Book #39: Looking for Diversions

"I often fell asleep on top of my manuscript, then woke with a swollen cheek.  Sometimes, when the wall clock's silver hands pointed past twelve, I would imagine I was hearing things.  Those sounds would recur, like the snoring of the electrical repairman next door, the boom of a crane on a far-off building site in the dead of night, or the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen." 
                                                                                                     -Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby
 
After a three day stretch of living in my pajamas, I finished writing the last chapter of my book yesterday.  I stole one of my boyfriend's cigarettes to celebrate and huddled in my bathrobe on our snow-crusted patio overlooking the park, a cold lucidity filling my lungs.

I wanted to feel tranquil and savour the moment, but just the opposite was so.  Editing.  Ugh.  I have one week to edit the manuscript as a whole before turning it over to my editor for her final comments and revisions.

I realized this morning that I definitely prefer writing to editing.  There's something so much more satisfying about putting pen to paper and forming words afresh compared to cutting and moving stuff around.  A few hours of editing simply doesn't make me feel like I've had my dose of writing for the day. 

Seeking some diversion from the task at hand, I picked up Shanghai Baby, which I've been reading intermittently over the past couple weeks, and found myself suddenly engrossed in the final chapters.  It's an autobiographical novel by Wei Hui, a young Shanhainese writer who lives a madcap, near schizophrenic life - caught between waxing lyrical about Henry Miller and Marguerite Duras and lusting after the latest Yves Saint-Laurent wallet.  While writing and secluding herself with her own thoughts - some of which are surprisingly beautiful reflections on the ephemeral quality of twenty-first-century life - she also finds time to engage in games of love and deceit at Shanghai's hot night spots, bringing into focus a city made for film noir, full of old world glamour, decrepit architecture, fast money.  My favourite scenes are almost reminiscent of the films of Wong Kar Wai (speaking of whom I may watch Fallen Angels tonight to reward myself for making some headway with this editing business).

Photo from: here

A Friend's Funeral

Over the weekend, I attended a friend's funeral.  Jean's death was sudden and tragic - after a long battle with cancer, she appeared to be in remission.  The last time I saw her for dinner over the Christmas holidays, she was laughing and quaffing wine and showing off her new shawl.  She told me about her most recent trip to Argentina where she'd bought five pairs of boots (she had extremely long, narrow feet and usually had to get boots custom made, she said, but Argentinian women had her kind of feet).

A woman who fears being on the cusp of death doesn't buy five pairs of boots, I thought at the time, with a sigh of relief. 

At her funeral, I found myself thinking about those unworn boots and how naive my assumption had been.  Her show of living life to the fullest and carrying on in her delightfully showy manner was a means of trying to put others at ease, as she always did.

Before the eulogy, her best friend - also named Jean - read Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman."

I came home from the funeral and stared at my bookshelf for a long time.  I pulled out a book that Jean had given me a couple years ago, My Maasai Life.  Tears filled my eyes as I realized I'd never even bothered to read it and now I never would be able to read it and discuss it with her.  It was a memoir written by her friend whom she'd met while doing volunteer work for Free The Children.

Jean, see you back in Kenya one day??! read the handwritten note above the author's signature.  (Had she  meant to give me her own copy?  Perhaps she'd only been lending it to me and I'd misunderstood?)

Last year, when I'd told her I was writing my own memoir I recalled how excited she'd been, and a couple years before that, I recalled how supportive she'd been when I told her I was leaving academia to do my own writing.  "So creative writing's your passion," she'd said somewhat quizzically (an Iowa farm girl by birth, and an entre preneur at heart, she was amazed by how little pay writers will work for). 

I could write more about Jean, for she certainly continues on in my imagination - her candid advice on men, her funny stories about travelling home and running into her old high school boyfriends, her incredible ability to draw others out and make an impression.  Maybe one day I will write more about her.  But right now writing more would be too sad.  

Book #38: Room's Unique Perspective

"I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that's nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus.  I choose Meltedy Spoon with the white all blobby on his handle when he leaned on the pan of boiling pasta by accident.  Ma doesn't like Meltedy Spoon but he's my favorite because he's not the same."                                                      -Emma Donoghue, Room

I met Emma Donoghue a couple years ago when I had the fortune to have her as my mentor in the writing programme, Diaspora Dialogues.  I had just moved back to Toronto the year before after a failed stint in academia, desperately wanting to return to my first love, creative writing.  Emma was wonderfully incisive and encouraging in her advice on how I could improve a story I'd been struggling with (it was later published in the anthology TOK: Writing the New Toronto).  I recall her advising me, in an email I read many times, to pay careful attention to perspective and which character I wanted the reader to sympathize with at any given moment.

