I Can't Complain (9 page)

I’ve convinced no one, or so it seems. I have a responsibility, someone repeats. Our shrinking numbers . . .

Later, during the book signing, there’s always someone who tells me that she converted to Judaism or married a gentile, and it’s working out fine. The funny ones lean in to confide, “I loved this book. Thank you for coming. My husband married a shiksa: me.”

I laugh. I open their copies to the title page and write gratefully, “To Mary Margaret (or Kathleen or Maureen or Christine), kind soul and brilliant critic, who restored my faith in my People.”

D
ECADES AGO, ON AN
unseasonably cold and rainy May morning, my phone rang, and it was Hollywood calling. “How would you feel on this miserable day to know that Sigourney Weaver loves your book?” this agent asked. She was talking about my first novel,
Then She Found Me,
and even though I surely knew that books could be turned into movies, I had no idea that mine had been circulated to producers. My husband and I threw an impromptu party to which I wore, aiming for Hollywood-tinged irony, a strapless dress, a rhinestone bracelet, and sunglasses.

It was 1989, and Sigourney was starring in
Ghostbusters II,
which I’d just seen with my six-year-old son. When I picked him up at school the day the deal was struck, I asked—expecting great excitement—“How would you feel if Sigourney Weaver wanted to make a movie out of Mummy’s book?” He said two things, very cautiously. “You’re not doing it for the money, are you?” and “Will it be PG so I can see it?”

Years passed. My six-year-old finished grammar school, high school, and college. I learned thirdhand that Helen Hunt, having just won an Academy Award for best actress, had taken over the project. (No one tells the author much directly.)

More time passed. Now working in Hollywood, my son saw an e-mail that suggested that
Then She Found Me
was close to getting made. (“Three great male roles,” the talent agent’s e-mail advised. “Hunt to star and direct.”) A copy of the screenplay came my way.

At first glance I thought,
Huh? Who are these characters?
But within a few pages, I was in love. I sent an e-mail to Helen Hunt via her manager, praising the screenplay, a few sentences only, figuring she wouldn’t answer. I told her at first I wondered what had happened to Dwight Willamee, the book’s geeky-librarian romantic hero, but then I hardly cared. She wrote me back quickly and at length:

All I’ve hoped for is that you feel April and Bernice [the book’s main characters] are alive and well, and that the theme and heart of the novel is there .
 
.
 
. I love Dwight. I imagine him sitting patiently for his turn to come to the screen. After years, I finally realized I had to find a magic sentence, a north star/theme for the movie that I felt deeply about and write toward that. Once I did, it became clear and I was able to start the work of putting aside a character that I LOVE, and trying to find the ones that help tell the story as I was beginning to imagine it on the screen.

How could I not love
that?
Yet before the movie even came out (in the U.S., May 2008), worried readers wrote me—not always politely, often highhandedly—about what they’d heard about Hollywood’s apparent departure from my book. Each time I wrote back, saying variations on these themes:

1. I love the movie. Adore it. Have seen it five times and counting. It’s smart, wry, and very touching. The book is the book, and the movie is its own entity. This I internalized early on when a wise friend told me, “Think of it as a movie based on characters
   suggested by
   the novel
   Then She Found Me.
   ”
   
2. This project took nineteen years from manuscript to big screen. I never thought I’d see this day, let alone experience the thrill of rattling off this cast: Helen Hunt, Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick. And hul-lo: Salman Rushdie as the ob-gyn and fertility specialist! And please appreciate the author-booster factor. It sold paperbacks with lovely stills of Bette Midler and Helen Hunt (in England, Helen and Colin) on the cover!
   
3. Helen (I call her Helen now) tried more faithful adaptations of the book. No takers.
   
4. I
   would
   mind the changes if I thought she was dumbing down the book.
   Au contraire.
   Helen and her team devoted ten years of their lives to getting this film made. She has said, in terms of that long road to greenlighting, “It was every version of no I’ve ever imagined.”
   

Someone once asked James M. Cain (
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce
), “How do you feel about what Hollywood did to your novels?” He pointed to his bookshelf and said, “Hollywood didn’t do anything to my novels. They’re all right here.”

