Thanks!

And time passes, and yet more time passes, and you still can’t think of anything to say, until you realize it’s been nearly two months since you posted anything. And you realize that you’re not a very good blogger.

I spent part of this morning reading Dooce.com, the personal blog of Heather Armstrong, who posts about all the minutae of her daily life. Much as I enjoy her writing, I am just not that kind of person: I like to keep things private. Which is why I don’t Twitter about every meal I eat and song I hear or post Facebook status updates ten times an hour. My grandmother would have said that nice ladies don’t air their dirty laundry in public — and maybe it’s some part of my puritannical upbringing that pushes me to retain some modicum of privacy — but I don’t think that’s the only reason I’m reluctant to share. I just don’t feel comfortable with strangers knowing the intimate details of my life. So I’ll never be a personal blogger like Dooce.

And I also can’t quite muster the enthusiasm to be a news and commentary blogger. I feel like we’ve reached a saturation point, where every things that happens in the world that is even vaguely news-worthy is immediately thrashed apart and commented on by at least a hundred different blogs. The noise is overwhelming. Do I really have that much to add to the fray? When I’ve already read fifty different homages to Teddy Kennedy, or analyses of the latest Caitlin Flanagan screed in the Atlantic Monthly, or thoughts about the new trends in book covers, I don’t feel energized to jump in to the discussion and contribute my paltry two cents. I mostly just feel exhausted.

What I want to contribute, instead, is a little peace and quiet.

I’m about to have a baby, so I’m going to officially take a little time off from the blog — or, more accurately, take time off from feeling bad about not updating the blog. I will return, when I have more to share — about the next novel (due to hit bookshelves next summer, if all goes well), or about the life of a writer, or about what it feels like to put a sophomore effort out into the world. Otherwise, I’m going to be saving most of my creative energies for the printed page.

Until then –

Janelle

So come by and say hello. I’ll be blogging about the writing process.

I’ve been a library geek my entire life. When I was in grammar school, my first ever “job” was at my local library, where I spent my summer shelving books and hand-typing card catalog cards and taping up books with cellophane covers. I did not get paid for this work; I thought it was worth it just because I got first access to all the Lois Duncan and Stephen King novels.

Even now, I am an avid customer of the Los Angeles Public Library. About two-thirds of the books I read come from the library (otherwise, I’d go broke buying hardbacks), and the citywide library system here is fantastic. I can go online, search for the book I want, put a hold on it, and then the library system will locate the nearest free copy of that book and send it to my local branch (three blocks from my house). They even email me when it’s arrived.

My friends are always surprised when I talk about checking books out of the library — most seem to have last used a library sometime around college graduation. My only hope is that the recession is reviving interest in our local libraries, which (thanks to budget cuts) could use all the support they can get these days.

A bad idea, especially now that Hoffman’s twitter feud has been reproduced all over the Internet — Hoffman has come off looking sour grapes, unnecessarily bitter. Of course, she’s not the first author to go public with her pique. Mary Elizabeth Williams had a great piece in Salon yesterday that documented a long series of these kinds of feuds, from Dave Eggers’s spat with the New York Times to the time when Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead for a bad review.

As an author, though, I can empathize with Hoffman’s impulse. When you’ve spent (as I did) four years of your life working on a book, it starts feeling like your baby; and when a journalist then casually — or, worse, cruelly — dismisses your efforts in a piece they churned out in just a few hours, it’s pretty hard to take this lying down. And unfortunately, the low-attention-span theater that is the internet has rewarded us with an era of critics (film, book, TV, you name it) who use snark as their primary writing tool. After all, it’s so much easier to be cruelly funny than it is to be measured, and apparently readers love the juicy thrill of those kinds of hit pieces. It’s criticism as shark tank, with your book as the bait.

In my journalism days, I was guilty of this kind of criticism too, and I wrote a fair number of reviews that, looking back, seem unnecessarily catty or snarky or mean. These days, I cringe at the thought of even writing a review at all, knowing all too well what the author on the other end might be feeling. (I can’t even tag a book on GoodReads with less than five stars without feeling bad about inflicting pain.) Not that I think every book deserves a good review, but I wish more critics would take all this into consideration before they tear a work apart with vicious glee.

So yeah, I can relate to Alice Hoffman, even if she did overreact. But I hope she turns her Twitter account off for a while, in her own best interest.

On Friday, she posted a status update — a cute little anecdote about her dog — and within the hour, she had two film agents approach her, wanting to pitch it as a movie. By the end of the day, she was already getting emails from industry friends all across the country, saying, “I heard you got a movie deal based on a status update!” By Monday, the agents were taking meetings, and my friend was also discussing a series of short books based on the idea. Watch for it to show up in Publisher’s Weekly any day now.

