Toward the end of the first season of Weeds, an episode begins in a rather extraordinary manner: With a close-up of an Orthodox rabbi chanting a Hebrew prayer. The camera quickly moves to the gravestone, engraved with a Magen David.

The body in the grave is Judah Botwin, late husband of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), the pot-dealing, mildly psychotic mom around whom the show revolves. She stands alongside the grave, with sons Shane and Silas, and her brother-in-law, Andy, all of them looking mildly uncomfortable in the crystalline California sunshine and inappropriately dressed for a religious ritual. Judah died-a heart attack during his morning run-sometime in the nebulous past, before the start of the show. His death sent the family into financial ruin and Nancy into her new, er, career path-so this clearly isn’t his funeral, but, as any Jewish viewer instantly realizes, his unveiling. The other 98 percent of the population, well, who knows what they made of this scene, because-and here’s what makes the scene and Weeds, in general, so brilliant-the writers refrain from explicating it until midway through the episode, when Nancy meets Peter Scottson, the DEA agent whom she eventually marries, at a karate tournament in which Shane is competing. Their ‘meet cute’ is Nancy explaining why Shane went crazy and bit Peter’s son while screaming the sh’ma. "We just came from his father’s unveiling," she rambles, in classic Mary-Louise Parker intonations. "Do you know what that is? It’s where they unveil the gravestone. It’s a Jewish thing. I know you’re thinking, ‘She doesn’t look Jewish.’ I come from Welsh stock…I’m not Jewish. My husband. He’s dead now. He was Jewish. "

Though the show is over-the-top and even cartoonish in its coverage of topics from evangelical Christianity to casual sex, when it comes to things Jewish, Weeds tends toward the subtlety, irreverence, and occasional iconoclasm of real life. Rather than over-explaining-or apologizing for-the inclusion of a not-immediately-recognizable religious ritual, Jenji Kohan and her team of smart writers allow the story to unfold as if unveilings-and, later, rabbinical school, the IDF, circumcision, Yiddish, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a host of other Jewish ideas and references-are as much a part of mainstream American life as, well, watching television. And that in and of itself-the lovely casualness with which the Botwin’s Jewishness (or lack of it) is simply a part of the texture of their lives-makes Weeds unusual in the deracinated world of the cathode ray tube.

In a way, that lack-the fact that Nancy isn’t Jewish, and Silas and Shane are half-Jewish (or, in the eyes of that Orthodox rabbi, not Jewish at all)-makes the show that much more realistic. Despite the best efforts of the sperm-meets-egg school of Jewish philanthropy (hello, Birthright!), intermarriage is the norm in the United States among secular Jews, and those mixed marriages (to use my mom’s term) are forging ahead–not, as the old guard likes to think, eradicating Jewish life and identity, but simply changing them. It’s telling that both of the show’s central families, the Botwins and the Hodes, are mixed and that religio-ethnic differences are barely acknowledged, much less a source of conflict. For the couples and their kids, at least. For their parents, it’s another story. Celia Hodes’s mother speaks viciously of her granddaughter Isabelle’s "Jew hair" and, conversely, Judah’s father, Lennie, introduced last season, hates his gentile daughter-in-law so much that he refuses to utter her name. Instead he calls her "not-Francie," meaning that she’s the utter opposite of the pretty Jewish doctor Judah was "supposed" to marry.

But these oldsters are represented as anything but sympathetic. Both are monsters who alienated their children with their outmoded views of the world and their general hardheadedness. All of this was part of Kohan’s vision for the show from the start, even before she knew that her heroine would be dealing pot. "There are more and more mixed marriages in this country," she told me last summer, soon after the launch of Weeds’ fourth season, which began with the Botwins fleeing to the seaside home of Judah’s famously cantankerous grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz, only to find her in a coma, being tended to by Lennie, a gambler with a serious mean streak. "I think it really reflects a reality and I like having that discussion available."

What Kohan means, of course, is that the potential conflicts of intermarriage allow her and her writers a larger bag of tricks from which to pull plot threads. However, there’s a sense in which she’s also, clearly, contributing to the larger discussion of what it means to be Jewish and American in this day and age. Toward the end of this season, Kohan pulled the Jewish card again: when Nancy’s Mexican gangster boyfriend, Esteban, refuses to put his name on the birth certificate of their newborn son, almost-a-rabbi Andy steps in and agrees to play father to the child if Nancy will agree to raise him Jewish. The baby, who doesn’t actually have a drop of Jewish blood, is given a Hebrew name. The family holds a bris, and suddenly the baby is Jewish in the eyes of everyone around him, including his enraged biological father, a Catholic. ("He’s pissed about the Jewish thing, huh?" says Andy, mildly.)

Is the child Jewish? Not in the eyes of that rabbi from the first season, or the government of Israel, but in the emergent American Jewish community, with all its confusion and contradiction, well, maybe. And we should, I think, be glad to have him.

The post Growing A New Breed of Jews on “Weeds” appeared first on Jewcy.

Sometimes, while I was scooting around the hardwood floor of a shiny new apartment, trying to make sure Coleman didn’t inadvertently reset some stranger’s Tivo, I felt like a secret agent, a spy, sent to report back to HQ about the foibles of modern parenting. All around me, women would be talking about sleep training, and eliminating petroleum products (goodbye, A&D ointment), and spacing out vaccines, and the sugar content of YoBaby, and which nannies ignored their kids in the park (much pity was reserved for the parents of said kids), and a million other things that I basically didn’t think about at all. And in a way, I was a spy: I was (am) a writer. At that point, I was working frenetically on my novel—whenever Coleman slept, at the weekend, etc.—while doing some writing for magazines, as I’d done for years, and editing features for an online magazine called Nextbook (more on this in a moment). But somehow my work life seemed unreal and strange to many of the other mothers I met. One woman, when I explained that Nextbook allowed me to work at home, said, “Oh, so basically you get paid to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s nice.” Er, no. The reason I bring all this up is because perhaps the strangest thing I encountered at the meetings of that group—stranger even allowing a baby to cry in his crib for an extended period of time in order to learn how to fall asleep on his own, stranger than the habit of writing down the contents of every single one of a baby’s diapers (!)—was an insistence that having a baby eliminated a woman’s ability to read. “I haven’t read a book since I had So-and-so,” the women, or many of them, constantly said. “I pick something up and then I just fall asleep.” One woman said she could make it through the whole paper each morning—which I found, and still find, deeply impressive, since I tend to fade out around the “Business” section—but couldn’t commit to actual books, because her time was so interrupted. Whenever I mentioned a book I’d read—generally as part of a conversation with a college friend of mine who’d moved to the neighborhood—someone was, apparently, legally bound to good-naturedly call out, “How can you read? I just can’t read anymore.” That’s weird, I thought, the first time it happened. And then it kept happening.