And back to my son: Tall and handsome, he came to the premiere in New York City in a Hugo Boss jacket we bought in a hurry that afternoon. I introduced him to Helen. He put his arm around my shoulders. “I hope you know you
made
my mother’s decade,” he said.

T
HANK YOU, BOOK LOVERS
, for even
thinking
about devoting your Saturday, in whole or in part, to a lit fest! You’ll be rewarded with stimulating, painless, and free fun. (Utterly up to you: the purchase of books that will help save our industry.) Not to be downplayed: the likelihood that persons to your left and to your right will be like-minded fellow readers of the opposite or same sex. Although no one promises that a literary festival is guaranteed fertile social ground, I once benefited from a feature in the
New York Times
titled “Readings As an Opportunity for Romance.”

Although everything from your side of the podium will be clockwork and pure pleasure, we vain authors still worry about things that are out of our hands. Here, therefore, is a reader’s guide to the baggage that may be fueling our silly, lit-fest anxiety:

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE WRONG IN THE PAST

1. The local newspaper prints the wrong day, time, or location for your event. Or leaves you out completely. You flop. This befuddlement will forever taint the city in your small mind.
   
2. The night and hour of your reading coincides with a critical playoff game or the final episode of the decade’s most popular sitcom. In my case, in May 2004, both
   Friends
   and
   Frasier
   .
   
3. Always, no matter how scintillating you are or how noisy the microphone feedback and clanging radiator, there’s a snoozer in the audience. He wakes up during the Q and A and asks a question you’ve just answered at length.
   
4. In the program, where the little bios are printed, you’ve supplied only the titles of your books and your hometown. Everyone else’s bio has quoted rave reviews and employed phrases such as “critically acclaimed,” “prizewinning,” “Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” “best-selling,” and “Guggenheim Fellowship.” You remind yourself to add some adjectives and adverbs next time.
   
5. You stand poised, book in hand, smiling, waiting to be introduced, hoping the very recent review calling you a cross between Barbara Pym and Kurt Vonnegut has come to the introducer’s attention. He or she approaches the mike and says, “You didn’t come to hear me, so without further ado, please welcome X (mispronounced).”
   
6. You prepare; you read; you talk your heart out. You are interesting and even a little funny. You’ve considered what to wear: edgy earrings, interesting eyeglasses, lipstick a few shades louder than everyday. Then the very famous headliner gets up. He drones; he splits infinitives; he laughs at his own lines and doesn’t know when to quit. You are so much better. You, up on stage, facing the audience, smile as if you are enjoying his performance, while all the time you’re thinking,
   Horse’s ass
   . Then the book-signing portion of the event begins. The patrons rush to line up in front of the bad famous writer, clutching several hardcover copies of his new book and whatever’s available from his backlist. After signing your cousin’s and a college classmate’s purchase, you slink away.
   Worst reading I have endured: The fellow who said proudly, “I’m just going to open the book and read from whatever page falls open.” He did, resulting in a lot of weather, derelict relatives, and bougainvillea. Tied for worst: The forty-five-minute reading in a hot barn by a poet who was drunk and gesticulating wildly.
   
7. Your books (the publisher’s reason for having paid your airfare to get here) do not arrive in time to be bought, signed, and read. You hear that the distributor said they were not yet available/out of stock/out of print/back-ordered/due any minute. All lies. You are gracious because you are aware that not all authors are. Once, when I gently pointed out to the event coordinator that the book I’d be reading from was out in paperback and I’d noticed she had only hardcovers there, she told me she knew that. She had a box of paperbacks, but she’d left it at home.
   
8. It’s time for the Q and A, which usually isn’t necessary. You want to kiss the person who breaks the ice, even if it’s (recent question in San Francisco) this: “The coffee that the librarian in
   Then She Found Me
   brought to school in his thermos? Was it Peet’s?” People ask who your favorite authors are and/or what books are currently on your night table. Several women in the audience write down your answers in little notebooks brought especially for this purpose and will later assign these to their book groups, possibly in lieu of your own.
   

LIES TO TELL AN AUTHOR WHO IS LOOKING FORLORN, UNLOVED, UNPURCHASED

1. “I’ve always meant to read your work. Everyone else I know has!”
   
