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-Jessica

I had all sorts of good reasons for stopping my New York Times subscription for the month of August.  First, it was to finally get the chance to get through all those unread sections that had been piling up for months.  I’d be going away on vacation for a week in August and would need to stop delivery anyway. 

For the few years since the NY Times has been available online I resisted dropping my paid subscription, even though I knew I could now read it for free.  I determined to be one of the last holdouts to support the dying newspaper industry – my measly contribution toward preventing THE END OF JOURNALISM AS WE KNOW IT.  Even though my tech-savvy fiancé Bob assured me that “paper is an antiquated way of delivering the news,” and my sons seem to be more than adequately informed by a combination of The Daily Show and online sources like Slate and CNN.com, I clung tightly to tradition.

I love my newspapers. I feel compelled to read every section, with the possible exception of the Sunday Automobile section and Sports (although I’ve even been known to  read the occasional article about a team or player about which I know nothing because the headline was clever and eye-catching). Tuesday’s Science Times, which I rarely get a chance to read on a Tuesday, will often wait until Thursday, Friday or even the following week. 

Sometimes I’ll come to the end of a long article about some archeological dig in the Galapagos or retiring appellate judge in Sacramento and wonder, “why did I just read that?” and I realize, it was just because the writing was so damn good.

But here’s the problem, and the reason I stopped my subscription for the month of August: I no longer read books.  Sections of the Times – they can be days old, no matter – follow me to breakfast, dinner, and up to bed at night.  Because the paper is never actually finished – and a new one comes every day – there never seems to be any time to read an actual book. 

I teach writing, and frequently urge my students to read both fiction and nonfiction, quoting Stephen King’s admonition in On Writing, “If you’re not going to read, don’t bother to write.” The pile of books on my night table, consisting of everything from the James Joyce’s Dubliners to The Ten Year Nap picked up on impulse at Barnes & Noble, to a manuscript of a wonderful unpublished novel written by a friend, go unread while I finish yesterday’s Business Section.

But August was going to be my month to read books, I decided.  I’m not teaching, have mostly administrative catch-up and planning work to do, and there should be plenty of opportunity to take a book to the beach or even read on my back patio.

In theory.

What happened is that I went through eight days of severe newspaper withdrawal.  For the first few days I managed by finally going through the old Travel Sections describing places I’ll never travel to, Book Review section containing reviews of books I’ll never read, and even an old Connecticut section that hasn’t been published since July. But when those ran out, I was in trouble.  Big time.

I couldn’t eat a meal without a section of the Times spread open – not breakfast, not lunch, not one of the many dinners I eat on my own, now that my sons are out of town a good part of the summer and Bob is around only on weekends. During dinner I would try to get my news fix with the evening news, but usually ended up missing the news and instead hearing yet one more in-depth piece on Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett, with a little Dannielyn Birkhead story occasionally thrown in, on those cheesy evening entertainment shows.

Sure, I could read the Times online, and I tried to.  But as someone who spends half her life on the computer, the last thing I wanted to do during down time was sit in front of my monitor for even more time than I already had to.

I was getting desperate. Like a junkie, I resorted to Times articles on my BlackBerry, and became one of those pathetic people who eat meals with a fork in one hand and a pda in the other. But there was something definitely missing; I was unable to tell where in the paper the article appeared – was it front  page, or buried somewhere?  Without the NY Times editors to signal the article’s noteworthiness by its positioning in the paper, not to mention the photos whose captions summed up the article perfectly (it took annoyingly long to download images), I was completely disoriented.

I made it to Day 8 before I made the call to the Times.  I wanted to apologize to the automated voice that accepted my amended restart date.  Take me back.  I’m sorry.  I’ll never leave you again.

But I’m really, really going to try to get to those books.

I was asked an interesting question in an interview in WomensMemoirs.com about my opening to Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey.  How and where do you start a memoir?  Here’s how the question was posed:

“Are you are having a hard time with the opening to your memoir? Don’t know where to start? Wondering how many times you have to rewrite it to get it just right? Then you’ll take comfort in listening in as Jessica tells how many rewrites she did before her opening was ready for publication. [Hint: She calculates she rewrote it as many times as Hemmingway said he rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms.]”

Visit the site to hear a clip of the interview.  You’ll hear me admit that my half page opening called ”Introduction: Into the Sunlight,” was once twelve pages long, and went through more re-writes than I care to remember.

In the full interview I talk about my early writing life on a “desk” made out of a cardboard box at the back of a deep closet.  I also answer some fascinating questions posed by writers can be heard here. I invite you to listen.

Okay, I’ve been trying to be nice about this.  As my friend Gordon likes to remind me, “if you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all.” (Clearly Gordon forgets who he’s speaking to.) 

Yes, I’ll admit that the fact that I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan has a lot more to do with my advanced age than the pop singer’s lack of talent.  And that for a decade now I have literally cringed whenever I caught a glimpse of that Frankenstein-manufactured, bleached, android looking creature, obviously means that I am missing some profound cultural statement being made about the importance of crossing the gender, race, and generational divide.

But enough already about Michael Jackson!  Surely our world must be a secure and happy place if every news and entertainment show has to nothing more to focus on but the highly predictable early death of this self-medicating, no-boundaries, delusions of immortality pop star? Surely greater tragedies have befallen our society, in this decade at least?

