Valentine’s Day – love it or hate it?

There was a time I was really into Valentine’s Day. Loved the fun of planning a surprise and wondering how I would be surprised. Red hearts and chocolates and all the fluffy bears holding stuffed hearts on convenience store, grocery store, and card store shelves weren’t anything I wanted for myself – bears and roses weren’t my preference – but they elicited that Christmas-type anticipation.

Then, one year, it changed. I don’t know why, but it did. And all of the people doing “romantic” things on the same day simply because the date dictated romantic things should be done struck me as far too insincere, if not a little weird, programmed, forced, burdensome, and pressure-filled.

After that, Valentine’s Day started to bother me just on principal. Spontaneous romance was how love should be expressed. All those suckers planning essentially the same evening – dinner, movie, presents, sex – in some kind of Stepford-scheduled event made me feel superior. I was outside of that freakish community. I wasn’t brainwashed. I would do no such thing. I would give gifts on random Tuesdays, not when February hit day 14.

I was no …

I was no …

No what?

No gift-giver? No dinner-planner? No crafty-card-heart-thingy maker?

I thought about Valentine’s Day today, and about how much scorn I’d been directing at people who were simply having a good time finding ways to be sappy and loving.

And I figured, so what if it’s all on one particular day? There are far more pointless “holidays” than one encouraging kissing and candles.

President’s Day, for example.

I don’t think I’m any more interested in participating in Valentine’s Day, now, but I do like that I’m able to see it as kind of sweet. Who cares how the day came to be? So what if companies making anything and everything with hearts on it scoop up billions in profits all because of a contrived “love”day? How can the result be bad? It’s the one day hundreds of thousands of couples set aside to be excessively nice to one another.

I can’t think of a better way for companies to make money. They’re not taking advantage of people – people aren’t stupid. People do it because they like it.

Everybody wins, really.

If you’re celebrating Valentine’s Day, I hope you have a good time. And if you’re someone who’s trapped into it by a partner who likes to celebrate it, if you’re someone who’s frustrated by the greedy bastard corporations looking to sell some stuff and you’re the poor sap dating a girl who’s making you buy that stuff, I hope you allow yourself to try to see the fun in it, and maybe even  use it as the perfect opportunity to do something thoughtful you might not otherwise have done.

The day my uncle met J.D. Salinger

*The following originally posted at my old blogsite in June of ‘09.  After reading the many articles today about Salinger’s death, I was reminded of this account of a meeting (but not really a meeting) between my uncle and Mr. Salinger.

My uncle, who I’ll call Harry, lives about twenty minutes from Cornish, NH. Says a lot of famous people – oddly – come through the small town he lives in. I suppose it’s not a surprise that J.D. Salinger would, too, considering how close he live[d].

In the late 80s, Harry was working for the motor vehicle department, and a man he worked with showed him an appointment sheet, and said, “Hey. Look who’s coming in.”

(Harry, you should know, loves books and literature and used to want to be a writer.)

Harry went home and grabbed his copy of Catcher in the Rye and brought it back to work with him.

When Salinger finally arrived, Harry said, he was with a woman much younger than him.

“The woman he was with was…I’m pretty sure it wasn’t his wife, because she was under thirty. She was clearly there running interference for him.”

Salinger went straight to Harry’s desk, and Harry directed him to the appropriate station.

“He was as tall as a tree with huge eyes,” Harry said. “Imposing in a way. He appeared to be healthy. I was really taken by his eyes. They were like big fucking marbles, or something. They were weird.” (Asked did he remember the color, Harry said no. “I think they were dark, though. I know they weren’t blue. They seemed dark.”)

He went on: “And he had a deep voice. But, you know, he was so tall. Or he appeared tall to me, anyway. If you go into his bio he’s probably 5 foot 3, but it felt like he was 6 foot 4.”

I remembered what Harry had said about going home to get his copy of Catcher in the Rye and said, “Did he sign your book?”

“No,” he said. “Nah. While he was over with the other guy, I told the girl with him that I had his book, I loved his book, you know, and did she think I could ask him to sign it. ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ she said.”

He did exchange a few words with Salinger, though. I wanted to know, was he friendly?

“No. No, he was kind of cold, actually.”

We talked a little bit about the mystery that is Salinger, and about what might have made him more famous – his writing, or his decision to hide.

I then attached in an email to Harry this link to a 2007 article I found on NPR about another man who’d met Salinger.

