field of vision by the end of the novel. I didn't necessarily expect that--but she had that in her from the beginning.

So I hope you had fun meeting Jackie.

Next up, another writer about difficult women: Vicki Addesso, one of four authors of Still Here Thinking of You. It's a clear-eyed, heartbreaking, yet hopeful memoir about daughters and mothers.

Look for Vicki's post next Thursday! Here's her Tumblr.



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UPDATE: Another bloghopper has joined us! Lawrence Coates, the author, most recently, of The Garden of the World, writes about his forthcoming novel, The Goodbye House, here.



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What did I see today?

A few months back, I published a piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Yuri Olesha's memoir in fragments, No Day without a Line. At the end, I suggested that I planned to try the same experiment: keeping a notebook--offline--in which I wrote every day. The purpose was not only to recover a purer experience of writing in the midst of constant distraction, although that was part of it. I wanted to write in a way that placed me in a larger context than just inside my own head. I wanted to record, for better or worse, "the times."

I'm sure you've all been on the edge of your seats, wondering: How's it been going? Did she do it? Has she written every day? What are those little handwritten gems really like? Answers: So-so. Yes. No. I was amazed how quickly I regressed to my previous journal-writing habits, which is why I gave up the practice in, oh, 1995. The thing became, far more than I had hoped,  Compendium of Complaints. A Litany of Laments. A Chronicle of Cranky. It's not that I ever intend these pieces to be published in this form (unlike Olesha, who was ultimately writing for publication). It's the ease with which I tumble into the black hole of solipsism as soon as I believe no one is looking.

On one hand, I obviously need some space for blowing off steam, and perhaps writing it is better than dumping it on, say, one's husband night after night. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that "venting" is really all that helpful in and of itself. And the writing it produces is altogether useless.

What to do? The solution I've come up with is, no matter what I've written previously, before I close out the daily blurb, I ask myself: What did I see today? This is a variation on one of Olesha's fragments. And it forces me to think of something, even something very small, that I've observed. Often I find myself writing about it at some length. For example, yesterday I recalled seeing, during my daily walk around the neighborhood, a film crew setting up on someone's lawn. Why? I don't know. But then I began recalling details, like a man entertaining a child (his daughter?) by placing her in the driver's seat of his car. I presume he was trying to keep her out of the film crew's way. But who knows?

Anyway, I would have entirely forgotten about that if all I'd allow myself to do was grouse. Just a suggestion for those of you seeking a way to get words on a page.



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The poet's brain in a jar

Here's a little coda to my piece in the LA Review of Books on Yuri Olesha's memoir-in-fragments, No Day without a Line. I tried so hard to get this into the piece, but it just wouldn't go ... So here it is.

In the section of No Day called Moscow, Olesha writes about several famous Russian writers he befriended in the early twentieth century. He was particularly close with the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide ... leading to this amazing memory:

When the evening after his death we had gathered on Gendrikov Lane in ... the Briks' apartment [where Mayakovsky had been living], we suddenly heard loud noises coming from Mayakovsky's room--very loud noises, unceremoniously loud, as if somebody were chopping wood. It was the opening of Mayakovsky's cranium to allow the removal of his brain. We listened in horror-struck silence. Then a man in a white gown and boots came out of the room--either an attendant or a medical assistant, but a stranger to us--and in his hands he held a basin covered with a white cloth raised in the middle almost like a pyramid, indeed, just as if that soldier in boots had been carrying a paschal cream-cheese pudding. In the basin was Mayakovsky's brain.

This scene, surreal even by Olesha's standards, defies belief. And yet, recently, an intrepid reporter from Vice Magazine, Joy Neumeyer, paid a visit to the Moscow Brain Institute. There she found Mayakovsky's brain, residing in a jar alongside those of many other luminaries. She even quotes Olesha to explain how the brain got there.