This being Hollywood, it’s still more about buzz than content — nothing has actually sold yet — but considering the amount of chatter around this one status update, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if she ended up with a handsome deal.

I find this utterly depressing. Not that I don’t think that the quality of the movie and/or book series will be lacking — knowing my friend’s skills, she’ll knock it out of the park — but it signifies a major problem with the way the entertainment industries works these days. Everything is sold based on a pitch - a one line “hook.” Got a complex idea, that’s hard to summarize in one sentence? Forget it.

My husband and I sometimes walk out of movies and imagine the pitches that were used to sell them. “It’s Wedding Crashers… in Italy!” “Three guys wake up in a room with a chicken, a lion, and a baby” “Two brides are booked in the same room in the same day!” What happens from there doesn’t seem to matter to the companies that fund the movies — as long as it will make a good pitch line and a decent trailer, who cares what goes on in the middle? A catchy premise is more important than the story to come.

The sad truth is that we’re living in a one-line (or 140 character) world these days, and anything that takes longer to explain is often lost in the noise. Being someone who likes to write long, occasionally convoluted, intricately plotted tales, I find this just upsetting. A year after my book came out, I *still* have a hard time summarizing it in one sentence.

That said, I’m honestly happy for my friend — God knows how hard it is to sell anything these days that isn’t based on a comic book series, a sequel, or a children’s toy. All the best to her.

I guess I’ll consider it a reminder to refresh my status updates more often.

I am always fascinated by this critique; and in some ways, I find it a compliment. As I mentioned in a previous post, my favorite literary characters are the ones who aren’t traditionally likable - like Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” or Holden Caulfield in “Catcher in the Rye,” or the selfish Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or the repulsive Ignatius Reilly of “Confederacy of Dunces.” These are the characters that stick with me decades after I read the books: Characters that I might have found repellent or horrifying or annoying, but were always always interesting .

Unfortunately the popular mode of current thinking in mainstream entertainment is that lead characters should always be “likable.” As my friend Carina Chocano, the (much-missed) former film critic for the LA Times once wrote, “After watching “Monster-in-Law,” I canvassed a few writer to share directives they’d received while creating their romantic heroines. There is no such thing, it appears, as a romantic comedy heroine who couldn’t benefit from being just a little more “likable” than she already is. “Likable” of course, can mean many things in the real world; but for a studio it tends to mean that she does some kind of work involving animals or the elderly. Perhaps she’s a veterinarian, or a zookeeper. If she works in business, she has a boss who doesn’t appreciate her, or steals her ideas. Whatever it is, she has it tough. Sometimes she’s a single mother, “trying to hold it all together in this tough, dog-eat-dog world,” one writer offers. “Also, likable often means clumsy,” she adds. “She falls down a lot, but in an adorable fashion. Likable also means pretty. As we all know, the fat are unlikable.”

It strikes me that a lot of contemporary women’s fiction suffers from the exact same problem — and not just because some editors reject flawed female characters, but because readers reject them too — and the result is a glut of generic fiction packed with bland, unremarkable, supposedly “likable” heroines. Their biggest flaws are a workaholic streak, or a weakness for the wrong kind of men, or a habit of eating ice cream by the pint. Take the book (and film) “The Devil Wears Prada.” The most memorable character in the story (by far) is Miranda Priestly, the complex, ambitious, intolerant magazine editor; the supposed heroine of the book, her beleaguered assistant, is so plain vanilla and nicey-nice as to be completely forgettable. (In fact, I can’t even remember her name; whereas Miranda Priestly’s has been burned into my brain).

A character that is “nice” and “likable,” in my opinion, has nowhere to go. Whereas one that is deeply flawed — selfish, cruel, egotistical, materialistic, a drug addict or a hooker or a criminal, you name it — is the one who has endless possibilities before him or her. Not only do we get to see this person make bad decisions, but we also see how they actually grow as a person. There’s a possibility for a significant character arc. This was my goal with the three women in the Miller family — Margaret is given a chance to grow beyond her strident intolerance; Janice learns that her suppressed unhappiness and obsessive perfectionism has driven away her children; and Lizzie comes to understand that sex is not the same as love.

Perhaps some readers won’t love these characters; they may even hate them at first. But hopefully they’ll at least find them interesting.

Every Wednesday this summer I’ll be chatting up a storm with fans and friends on GoodReads, discussing not just All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, but the writing process, the joy of reading, favorite books, and pretty much anything lit. Come probe me with your most challenging questions!