“Interesting article,” he wrote back. “Makes me feel I had a rare experience!”

The Princess Parade

In writing The Year of Dan Palace, I couldn’t help but include a scene that has Dan sitting in a restaurant across the table from a teenage girl and her father. The teenage girl is wearing a shirt that says “Princess” in sparkles across her chest. (The scene goes on to illustrate the curious practice of wearing a shirt with writing across the breasts when not welcoming sets of eyes on the breasts, but for now I want to focus on the word “Princess.”)

A year or two ago, I heard a woman say on some show or other, “Every woman is a princess and should be treated as such.”

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I don’t know anyone, personally, who would say this kind of thing, but then again, I don’t know a lot of people. If TV is even a semi-accurate reflection of modern society, I’m sure there are those out there who really do twitter from behind glossed, pouting lips that they have an inner princess who needs feeding.

“Princess” is a misnomer for some of today’s girls and women who believe, for whatever reason, their vaginas entitle them to automatic privileges and special treatment.  If you’ve ever seen the show “Bridezillas” on the WE channel, you’ve witnessed a few prime examples of this recent (and, with any luck, fast-passing) behavioral trend.

These girl-women yell at their bridesmaids, insult their future husbands, stomp and flail and pout, and use as an excuse that it is their day.  (1. Note: a wedding is not the woman’s day, but a celebration of the union between two people.  2. A little secret someone should let the men in on is that a woman who behaves that way over a wedding will continue to behave that way until the divorce is final.)

To be fair, some of the women featured on “Bridezillas” are simply picky and detail oriented, and for what they’re paying, they should be.  But many others are selfish and cruel, and their behavior obviously has little to do with isolated wedding-day expectations and a lot to do with this new insistence that sporting a set of breasts gives a girl-woman full license to be an asshole.  [I really try not to swear in my blogs, but this is the most fitting word to use, here.] And if being concerned with planning the perfect event is what brings out the evil in the Bridezilla girls, what’s the excuse used by the girls on shows like the “Real World,” the “Bad Girls Club,” “Big Brother,” “Jersey Shores,” and the rest?

A talk show I watched last year or the year before centered around this idea of being proud of what I find to be reprehensible and socially unacceptable behavior, and the woman being interviewed—who was not at all embarrassed to put herself out there as a speaker for all bitchy princesses—named as one of the rules of princess-dom a guideline that went something like this:  “When a princess is walking on the sidewalk, she never moves for someone else.”

What happens when one princess gets in the way of another?

Princess bitches are so popular right now, as is bad male behavior (overblown arrogance, superiority complexes, fighting), that I hate to think of how this is affecting the behavior of the teenagers watching it, or influencing their idea of what it means to be “cool.” The idea that cruelty and meanness is “cool” is about as surprising to me as it was when I found out today’s high school girls are having sex because they want to be popular. When I was in high school, the last thing that made girls popular was having sex. (I mean, I’m sure it made them popular with boys who wanted to have sex, but that was about it.)

What I find most disappointing about these self-proclaimed princesses is that they’re ruining things for real women who for decades have been working toward being taken seriously and treated as equals to men. These days, the loudest female voice comes from those whose only interest seems to be living on a cloud-high pedestal with a whip in one hand and a pink-colored drink in the other, which they’ll greedily slurp from in between snide remarks.  (And they neither poured—nor paid for—that drink, make no mistake.)

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Diana, the most famous of princesses known to our generation, might have had her own small neuroses, but when she wasn’t lamenting her marriage to a man who never loved her or suffering from bulimia, she was helping clear mine fields and visiting underprivileged nations and dealing graciously with the public.  She was not chest-bumping people on sidewalks, baring her teeth at society, or insisting she was the most important person ever in all of existence.  Princess Diana had what today’s spoiled little girls with their false sense of entitlement are severely lacking:  class.

Quitting gets a little easier every time.

I used to smoke regularly. It started when I was 13 with a Marlboro red 100 (if you’re going to do it, go big). My friend D and I sat at the top of a long set of stairs leading down to a narrow path that cut through my small Neckarsteinach neighborhood, and she pulled one from the soft pack. “Are you sure you want one?” she said.

“Yeah. Just give it to me.”

I was an automatic inhaler. I didn’t even know how to puff. I’d take a drag, and then I’d blow out the smoke, cough, and spit.

“Are you inhaling?” she said.

I said I didn’t know.