So Olesha was not making this up. As Neumeyer explains, "When a Soviet celebrity died, the brain-collection process worked in one of two ways. Sometimes, the family or the deceased had already agreed to give their brains to the Institute. Or—as in the case of Mayakovsky—they came without asking."

Thursday, July 10: Reading at Folio Books, San Francisco

Join us at Folio Books, the wonderful Noe Valley bookstore, on Thursday, July 10, at 7 p.m. to celebrate Bigfoot and the Baby. We'll have wine, a reading, Q and A, and ... possibly a Special Guest!

The Writer in Pieces

My essay on Yuri Olesha's No Day without a Line, which records his struggle to relearn how to write, is up at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

What do you want from an author reading? (updated)

This issue has been on my mind, since, you know, I'm now doing readings somewhat regularly. Having attended many bad author events that resemble ritual obeisances akin to church--from which the bored audience members, like bored parishioners, feel ecstatic to be freed--I promise to try my damnedest not to let this happen at my readings.

On the other hand, certain ritualistic behaviors are expected. At some point, the author reads from her work--presumably to entice audience members who don't know the book to buy it, as well as to offer some deeper interpretation to readers who may already know the story. The author then takes questions and signs books. Schmoozing, perhaps with alcoholic beverages, may occur before, during, or after.

Given this general format, what can an author do to not only limit the pain she inflicts on the audience, but actually turn the evening into an enjoyable event? First, as I've said before, it probably wouldn't kill you to take some acting lessons. Second, read and consider everything in this post. Third--well, maybe this is obvious, but I honestly didn't reflect on it until just now--think of what you'd enjoy most from an author reading, and do that--because your audience is probably made up of people much like you.

So what do I especially enjoy at a reading?
1. A good performance (see above).
2. Interesting information, particularly about the writing process. The audience is probably full of aspiring as well as successful writers. And we all love to find out how others do it.
3. A sense that the author is genuinely glad to be there and excited to share her work. For the introverts among us, this can be a tad difficult to pull off. I can say that my acting lessons helped with this aspect, too--not least in building my confidence, which (I hope) translates into greater ease in public.
4. A sense that the writer is not only there to promote her particular book, but to take part in a larger conversation. In other words, believing that the author cares about writing and her subject in general, and that she sees the audience as contributing to her understanding. In still other words, I want to feel like part of a spontaneously formed community around a topic of common interest--not like a vessel receiving 40 minutes of promo.

I'm sure there's more.

Of course, for all of this to happen, you also need a good audience. Not necessarily a large one--though a tiny one can certainly feel dispiriting--but one that's rooting for you and your event to succeed. Which, fortunately, is usually the case, given that they showed up in the first place.

UPDATE: But read this post by Jennifer Margulis, which describes what can happen, all too often, and what we can do to fix it.

This Thursday: Bay Area Launch of Bigfoot and the Baby!

This Thursday, June 26, join us at Village House of Books in Los Gatos to celebrate the release of Bigfoot and the Baby! Music, food, and schmoozing start at 6 p.m., and the reading starts at 7.

I would love to see you there!

Blog hop! Questions of character

Last week, Harriet Chessman answered questions about the main character in her latest novel, The Beauty of Ordinary Things--a truly beautiful and extraordinary book. Harriet is also the author of Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels (a title particularly close to my heart). If Harriet ever does a reading anywhere near you, overcome any obstacle to go see her. She is warm, insightful, and charismatic. Her website is here.

This week, Harriet has passed the baton to Thaisa Frank, Elizabeth Stark, and me. So here are seven questions and seven answers about Jackie Majesky, the main character in Bigfoot and the Baby.


1. What is the name of your character? Is s/he fictional or a historic person?

Jackie Majesky, definitely fictional.


2. When and where is the story set?

1986. Near Bakersfield, CA and the Mojave Desert. Detour to the Washington rainforest.


3. What should we know about him/her?

It's easy to get irritated with Jackie. She can be self-righteous, self-justifying, and judgmental--but she means well. Kind of like most of us. Writing her, I learned to be more aware of those aspects of myself, and therefore more patient, I hope, with everyone.