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/19557.Hump_Day_Chats_with_Janelle_Brown

Or you can add this widget to your Web site, for a direct link to my GoodReads page–

Janelle Brown’s books on Goodreads

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

reviews: 131
ratings: 1034 (avg rating 3.39)

The other upside of doing this is that you get to visit bookstores where you’re not doing events. As such, I’ve managed to visit some of the most wonderful independent bookstores that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered — like Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, an incredible brick edifice to books which just reeks of history; or Depot Bookstore in Mill Valley, with its wonderful cafe. Most bookstore salesclerks are happy to meet the author, want to chat about your book, clearly care about writing — including some great staff that I’ve met at assorted Borders and Barnes & Noble. But every once in a while you have an encounter like this:

Me: “Hi, my name is Janelle Brown, and I’m wondering if I could sign stock on my book?”
Clerk, chatting on phone with friend: “You wanna do what?”
Me: “Um, autograph my book?”

Clerk, clearly annoyed to be interrupted, huffs off to locate book. Returns, ten minutes later, smelling like cigarette smoke.

Clerk: “Can’t find it.”
Me, meekly: “Actually, it’s right there on your front table.”

Clerk retrieves books with aggrieved sigh. I sign books, hand them back to bookseller, who is now reading the latest US Weekly.

Me: “Do you want help stickering them?”
Clerk: “We have stickers?”
Me: “Just don’t put it over the title, please.”

Clerk begins haphazardly slapping enormous stickers on the front of the book, covering my name.

Me, still hopeful: “Thanks for taking care of my book.”

Needless to say, this is generally not something that happens at a little independent, but at a major chain store. And it makes me appreciate, more than ever, those bookstores where you feel like the booksellers aren’t just selling widgets to make money, but consider themselves stewards of literature. Places where booksellers lovingly post recommendations under their favorite books and are eager to hand-sell you an author you’ve never heard of. It’s horrifying to me that they are such an endangered species — the entire city of Los Angeles boasts fewer than half a dozen these days.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t share this with you, dear readers….

* * *

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

I bought my copy of The Annotated Lolita in a used bookstore just off the Berkeley campus, in 1991. Required reading for the freshman English 110 course, my Lolita was already marked up with a stranger’s highlighter, and stale bread crumbs fell out of the spine when I opened it. Having only recently worked my way through War and Peace, I regarded this book with dread: Another dead Russian author, I figured, another dense and musty tome.

How wrong I was. From the very first line of this tricky, slippery book, I was electrified: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Eighteen years later, this is still the only opening line of a novel that I can recite by heart. I find it irresistable, capturing, with its thrilling alliterative wordplay, the horror of illicit lust, the magic and the agony of love, the darkness of the heart.

My mother, when I later told her I had read Lolita, responded with surprise: “That nasty little book?” And if you go by the plot synopsis alone, it is a nastly little book: The story of Humbert Humbert, a twisted pervert who essentially kidnaps his precocious twelve year old stepdaughter Lolita, takes her on a road trip across America, and turns her into his sex slave. Not for puritans, this novel. Which is, of course, is why Vladimir Nabokov couldn’t find an American publisher for Lolita – not until 1957, two years after the book had already been published to much acclaim in France.

Even for a self-styled urban college sophisticate like me, Lolita was shocking, the first book I’d read that made me physically uncomfortable with the emotions it dredged up in me. I was, after all, being asked to sympathize with the misdeeds of a pedophile – often, to even laugh at his mishaps. And the genius of Lolita is that I did: I found myself rooting for repellent Humbert Humbert as he tried to win the affection of his poor corrupted nymphet and wreak vengence on his depraved double and sexual competitor Clare Quilty — even as I also loathed him (almost as much as he loathed himself). I spent hours poring over the annotations, trying to deconstruct Nabokov’s literary wordgames – or were they Humbert’s? – and marvelling that something as simple as a list of schoolgirl’s names could be a portal into a whole world where nothing could be trusted and everything suggested something else.

Lolita introduced me to the concept of the unreliable narrator, and it taught me that the most compelling literary journeys are the ones that take us to unnerving places we never would otherwise have gone. As a novelist, even now, deeply flawed characters are still my favorites, both to read about and to write about – not the nice girls and well-behaved boys, but the corrupt and the amoral and the emotionally complex, the Humbert Humberts and the Alexander Portnoys and the Holly Golightlys.

Towards the end of Lolita, Humbert begs the reader: “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let’s even smile a little.” This, for me, is the ultimate manifesto of great literary creations — their plea to be understood; for you to look into their black souls, and to love them anyway, maybe even as much as as Humbert loved his Lolita.