What made it particularly weird was that, for me, the opposite was true, particularly in Coleman’s first few months. I spent so much time simply sitting in a chair, nursing him, that it seemed like I had nothing but time to read. For years I’d worked like a maniac trying to establish myself as a journalist—or, at least, just make a living—which meant reading many, many very bad books for assignments, as I wrote a lot of book reviews and author profiles and “five-books-about-Iran-type round-ups. When Cole was born, and my freelance paced slowed, I began to read as I had in childhood, obsessively and purely, picking up anything that struck my fancy. I read the collected works of Somerset Maugham, simply because my grandmother had liked him; I read through a huge pile of novels by my former Columbia classmates, which was equal parts thrilling and disappointing; I caught up on the Victorians; I re-read Jane Austen and Thomas Pynchon and other writers I’d loved in college. I read every issue of The New Yorker and pretty much anything else that anyone left within arm’s reach of our rocking chair. I didn’t, of course, read any of the parenting books that the other mothers often discussed, as I’m constitutionally incapable of concentrating on nonfiction (unless its narrative), but I did, certainly, find that much of what I was reading was relevant in one way or another to my new life as a mother. There was the obvious: Like Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, which beautifully captures the playground politics I’ve just described, as well as the day-to-day experience of tending to a baby, by turns glorious and tedious. And the not-so-obvious, which covers just about every book I read: Every fictional parent-child relationship made me think about Coleman, about the sort of parent I wanted to be, about my own parents, the choices they’d made. Was this not, I wondered, as important as reading How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, and Listen So Kids Will Talk or Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child? In the end, there’s little fiction that’s not about family. Then, when Coleman was five months old, I started working for Nextbook, which meant vetting a good deal of material to decide if we should cover it or no. Every Tuesday, I somehow got myself dressed in normal clothing and walked to our Soho office for the weekly story meeting, at which I’d present my feature ideas. Nextbook, as you probably know, is a Jewish magazine, but like Jewcy it’s a somewhat unusual Jewish magazine. Basically, our then-editor’s concept was that every story needed to truly have a Jewish idea at its center. So while other Jewish magazines might, for instance, run a profile of, say, Seth Rogen, in which he mentions something about his bar mitzvah, we would run a long, semi-analytical essay that would ask whether the films of Judd Apatow and his acolytes have a Jewish sensibility. We spent much of our time trying to figure out what to cover and how to cover it, trying to figure out the idea at the center of any piece. At first, I worked two days a week—squeezing in my editing whenever I could, since we couldn’t afford a sitter for two full days—then, as Nextbook rapidly grew, three days, and then, when Coleman was eighteen months old, began working at the office full-time. Our editor-in-chief left and I was given his job. Suddenly, my life became all-Jewish, all-the-time. The volume of reading expanded maybe threefold. Soon, I felt like I could recognize the major tropes of contemporary Jewish lit: The historical novel set in the shtetl; the ironic modern immigrant’s tale; the Holocaust memoir; the who-knew-there-were-Jews-there (India! China!) memoir. Before I go any further, I should explain that my family falls into the secular Zionist branch of American Jews. Thus, I went to various hippie Zionist camps and spent a summer in Israel, but was allowed to drop out of Hebrew school after a year. And though our Seder always followed the bones of the Maxwell House Haggadah, we definitely skipped some of the more dull moments. My parents are interested in, but not fully defined by their Jewishness. We had Exodus and Our Crowd and Masada and Hooray for Yiddish! on the bookshelf, along with some Roth and Bellow and Malamud, certainly, but that was the extent of it. In college and grad school, I studied English, with an emphasis on the Moderns and postwar American poetry, but I was interested in people like James Wright and Robert Lowell, not Philip Levine or even Allen Ginsberg. I’d lived in London for a bit after college, and for pleasure I tended to read British. And so working at Nextbook was something of an immersion course for me. I’d not, for instance, read much contemporary Israeli fiction, so it was a revelation to discover Yehoshua and Etgar Keret. Or to discover obscure novels like Jerzy Andrezjewski’s controversial Holy Week, an account of the final days of the Warsaw ghetto. Or to find my way through those big three that had graced my parents’ bookshelf: Roth, Bellow, Malamud. And Singer. Writers that were, perhaps, so ubiquitous that I’d not thought them necessary. (They are.) Equally exciting was discovering Jewish threads in favorite writers, particularly my beloved Brits: Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate; George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Or new writers, like Jami Attenberg or Rachel Kushner or Elisa Albert. Pretty quickly that thing happened, the thing that happens when you master a particular job. I’m sure it has happened to you. What is it exactly? It’s that, I suppose, you internalize the ideas in which you’ve been schooled. Soon, I couldn’t read anything without figuring out a Jewish slant on it, a way for Nextbook to cover it. The Emperor’s Children: Danielle is Jewish, isn’t she? And what’s up with her nose always being described as beaky? My friend Lauren’s book about young evangelicals? Well, Lauren is Jewish, didn’t that inform her reporting? At first, this was fine. But as a year, then a year-and-a-half went by and I realized that I couldn’t turn it off. I was a machine, trained to assess the Jewish content of any bit of reading material. Last June, I began to realize that it most certainly was not fine. The galleys of my novel were just about to go to press and people were starting to ask me about the next one, but I couldn’t, somehow, think holistically about a story in the way I had during the early stages of writing A Fortunate Age. In July, after I resigned, I went on a binge of non-Jewish reading, which truly felt like a binge. We were out of town for much of the summer and before we left I grabbed books from our shelves, taking care to avoid anything that might have anything even remotely Semitic in it. It was a relief, as it had been three years earlier, just to read for pleasure, to read anything that seemed like it might interest me, writers I’d heard about but never read (Anne Beattie, Susanna Moore) or new novels by writers I loved (Kate Christensen, Kate Atkinson). Most gratifying, I suppose, was reading works by writers I knew to be Jewish, like Meg Wolitzer—which I eventually allowed myself to do—without trying to find the Jewish story within them. The strange thing was that even when I wasn’t looking for Jewish stories, they seemed to find me. Even the most unexpected bits of fiction—like, say, British novelist Rachel Cusk’s In the Fold—have a Jewish element, a character or plotline. Back in December, when Pearl was born and I was eternally stuck in the nursing chair again, I once again plowed through whole unexplored sections of our bookshelf (Paul Auster, John O’Hara) and caught up on some of the bigger books of recent years (Netherland, Suite Francaise), but then, in March, maybe a week or two before my own novel came out, a strange thing happened: I couldn’t read. That is, like those mothers who’d complained to me when Cole was a baby, I could read the newspaper or The New Yorker, but I couldn’t even pick up a book. “I can’t concentrate on anything,” I told Lauren. “I can’t imagine why,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You have a little bit going on.” But I’d never, not in my whole life, had any trouble picking up a book. At night, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Anxiously, I flipped through my own book, trying to choose sections for my readings, but I couldn’t even make it through more than a few pages of that (admittedly, I know how it ends). I didn’t know what to do with myself. I became one of those people who obsessively checks her phone. And then, once the novel was safely out in the world, the madness stopped. I walked over to the bookshelf and randomly chose two novels I’d long been wanting to read: Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor and Lesley Dormen’s The Best Place to Be, the first a slyly satirical look at the liberal branch of the British middle class in the mid-1990s, the second wry take on New York at the latest fin de siecle. Or so I’d thought. Of course, one of Drabble’s main characters Jewish: Nathan Herz, a child of Golders’ Green who’s made himself over as a slick, cigar-chomping ad exec, and married into the faux-patrician Palmer family. And the Dormen, well, midway through, the heroine explains to her brother that their long-absent father isn’t English; his family fled to England during the war. They’re Polish Jews. Throughout the rest of the novel, the family’s Jewishness frequently comes into play. Now, of course, I can enjoy such surprises for what they are. A thread within a whole, rather than a lens through which to view the whole: The Drabble is a spot-on comedy of manners, just the sort I like, about a large, accomplished family, the offspring of a prominent writer and their spouses and children. The Dormen is, in a way, more a coming of age tale, perfectly observed, linked stories about a woman at various stages of her life in New York, her relationship with her glamorous, feckless mother and her glamorous, feckless best friend, her icy brother, and her kind, patient husband. They are also, as you probably don’t need me to point out, all about families. And this time around I find myself thinking about the relationships between siblings, the way they band together against their parents, the way they grow apart and come together again. My own sister is so much older, so some of this is new to me. I see those other mothers on the playground these days. Like me, many now have two children, and lately they are recommending a parenting book called Sibling Rivalry, about raising children with equanimity, or so I assume, as I, of course, haven’t read it. I’ll take my Margaret Drabble—or Jane Austen, or Jonathan Franzen—over some psychologist’s parenting tome any day, but I generally just say ‘thank you,’ and tuck away the suggestion. Who know? I may need it some day. Parenting is hard and I could certainly use all the advice I can get. Now that our kids are older, the cliques seem to have fallen away. Maybe they were, like so much, simply the result of that mad, exhausted period when our babies were tiny and no one was thinking straight, everyone was searching for some sort of answer, some sort of succor. Now that my novel is out, they seem to understand that I wasn’t just paid to be a stay-at-home mom all those years. And hearteningly, some of them have even read it.

