My Girl Crush - Jhumpa Lahiri

My writer girl crush is Jhumpa Lahiri, seen here reading from her latest book of short stories, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH. I just finished it this morning and it's a truly amazing work of art. In fact, it's the best collection of short stories I've read since INTERPRETER OF MALADIES, which she also wrote and that in 2000, garnered her the Pulitzer Prize.

I'm a big, big fan and one day, hope to be able to achieve at least part of what she can - flawed, true characters, rich dialogue, stories that leave a lasting impression on the reader. She creates masterpieces.

Enjoy!

Speaking of Nostalgia...

According to dictionary.com (ironic that as a book lover I've readily given up leafing through a thick dictionary in favor of bookmarking a website that will reveal a word's definition to me in five seconds), the word "nostalgia" means, "a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time."

So, in embracing my nostalgic self I wrote a little piece about my dad. He's the type of person that one doesn't forget: loud, funny, and quite a character.

My father has always had a veritable chest of phrases I like to think he stores in his rather rotund belly, supported by two slim, limbering legs, and a sharp mind celebrated for its acerbic wit. When concerned about leaving enough time to arrive at the airport, or a movie, he will persistently ask, “what time are you leaving?” If confiding in him about a new relationship, he will question whether it is “hot and heavy.” When complaining about a friend’s insensitivity, he will affirm, “that’s not right.”

Many times my father has smiled slyly at me and whispered, “she wants me,” his head cocked towards the tall, slender waitress, a thick-waisted barista, or a blond woman passing by our table. Last year I lectured him about the danger of a diet latent with high-fructose syrup. His response was, “that’s fruck-ed up.” To this day, he refers to “milk” as “klim” and “fish” as “fis.” No one is sure why, but much to his first and second wife’s dismay, it never fails to make my older brothers and I smile.

Then there are the phrases a little girl never thinks of hearing.

“Your mother and I are separating.”

Shortly after I turned seven, my parents sat me down in the den of what would become solely my mother’s apartment, and broke the news. Although inside my stomach turned, I asked whether I was free to go, more concerned more watching my television shows in my room. I do not remember the exact look on either of my parents’ faces, but I am sure it was something close to absolute horror.

When I was younger, television was of the utmost importance; if anyone in my family needed to know when a specific show was on they turned to me. I was the TV Guide model of Small Wonder, able to announce the time, channel, and name of any show on basic cable between the hours of 8 A.M. and 8 P.M. Not even the break-up of my parent’s marriage could tear me away from Blair, Joe, Natalie, and Tutti on the Facts of Life. After all, it is where I first fell in love with George Clooney, twenty years my senior.

My father moved out soon after, to a cramped, furnished apartment on East 54th street. I saw him every other weekend and reveled in the microwave oven I had been nagging my mom to buy. With a few satisfying pushes of a button and a couple of high-pitched beeps, could I really turn a box of previously frozen chicken nuggets into a steaming plateful in under two minutes? How glorious!

After a brief reconciliation between my parents one summer, my father moved out again—this time to East 33rd street. He lived there for two years and permitted me to do whatever I wanted when I visited. I drank Raspberry Snapple morning, noon, and night, rented Wilson Phillips music videos I viewed for hours on end, and lived on Weaver chicken nuggets that burned my mouth, my impatience to eat trumping common knowledge to let them cool.

Some weekends we went to Broadway plays, “A Chorus Line,” and “Fiddler on the Roof” to name a few; others were for trips out to California and Florida to visit my grandmother. Still, on other especially low-key Sundays, I voluntarily mopped his kitchen floors and scoured the toilets, or holed up in my room, began to embrace puberty and the boy I liked by privately daydreaming of the moment when he would become my first kiss.

Every now and again my two brothers, entrenched in their own twenty and thirty-something lives, would come over to visit their aging father and much younger half sister. When I was thirteen I decided my father was lonely, so my brothers and I adopted two cats for him, which we ill-fittingly named, “Bonnie and Clyde.” Bonnie urinated on my father’s leg when he was in bed. Clyde hid under the couch the first night we brought him home and never reappeared until, months later, fed-up of dropping his sheets off at the cleaners three times a week, my father coaxed Clyde into a carrier cage beside Bonnie, and returned them to the shelter.

I am now twenty-eight and a lot of time has passed since the days when I used to dance around my room or subject my father to John Candy movies and Bobby Brown music videos. I have graduated from college, had four jobs, fallen in and out of love, and moved into my own, cramped apartment (without a microwave).

My father’s life has changed too. In the past fourteen years he has retired, lost his older brother to Leukemia and mother to pneumonia, also fallen in and out love, and recently, after hamstring surgery, began walking with a cane. He refers to the thick slabs of skin that hang from his neck as his “jowls” and brown age spots have begun to pepper his hands and arms. His new favorite phrase is, “you’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit my father at his apartment. After the usual catch-up conversation, speckled with a few good-humored jabs thrown my way or his, we turned ourselves over to the television, which I still watch, but not with the same fervor of my childhood.

It began to get dark and when I looked at the clock it was 7:30, far past our normal 6:00 dinnertime. I asked my father if he was hungry and he nodded.

“There are some chicken nuggets in the freezer. I picked them up on the way home from my physical therapist’s office for you,” he said.

I smiled and went to the kitchen to make dinner. In under two minutes.

Rejected.

So I received my official rejection letter from a children's agent earlier this week. It wasn't particularly surprising, since I hadn't heard from him in months, but it still stung - I can't lie about that. In retrospect the way in which I received the letter was mildly comical. My boyfriend handed it to me - along with three bills and my latest copy of "The Writer" magazine - while we were in the elevator going up to our apartment. "Oh. This," I said, looking at the thin envelope on which my name and address were unsteadily printed by an aging typewriter. My first thought was that as an assistant, I'd never send a letter out in which the addressee's name is as high up on the paper as the return address. My second thought, having endured many college rejections thanks to lofty goals and a guidance counselor who provided no guidance whatsoever, was "this isn't good."

And so I read through the letter. Three times. Then my eyes welled, at which point my boyfriend rushed over to me and assured me that I am indeed, a good writer. And I am. Even the letter said that. Praised for my characters, my voice, the way I can draw out relationships between two people who exist only on paper. But my plot, I was told, may not be engaging enough for children. "Nostalgic," was what the piece was called. "How ironic," I muttered, since it takes place in a decade I never experienced, and in the South, a part of this country I've barely even visited, save for a two-day business trip to Nashville and a long weekend with a friend in Chapel Hill.

And so I placed the letter in my coffee table, resigned to filing it away at some point and filled up the rest of my evening with take-out food, old episodes of "The Office," and candy. The following day, when I returned home from work, I read the letter again. I expected I'd be angry. Or sad. Or some other feeling that in general, I try to avoid. But I wasn't. If anything, the 24 hours I'd spent drowning in emails, reality TV, and US Weekly, made me realize this - he's right.

Plotting is not my strong suit. I actually hate it. Characters, and their relationships, are. I'd be happy writing an entire novel about two characters talking - perhaps this is why I like "Before Sunrise" so much? But books also need to be about something happening. Perhaps if I my novel took place in some post-apocalyptic 1956, where my main character was no longer just fighting for her family to be as it "was" before tragedy struck, but also fighting large wolverines who were threatening to eat the whole world, it would have been accepted?

All joking aside, what happened was this: I was given a wake-up call to improve my novel. And so, three years later, I go back and start again.