What’s In A Name?

In front of Fortitude, one of NYC Bryant Park Library’s iconic stone lions, just after donating a copy of Two Over Easy All Day Long. Check it out (literally)!

(Pardon me while I go a little author-dorky on you, for a moment. The rest of this newsletter returns you to your regularly scheduled programming: Two Over Easy All Day Long news, a book review, and a celebration of Women’s History Month.)

Writers like to obsess over things like
story arc, character development, and genre.

Readers just like to read good books.

Image by Bowie15 from Getty Images (text added)

I am both writer and reader, so I get to obsess, and then be annoyed with myself for the obsession. Not nearly as much fun as having your cake and eating it too, but what’re you gonna do?

Apologies to those of you who are readers but not writers—this newsletter takes a short dive into the somewhat neurotic preoccupation with genre.

The title of this newsletter, What’s in a Name?, is part of a famous quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Having spent a little time in the rarefied air of authors, publishers, librarians, and booksellers, living and breathing conversations about titles and genres,
I have to ask: Would it? Would it smell as sweet?

More specifically for my purposes, is a book only as appealing to you as its genre-label? Did you buy (or borrow from the library, or from a friend) Two Over Easy All Day Long because it was labelled a mystery? Would you have picked it up if it was simply labelled “contemporary” or something equally generic? What if it had been labelled, courageously, “genre-bending” or “defies conventional genres”?

I am by no means the only writer grappling with these issues.

At the end of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, a Critical Essay by Robert Crossley (University of Massachusetts at Boston) contrasts Kindred with stereotypical science fiction. “Butler herself has repeatedly insisted that Kindred should be read as a ‘grim fantasy,’ not as science fiction, since there is ‘absolutely no science in it.’ She has also remarked that such generic labels are more useful as marketing categories than as reading protocols.”

In her March 2025 newsletter, Louise Penny makes a similar statement about her Three Pines series. “I think part of the challenge with STILL LIFE [the first book in the series], and all subsequent Three Pines books, was that the series defies convention. While proudly a crime novel, Still Life is not really about the crime. That is the vehicle to explore all sorts of issues. . . . [T]he books are about decency.  About honour and the courage to be kind. To stand up. They are about integrity, and friendship, and goodness, and belonging, and community. They're about terror and they are, in the end, about love in all its forms.”[i]

I am no Octavia E. Butler or Louise Penny—though as they say in the movie City Slickers, “Day ain’t over yet.” But I struggled with the same issues when sending out queries for Two Over Easy All Day Long (thank you, Golden Antelope Press, for loving the story in spite of its genre-ambivalence!), when sending out queries for the Looser Island Dogs series, and most recently when sending out queries for Jaysus, MooMoo, and The Immortal Woos. And the issue pops up when someone finds out I have a published novel and asks, innocently, “Oh? What kind of book is it?”

If only they knew what soul-searching I go through every time that question is posed!

Labels like “mystery” seem inapt. I intentionally did not use the traditional format of a mystery, with red herrings and clues, and of course there’s the fact that the dead body doesn’t even show up until Chapter 5.

Whodunnit? is not the central theme of the book.

“Cozy mystery” is even less appropriate, given Walt’s (and Nancy’s) foul mouth, and the occasional references to sex, some of which are somewhat explicit.

Two Over Easy was described by one well-known reviewer (who shall remain nameless, such is my frustration with their assigned genre) as “a comic novel.” Though they did add “with heart.”

Say what? It starts with the death of a child.

There are parts of Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven and The Bean Trees, and Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry that are hilarious, but I’d never describe them as “comic.” Similarly, Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles (review below) is wickedly funny, but it is not a “comic novel.”

The central message of Two Over Easy is redemption, the transformation possible through created community and learning to see the world from another’s perspective. The “point” of the book is that people can change for the better, and sometimes, miraculously, against all odds, they do.

So I can’t help but bristle at calling my book “a comic novel,” though perhaps my feelings are much ado about nothing (thank you again, Bill). I leave it in your hands, sweet reader. If you feel so inclined, drop me a note in the comments or by email and let me know what genre – what “name” – you’d ascribe to Two Over Easy All Day Long, or any of the other novels mentioned above, whether there are other books you’ve loved that seemed mislabeled, or any other thoughts you’d like to share.

And now, back to your regularly-scheduled programming . . . .