The post All Jewish, All the Time appeared first on Jewcy.

The trouble is that when you have kids, you can’t really get sick. Or, well, you can—in the last six months alone I’ve lost had strep throat and full-on, completely-lose-your-voice laryngitis (twice)—but you can’t stay in bed, sipping tea with honey and lemon while watching bad TV. So maybe it would be more accurate to say you can’t really get better. Four-year-olds understand, intellectually, that you’re sick, but they still want you to play with them. And if they can be convinced to lie down with you, they generally cannot be convinced to be quiet enough to actually allow you to sleep, or, at least, not for more than five minutes. This time, though, I was so completely worn out that I actually fell asleep—truly, deeply asleep—while Coleman jumped around beside me and Pearl squirmed on my chest. I had no choice but to rally, though, as the readings continued on: The Barnes and Noble in Park Slope, where the very nice manager is named Peaches (really!), and readings take place in the New Age section, leaving writers (me) subject to meanderings of shoppers seeking books on astrology, which was only slightly less distracting than the fact that as I read my nose became more and more plugged, and I idiotically hadn’t remembered to bring tissues up to the podium with me. But the most distracting thing—hold tight, for here things take a serious turn—was the fact that I was not alone in my illness. On Sunday, I’d received a note from my mother, saying she wasn’t feeling well, that she’d had all our cousins over on Saturday for a delayed Seder and that by the time they left, she’d been so wiped out that she’d had to get in bed. My mother, who is 78, generally has more energy than do I, so it was clear that something was very wrong. “Go to the doctor tomorrow,” I wrote back, “and please call as soon as you know what’s going on.” She insisted that she was fine, though, that no doctor was needed. Argh, I screamed, inwardly, and left a message for my sister, who pretty much never answers her phone. She manages a restaurant in Brooklyn and it’s usually too loud to talk, so she lets everything go to voicemail, then returns calls on Mondays, when the restaurant is closed. My sister is a eighteen years older than me. She’s also a nurse, by training. For these reasons, my mother sometimes takes her counsel on health matters more seriously than she does mine, which makes sense, seeing as my knowledge of medicine is largely cribbed from articles in the “Science Times” and the occasional episode of ER. Or my sister.