“Try just puffing,” she said.

I pulled on the filter and the smoke crawled down my throat. I shrugged, blew out the smoke, coughed, and spit. She laughed.

I switched to lights and smoked off and on until 9th grade, when I started for real. (Cigarette in the morning before school, “nic fits” before I could run outside with friends to have one during the long break between second and third period, cigarette or two after a chili-fries and egg roll lunch, etc.)

I tried quitting at 18, and I was almost successful. My boyfriend at the time and I  both wanted to quit, so we stopped bringing our cigarettes with us in the car, and I remember I even had a successful night downtown – not one cigarette. (“Downtown” means “at the bar” – Germany, 16 legal age.)

I don’t remember when or why I started up again, but I did.

I tried to quit again at 26 by cutting down to no more than four cigarettes a day. It was working very well – I’d just gone down to three a day – and then, on the morning of September 11, I broke away from the TV after watching for two hours to rush to the gas station for a pack.

At 29 years old, I was still smoking. My hair had also gone through enough highlighting to have turned all of it very light blond, and I decided I did not want to be the 30-year-old cigarette smoking bleach blond. Before my birthday, I dyed my hair back to its natural color and started to quit smoking again by cutting down. (Cold turkey doesn’t work for me – it’s too rigid.)

Something similar is happening with my efforts to quit marketing Homefront.

The addiction to marketing started out slowly enough – I made a MySpace page, designed a few fliers.

As I learned more about the many marketing avenues there were, I gradually and increasingly immersed myself in promotion for two years. (Minus the time spent working one of those years.) Making phone calls, sending emails, arranging readings and signings, and so on. And on and on and on.

Before Homefront, I’d been writing all kinds of things. Short stories, articles, essays, flash fiction. When I finished one project, I would send it out for rejections and start a new one.

For over a year, I’ve been trying to quit marketing Homefront so I can get back to writing new things. I tried once in late 2008 after starting Dan Palace my first week living in Connecticut. I figured I’d write while I looked for a job, and when a few weeks later I started working for the newspaper, I was successful, for the most part, at forgetting about Homefront. My days were too busy to worry about marketing. Every now and then I’d dip into it if something occurred to me that I hadn’t tried, yet, but the activity was very sporadic.

A year later, when I moved to Tennessee, I was going to take a year away from working to write. Not market, write.

It worked for a little while. Then I’d hear something on the news that applied to Homefront – something allowing me a lead-in for a press release – and the writing would be set aside for the marketing.

Several months ago, I was almost successful at letting go again. I finished writing Dan Palace and the editing was coming along. I was determined to let Homefront sit for good.

But then we got this news we were moving again, and I was too busy to have any real zone-time for editing/revising/rewriting Dan Palace, so I thought I may as well use random hours here and there to market Homefront…

Thank goodness for wise people.

One of them told me yesterday that if I can’t let go of Homefront, I won’t be able to enjoy working on something new.

This person is absolutely right.

I’ve done all I can with it, and if I want to be a career writer, I have to be able to put my energy into the creative writing process. I have to be able to enjoy it the way I did when I was writing Homefront and everything that came before it.

Besides. The last thing I want to be is that person clinging desperately to the one thing she did years ago because it felt so good and so right. You can get away with being a bleached-blond smoker when you’re young, but the day comes when it just starts to look ridiculous and it’s time for a nicotine patch and a trip to the salon.

“Homefront” and/or “Carol’s Aquarium” purchase will be donated to Haiti relief

100% of the proceeds from the purchase of  “Homefront” (novel) and/or “Carol’s Aquarium” (fiction collection) at Smashwords (which allows you to download the books in a variety of formats you can read on your e-reader or on your computer) between now and March 1 will be donated to Doctors without Borders.

See sidebar, or click the “books” link above, for information about the books.

An explanation re: “Just don’t call me an Army wife.”

I should have anticipated this entry would not be well received by some military spouses. My friend, who is married to a man in the Air Force, warned me. As did Ian (the husband about to re-enter the military).

“Yeah, sure, the essay ends well…but that first part…I don’t know. People might not see past the first part.”

“But it’s positive,” I argued. “It’s a happy ending. It’s about growth and–”

“Oh, we know, we know,” they might have said in unison if they had been in a room together. “But…”

There is only one comment at the end of the blog post, but I also introduced the topic on a couple of military spouse forums because I know there are other women married to service members who bristle at being called a “Military Wife,” and who will be chastised by certain military wives (not all) for not taking pride in the title.