4. What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Jackie wants a great deal more from life than it seems to be giving her. Basically, she wants to save the world, and those around her don't share or understand her ambitions. Fortunately--or disastrously--she finds someone who does.


5. What is the personal goal of the character?

In addition to saving the world, Jackie wants to feel like she matters. She needs an effective, responsive setting for her agency, which she hasn't had up till now.


6. What is the title of this novel, and can we read more about it?

Thanks for asking! It's Bigfoot and the Baby. You can learn more about it here.


7. When can we expect the book to be published? [Or: When was the book published?]

It just came out on Friday, June 13, 2014. A very lucky day for me.

Up next in this blog hop, on June 23, is Shelly King. Shelly is the author of The Moment of Everything, coming September 2 from Grand Central Publishing. It's a novel about love, and bookstores, and love in bookstores. It's getting amazing advance press, and Books, Inc., Palo Alto will be doing the launch. Join us then for a fantastic party!

Take it away, Shelly!

Bigfoot is real (almost) ...

My debut novel, heading out to distributors this week! Available for sale June 13 (preorder here).

A summer of Bigfoot and the Baby--updated and corrected

Like summer, Bigfoot is just around the corner. Here is a partial list of events and readings for my debut novel:

• Friday, June 13, 7 p.m.: Bigfoot and the Baby Tahoe Launch,Lake Tahoe Community College Library, South Lake Tahoe. More information here.
• Saturday, June 14, 10 a.m. - 1 p.m..: Making It Strange: A Workshop for Fiction Writers, Bona Fide Books office, South Lake Tahoe. Sign up here.
• Sunday, June 22, 6 p.m.: Tongue and Groove, The Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 No. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood.
• Thursday, June 26, 6-8 p.m., Bigfoot and the Baby Bay Area Launch, Village House of Books, 326 Village Lane, Los Gatos.
• Thursday, July 10, 7-9 p.m., Folio Books, 3957 24th St., San Francisco.
• Thursday, August 14, 7 p.m., Why There Are Words, Studio 333, Caledonia Street, Sausalito.
• Sunday, August 17, afternoon (time TBA), Litquake debut novelists panel, Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto.

Come to one, or come to all! I would love to see you there.

Must unconventional female characters be punished?

So I just finished reading Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. I almost didn't buy it because of this cover:


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Someday I will write a screed about literalism and book covers, but, OK, it was the 80s. And Moon Tiger won the 1987 Booker Prize, which struck me as a good sign.

Still, when reading the back cover copy, I had my doubts: if this was "the life of a strong, independent woman, with its often contentious relations with family and friends," was I in for a tale of this woman's eventual comeuppance? As Claudia Hampton "lies alone in a London hospital bed," reviewing her life, will she come to regret her choices--her aloneness, above all, showing how wrong she has been?

[SPOILER]
No. And, therefore, yay!

Claudia, a best-selling history writer, worked as a war correspondent in Egypt during World War II, where she met the love of her life and, soon enough, lost him. And while this love affair is presented as the heart of the story, and of Claudia's life, it doesn't represent Claudia's one chance to settle down and have the normal life she secretly wanted--it wasn't, and she didn't. Her loss doesn't impede her from going on to a successful career, despite the obstacles that stopped less determined--and less abrasive--women at that time. The affair ultimately is no more and no less than heartbreak, which all of us, conventional or not, will experience at some point in this life.

Claudia does have a child with another man, whom she never marries. But motherhood doesn't change her. She doesn't find it, or her daughter, Lisa, very interesting--and here's where I think Lively does an especially good job of criticizing without condemning or pitying. The story is told from multiple points of view, so we sense the daughter's pain as her mother once again brusquely dismisses her. But we are also discouraged from making easy judgments. We come to understand that these two are simply made of different stuff, and they're doing the best they can under those circumstances. Lisa craves convention as much as Claudia loathes it. Perhaps Lisa's conformity is her rebellion against her mother, much as nonconformists rebel against their straight-laced families, but no matter. As the novel unfolds, we see both of them accepting their own and each other's limitations, while not being exactly happy about them.