My parents live in California, in the southern part of the Bay Area, though they’re both New Yorkers (and still complain about the bad bagels in their adopted city; and the lack of pastrami). Here in New York, whenever I tell people that my parents live in San Jose, they look at me strangely, as if I must be mistaken, and say, “Really? Why?” Here is why: In the late 1960s, before I was born, my mother’s cousin Arthur, a physicist, took a job at Stanford and never left. His parents and his brother followed. My mother and Arthur grew up together—they’re a bit like brother and sister—and during my childhood we visited constantly. A dozen years ago, when my dad retired, they moved out there, perhaps thinking that I might follow. I didn’t, of course, and neither did my sister, who didn’t want to uproot her now-grown kids. None of this—that is, the distance between my parents and my sister and me—would be a big deal if my father hadn’t fallen ill. ‘Ill’ might not be the right word. Shortly before they headed west, he began to suffer from a confusing set of symptoms. For a brief moment we thought he had a brain tumor. Then we were told there was nothing to worry about, he just had a problem with the tiny bones in his middle ear. But year after year, as he went from doctor to doctor, searching for a diagnosis, he began to fall apart. Eventually, he was diagnosed with a condition that has a complicated, unpronounceable name, but basically has the same effect as Parkinson’s, which means he’s losing his memory—particularly horrifying to a man who, literally, had a photographic memory—and his ability to walk, or even sit up properly. As he gets worse, things get harder on my mother, who not only fully takes care of him—the endless doctors’ appointments, the falls in the middle of the night, the cabinets full of possibly-pointless medications—but is rapidly losing the brilliant, hilarious man she married almost sixty years ago. He is, she constantly reminds me, a shell of himself. I won’t, here, go into how heartbreaking it’s been to witness his deterioration. You can just trust me. It’s devastating. Too devastating to dwell on. And all the more so because he fully understands what’s going on. But for now: my mother. Who has been so worn out by the stress of the past few years that she’s not quite herself. And so I wasn’t all that surprised when she called last Tuesday to say she had pneumonia. Her voice was so weak she could barely get the words out and I had to struggle to maintain my composure on the phone. “I’m taking Zithromax,” she told me, knowing I’d recognize the antibiotic in question. I’ve inherited her tendency for lung ailments, had pneumonia myself a few years ago, and can generally count on a bout of bronchitis once a year or so. “It works quickly. I should start to feel better in a day or so.” This, from my experience, is true, but she really did sound very, very sick. “Should we come out?” I asked, not mentioning that I was sick. “If you need us, we’ll come out there. You just have to tell me.” My dad, at this point, can’t really take care of himself. And she, I knew, needed to stay in bed and rest for at least a week, even if she started feeling better right away. But I also knew that she wouldn’t want me around her or my dad, whose immune system isn’t in such great shape, if I had some sort of bug. Which was worse: My mother, so sick she could barely move, trying to fix meals for my dad and shlep him up to Palo Alto for his various tests and injections? Or me, taking care of them, but possibly infecting them, in their fragile states, with a flu bug? I didn’t know. “What do you think?” I asked. “Let’s give it a day or two,” she said. “Let’s see how I feel tomorrow.” The fact that she was telling us not to come out was, I knew, a sign that things were very, very bad, first because my mother has that quality that I perhaps erroneously ascribe to Depression-era Jews of the female persuasion, some sort of vaguely martyr-ish inclination, which dictates that when things get really rough, she’d prefer anyone and everyone to keep their distance. Is it a guilt thing, that she can’t stand the thought of being a burden to anyone? Or is it about strength, that she can’t stand the thought of anyone seeing her at her weakest? I don’t know. But I’ll confess that I’ve inherited it, just as much as I’ve inherited her weak lungs. Regardless, the more sick my mother is, the more she insists she’s okay. The next day she was worse. And the day after that, even worse. She wasn’t, it seemed, responding to the Zithromax. On Thursday, she couldn’t catch her breath and, in desperation, called 911. At the hospital, she was given an intravenous drip of antibiotics and rehydrated, then sent home. “How is she?” Evan asked as I hung up the phone, after she’d explained this to me. In answer, I burst into tears. It wasn’t just the illness—though she did sound terrible—but that I’d never, in my life, heard my mother sound so frightened and lost. We should be there, I thought, but she still insisted that we should wait to fly out. By this point, I sounded terrible myself. There was no hiding my flu and she was, as I’d thought she would be, nervous about my passing it on to her. Pearl had now caught it, too. My mother could hear her coughing in the background. “Let’s wait a day and see if you’re better. Or I’m better. Or Pearl is better.” Nervously, I agreed. But I spent the day—and the one that followed—in a haze of anxiety, unable to feed myself, unable to make even the smallest of decisions, unable to prepare for the next couple of readings, which I wasn’t sure if I’d make, anyway, as we might be flying out to California any second. I called my agent, to warn her that I might have to cancel these readings—and to seek counsel—but she didn’t call me back. I called my editor, but didn’t hear from her, either. It was, of course, spring break, I remembered. My agent was away with her family. The irony: If I hadn’t had all these readings scheduled, we would have been in California, visiting my parents. Would she have gotten sick if we’d gone out there? If I’d been around to help her with the Seder? It was too much to think about. I’ve always been very close with my parents, which has meant, as an adult, having difficulty figuring out where to draw the line between family allegiance and personal ambition (a problem I gave to one of the characters in my novel, Emily). Eventually, I broke down and called my cousin Roz—Arthur’s wife and one of my mother’s closest friends—and asked if she’d visited my parents, if she could give me any perspective on the severity of the situation. Roz is one of the more sane people in my family and she also happens to know all there is to know about lung ailments: Her late daughter, Amy, had cystic fibrosis; and she’s a longtime board member of the American Lung Association. Under normal circumstances, she would likely have been down at my parents’ place, sticking casserole dishes in the fridge, but she and Arthur were leaving for Germany the next day. She had seen my mother, she said, a couple of days earlier, and my mother did indeed seem very ill, but pretty much about what you’d expect when someone has pneumonia. “You can’t come out here,” she said, in her calm, rational way. “You have an infant—a sick infant—and a four-year-old. You can’t take care of them and your parents. It’s just not possible. And you have readings in New York. This is a special time for you. You have to enjoy it a little. It’s wonderful.” This was a novel concept for me. I’d been so anxious—about reviews, about finding sitters, about moving, about everything—that it hadn’t occurred to me to actually try to actually enjoy this time. I suddenly recalled that others had given me this exact same advice. But now, of course, how could I enjoy any of it, knowing my mother was suffering three thousand miles away? Worrying that the worst might happen and I wouldn’t be there. I said as much to Roz. “Your mother will be better in a few days,” she said. “If she’s not, then you can come out. But if anyone’s going to come out right now, it should be your sister. She can come alone.” This, too, hadn’t quite occurred to me: That someone else could take care of my parents during this rough bit. But my sister, for her part, was way more calm about the situation than was I. She’s older, as I’ve said, so perhaps she’s less freaked out by the thought of our parents’ mortality. And having worked as a hospital nurse for twenty years—she just started this restaurant stuff, which seems only marginally less stressful—she’s seen her share of serious illness. “The thing is, Jo,” she told me gently, “if she were in danger, they would have forced her to stay at the hospital. They wouldn’t have run the risk of lawsuit in letting her go home.” Okay, I said, hoping she was right. “The Zithromax is a broad spectrum antibiotic,” she explained. “They’ve put her on something else, too, something more targeted, and that will probably work.” Okay, I said, again, hoping she wasn’t just saying this because she didn’t want to go out there. My sister hates to fly. And things were a bit crazy at her restaurant, which only opened a few months ago. But she was right. The next morning, my father answered the phone in a chipper mood. “She’s much better,” he said. “She’s up and walking around. I can’t get her to stay in bed.” Her voice, indeed, sounded stronger. “You’re better,” I cried, nearly shaking with relief. “I’m worse,” she said. “Contrary to what daddy says.” Now, I struggled not to laugh. If she was arguing with my dad, and insisting she wasn’t well, she was truly on the mend. On and on she went, about the myriad ways in which she was worse, and the various people who were annoying her, and the meals that her nice friends out there brought over for her father, and how everyone says you should have hot things when your throat hurts, but she prefers cold. “Tell me about your bathroom,” she said, suddenly. “My bathroom?” I asked. How could and why would she be asking about our bathroom at this exact moment? “How did it turn out?” she asked. “You can’t really see it any of Evan’s pictures.” Oh, I realized, right. She was asking about our renovation. Of course. Something else I’d sort of forgotten about, or forgotten to enjoy, given all the chaos. My mother, like many mothers, is a bit more interested in such things than am I, which also means she really knows how to enjoy them. It occurred to me, just then, that she might never see our apartment, in its reconfigured state, the apartment in which my father’s mother lived for sixty years, amidst clusters of huge, dark-veneered dressers and green velvet couches, the walls decorated with photographs of Israel and Chagall prints. My mother, a devotee of all things light and modern, had hated this apartment, and thought me slightly crazy for wanting to live in it, much less live in it without doing any work on it. After ten years, we’d finally come around to her way of thinking. Or, really, found the time and cash to do the work. “You would love it,” I said. “I know,” she said, “I know I would.”