There is a wide spectrum of feelings about this, I discovered in the conversation about military spousedom, but the sentiments boil down largely to the following:

1. Pride for the spouse, but a lack of interest in using the Military Wife title.

2. Fine with the Military Wife title, but as one of many identifying titles (wife, mother, sister, doctor, and so on) that shape who the person is. Additionally, there is something unique about the military spouse title, or label, as those married to the military live a unique lifestyle. They move frequently, have to suffer the absence of their loved one during a deployment, and have to figure out what to do with their kids and/or  jobs when it’s time for either a deployment, TDY, or a move.

3. Being a spouse is a lifestyle choice, a job, and being the spouse of someone in the military is an incredible source of pride.

The second sentiment was the most prevalent.

What also happened is I received more than a few responses that indicated to me I didn’t do justice to what it was I was trying to communicate. Or, maybe the “before” part of the contrast used to illustrate the growth was a little too incendiary for some.

In any case, the larger message was not (for the most part) absorbed.

A few responses pointed to my having a hang-up about titles and labels, and because I spent so much time saying “Army Wife” and “Military Wife,” I can see how that happened.

The larger message in the entry – which, again, I now realize I probably didn’t communicate very well by using titles and stereotypes formed in childhood as a vehicle to take us there – is that it was a “I didn’t see the forest for the trees” situation.

Being with Ian made me see the military in a completely new way. He has a very deep respect for it, but it was difficult for me to perceive the military as anything but ho-hum-whatever when it was something I saw every day as a child. The first time I was able to truly appreciate it was when Ian took me on a tour around Arlington, and we stopped at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I started to joke about something unrelated, and he tapped me on the arm and said, “Sh.” So I “sh”ed, and I watched, and I listened to the silence surrounding the tapping and the clicking of the guard’s shoes, and I thought about what it all meant, who the unknowns were, and the powerful symbolism of the ever-present guard protecting the tomb, his presence a constant reminder: “You’ve not been forgotten.”

And it took Ian’s leaving the military for me to appreciate the spouses and their community.

It often takes stepping away from a thing, or looking at it from a new point of view, before I can see it more clearly.

And the point is this: I’m so glad I did.

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Related post:

Military Spouses get candid about waiting through a deployment

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Just don’t call me an Army Wife.

I was married to an Army soldier, but I refused to call myself a Military Wife. He flew Chinooks during his 2003 Iraq deployment, even made a brief phone call over the unpredictable and crackling line from Mosul to tell me he’d been shot at while at a “hot” LZ (landing zone), and I still wouldn’t do it.

My first introduction to Military Wives came when I was attending a DoDDS middle school in Heidelberg, Germany where my father’s government job had moved us in late 1981. The school bus took us bratty little civilian kids, who lived on the economy, through the military housing area. Few mornings passed when we didn’t make fun of the Army wives standing with snarled bed hair outside their stairwells or smoking morning cigarettes on the parking lot sidewalks. They wore dingy pink sweatpants and their husbands’ oversized Army PT sweatshirts. Intimidated by public transportation and European roads, their slovenliness screamed of voluntary isolation. Our bus would bounce by, and we, at our small square windows, would point at them. “Army wives!” we’d squeal.

Predicting someone would grow up to be an Army Wife was not an uncommon insult.

After middle school came high school and a keen awareness of the GIs (as we called them) speckling the fringes of our teenage experience. We girls who had been in country for several years had assimilated. We knew the local restaurant etiquette. We’d learned to be quiet, in keeping with the larger German personality.

The GIs wrestled like dogs in the Fest beer tents and, often younger than 21, would drink more than they were used to in quiet German restaurants. “Ein Bier, bitte!” they would howl, pounding the table. In public, they walked in loose clusters, shouted their words, and leered at—and hit on—American high school girls because we were girls and, more importantly, we spoke English.

I learned at an early age to avoid GIs, but in 2005, after having been away from all things military for a decade or more, I married someone in the Army. We’d met in Germany during our senior year of high school when he, with his cross dangle earring, untied shoelaces, and heavy-metal band T-shirts, was the last person anyone would expect to join the military. Still, he joined a year after graduation, and we kept in touch for eleven years before deciding to be together.