Little did I know that at the time, she must have been putting the finishing touches on her own masterly experiment in perspective, Room.  As I said when I saw her at the book launch, had I known I was being mentored by a Man Booker nominee (fingers crossed for you, Emma!), I would have probably been too overwhelmed to write.  A couple weekends ago, I read Room straight through - unable to put it down except to shower and eat.  I was utterly mesmerized by the freshness of the narrator's voice. 

Although the premise of the novel is horrifying - five-year-old Jack has spent his entire life in captivity, born to a sex slave - the tale is strangely uplifting.  And I don't think this is simply a matter of the novel's narrative arc, as we follow Jack on his escape.  Particularly in the first half, when Jack's entire world consists of Room, I found myself falling in love with how his imagination brings to life the most stripped down environment so that all things appear charged with unique properties and wonder.  Meltedy Spoon, Plant and Spider spark the most delightful reflections in the child's mind, as his language itself appears something malleable and one-of-a-kind.  I loved the experience of entering his world and perversely, I have to admit, I felt a twinge of sadness when he escapes into the "real" world and is compelled to take on the life of a normal little boy.  But Jack will always retain something of his unique perspective, and this is the beauty of Room......

It occurred to me as I was sitting in a room by myself, staring at the white wall, trying to get started on the twelfth chapter of my book, that Room also offers an intriguing metaphor for the writer's life.

Photo from: here

A Japanese Custom

My short story, "A Japanese Custom," was published in this month's issue of MTLS.  If you feel like it, you can read it here.  It's loosely based on the stories that my grandmother, Kayaco, told me over the years....  Growing up, I always loved how she would reminisce at family gatherings about her girlhood in BC, back in the days before the Japanese-Canadians had lost everything, and her spunk never failed to astonish to me.  I wrote this story two summers ago for U of T's Summer Writing School (Alissa York was an inspiring instructor).  Although I liked the story at the time, rereading it now I feel that in many ways this slice of life doesn't do justice to my grandmother.  Oh well.  I guess my feeling of sweaty-palm-dissatisfaction may push me to write a novel about her....

Photo from: here

Book #37: Breakfast with My Publisher

"In studying old photographs I am struck sometimes by a sense of my being contemporary with my parents - as if I'd known them when they were, let's say, only teenagers.  Is this odd?  I wonder.  I rather suspect others share in their family's experiences and memories without knowing quite how."                                                                  -Joyce Carol Oates, The Paris Review Interviews

This morning I had breakfast with my publisher, Sandra, to discuss the first ten chapters of my book.  Since this chunk of writing contains some deviations from the chapter outline I'd included in my book proposal, I was a tad nervous, and it didn't help that I was jittery from too much coffee.  But as I perched on a bar stool at Canteen, unable to resist another Americano, Sandra told me she was delighted with the new emotional territory I'd broached, and in fact, if I hadn't included the new material, she'd been planning to push me to delve deeper.  As if through some beautiful telepathy, I'd intuited that she wanted more vulnerability and self-disclosure, which was wonderful to hear, because at this point I really am having so much fun reliving and revelling in the most miserable periods of my life - my promiscuous youth, my failed career as an English professor, family secrets, my deformed spine, what have you.  Writing about all that old misery somehow helps redeem it (at least in my mind).

So now I am down to the last three chapters, which I have the next month and a half to write.  No sooner had Sandra and I toasted to saving the best for last than a wave of cold sweat and nerve prickles swept over me.

After we'd wrapped up our meeting, I decided I needed a short break from working on the manuscript to clear my head.  So I ended up reading a book that a friend lent me, The Paris Review Interviews, volume three.  What a marvellous discovery.  I had no idea that these interviews are so revealing and interesting - it's as if these revered writers are sitting down with you and disclosing the most intimate details about their minds and writing habits, over a glass of wine.  I love in particular Joyce Carol Oates' reflections on how old photographs serve as inspiration and transport her, almost magically, into the minds of her ancestors.  What she's saying resonates with how I feel when I look at the old photos of my grandmother, particularly the pre-Internment photos from her adolescence, and I think to myself, Oates said it perfectly: her memories are my memories.

And so I must finish my current book quickly so I can move on to writing something else.  My deepest desire has always been to write an historical novel.