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We were having lunch in the garden of an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park – the sort of place at which your average person only dines when on expense account – and I had already plowed my way through my own too-small bowl of pasta, my first-trimester hunger having stubbornly hung around through the first weeks of the second trimester. "December," I told her. "The beginning of December." She arranged her features into something resembling composure. "And the book’s out in April," she said. "That’ll be fine." Clearly, she was comforting herself as much as me. "Coleman was an easy baby, right?" I nodded. This was true. Coleman rarely cried and slept pretty well, which is pretty much what people mean when they say a baby is "easy." But he was still a baby and, thus, required almost constant attention. (Like most babies.) He was also huge, which meant that he needed to eat pretty much around the clock. Most of my memories of his first months involve sitting in a chair nursing him or racing around various parts of Manhattan or Brooklyn frantically trying to find a place, any place, to sit down and nurse him. (Note to new moms: The Gap and its sister stores will let you nurse in their fitting rooms, no questions asked. You don’t even need to pretend to be trying something on.) "This one will be easy, too," my agent said. "Yes," I told her, and I truly did believe this to be so. According to my mother, who sometimes takes a rather romantic view of the past, all babies in our family are easy. Besides, easy or not, this baby would be four months old by the time my novel, A Fortunate Age, came out, which was pretty much old enough to be left with my husband or sister for a couple of hours, if I needed to do a reading or suchlike. We’d left Coleman with a sitter-or, okay, a pair of very close friends–for the first time when he was just shy of five months old. With our second, we’d be more carefree and cavalier, or at least less nervous, right?

Four-odd months later, in December, when Pearl was born, a parade of friends came to visit and, as I’ve written about elsewhere, anxiously asked about the novel – when was it coming out again? – after they’d finished cooing over the baby and presenting her with organic onesies and miniature cashmere hoodies. "April," I told them, and watched their faces melt into that odd mixture of concern and anxiety, and, in one case, a bit of Schadenfreude. "It’ll be fine," they told me, as my agent had back in July. "It has to be," I told them, "since Pearl isn’t going anywhere." And I did truly believe this to be so. Sensibility-wise, I tend not to worry about things until I’m deeply mired in them, which is to say, I tend to think that things will just work themselves out. (And when they don’t, well, okay, I sometimes completely freak out.) This is basically how I feel about having kids, in general. For years, I listened to friends say things like, "I just don’t feel like I’m ready to have a baby," and nodded sympathetically, but the truth is that I don’t think anybody is ever ready to have a baby, an event that, no matter how cool you are, kind of eradicates your life as you knew it. You just have to make the decision, know that nothing can prepare you for what’s to come, and hold steady as the walls come tumbling down.

This was what I was prepared to do regarding the whole baby-and-book thing. But as the publication date approached-coincidentally, it happened to be Pearl’s four-month birthday-my resolve became a bit shaky. The problem, I suppose, was less simply Pearl’s existence and more that there was also Coleman, who was doing his own bit of freaking out about this new baby sister who, like him before her, was basically on perma-feed (she’d clocked in at nine pounds, six ounces, so she was even bigger than her brother at birth, a fact I’ve been hesitant to share with him lest it instill some sort of inferiority complex), keeping me locked in our tattered glider for the majority of the day and way too much of the night. And there was our less-than-ideal living situation, with all four of us in a studio, while our apartment was renovated. All of which somehow contrived to prohibit me from doing anything at all. When getting myself a glass of water seemed like a challenge–Coleman would scream and throw himself on me the minute I started toward the kitchenette, then stick his grimy hands in the glass once I’d returned to his side-it seemed impossible to do the million publicity-ish things one is supposed to do when publishing a novel, things that are not quite my forte even on a good day. Despite this, the novel proceeded on its march to publication, and my publicist proceeded to book me a bunch of readings in the city. With each new date, I felt a little thrill-I would be reading at KGB, where I’d seen favorite writers read over the years, and at two of my favorite bookstores-but as the calendar began to fill with events, I began to worry. Pearl was, as expected, an easy baby. Even easier than her brother. She started sleeping through the night at eight weeks. She smiled all the time. But because, again, of our weird living situation, she wasn’t really on a sleeping schedule. How could she be, when the minute I got her to sleep, a wild-haired four-year-old jumped on her screaming, "I’m a leopard seal and Pearl’s a BABY PENGUIN." (You guessed right. Leopard seals eat baby penguins. These are the sorts of things he learns at his hippie preschool.) If you have a baby, you know what I’m about to say: Because she wasn’t (and isn’t) on any sort of schedule-as Cole had been at that age-there was no way we could leave her with a sitter, for she might wake at any time and need to eat. And to eat, she needed me, since like her brother she’d refused the bottle. Evan and I, in the two minutes we had alone each day, had hushed conversations about what to do, but we couldn’t come up with an answer. Meanwhile, I frantically lined up sitters-once again, if you have a baby, you know the difficulty of finding sitters for six nights in the space of two weeks – knowing, at the very least, we couldn’t bring Coleman with us. Not unless I wanted top be accompanied by a floor show.