Two Over Easy All Day Long News

• NYC Library: The photo for this newsletter is me standing in front of Fortitude, one of the iconic stone lions in front of New York City’s Bryant Park Library, shortly after donating a signed copy of Two Over Easy All Day Long. If you live in the area, or know someone who does, check it out (literally)!

• Reader’s House Interview coming soon! Check out their issues here.

• Playing with audio books: Spoken Press recently launched a program to make audiobook versions more widely available to authors and readers. Check out Chapter Two (read by “Eric”) and an excerpt of Chapter Three (read by “Sarah”) here. Vote with stars or comments if you have a preference. You can also let me know if you prefer to hear the author read his/her/their own work – and you can hear me read an excerpt on my YouTube channel, for comparison.

• Goodreads Giveaway: Signed copies of Two Over Easy All Day Long will be sent to ten winners. Open until 3/30/2025. Enter here - entry is free!
  
  Already have a copy? Why not enter anyway? If you win, share with a friend, or donate a copy to your local library. If you donate, be sure to tell the librarian what you loved about the book, and why you think it should be included in their collection.

• Book Clubs: I’ve now had the pleasure of appearing, virtually or in person, at a handful of book clubs. I absolutely love participating in those discussions, so please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like me to join your conversations, in person, remotely, or by email. As I’ve mentioned in previous newsletters, Golden Antelope Press is a small (but mighty!) independent publisher, and there is no army of PR folks between me and my readers, which means you can email requests to me directly at sharilaneauthor@gmail.com.

Book Review

I know I tend to gush over every book that makes it into my newsletter, and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles (William Morrow 2024) is no exception. It’s also an excellent example of the queries posed earlier in this newsletter.

The novel follows a nineteen-year-old whose college professor seduces her but disavows all connection when she gets pregnant. Margo, our protagonist, decides against abortion without any inkling what parenthood entails or any plan for financial stability (or resources to develop a plan).

[SPOILER ALERTS - skip the next sentence if you like!] Margo loses her job, then her roommates (who share the rent), navigates her father’s heroine addiction and her mother’s legacy of poverty and dependence on men, starts an OnlyFans[ii] account to support herself and her baby, and because of that endures a legal custody battle and public “doxxing.”

The story is about female empowerment and smashing the societal taboos placed only on women. It includes explicit descriptions of pornography, and viscerally painful descriptions of parenthood and childhood trauma. That it also manages to be wickedly funny is a triumph. So it was almost shocking to see it described on Amazon as “heartwarming,” “laugh-out-loud,” “feel-good,” and “lovable.”

Not until I got to the end of the Amazon blurb did I find a more accurate description, and even then I had to meander through “fluff” descriptors to get to this:

“ . . . filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale [about] . . . struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. [An] . . . honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off. A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.”

 I heartily, highly, and enthusiastically recommend Margo’s Got Money Troubles. And if you read it, write and tell me what you thought, how you’d describe the book, or any other little thing you’d like to share.

Women’s History Month

Image by imaginaryparty (text added).

In honor of Women’s History Month, I’d love it if you’d share your favorite female author/author who identifies or identified as female.

I’ll start, and since my obsession with—I mean passion for—reading started as a child, I’m going for children’s authors first: Madeleine L'Engle, E.  Nesbit, J.K. Rowling. Next up, authors of adult books: Barbara Kingsolver (of course), Emily Dickinson, Ruth Ozeki, Emily St. John Mandel, and Louise Penny.[iii]

Your turn!

Footnotes

[i] I just have to wax enthusiastic about the fact that, when I wrote to Louise Penny to ask for permission to use this quote, she, or rather her executive assistant, actually wrote back! Granting permission! What a thrill! (Okay, done with the excessive use of exclamation points. For now.). Her marvelous newsletter is available here: https://www.louisepenny.com/newsletters.htm

[ii] This dinosaur had to research the term. According to Wikipedia, “OnlyFans is mainly used by pornographic creators . . . . As of May 2023, OnlyFans had 3 million registered creators and 220 million registered consumers. In 2023, creators earned a mean average of nearly $1,300 per year. A study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that ‘OnlyFans users were predominantly white, married, males who identified as heterosexual, bisexual, or pansexual.’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans

[iii] There are so, so many others! Also, in case you followed the events related to J.K. Rowling’s comments about trans rights, I want to say this: I will neither defend those comments nor apologize for including her in this list. The Harry Potter series brought joy to so many, and her books championed diversity and inclusivity, acceptance of each person on his/her/their own terms, forgiveness, and taking a stand against evil. Her contributions on those issues should not be cancelled, even as I acknowledge that I share concerns about her statements and actions related to trans people.

