Writing about suicide: Adam Johnson’s fabulous short story “Nirvana” (from Fortune Smiles) and the YA book All the Bright Places have gotten me thinking about the challenge of how to bring suicide into a story. Johnson does a great job of the narrator husband struggling to love his depressed and probably suicidal wife who can’t stop listening to Nirvana (the band) and will probably be unable to get out of bed for the rest of her life. How do you create love in that setting? It’s a powerful, moving story. Though honestly I could not put All the Bright Places down, I found Finch, the suicidal bi-polar boy, to be a bit too charming. What if he was just depressed? What if he wasn’t so likable in his manic phase? What would the story be like then? It did feel like Violet (popular pretty girl who is struggling with older sister’s death) only knew, and perhaps could have only loved, Finch as his manic self. Was it really love then? The thing about teenage love, I suppose, is that it has less strings attached than, let’s say, marital love with house and kids. Though it’s sad to leave it behind, you could more easily. Had Finch only been depressed, I’m guessing Violet would have never fallen in love with him in the first place (or if she had been able to fall in love with him, that would have been a very interesting and complex story). For my own writing, I was pondering if the least interesting point of view in a story about suicide was the suicidal person’s point of view. Why would this be? And who to tell the story from then?  

YA tropes: though I love really, really YA, some of the repeating tropes are starting to get a little old for me. The cute outsider boy in a band. The boy who likes the girl who eventually likes him back. The awful parents. The clueless parents. The absent parents. The parents who are the cause of the characters’ problems. Are parents of teenagers actually so terrible?

YA books that transcend those tropes: Picture Me Gone (a girl who has a close relationship with her parents, her parents are good, they do make mistakes but everyone works past that – it’s also a great mystery); Tamar (historic World War II novel about resistance in the Netherlands. Parents make mistakes but it also shows the parents, or in this case the grandparents, at a young age making those mistakes, and it shows the complexity of how a mistake is made, and then having to live with those mistakes); The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing (I don’t remember there being any romance in this book, finally. Instead it is brutal, honest, breathtaking account of race and the American Revolution ); The Summer Prince (the prince loves the narrator’s best friend (a boy) but also loves the narrator (a girl). In fact he has gotten some tech alterations and now loves everyone, including the city — can that still be love? And the girl loves the prince….it was kind of mind-blowing to see a different set up of teen relationships here);  

Where are the YA books where: nobody likes anybody romantically; people like each other but then those people like other people for the entire book; people like everybody; the parents are good and doing their best; kids cause their own problems; there is not some revelation at the end and it’s just really messy

Why is everyone not reading to their children in public? I know, I’m kind of an extreme reader, so maybe it makes sense I have two kids who also really really love books. But when traveling, I do wonder why am I the only parent reading to their child in the entire airport? I’m not exaggerating. I can not remember seeing another parent reading to their child in all my travel these past 9 years. Even at the library, it seems the kids are flocking to the computers instead of sitting in their parents laps, or beside their parents laps, listening to a book. Reading is my daughter’s and my number one activity to do together, and I am already worried about how sad I will be when she no longer wants me to read her books (though she has offered that, once she nails this reading thing, we can take turns reading Harry Potter #5 to each other, she reads a chapter, I read a chapter, etc.). Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if airports had little children’s libraries that you can borrow books from for the flights? 

Alice Munro: I have been reading her slowly every morning, trying to learn from her. Just finished “The Love of A Good Woman,” a 4 part novella which makes incredible twists between each of the parts. 

What I want to be reading: a really good historical novel. I didn’t see many (any?) on the best of lists 2015 though. How about a really good YA historical novel? That’s what I want to be writing right now. I went back and reread Bringing Up The Bodies over the holidays and tried to enjoy the book while, at the same time, tried to study how Mantel is such a pro at dialogue. Each character speaks distinctly, in his or her own style, and for much of the book — or all?–the action of the story is people sitting in rooms and talking. But somehow Mantel makes it work.

Meta fiction: For the past year, I’ve felt disillusioned with fiction, maybe because some major stuff was happening in my life. When I was writing about that major stuff, it felt so false to try and craft it into a traditional well-written story. I didn’t feel like putting on an attention-grabbing beginning, or putting a thoughtful ending on it, or adding some connection between the characters, or making sure the whole thing felt satisfying to the reader–because that didn’t seem true to my life. So I wrote a meta novella about a mom parenting a boy with autism and two meta short stories, one about marriage and another about religion, all of which the writer played a role, and now all that is done, and I am…purged! I hope. And ready to start fully reimagining characters again. (I know, according to one of my writer friends, adding creative non-fiction to a fiction story is EVERYWHERE these days, but that’s not why I did it, honest!) (though I do think Adam Johnson does this very nicely in his short story “Interesting Facts”) 

Harry Potter: just finished reading the new illustrated version to my 6 year old daughter, and I’m listening to the 7th and final book with my 9 year old son. What changes those characters, the plot, and even J.K. Rowling’s style went through over those 7 books! I didn’t love The Deathly Hallows on my first reading many years ago, but this time I thought the book was great (up until the battle scenes toward the end, which got a little battle-ish for my taste).  The break from the usual traditions of the first 6 books is startling: while Harry starts at the Dursleys, he is never going back to school, there is no riding the train or sorting hat this time. And the impossibility of the task that Harry is left with, to find the remaining horcruxes but who knows where they are or how to get rid of them, is captured so accurately in the first half of the book. Harry is alone (well, with his two friends, but the three of them are alone), Dumbledore is gone, and he has to do something that’s really, really hard. About 1/3 of the way in, I as a reader began to feel just as hopeless as Harry and Hermonie and Ron (where is this book going? is it going anywhere?) — I mean this in a good way. I liked sharing Harry’s despair. And I feel like Snape’s evolution of a character is so excellent. Though I’ll admit I may never understand the logic of the whole Elder Wand (why is Harry its master if the wand was buried with Dumdledore, and I know Malfoy is involved too?). Anyway, I unabashedly love these books. 

John Irving: I wish he wrote more concisely, as I have to read Avenue of Mysteries for a book club I’m in and it is 20 hours long. I’m curious at what speed I can listen to and still absorb the plot. X1.5 is okay (only 15 hours long!). Will x2 work (10 hours long!). x4 would be awesome but…(5 hours long!). I was trying to think of him as a Charles Dickens, but I feel like Dickens prose is denser and his use of language much more surprising. That said, Irving has made me laugh out loud, which is difficult to do while on a long run, and I am intrigued by the manic farcical energy of some of his scenes.