My publication date arrived and with it, my book party, to which we brought both kids, and I told myself, as I sipped an overfull glass of icy wine, and Pearl was passed from friend to friend along the long stone counter of our neighbor’s bar, and Coleman played with his friend Izzy – the daughter of two close friends from Oberlin – that this was all good, that I was somehow, finally living the life I’d always wanted, that Evan and I were like…I don’t know, some unnamed, glamorous writers of yore, who had a big, happy, bohemian families and brought their kids to dinner parties and let them fall asleep on the piles of coats in the bedroom. Three days later, on the day of my first reading (Good Friday!), I was feeling a little bit less thrilled. Coleman was home from school on spring break-had been for two days-and I had been pretty much unable to secure more than a moment to myself to figure out what I was going to read, much less practice reading it. We’d just moved back to our apartment, which was now completely filled with boxes marked "tea cups" and "fondue pots" and "punch bowl" – all things I’d happily lived without for five months and was pretty sure I could live without for the rest of my life – and Evan, who thrives on order, was consumed with unpacking and alphabetizing our thousands of books and endlessly moving things down from the studio in which we’d been staying, all of which needed to be done, but not, perhaps, right at that exact moment, I thought. Somehow, thanks to the arrival of the sitter, I managed to take a shower and dress myself, all the while wondering if I was really going to do this, to get up in front of an audience and read from this novel I’d managed to write, without having really prepared myself, without being absolutely sure the section I’d chosen was the right length, or that I’d hit every sentence right, or look up enough to maintain everyone’s interest (or at least not seem like an awkward teenager mumbling her way through Speech and Debate). I couldn’t quite explain it, though: How had I managed to write this novel in the years following Coleman’s birth – including his infancy – but now, with the addition of Pearl, was somehow unable to find an hour in which to prepare a ten-minute reading? Is having two kids really that hard? Or am I just deficient in some major way? Regardless, we managed to get to the bookstore on time, with Pearl asleep in her stroller – that was the choice we made, in the end, to bring her with us – and it all went as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Or so I’ve been telling myself. The following Monday, I was scheduled to do another reading, followed by an interview conducted by my editor, at my favorite bookstore, McNally-Jackson, in SoHo. Over the weekend, I carved out bits of time in which to practice, and by the afternoon of the reading I felt a bit more calm. We’d been unable to find a sitter for this reading, so Evan would stay home with Coleman, and my friend Kira-who is known in our neighborhood as something of a baby whisperer-would accompany me to the reading and serve as Pearl wrangler, though I figured that good baby would fall asleep on the walk to the bookstore, just as she had on Friday. No such luck, of course. Though she yawned and yawned, P seemed to sense that something exciting was happening – or perhaps she simply picked up on my anxiety, as babies tend to do – refusing to fall completely asleep. This was, I realized as we arrived, the worst possible scenario: She was going to become exhausted and cranky while I was reading. Which meant she was going to start crying and, yes, need to nurse while I was reading. It’ll be fine, I told myself, though I could see Kira was thinking the same thing and worrying about being responsible for a screaming, inconsolable, overtired infant. Friends began to stream in, including, bizarrely, three people I’d known in high school, members of the popular, jocky class who had largely scorned me (as I, in my combat boots, had scorned them, I suppose), but who now hugged and congratulated me as if we’d been best buddies. As the bookstore’s clerks brought out more chairs-the audience was swelling-I took my seat on the little stool appointed me ("a sort of singer-songwriter set-up," the manager joked), went through my spiel about the book-five Oberlin grads move to New York during the tech boom of the late 1990s and gradually lose the idealism of their youth-and began to read, amidst Pearl’s squawks and cries. Pretty quickly, those little squawks turned into shouts. At the back of the room, Kira jostled her, trying to comfort her to sleep. I told myself, with steely resolve, to ignore the situation. Kira could get any baby to asleep – had, in fact, gotten Pearl to sleep just a week earlier, at my party – and would be fine. I read on. And then, suddenly, as I found my place on page seven, came a scream so enormous that the entire audience, as one, turned their heads to the back of the room. Pearl had reached the end. I put the book down. "Okay," I said. "Hand me that baby." Kira, happily, raced to the front of the room. "Now," I said into the microphone, "comes the public nudity part of the evening." Two seconds later, Pearl was silent and happy, and I was somehow managing to hold both a 400-page hardback book and a seventeen-pound baby, while perched on a small wooden stool, aiming my voice toward the microphone, and keeping my sweater pulled down low enough to cover my left boob. She stayed on my lap for the duration of the event, first asleep, then awake, staring out at the audience with her huge, brown doll eyes, smiling and laughing, and generally stealing the show from me. And I suppose I learned what every mother must eventually learn: Eventually you must cede your powers to the next generation. I’m not sure, exactly, how my publisher felt about these shenanigans, but for me, in a way, the whole thing was more fun because of all the craziness. Pearl, I suspect, took a little pressure off me, let me relax a bit more in front of the audience than I might have otherwise. But I also realized that, well, if I can manage to hold my own while half-naked and nursing a massive baby, then I can do pretty much anything. Except be in two places at once, which is the subject I’ll turn to tomorrow. Until then.

The post Public Nudity appeared first on Jewcy.

What I didn’t bargain for was the fact that these days, in the age of the Interweb, everyone is a critic. A week or two later, my editor called again, ecstatic. The novel had been chosen for one of Barnes and Noble’s book clubs, something called "First Look," in which readers receive galleys of new novels a few months before they come out, then discuss the books in an online message board. "This is really, really great," she told me. "Simon and Schuster, as a company, has only had one other book chosen for it." The catch: The author participates in the discussion for nearly a month, answering reader’s questions. In my case, I’d be logging on in January, when my as-yet-unborn baby would be about a month old. "That sounds really fun," I told her. And, in a way, it did. Sort of. January came quickly and found us ensconced in our studio, which had no phone line, which meant we had no DSL. Luckily, we were able to piggyback on a neighboring school with an incredibly powerful, inexplicably-not-password-protected wi fi signal. A week or two before I was due to start answering readers’ questions, Evan excitedly told me that readers were already posting. A few days later, he was a little less excited. "My advice for you," he said, "is to not take any of this personally. Some of these people are clearly cranks. And some just aren’t used to reading literary fiction." "But some are smart," I said. "Right?" "Yes," he admitted. "Some are smart."