Photo from: here

Book #36: My Wayward Bones



"The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita - full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down as I held her."    -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Today was a lovely day (and I'm not the sort of person who often considers her day "lovely").  I went to my writers' workshop where I shared a chapter in my memoir that has been troubling me for a while - the chapter deals with a painful deformity of the spine I suffered as a teenager.  The other writers in my workshop were very supportive and encouraging (which came as a great relief, because the chapter is very revealing about my sexual coming-of-age and I was beginning to second guess my decision to include it at all).  This is the joy of belonging to a workshop - a respite from the isolation of writing alone and self-doubts whispering in my head. 

Here is an excerpt from the chapter, where I'm reading Lolita and identifying all too well with the heroine:

I stared at the cover for a long time: a close-up on a pair of pigeon-toed legs, clad in ankle socks and saddle shoes, slightly grubby around the toes. “The only convincing love story of our century,” reads the endorsement by Vanity Fair. I’d heard this line before, and yet I’d never found anything the least bit romantic or erotic about this novel. Fascinating, yes. Sexy, no. For me, it had always been a story about victimization and survival and a wily, foul-mouthed little girl struggling to hold onto some shred of self throughout her sordid predicament.

Humbert Humbert tries to control Lolita’s body – cataloguing all her measurements, policing her diet, relishing in running his hand along the prepubescent slope of her spine. As she gets a bit older, the signs of her body maturing – plumping out, growing curvaceous – are the ultimate turn-off. He desires to freeze her as his perpetual lover-child, his “nymphet,” forever smelling of grass stains and ice cream sundaes.

As I flipped through the pages, rereading my favourite sections, Humbert Humbert’s hands turned into the probing hands of Dr. Foote, as he bent me and molded me, exploring the possibilities of my young body, testing the flexibility of my wayward bones.

I wanted to stop reading, yet I couldn’t stop. The pain (and pleasure) of watching Lolita being violated was too immediate, too fascinating.

Photo from: here

 

Book #35: Looking for Madame Sosostris

"For years she had drifted into fantasy as she lay in bed at night or sat quietly looking at a book without reading it.  Now her fantasies began to serve a more urgent purpose.  It was much more bearable to be a princess getting tortured in a dungeon than a crooked little girl being tortured by doctors."  -Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Last week, my boyfriend took me to his office Christmas party, where I had my fortune told.  While mingling over glasses of bubbly, you had the option of slipping off to a table in the corner where an old woman with battle-marked skin and dangly earrings shuffled a pack of Tarot cards.  At first, I was skeptical about going up - I've never considered myself the new agey, occultist type, not since junior high at least - but one of the other guests told me that this woman had discerned all kinds of intimate details about her life and yielded scads of insight.  Curiosity got the better of me.

Whether working from intuition or mystical powers, the fortune teller did draw out a good deal about my life.  She knew (guessed?) that I am a writer and that I'm prone to stress and neck pain (maybe she could tell this just by looking at my posture).  But in any case, some cred had been established in my mind.  So when she said that something - some key ingredient - is missing from my current project, I sat up straight indeed.

Although she couldn't say what exactly it was, I knew what she was getting at.  It's something that has been lurking at the back of my mind, a shadowy territory I've been reluctant to explore in my memoir.

When I was eleven, I was diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis, a curvature of the spine of unknown cause.  For two years, I had to wear a fibreglass back brace, and after that treatment failed to do much of anything, aside from giving me breathing problems, surgery was the only option.  Several vertebrae had to be fused and a metal rod was stapled to my spine and I was left with a bright red seam that both tormented and intrigued me for years to come.  (It's like the scar's a zipper into me... a reminder of my ability to become undone).

Since this event was so formative to my identity (my sexuality, my relationship to my body, my "escape" into reading and the life of the mind), it might seem obvious that I should include it in my memoir.  But I haven't, until now.  I haven't wanted to open that closet.  I've said to myself that it isn't important or relevant, but now I sense that just the opposite is true.

Thank you, Madame Sosostris.

So over the past few days, in between eating turkey at Christmas parties, I've been reading for inspiration Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner's 1970s bestseller.  Based on a true story, the novel tells a dark tale about a Catholic school teacher, who suffered from scoliosis as a child, leaving her with a sense of disfigurement that plays out in her games of seduction on the New York bar scene.  While her experience is no doubt different from my own (thank God!  I didn't end up being killed by a psychopath), I have to say that there are certain scenes dealing with memory repression, depression and fantasy that resonate with me all too well.  Now I have to curl up with my notebook and delve into that morass of my own memories.  A little light Christmas reading.

Photo from: here