2. “My book group is doing [title of novel you’re not buying] in February. In fact, I’m going to be the facilitator. I love your website.”
   
3. “I own every one of your books but didn’t bring them today. I look forward to your next one.”
   

GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

1. Never, ever read longer than twenty minutes. Fifteen is better. Ten minutes if there are more than two authors on the docket. Practice reading in the privacy of your home using your microwave oven timer. Note that twenty pages does not equal twenty minutes; twenty pages, especially the too-beautiful kind, go on forever. Once, when a fellow author was up at the podium and going on endlessly, I wrote the word “time” on a slip of paper and delivered it to his open book. He stopped.
   
2. Eventually say, “I’ll take one more question” — not because you’re spent, but because the audience has had enough.
   
3. Don’t complain about anything from the podium. Anything! You had to get up at 5
   A.M.
   to get here? Boo-hoo. There are MFA students and unpublished writers listening who’d be only too willing and grateful to set their alarms for any hour, without bellyaching. You complain that writing is such hard work and so lonely? You brat: try digging ditches or disabling IEDs or doing a thousand other harder things for a living.
   
4. Buy some books yourself, especially those by today’s unfamous and ignored. Tomorrow they’ll win prizes.
   

I
ONCE FROWNED THROUGH
an episode of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
featuring marriageable Alaskan males in search of wives. Every flannel-clad guy was hoping for a gal who shared his passions, i.e., fishing, hunting, and snowmobiling. Oprah did not challenge the basic thesis—that eligibles who dogsled together, bed together—nor did she ask, “Why all this comradeship? Why not hunt and fish among yourselves and meet the ladies for dinner?”

I am not against hobbies, just the elevation of them to a relationship prerequisite. My bias springs from my own lack of intergender interests and my conviction that togetherness is overrated. My parents were happily married for forty-five years. Did my mother ever toss a football around with my father? Did he knit or sew or tend the tomatoes? He’d been a tennis player before he broke his ankles in the war; she never held a racket unless it was used to dislodge a cobweb from a light fixture.

Today’s attenuated wedding announcements advance this modern theory, the one that says men and women find truest love on a raft or a lift line after the wasted years of dating sissies. Bridesmaids and siblings testify, too: how the featured bride and groom love the same obscure rock band, forage for the same mushrooms, ski telemark versus alpine, see only the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

I do understand that putting forth one’s common interests for the sake of matchmaking is more polite than asking for a certain size breast or bank account. But in private, in the office I would run if I were a professional matchmaker, I’d base my decisions on better predictors of compatibility than shared leisure pursuits. My questionnaire would ask: Do you have children? Do you want children? Are you religious or irreligious? How far ahead of your flight do you get to the airport? Are you willing to leave dirty dishes in the sink overnight? What percentage of the bill do you tip? How close to the screen do you sit at the movies? How often do you eat out/talk to Mom/pay bills? Can you fall asleep with the light on? Coffee or tea? Red state or blue?

This matchmaking impulse runs in my family, and our successes are an ode to randomness. My favorite stories celebrate love as accidents of luck and good timing. The best last-man-standing fix-up story belongs to my sister. Circa 1968, her then fiancé was driving from Cambridge to Amherst, Massachusetts, to visit her. “Could you find someone for Pete?” he asked before setting out. “We’re leaving here at midnight.” My sister canvassed Patterson Hall until she found a night-owl friend, Linda, the only girl awake at 2
A.M.
Linda said okay, sure, I’ll meet him. One year later: wedding bells.

Closely related to accidental love is the time-honored hunch. Good instincts help here, and a willingness to let the aphorism, “It’s what’s on the inside that counts,” stand shoulder to shoulder with physical attraction. My friend Douglas indulged an excellent hunch when he was a bachelor of thirty-five. As a graduate student at Boston College he shared a big open office with five other teaching assistants, including Mary. One day her brother, a BC undergraduate, came by to visit and found her asleep at her desk. Douglas watched; he told me that he knew from the way Louis looked at his sleeping sister, with such fondness, that she had to be an extraordinarily good person. He asked Mary out that night and married her soon thereafter, almost forty years ago.