And some were smart, I discovered when it came time for me to make my virtual entrance, which coincided with the sudden disappearance of our stolen wi fi, forcing me to take up residence in our local coffee shop (where the pack of ancient cronies that crowd the table by the bar became accustomed to the site of me nursing Pearl while typing with one hand). In fact, most were smart and lovely, and asked interesting questions about the writing process, about literature, about history and about life, in general. But then there were the cranks. The guy who wanted to know why my novel wasn’t more like Ken Follett. The guy who explained that he’d learned in writing class, to "show not tell," so why was I "telling" so much rather than showing? The guy who was furious that I’d included so much "insidery" information about New York (he was, of course, a resident of New Jersey). For some reason, most of the cranks were guys. But the biggest crank of all was, in fact, a woman, who told me, with barely concealed hostility, that she didn’t understand why I’d included so many "obscure Judaic references" in the novel. Why, she wanted to know, had I made all my characters Jewish? Was my novel intended solely for readers in New York and Los Angeles? Didn’t I care about readers in the "flyover states" who wouldn’t know anything about the Jews and, thus, wouldn’t be able to "relate" to my characters? And, moreover, didn’t I want non-Jews to read my book? Why, why, why had I not written a novel about Episcopalians, which would appeal to everyone? I knew from the first post that this gal was trouble. The bad grammar. The weird, Star Trek-ish screen name. The oddly pompous tone. And I resolved to answer her question as politely and seriously as possible. Hours, I spent thinking over how to respond, crafting replies and then discarding them. ("Listen here, bigot," would not do as a greeting, I decided.) I’m tempted to let the absurdity of this person’s argument stand on its own, for even if I had written a novel about a Satmar rabbi, isn’t that my prerogative? And is it really true that a Catholic in Wyoming can’t relate to a Jew in New York? No, of course not. But in the interest of logic, I feel I have to explain that while, yes, all my characters are indeed Jewish-a purposeful choice on my part and one I thought long and hard about-my novel isn’t particularly Jewish, in the strict sense of the term. It’s not, for instance, like Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, which hinges on spiritual experience and belief (and which does include obscure Jewish references, though that didn’t stop it from landing on the bestseller list; hmmmmm). Or Tova Mirvis’ The Ladies’ Auxiliary, which explores the limits and comforts of an Orthodox community. Nor it is like the ubiquitous Everything is Illuminated, which wrestles, albeit in a naïve way, with the legacy of the Holocaust in the Western world. My five protagonists are all secular Jews from culturally sophisticated-let’s say, secular humanist-backgrounds. One gets married in a synagogue, yes, and another eventually moves to Israel. But these events are parts of the rather complicated fabric of the story. There are, I can safely assure you, no obscure Jewish references. Certainly no more than in your average Woody Allen movie. That said, there is a way-a very strong way-in which I conceived of A Fortunate Age as a Jewish novel from the very start. You see, it’s loosely based on The Group, Mary McCarthy’s fantastic 1963 novel, about a clique of Vassar grads who move to New York during the Depression and try to find their way in demi-bohemian fields (publishing, theater, etc.), but end up quashed by their inner bourgeois. All of McCarthy’s characters are, of course, WASPs, primarily from blue blood-type families. When I first read the novel, in 2002, I was struck by the similarities between her characters experiences and those undergone by my friends in the late 1990s. It was as though, somehow, feminism had never happened. But I was also struck by the oddness that their universe was so circumscribed as to not include anyone Jewish-this was New York, in the 1930s-or even German or Irish or Italian or, I don’t know, Swedish, or anything even remotely dissimilar from their own backgrounds. The only Jewish character who appears in the novel is the wealthy husband of the titular group’s nemesis, a sad figure named Norine Schmittlapp, who is largely disdained by McCarthy’s protagonists, all the more so after she marries the curly-haired Freddy, even though he graces her with a massive diamond and an an Upper East Side townhouse, and even though his family turned Rosenberg into Rogers and converted to, yes, Episcopalian. "[I] f you wanted to give your child the best start in life, you would not marry a Jew," a character named Priss thinks while visiting Norine’s swank new digs. And Norine herself strangely fetishizes her husband. "Do you mind Jews?" she asks Norine. "I’m mad for them myself." In fact, she wishes he’d stayed a Rosenberg. "I was hell-bent to have him go back to the old Orthodox faith. With a prayer shawl and phylacteries." Yikes! And so it was partly a political move, of sorts, to make all my characters Jewish. Though it was also partly documentary: In writing about bohemian circles of a more recent era, how could I not write about Jews? But how to explain this to my online antagonist? A person who didn’t seem to realize that there were Jews in Wichita and Fargo and…everywhere and, more importantly, that the pleasures of reading fiction don’t necessarily derive from reading one’s own life played back at oneself from the page. I thought about how, after reading The Corrections, my friend Andrea and I both said, simultaneously, "My parents are Enid and Albert," even though, culturally speaking, our parents are as different from each other-mine, New York Jews; hers, Indiana farmers-as they are from Enid and Albert. And I thought about the novel I was reading just then, Aravind Adiga’s brilliant The White Tiger, written in English and published originally in the UK, though set, of course, in India. Would this person ask Adiga what he was thinking, writing a novel about India for a British audience? No, never. Would she ask Toni Morrison why all her characters are black? No, of course not. Why did she feel comfortable lambasting me for making my characters Jewish? And insisting that no one would "get" the novel because of it? I’m not quite sure I want to answer that question, but I’ll leave you to ponder it. And I’ll tell you that I did indeed try to restrain my darker thoughts in my dialogue with this person. I wrote an earnest, probably too earnest, response, explaining much of what I’ve explained above, in calm, neutral, respectful tones. Her response? That I was calling her an anti-Semite because she didn’t want to read a novel mostly populated with Jews. Well, I thought, you said it, not me. I wish I could say that none of this bothered me, that I laughed it all off and went about my business, but I’m afraid I’m not quite built that way (or so I’m discovering). By the final days of my B&N stint, I was almost afraid to go online. And while I know, certainly, that a guy who reads Ken Follett novels isn’t going to love a novel heavily influenced by John Galsworthy-or even a novel without gunplay and car chases (though there is, now that I think about it, an FBI agent and some illegal activity of a political nature)-I still hear, echoing in my head, some of the nastier comments. It’s odd how the comments of a few cranks can obliterate the interesting thoughts of the smart majority. Thus, when we got closer to the publication date-April 7, by the way-and my editor asked me again if I wanted to see reviews, I quickly said, "no, no, no," and tried to spread the word among friends, so no one would send them on or call, quoting them, or any of the things that friends do because they’re excited for you or protective of you or what have you. But here again, we’re in an age in which it’s difficult to turn off the million media outlets that bombard us with information day and night. I opened up the April issue of Vogue to find a mention of the novel, describing it as an "amber-hued" look at the late 1990s. "Amber-hued?" I ranted to Evan. "It’s satire. Not nostalgia." One morning, I turned on my phone and found an email from Facebook informing me that someone with whom I went to high school-not a friend, mind you, someone I’d spoken to perhaps once or twice, someone whose name I didn’t recognize when he friended me-had posted a link to a review in Entertainment Weekly on my wall. (Thank you, Ira Lieman, wherever you are!) The next day, I went to look something up for my editor, and accidentally found a blogger-a Jewish blogger, no less-slamming the book as pretty much the worst thing she’d ever read. "Yeah," a commenter wrote, in response to her post, "I’ve heard nothing but negative buzz about this book." My head began to buzz. So what if this blogger was clearly a fan of Shmuley Boteach and, thus, clearly not the audience for my novel? "Stop reading blogs," my friend Jenny commanded me. "Turn off your computer. Write longhand." I did, for the most part. But these little tastes of opinion had made me curious to see others, perhaps in the hopes that a rave would wash away the residue of the bad stuff. Particularly about the Times review. Wouldn’t you be? I’ve been reading the Times Book Review every week since high school. And I’m a book critic. How could I not be curious about, at least, to whom they’d assigned it? The Monday before it came out, my editor called-like everyone else in media and publishing, she had an advance copy of the following Sunday’s Book Review-and told me that it wasn’t great, but wasn’t bad. "Okay," I said, feeling sick to my stomach. Later that day, Evan read it, too. "She’s exaggerating," he said. "It’s good. The reviewer chastises you at one point, but she likes the book." "Okay," I said, through clenched teeth. And then, strangely, I forgot about it. Until Saturday, I picked up my phone and found many Facebook emails. People I’d known in college, at my hippie summer camp, in nursery school, people I’d not heard from or thought of in twenty, thirty years, their names were crowding my inbox. "Congratulations," they all said, "on the review." Had they actually read the review? I wondered. Would they be offering congratulations if it were bad? The next day, I arose before everyone else-no small feat with a four-month-old baby-and tried to straighten our apartment, which was (and is; more on this later) still largely filled with boxes and piles of books. As I shuffled the paper on the counter, I suddenly realized the obvious: The review did not just exist online. It was in there. I could, if I wanted to, open up the Book Review and read it. Furtively, glancing toward the bedroom door to make sure Evan wasn’t stirring, I opened it up and began to read. The beginning was largely plot summary, like so many Times reviews. I read on-first paragraph, second, third-until I got to the second column, where the reviewer notes that "all of the friends are Jewish." I quickly closed the paper. I knew nothing weird or scary would follow-this was Liesl Schillinger, after all!-but somehow the word "Jewish" served as a sort of reminder of the terrors that could befall a writer from reading even the most innocuous review: That those critical voices might resonate in one’s head for months, years, to come. And there is not, I’m afraid, space in my head for anything else. *** Okay, due to technical difficulties this post, scheduled for yesterday (that is, Tuesday, April 21st), isn’t making it up until today (you can read the date at the top.) On Monday, I promised that my next post would deliver a few things-Mets-themed bobble head dolls, two guys named Bruce, some serious (rather than Woody Allen-style) problems-and those, you can expect later today.