And in the end Claudia [SPOILER] does die alone. But this is not a punishment or comeuppance, but, as I read it, a kind of triumph. Lively suggests that aloneness can be beautiful and satisfying--at any rate, no more imperfect than "proper" family life.

This is where Moon Tiger departs from another, more recent story with a non-conforming female protagonist, Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs. This book sparked a much-needed conversation about "likable" female characters; in a now famous interview, Messud sharply pointed out that "likability" is an absurd, sexist, and shallow demand that male authors and characters don't have to contend with. Still, I read The Woman Upstairs as ultimately supporting traditional definitions of female success. Nora defies conventions for female protagonists, but not convention itself: she is angry because she hasn't been able to get married and have kids and succeed as an artist by her early forties. Lively, in contrast, allows her protagonist to suffer the downsides of defiance while still showing that defiance was worth it.

I don't mean to suggest that novels should have a particular political agenda, or that Moon Tiger is "better" than The Woman Upstairs because the former is more radical. But I do think that more books like Moon Tiger would be good for us all.



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How do you create an alternative world?

I've been reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam (the third installment of the trilogy), and marveling at how complete her post-apocalyptic world is--how thoroughly thought-out, how detailed, how true to its own internal logic. How the hell, I ask myself whenever I encounter such a world, does a writer accomplish this?

For Bigfoot and the Baby, I did end up creating a somewhat alternative world, mostly but not entirely like Southern California in the 80s. Apart from providing a sort-of habitat for a sort-of real Bigfoot, that world differs from ours by containing a domed city in the Mojave Desert. So I had to posit a technology to do that, though I don't explore the technology's plausibility in any great detail (it's not that kind of book). Other than that, I don't remember setting out to build an alternative world as such; it just sort of arose, over time, from the needs of the narrative.

I don't know if that's how Atwood proceeded. And I really don't know how, say, China Mieville created the far more alien world of Embassytown, or how any number of so-called "hard" science fiction writers do it. You probably have to know more than I do about ecosystems, architecture, ancient civilizations, high tech, low tech, organizational psychology, and everything else besides.

One strategy I've heard of, which I suspect came from the Poets and Writers writing prompts page, is to consider a world exactly like our own, except with one difference. That difference, I suppose, could be big or seemingly small--an entirely different government in the US, or people walking on four legs rather than two, or trees having black leaves instead of green. This difference becomes a seed that, as it grows and sends tendrils throughout your story, changes almost everything in subtle or enormous ways.

You could probably go really small-scale with this, too. Say, imagine the room you're in, with one thing different. My God, what if this very room were ... clean?




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Empathy vs. justice for characters

I just finished reading Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History.* I found it almost insanely absorbing. The characters felt realistic and compellingly distinct.

Yet I did not care about them in the same way I care about, say, Ivan Karamazov or Oscar Wao. Yes, I cared what happened to them, but what I wanted to happen was comeuppance. While feeling some sympathy for their plight--which was entirely of their own making--I also wanted them to be caught or at least punished somehow. This seems rather different from the awkward situation of rooting for an anti-hero to get away with a crime, which can also be an interesting reading experience.

I'm not exactly sure how Tartt creates this sort of double-consciousness in the reader. I suspect it has to do with her precise attention to detail in every aspect of the story. We know quite clearly what the characters look like, which is often not the case in literary fiction. We understand the social milieu, its arcane hierarchies, its dangerous gray areas. We see, feel, and breathe the Vermont setting, the crushing winter and the hopeful--and then also, suddenly, crushing--advent of spring. These elements, rather than any aspect of the characters' (including the narrators') almost entirely self-serving behavior, draw us into the story. I really did feel, at every single moment, like I was there.