When he deployed to Iraq, and for months after his return, I again found myself judging Military Wives. Their cars sported bumper stickers reading, “Army Wife: Toughest Job in the Army.” Women on the military spouse forums would list, as their occupation, “Military Spouse.” Their names were “Army wifey” or “Sgt. John’s Wife.”

If being a Military Wife meant losing my identity, I wanted no part of it.

I avoided all things FRG  (Family Readiness Group, a spouse support group), even when Ian became a Commander and I knew the Commander’s wife typically headed the FRG. Before one of Ian’s promotion ceremonies, I told him I didn’t want him to present me with the yellow roses wives usually receive; instead, I wanted the battalion coin. I didn’t want him to thank me for being his support, or to give me credit for his accomplishments and success. I asked him to refrain from mentioning me at all because he had done it himself – with or without me, he would have been where he was.

I fantasized the military families in attendance were gasping, the wives’ hands pressed firmly to their laps so they wouldn’t raise them in shock to their hearts.

After thirteen years in, in 2007, Ian separated from the Army. We wanted to be the ones to decide where we lived, when we could travel, and when we would move. He got work as a freight pilot for one year, and as a salesman the next.

Recently, he told me he wanted to enter the military again, be a member of the National Guard. He wanted that sense of purpose again, he said. He wanted to use his (considerable) leadership skills.

And I?

I could not have been more thrilled.

Sometime in the many months I’d spent on the military spouse forums, even after Ian had separated from the military, it became increasingly clear I was on the outside of the military community—and to my surprise, I wanted back in. The spouses had (lo and behold) become individuals as I’d come to know them in online conversations, and I learned we weren’t so different, after all. Or, rather, at all. They had diverse skills, passions, fears, and interests, and they led complex lives. They were not—as I had unfairly perceived them to be—walking yellow ribbon car magnets. I’d been guilty of stereotyping the spouses in precisely the same way I’d fought against being stereotyped, myself.

But, as much as I may have come to enjoy them, I had to accept that I was no longer a part of what I’d learned was indeed a unique community of people with a profound shared experience. No one but a military spouse or significant other can know the passionate torture and tumult of sending a lover to war. Few, outside of military families, can claim to have lived in five different states in under ten years, or will have spent considerable time in a foreign country. Military spouses/significant others have the common advantage of knowing the souls behind the uniforms as men and women they love, rather than as political talking points or wars’ game pieces.

When Ian and I move and he enters the National Guard, I can’t say that I’ll participate in an FRG if there is one (or start one if there isn’t). A natural loner, I may not commiserate with other Army wives. And I probably won’t call myself a Military Wife—but, then again, I wouldn’t refer to myself as a salesman’s wife, a pilot’s wife, or any other kind of wife. But I do know I’ll welcome his position in the military family and feel privileged that I, by extension, can call myself a member of that family. A far more appreciative member.

[Jan. 19, 2010 - some military spouses did not respond well to this entry. Read the resulting defense/explanation/clarification here.]

New Backword Books author

Backword Books snagged another author, bringing the participating members to a lovely, double-round 8.

Persinger is the author of Do the Math (Silver Medal 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Popular Fiction and Third Prize 2009 Premier Book Awards, General Fiction) and Semele (2009 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist for Excellence in Independent Publishing).

Click the Backword Books link above to find his work there, or visit his website: www.persinger.com.

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An unexpectedly heated topic

I’m a member of an online forum (as many are, these days) where a discussion about the child-free lifestyle has gone on for pages. And pages. Who knew people had so much to say about it?

It turns out there’s actually very little to reasonably argue: you either want kids, or you don’t. However, it turns out some won’t be satisfied to be content with their own decisions, but have more fun criticizing the decisions of others. For some reason.

Parents: “People aren’t living their life’s purpose until they have children.”

Childfree: “People who have children are throwing away their lives and their money and messing up store aisles with screaming kids knocking over spaghetti sauce jars.”

In the psychological studies arena, there seems to be a basic assumption that women have children because that’s what women do, but when it comes to women who don’t want children, you see book titles like the following:

“Unwomanly Conduct: The Challenges of Intentional Childlessness,” by Carolyn M. Morell; “Voluntary Childlessness: The Emergence of a Variant Lifestyle,” by Ellen Mara Nason; and “Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness,” by Laurie Lisle.

“Hey, now,” I say, as someone who doesn’t want kids. “My lifestyle is hardly ‘variant,’ I’ve experienced no challenges outside of having to answer ‘So, why don’t you want kids?’ and the occasional ‘You’re just selfish,’ and if I’m challenging the stigma of childlessness, I’m not doing it intentionally. Quit studying me. It’s just a preference!”