Happily Ever After

A few years ago, Netflix put out a miniseries called Hollywood, based on the appalling real-life experiences of women, the LGTBQ community, and people of color in post-WWII Hollywood.

Writers, actors, producers, dreamers . . . the takeaway from the early episodes was that if you weren’t a white man (or a buxom white woman applying for a role as Siren), even genius was likely to be overlooked.

What I enjoyed about the show was that Netflix gave it a somewhat happy ending. Not a Disney-fied, tidy and wrapped-in-a-bow ending, but an ending where, eventually, brilliance and perseverance were rewarded, and prejudices were set aside.***

(***Lots of asterisks here, as will be obvious to anyone who watched the show.)

Interestingly, critics were not impressed.

Here’s a sample of their complaints:

• From The Guardian's Lucy Mangan: “This should be the perfect set-up for a scabrous look at prejudice, corruption, the trading of sexual currency, coercion, the well-oiled machinations that underlie an industry and how it all shapes history—all through a #MeToo lens. But it becomes a mere wish-fulfilment fantasy that, whether it intends to or not, suggests that if a few people had just been that bit braver, then movies—and therefore the world!—would be a glorious, egalitarian Eden.” (Emphasis mine). (Quoted from the Wikipedia article)

• Similarly, FAULT Magazine criticized “the show's dangerous embellishment of systemic prejudice of post-war USA,” saying, “The only ones who benefit from the erasure of Hollywood's brutal history of racism and homophobia, are those that perpetrated it.” (Also quoted from the same article)

I’m not here to argue that Hollywood was great art, but I disagree with the cited criticism, and here’s why: I believe good fiction—on the page or on the screen—can take tragedy, whether real or simply true-to-life, and turn it on its head.

I believe a good story can show us not only life as it is,
but life as it should be.

In my opinion, this is not “erasure of brutal history,” this is John Lennon singing “Imagine all the people living life in peace.”

Hollywood first takes us into a world where anyone who dreams of success in film must exchange sex for recognition, and then allows us to climb out of that sordid world, and glimpse an alternate, happier ending.

And I think we need those happily ever after endings
almost as much as we need air.

We need to see that it is, in fact, possible to have a different outcome if we can bring ourselves to be “that bit braver.”

That is, of course, what I have tried to do in Two Over Easy All Day Long, and what I try to do in all my writing. As I’ve said in Meet the Author events, newsletters, and elsewhere, Tell Your Story is my mantra and fervent hope. And as long as you’re telling your story, why not give it a happy ending?

Postscript

About that photo at the beginning of this newsletter: My personal Happily Ever After involves kids (the hairy kind and the not-so-hairy kind). So here, in addition to the photo of me with lambs and kids, is a photo of me with my grandson. Just because . . .

Two Over Easy All Day Long News

• Check out the new YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sharilane38

• Subscribe to the Facebook Page

• Meet the Author event scheduled for Monday, October 7, 2024 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm, at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Oregon

Book Reviews

Fire Music by Connie Hampton Connally (2024 Coffeetown Press) follows three teens trapped in a basement-turned-bomb shelter in Hungary during WWII. Music becomes escape and salvation, and a way to heal the trauma of that time for the next generation. A lovely read and a page-turner!

And speaking of music . . .

I will be collaborating with the incomparable Adam Brock on some music for the new YouTube channel. In the meantime, check out two of my favorite songs: In This Kitchen, with Claflin and Grace, and Alice Di Micele’s Wise Old Woman.

Regret

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations
—one can either do this or that.
My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this:
do it or do not do it
—you will regret both.”

Soren Kierkegaard

(Moving from the profound to the whimsical-but-still-true)

“Regret is the worst human emotion.
If you took another road,
you might have fallen off a cliff . . .”

 William Shatner

A deeply personal note to start today’s newsletter: I am discussing with someone I love the possibility of moving to assisted living, or some other similarly monumental shift in what had been a comfortably established life. This particular someone has always been my rock, and the conversations have been heart-wrenching.

I regret so many things.   

I regret not spending more time visiting. Two or three times a year was the norm until Covid, and our last planned visit was cancelled due to—wait for it—Covid. I wish I had tried harder to reschedule.

I regret not trying, before now, to get this someone to live near me on my magical island in the Salish Sea. (I tried, but not hard enough).

