I met with my client Irene yesterday. She’s an amazing woman—a dentist, who retired early her to write her memoir. She’s been bitten, hard, by life and she’s got this amazingly hilarious and super-smart sharp insight into her life. We were meeting because Irene hasn’t been working on the book. She hasn’t been working for a year. She paid for appointments, didn’t show up. She went to Turkey, Russia, and started a foundation for children whose lives were affected by the Gulf spill. All good stuff. But was she avoiding writing her book, throwing herself into the world?

I had a whole little lecture planned out for Irene, a series of statements of the obvious: you have to set aside time. The book has to be like you left the water running upstairs, always on your mind. Always something you’re going back to. You have to hold the whole thing in your head. Write first thing in the morning. Things come so easily to you, because you are smart and good, really good, like most dentists, at being a student. But you aren’t giving this writing project the time you must give it.

But when Irene, in her red silk dress, waltzed into my office (she always brings me flowers) and flounced down on my little sofa, she said, “I’m reading Chapter after Chapter. I feel like you wrote it to me! I’m ready now. I’m going to write each morning. Stop making excuses. Stop avoiding. I’m lazy. No more. I’m going to write for thirty days, every day. I will do this if I tell you. I do not break a promise.”

My mouth fell open. For a few minutes, as she chattered brightly about how helpful my book was, I wondered. Do I tell her? I did write the book to her. Literally. When I wrote Chapter, I had expanded my private client business, and I’d just started working with Irene. I wrote many of the chapters by writing letters to Irene. I confessed. I’m not sure Irene believed me. She didn’t say anything. At this point, she thrust her new pages into my hands. “Am I on the right track?”

*

Just last week, I called, mid-morning, my friend S., whose initials spell SOS, which is very helpful since she is a rabbi and very helpful if anyone is in over her head. I didn’t know how to revise my new manuscript. I wanted it to be perfect. I liked it how it was. What to do? I complained in this vein for one hour (one hour!) S said this: read Chapter after Chapter.

Which I have not done.

We are all so scared of what we know. We all think the answer is someone out there, somewhere out there, in a lover, in a book. We spend all this time talking about writing, worrying about writing, learning about writing, whining about writing, writing, as I am doing now, about writing!

You know the answer, I said to Irene. You know the answer, Irene was saying to me, and SOS was saying to me.  You already know. Writing is confirmation.

So go. Be the word.

You have to read this book: Patrimony, by Phillip Roth. I have been walking around for weeks, running my fingers across my bookshelves…waiting for a book to choose me, a great great book that I can’t put down, can’t stop talking about (remember the Shadow Divers summer? how I couldn’t stop pushing that book? hocking Kurson, hock hock hock. Remember the cod phase? my pirate phase? and that whole Pilgrims thing?) I love nothing more than being completely obsessed and colonized, seduced, haunted, taken in, and completely defragged and reconfigured by A New Book.

Patrimony by Phillip Roth isn’t new. It’s from 1991. 1991!  What were you doing that year, the year this book won prizes? Before you got email from amazon.com and before you spent your reading lunchtime on facebook?

A friend of mine loves Phillip Roth and so I wanted to read some Phillip Roth, having not read him at all since he was assigned to me by Doug Fowler in American Lit. I read about Roth’s books and Patrimony sounded like the shortest, easiest, least intense.

Oh

My

Goodness

Phillip’s dad is dying, and the way he describes the difficulty and beauty and weirdness of having a father, of having a dramatic hilarious very very old strong weak father, the way he describes what it is to watch a person trying to put a life together, at the very end of life–I read and reread each page…I’m only on p 62 and I am dreading the book being over. I never want it to end. I love this book. I love this book.  You have to read this book.  If you have a father or love anyone.  You will find something in this book.

And his sentences!

That’s a whole other topic.

I’ll probably stil be obsessing on this in November. February.Forever.

I love this book and I love how it makes me see my dad, how it outlines the love I have for him, and fills it in some too.

My Summer Screens Rant…

Dave Eggers, interviewed in the new issue of Creative Nonfiction, talks about e-readers. And how most of the people in the world can’t afford e-readers. “Secondly,” he says, “I just plain won’t read books on a screen. It just seems nuts to put every last aspect of our lives continually onto a screen. We moved entertainment onto screens (TV), and then we moved most of our work onto screens with computers. And I know so many people who just can’t wait till they can read everything on a screen…”  (He goes on, and it’s a great rant—for my students I assign this interview as required summer reading.)

I could see myself reading a book on a screen, I suppose. I haven’t yet. I’m not against it. I have get emails from readers asking me why my books aren’t e-available. I’m sure they will be. Very soon. And I feel lucky about all that. I’m not anti-screen. But, I have to say, the happiest week of my year this year was the one I spent at the retreat center—no computers, no television, no e. No screens except the ones in the window, overlooking the mirror lake.

I work by hand. I sleep by hand. Eat by hand.  And I use my computer—I use it a lot.

But I need lots of breaks from screens. My eyes need the breaks and my heart needs the food. I love book books. I love non-electronic things: jewelry, flowers, friendship where you take a walk together. I love food and bicycles and love—these things are completely non-e-able.

I’m getting a web cam this week, so I can talk to a soldier I love, a kid on a tropical island, far far far away. I love vast stretches of the e world.

As I write this, I see a kid in the park across the street from my house. He’s in the branches of the ancient mulberry tree. He is reading a book.

I love unconventional farmers in the age of agribusiness. I don’t want to lose touch with paper, pencil, chalkboard, hopscotch. I like DIY and wrinkles. I need the kid, across the street from my house, in the park this afternoon, lodged in the limbs of the mulberry tree tree with a book. A book book.

He is his own battery charger, which is never lost, which he knows, intuitively how to repair (read another book).