In the interest of presenting the idea of child-free-ness as a simple, personal choice,  one that hardly warrants so many books explaining it, I wrote “How to (Not) Have Children,” a straightforward and humorous collection of musings, arguments, anecdotes, and even some helpful advice for those living, or thinking about living, a child-free life.

One reader wrote to tell me she, as someone who was “on the fence” about children, found it incredibly useful and was able to relate to several of the passages (people’s reasons for having or not having children, in particular).  I don’t know what her ultimate decision turned out to be, but if “How to (Not) Have Children” helped (and, by the way, I don’t try to convince women not to have children), I’m happy.

I’ll post an update when it’s available for Kindle.

For an archived article I wrote for the Journal Inquirer titled “They’re Not Kidding – Childless and Loving Every Minute of It,” click here.

What does it say about me that I like the suicidal writers?

I don’t mean to. And when I say I like the suicidal writers I of course mean I like the writing of suicidal writers. I obviously haven’t met Ernest Hemingway or Dorothy Parker or Sylvia Plath, so I can’t say whether I’d like any of them personally.

Well…

I am reading the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (off and on), and based on what I’ve read so far, it seems safe to say I probably would have liked her. (Then again, can’t we come to find we presently like someone we didn’t get to meet until after they were dead? If a journal represents,  in large part, the essence of a person, and if we can assume the journal was written with honesty, it could be that we like the person inside the pages, that I can say, “I think I like Sylvia Plath” rather than “I would have liked” her. She doesn’t have to be alive for me to like her, does she?)

As to Dorothy Parker, having read her stories and poetry and book reviews collected in The Portable Dorothy Parker, I think I might have been more concerned with whether she liked me. There would have been something at once flattering and scary about being taken into her little Algonquin circle (as if I would have been!), and more unnerving would probably have been the way she would look at a new person, followed by the creative ways she would find to insult them that probably wouldn’t really hurt until two hours later when what she said finally settled in.

All of that is an aside. What struck me when reading Plath’s journals (having never read any of Plath’s other writing) was that I absolutely loved, and was inspired by, her skill and her style, which was a surprise to me because I didn’t expect to enjoy it. In high school, when the teenage girls were going through their “very deep” and emotionally traumatic phase, many of them turned to Sylvia Plath’s writing. It felt to me at the time like they were worshiping Plath’s depression, and envying her suicide. I wanted no part of that, so I stayed away from Plath.

But her journals (and, again, this is the only writing of hers I’ve read) are truly incredible. The skill she displays – and she’s just 18 years old at the journal’s start – is phenomenal.

Just as I enjoy Plath’s style, I enjoy Parker’s style. And Hemingway’s (even though I could do without his endless run-ons). Aside from John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger (who does have some issues), they’re the only long-gone (excluding Salinger) literary authors I would immediately cite as my “absolute favorites.”

But what I can’t help noticing (naturally) is that they were all suicidal.  (Parker didn’t technically kill herself, but she did try at least three times.)

Is there some truth to the “tortured artist” after all? That the best art comes from the tortured soul? I don’t like to think so, not only because I’m not tortured and would therefore end up at an automatic disadvantage, but because it seems so very dramatic and ridiculous as an idea. While there very well may be actual “tortured artists,” there’s nothing more annoying than someone who identifies him- or herself as one of them. (And it’s probably safe to say anyone who calls her- or himself a tortured artist isn’t one. At least, not one to be taken seriously.)

It used to be that I intentionally stayed away from reading these suicidal writers because it was considered “trendy” to like them, and also because I wasn’t separating their behavior, or their lives, from their writing. But it’s a true thrill to have been introduced to Plath’s journals this past Christmas, when Ian gave it to me as a gift. I’d never mentioned Plath to him, but he saw the book in the store and thought I might like it (I’m nosy and find people’s published journals interesting). I don’t think he could have anticipated just how much, though. Nor could I. I didn’t want to like her. Or Hemingway. Or Parker. But I can’t help it.

Question: What are your thoughts on the “tortured artist”?

(Backword Books author Bonnie Kozek wrote an engrossing article on the subject of the “tortured artist:” UNDER THE INFLUENCE: WRITERS AND DEPRESSION AND CHOICES CHOSEN. Read it here.)