I regret the times I was too busy to have our weekly call. I let these things get in the way: the dishes and the groceries and the laundry and the yard work and the never-ending To Do list at the office. Travel, writing (of course), music, and gathering with friends. “I’ll call tomorrow,” I said, and meant it, but tomorrow came and then more tomorrows and suddenly two weeks had gone by.

Moving to another well-known maxim:
All we have is now.
And so I plan for our nows,
scheme and dream to make the most of the time we have together.

But that doesn’t fix the regret.

What does any of this have to do with Two Over Easy All Day Long? (Since this is ostensibly my author newsletter)?

Any writer will tell you even the most fantastical characters take a page from the book (pun intended) of life. I am not new to regret, and so my characters experience it as well. Nancy regrets her ongoing intimacy with the steaming pile of excrement that is Roj. Leesa regrets never leaving the town where she was born. Walt regrets that, having escaped from one unbearable life he is now mired in another (sometimes unbearable) life. It’s possible even Roj regrets his sins.

And Giles/Tony regrets the moment he signed off on a defective toy. Oh how he regrets that moment.

Any writer will also tell you their characters’ stories are sometimes a stand-in for processing the stuff*** the universe throws at us.

***Using a nicer word than the one that comes to mind. Walt wouldn’t hesitate to let the profanity fly, but outside my writing I’m a bit more circumspect.

So what do my characters tell me?

The only way through is forward.

I am no time-traveler. (Where, oh where, is my Tardis?)

I can’t undo my past failures, screw-ups,  and pettiness.

“Bad mistakes, I’ve made a few.”

(If you weren’t an adolescent in the late ‘70s or early ‘80s, you might not recognize the quote—so for my younger readers, here’s your bit of deep, meaningful history: the quote is from the lyrics of We are the Champions, by Queen.)

Of course I don’t regret this glorious moment with my son!
But pigtails on mom, blonde dye on son -
I think my son would join me in characterizing these
fashion decisions as . . . less than desirable.

To sum up, Inigo-Montoya-style: I can’t undo my past, can’t fix the acts and omissions I so deeply regret.

I can only try to do better in this
second/moment/hour/day/week/month/year,
can only try to make time for this someone,
to be present in ways I haven’t before.

Wish me luck in moving forward, past the regret, into a better now.

I’m going to need it. (Luck, that is.)

Opening quotes from BrainyQuote.com – if they’re wrong, let ‘em know!

Other News

Because of the aforementioned personal situation, planned events are subject to cancellation or rescheduling, but as of this writing, scheduled events for Two Over Easy All Day Long:

• Thursday, July 25, 2024 at 6:30 pm, join me for a reading and Meet the Author event at Roundabout Books in Bend, Oregon. Learn more here:
  (providing the full link as well, since the link has changed with the bookstore’s updated website: https://live-rndaboutbk1714843360.pantheonsite.io/event/2024-07-25/two-over-easy-all-day-long-shari-lane)

• Interview with HC Media’s Write Now (Haverhill, MA), hosted by former two-term Poet Laureate of North Andover Gayle Heney. Watch the News and Events section of the home page of this website for the date the interview will air, and check out earlier shows here: http://haverhillcommunitytv.org/category/community/series/writenow
  

Shy People and Powdermilk Biscuits

Full quote from A Prairie Home Companion:
“Powdermilk Biscuits
—they give a shy person the strength
to get up and do what needs to be done.”

I love reading, I love writing, and I love talking with good friends about books—my own, and others’ books. Unreservedly, forever and ever amen.

My feelings about public speaking are more mixed.

So when I am asked to talk about Two Over Easy All Day Long, I am (a) thrilled, (b) terrified, (c) proud, and (d) looking for the nearest exit.

(On that topic, if you get a chance, check out this speech by Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, and other marvelous books.  A teaser: “I’m here because my agent said it would be good for my career.  . . . It will be fun, she said. So I told her that I write books. I spend eight hours every day locked inside a room with people I have made up. If I was comfortable talking to real people I would have a real job.”)

Because of the aforementioned shyness, it is with more than a little trepidation that I share my interview with Literary Titan.

Image by Marek Piwnicki @marekpiwnicki

In case you don’t feel like clicking on the link, here’s a mash-up: I refer to my background as an attorney, call into question my own sanity, throw in a little woowoo, celebrate the power of community, and make reference to my/our human penchant for making the same damn mistakes over and over and over, balanced against the possibility, always, of rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

Time for some powdermilk biscuits. While answering the questions was fun, seeing my answers in print, on the organization’s published website, made me the tiniest bit nauseous. Just a smidge.