At the same time, I, at least, take some satisfaction in knowing--knowing--I would not fall into the particular trap the characters find themselves in. Often, fiction makes me wonder what I would do when faced with some extreme moral dilemma. Not in this case. These people are vivid and palpable, but they're really and truly not like me. Maybe it's just good old class resentment at work. I can't deny there's a certain pleasure in seeing fictional rich preppies and wannabes doing stupid, violent things to each other.

Several years ago I wrote a post about "altruistic punishment," which is the scholar William Flesch's term for a particularly satisfying plot formula. Readers, according to this theory, love seeing wrongdoers discover the error of their ways. They much prefer this outcome to virtue rewarded (sorry, Pamela). However, they also want justice meted out, well, judiciously. The punishment can't be too severe, or readers begin to feel sorry for the punishee. In fictional practice, this means "just" endings have to somehow feel a little ambiguous; a simple eye-for-an-eye won't do. I won't give away how, but Tartt mainly succeeds in striking this balance.

What's my point here? I suppose that we don't always have to empathize with characters in order to engage with them. We can stand very near them without actually stepping into their shoes. And we can care what happens to them by rooting against them rather than for them.

So this is just another permission slip to create unlikable characters. You have other, powerful mechanisms for engaging your reader.

*No, I haven't read The Goldfinch yet. I attribute this to two factors: 1) The Secret History, not The Goldfinch, was under the T's at my favorite used bookstore. 2) Frankly the plot of TSH appealed to me more than that of TG; at the time of purchase, I strongly wanted to read a story about preppie killers at a second-tier liberal arts college. In fact, I only wanted to read stories about preppie killers at second-tier liberal arts colleges. That desire more or less continues today. Any suggestions?

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Learning to trust the laughter

In selecting parts of my novel to read at events, I've been running up against a particular prejudice I didn't realize I harbored. It's actually really stupid. A lot of times, when I read my work to an audience, they laugh. Now, a lot of my work is satirical, which implies that if my audience laughs, I've succeeded. Besides, I personally like funny books, though my idea of funny may not be everyone's. Dostoevsky is funny. So is Richard Powers's new book, Orfeo. I didn't expect that, because these guys have long worn the mantel of Serious Artists who write about Serious Subjects.

So why does it make me nervous when people laugh? Because deep down, I fear the laughter means my work isn't serious. If you're laughing, you're making light of something, evading, skating on the surface rather than diving in.

But this isn't true! George Saunders talks about this all the time, possibly because the question comes up for him, too: are you really "just" making jokes? He recently said in Salon:

[Y]ou can’t play it large unless you play it small. And you also can’t eradicate one or the other. An amateur eradicates one or the other. A real writer would say, “No, both exist. Of course they do. Serious and funny. Hunger and satiation, they exist.” In a certain sense, you just have to see where you are in that cycle, and the story is an entity and response to itself.

The complexity is in saying, “Oh, this story is so funny. Is it a little too funny? Is it too silly?” And the writer goes, “Maybe.” Boom! And then something really significant happens, and the reader goes, “Oh, I misjudged you.” That’s a wonderful artistic feeling, when you’ve said to the artist, “I’m sorry, I misjudged you.”

There are different kinds of funniness, of course. What Saunders is getting at is that life's staggering complexity encompasses laughter as well as earnestness, and that one powerfully can set off the other--or incorporate it. Laughter isn't just a way of dismissing something--it can be a reaction of surprised recognition, a sign of empathy between reader and author. It can also contain deep darkness. I remember laughing hysterically with my mom at my dying father's bedside. But that's another story.

The point is, trust the laughter. Your own, and your reader/listener's.

Anyway, here's my cat, Bella, sitting on page proofs of Bigfoot and the Baby.

Review copies are now available!

Ordering information is here.