The post Everyone’s a Critic (of the Jews) appeared first on Jewcy.

But Jewcy has managed to break down my defenses and for this week I’ll be, yes, blogging (still painful to type the word) on the site, about a subject that I hope won’t strike you as hopelessly played: the strange and anxiety-producing weeks surrounding the publication of said novel, which happens to be my first.

Before I go any further, I should stop here and go back to that whole overcommitted thing. In high school, despite (or because of) my extreme freak status, I got myself entangled in so many college-admissions-office-impressing activities that I ended up with a case of mono that kept me in bed for half my junior year (and almost failed speech class for lack of attendance). As an adult, I tend to be perpetually on deadline. In my first years as a book critic, I went through periods in which I’d churn out three reviews per week. Later, I somehow managed to write a 500-page novel while working and tending to a baby (then, toddler), which now strikes me as complete insanity, seeing as it involved waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning almost every day for a year or two. And, thus, it somehow seems fitting that the week when that novel arrives in bookstores—and when I have any number of readings and a party for which to prepare—also turned out to be the same week in which husband, Evan, and I were given the okay to move back into our apartment. Again, I should explain: About a year ago, when we found out I was pregnant with our second child, we decided we should finally do something about the fact that our apartment—which we’d lived in for ten years after inheriting it from my grandmother—was basically falling down around us, lead paint and all. We hired architects, as mandated by our co-ops bylaws, and as tends to happen with these kinds of ventures, before we knew it we were agreeing to knock down all the walls of our apartment and start from scratch. More distressingly, we also agreed to live in a (very generous) friend’s studio while the work was done, having been told that it would take no more than three months, probably less, and would be complete before I gave birth in early December. Five months later, in March, the four of us—Evan, me, our four-year-old son Coleman, and our new baby, Pearl—were still in the studio, making a concerted effort not to kill each other accidentally (our stuff so clogged the place that a misplaced shoe could cause impalement by Gymini) or on purpose (no explanation necessary). Calls were starting to come in about the novel—from reporters and so on—and I’d ask Evan to watch the kids, then run outside to the stoop so I could talk without Coleman waving a foam sword in my face and shouting, “I’m Captain Hook. You’re Peter Pan. FIGHT, MAMA, FIGHT!” When I needed to write or do any of the weird pre-publication publicity things that all authors seem to do these days—like responding to readers questions on a Barnes and Noble message board (“Which character is you?”)—I ran to our local coffee shop, sometimes with Pearl in the stroller, praying she’d stay asleep. By the end of the month, it was all we could do not to call the contractor every day, begging him to get the place in merely habitable condition. Instead, we sent friendly, passive-aggressive emails telling him, jokingly, that he might be held liable if we were institutionalized and could he please install the shower head so we could move back in, hoping wildly that we might get settled before the true book madness set in.

But no. Four days before the pub date we were told the place was ready enough for us to sleep there, though we’d still have to shower in the studio, two floors up, for a few more days. “Are you really going to move back in tomorrow?” asked my friend Lauren, when I explained that we’d gotten the okay. “With all you have going on?” “I don’t know,” I told her. But I did. The truth was that we didn’t have much of a choice. Our friends were anxious to have use of their studio again. And we were anxious to put some walls between ourselves and our children at night, anxious enough that we would somehow, as usual, figure out how to do a million things at once. We started moving our stuff downstairs—that is, the fraction of our stuff that we’d kept in the studio, which still felt like a lot; the rest, spread between two storage units, we would tackle once things calmed down, never mind that it included pretty much all my clothing. For months I’d been risking public nudity wearing now-massively oversized maternity clothes, which, I suddenly realized, was not really going to make me feel confident and fabulous while standing before a crowd at KGB or McNally-Jackson. I’d need to either wade through an entire room of identical boxes at a Chinatown U-Store-It or go shopping. The choice was obvious. And yet, for the first time in my life, shopping felt like a burden. How would I manage this relatively simple task while moving, while cleaning both apartments, while endlessly nursing a still-new, supernaturally hungry baby, and, in the style of modern parents, focusing completely and carefully on everything Coleman—who was on spring break for two weeks, just to make everything that much more crazy—said or did or drew or made with Play-Doh so as not, in any way, to make him feel that this cute new baby had usurped our love and attention? People have much bigger problems, of course—I’ll remind you all, again, that this is maybe why I am averse to blogging, averse to exposing the silly minutiae of my life (oh my God, I had to go shopping!)—and as I write this all out, the stupidity of it, the bourgeois-ness of it, makes me a bit ill. How did I become this person, moaning about how hard it is to move and publish a book in the same week? That question, I suppose, is the same one that afflicts the five main characters of my novel, among others, and so I’ll end here. But to give you a taste of what’s coming tomorrow: drunken depravity, two accounts of actual public nudity (rather than just the risk thereof), a debacle involving Mets-themed bobble head dolls, the New Age section of Barnes and Noble, two guys named Bruce, and the moment when my difficulties turn serious.

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