But posting the interview—like Fredrik Backman’s speaking gig—is “good for my [writing] career,” or at least that’s the prevailing wisdom. So there, now I’ve done it. If you have any questions, contact my PR agency. (Hah, that was a little joke. It’s just me and my oh-so-wonderful publisher, no vast team of PR agents. If you have a question or comment, you can post it in the Comments section below, or email me at sharilaneauthor@gmail.com)  

And though I remain deeply uncomfortable blowing my own horn (see previous statements), I am also proud to share that Two Over Easy won Literary Titan’s Book Award this month.

Courtney Maum’s helpful (and funny!) book, Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer's Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book, points out it can get tiresome—for authors and for their readers—to always and only talk about their own book, and suggests reviewing others’ books. I’ve been doing that for years (because, as I said, I love reading and talking about books). But Maum goes on to note that most people have already heard about bestsellers, and suggests boosting the underdogs, so there will be lots of that (in addition to reviews of well-known books) in this and future newsletters.

Here's the first installment.

At the end of last year, friend and fellow author Gini Chin came out with her debut novel, The Beautiful Abyss. It’s got: a loveless (and sexless) marriage, an escape to Greece, a shape-shifter, passion, danger, and a criminal caper! A sampling of reader reviews: “A fast-paced thrilling read that will leave you wanting more,” “I didn't want it to end and when it did, I found myself wishing there was more. Night after night I found myself wondering what the main character might be up to now. Possibly a sequel?” “It’s the kind of story that’s hard to put down.” So do yourself a favor and check it out! It’s available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

Last but not least, if you’d like to support Gini and any other writer you know, the very best thing you can do (after buying the book) is easy and takes very little time: talk about the book. Talk about it on social media, ask your library if they’d consider carrying it, order it from your local bookstore (and ask if they’d be willing to order another copy to have on their shelves), post a review on Amazon, and/or GoodReads, suggest it to your book group . . . . You get the idea. In this information-overload environment, it’s not so much about winning awards or being backed by a big publishing house, it is about word of mouth.

If you’ve read a book and genuinely liked it, spread the word!

Ode to Curmudgeons

Portrait of Walt Whitman
On the cover of The Illustrated American, April 19, 1890

Why do we love curmudgeons so?

Cantankerous characters are sprinkled liberally throughout literature. Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Ove in A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books 2015), Ernest in Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson (Random House 2011).

 . . . the two old Muppets who sit in the balcony and heckle everyone . . .

. . . the grieving old man in the movie Up . . .

 . . . Winston Churchill. Who can forget this famous exchange?

Bessie Braddock MP: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more
you are disgustingly drunk.”

Churchill: “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.”

 As an aside, there is much to dislike about this, including, of course, the fact that the ultimate diss on a woman is (assumed to be) insulting her looks. That certainly didn’t start with Churchill and, alas, continues still.

The thing is, curmudgeonly quips and sarcasm can be wickedly amusing to hear or see or read about.

Living with them? Not so much.

I have a theory about curmudgeons. I think we admire them, in literature and in real life, because they say what we polite and sensitive folks are too . . . polite and sensitive to say.

When a neighbor invites herself in for coffee and all you want is to be left alone in your smelly sweatpants so you can finish off the package of Lorna Doone’s, the curmudgeon will shut the door, irritably, on the neighbor, with or without a growled, “I’m busy.”

But you will say Oh of course, come in, let me make another pot of coffee, I’m not doing anything right now.

Because you are a kind person who really doesn’t want to hurt your neighbor’s feelings.

An extremely unscientific poll reveals that the surly cook is most readers’ favorite Two Over Easy All Day Long character. Walt, who grows shallots in his garden and sneaks them into the diner, and writes poetry on the side. Walt, who is almost uniformly rude and irritable and announces to all and sundry: “I’m Walt and I don’t like chitchat.”

So why do readers like him? Is it because he dispenses with social niceties when talking to Tony, the wealthy company president who’s had enough social niceties to last several lifetimes but a dearth of opportunities to practice actually being nice?

Possibly.

I think another reason may be the idea, possibly mythical, that every curmudgeonly exterior hides a soft heart, the fuzzy underbelly of the porcupine.