Talented? No question. (Great beat, and I still can’t figure out that moon walk.) Successful? Certainly.  But if we’re going to talk about lasting impact on the American music scene, can we now have a little equal time for (in no particular order) Ray Charles, Buddy Holly, Aaron Copeland, John Lennon, or Robert Merrill, to name just a few?

When will all this be over??

Okay, now I’m finally starting to get it about blogs.  How else would I suddenly find that I’ve got a readership in South Africa?  Take a look at this lovely review of Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey by a very cool single mom named Laura Kim in Pretoria, South Africa on her blog called Harrassed Mom.

My children grew up in two homes – there is no other way to look at it. At first I would have thought there would be something terribly sad about this. But as I share so often in Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey, the dismal situation I expected turned out not to be the case.

There were the usual glitches – a report due tomorrow, accidentally left on the other parent’s computer.  Easily a hundred unmatched socks whose mates must have been at the other house.  (What other explanation could there possibly be?) As I describe in the chapter called “Divorce in the Age of E-Mail,” most of these annoyances disappeared over the years due to technology, laptop computers, the boys’ maturity, and that particular Godsend, the teenage driver’s license. (Yes … really!)

I know now that my sons grew up in two very loving, supportive homes. By agreement between me and their father, their routines at each home were consistent – bed times, curfews, expectations regarding household chores expected of them. 

But what was most important about their two homes was reminded to me in a lovely book that came across my desk recently, Sending Love … My “Different-Functional” Family. Written by Utah single mom Lori Hilliard, with photos by her former husband and featuring their very real 5-year-old son Joshua, the book is delightful presentation of a child’s life in two separate homes.  Along with Joshua’s arresting blue eyes (Lori’s exactly), one can’t help noticing a genuinely happy boy who has adjusted well to – and delights in - his two separate homes.

The key is, of course, is the what Joshua tells us about his parents:

“But they both love, love, LOVE me like crazy! (And with all of their hearts!!!!!!!)”

Because isn’t that what it’s really all about for a child?  That, and consistency – knowing what to expect, wherever they are, and with either parent?

All the rest is just real estate.

 I was interviewed not long ago by a reporter about my recently released collection of memoir-based essays Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey. “Gee,” she said, “you shared so many personal details in your book. Didn’t you mind being so … revealing?” From time to time during the interview she kept coming back to this point, as though it was something very unsettling. “How did you find the courage to expose so many private details about yourself?”

Courage? No, not really. It was something else.

What were those terribly revelatory, potentially embarrassing details she was referring to? Let’s see. In “Losing It” I wrote about the time my young sons could hear me sobbing through the closed door one night and timidly knocked, pleading for an explanation. I revealed in “Eating and Drinking” that my habit of comforting myself as I went through my divorce with cookies and Ben & Jerry’s Super Fudge Chunk developed into a full-blown eating disorder. In one of the more humorous chapters called “My Lost Romance.com,” I confessed to letting my imagination get a little too carried away during an online dating correspondence, with both disastrous and comical results.

In the memoir and personal-essay workshops that I lead at the Westport Writers’ Workshop, this issue of how much one needs to reveal about oneself is a familiar one, and it troubles many first-time memoir writers. “There’s a lot I want to write … but what if my [fill in the blank: husband/mother/children] ever read it?” they ask. There is actual fear in their eyes.

I was invited shared my answer to that problem in a guest post on the popular web site WomensMemoirs.com published today.  Take a look.

Last weekend was my college reunion – my (gulp) 35th, hard to believe. I go to most of my reunions, which are held every five years. This was the first reunion where I heard, among my classmates’ conversations, words like “retire” and “grandchildren.” It was pretty terrifying. At the same time, I had a great time catching up with my former classmates – many of whom I have only met at reunions, long after graduation – from the “Notable Class of 1974.”

My college reunions are always bittersweet for me, however.  Diane Behar, my dear friend and roommate for three years, died at age 45, after battling breast cancer that she fought since the age of 35.  I make sure to bring and post photos of her every time,

With Diane Behar at our 5th reunion in 1979

so that Diane can be remembered, and somehow be there with us.  I know she is for me, as I pass so many places – our adjoining dorm rooms in Balch Hall, the apartment on Eddy Street we shared our senior year – where we spent some of the most important days of our lives together.

My ever supportive fiance Bob Cooper waited patiently while I signed books.

One of the highlights of the weekend was being invited to sign copies of Happily Ever After Divorce: Notes of a Joyful Journey at the Cornell Campus Store at a book signing for Cornell faculty and alums. My most longtime (I won’t say “oldest!) friends from freshman year, Merrill (Weitzner) Naughton and Ellen Franklin, stopped by to say hello.  I think we look pretty damn terrific for 35th reunioners, don’t you?

With Merri and Ellen at the Campus Store

Have you ever heard of Powell’s Books?  I must have been living on some other planet because I had not.   Or maybe I’m just too much of a settled-in east coaster to have heard of this famous bookstore in Portland, Oregon that occupies an entire city block.  It’s a west coast legend, and one of the last of the independent book stores.

My fabulous publicist Meryl Moss arranged for me to do a guest post on Powell’s highly regarded Powells.com.  I’m even on their home page today as the featured blogger.  In the post I write about what qualifies me to write a book on divorce, given that I’m not a family therapist, mediator, or other professional.  Click here to take a look.