Like many writers, I don’t so much create characters as transcribe them onto the page. They saunter or creep or march into my consciousness and instruct me, imperiously, “Take this down, scribe,” or whisper plaintively, hopefully, “Would you, perhaps, be willing to tell my tale?”

Walt’s spirit was complex from the outset, and I have tried to be faithful to that. He is kind to Nareen, probably recognizing her as a kindred spirit, and to Nancy, who is already carrying the weight of the world in her “VW Bug of hearts.” So it’s not so much that he reveals a hidden softness as that he is a complicated man, sometimes practically heroic in his generosity of spirit, other times only and exactly what Nancy calls him: a cranky old fart.

Maybe we love curmudgeons because they give us grace for the moments we cannot muster the strength to be kind. And because, like you and me and everyone else I know, they are occasionally inspired by their better angels, but mostly they’re just muddling through.

A Good Book

On Reading and Writing and Pigs in Heaven

I’d like to talk to you about
Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven.

Yes, this is my brand new blog/newsletter on my brand new website launched to support my brand new book, Two Over Easy All Day Long.

But I’ll have plenty of time to talk about that in the coming months, maybe even (if I’m lucky) in the coming years.

I hope so.

For now, I just want to rave about one of my all-time favorite books, by one of my all-time favorite authors.

The quotes below, from Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, encapsulate beautifully what is possible in a good book.

___________________________________________

Background: Annawake Fourkiller, a newly-minted lawyer, is trying to explain to her boss, Franklin, why she believes the Cherokee child Turtle should be returned to her people, even though Turtle’s white adoptive mother is the only family Turtle knows. Annawake describes how important a sense of belonging is.

“People thought my life was so bleak . . . But I dreamed about the water . . . . All those perch down there you could catch, any time, you know? A world of free breakfast to help get you into another day. I’ve never been without that, have you?”

“No,” he admits. Whether or not he knew it, he was always Cherokee. The fish were down there, for him as much as for Annawake.

“Who’s going to tell that little girl who she is?”

. . . Franklin wears a Seiko watch and looks as Cherokee as Will Rogers or Elvis Presley . . . yet he knows he isn’t white because he can’t think of a single generalization about white people that he knows to be true. He can think of half a dozen about Cherokees.

Later, Annawake tackles Turtle’s adoptive mother, Taylor, who is deeply upset and offended that anyone would try to take her child away.

“There’s a law that gives Tribes the final say over custody of our own children. It’s called the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed it in 1978 because so many Indian kids were being separated from their families and put into non-Indian homes.”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with me.” [Taylor says]

“It’s nothing against you personally, but the law is crucial. What we’ve been through is wholesale removal.”

“Well, that’s the past.”

“This is not General Custer. I’m talking about as recently as the seventies, when you and I were in high school. A third of all our kids were still being taken from their families and adopted into white homes. One out of three.”

. . . “My home doesn’t have anything to do with your tragedy.”

Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins 1993)

___________________________________________

In a few short paragraphs, Kingsolver tackles identity, loss, and the desire for absolution from our ancestors’ sins. Her characters are morally and ethically imperfect, not fully “good” but—like Giles/Tony—“not bad,” and evolving into something better.

(See? I did get in a reference to Two Over Easy All Day Long after all.)

Kingsolver’s stories are full of grace, even when tackling the darkness we humans sometimes fling at each other. And humor, too, which is nothing short of miraculous; to look into the void and find, in addition to hatred and bias and hurt, an infinite well of laughter.

What does that have to do with me?

I’m a writer because I love to read, because ever since I was a child books have touched me, moved me, and, sometimes, changed my mind. I felt as if the authors were speaking directly to me, as if the characters were friends taking me along on their journey, whispering their revelations to me. I knew from the first time I opened a book and the symbols resolved themselves into words that this, this is what I wanted to do—speak through stories. Then and now, it often feels as though stories are my only meaningful form of communication. I often feel a Homer Simpson-ish ‘Doh! over every word I actually speak aloud, certain I’ve said the wrong thing, or failed to say the right thing.

Image by Elena Mozhvilo @miracleday

But when I write, I can test and weigh and sit with the words first, make sure that my words are honest, and sincere, and as often as possible, kind.

When I write, I can paint a verbal picture of how I see the world, and more importantly . . . how I imagine it could be.

The title of this, my inaugural newsletter, is A Good Book. I am, of course, hoping something I’ve written or something I write some day in the future will merit the label: A Good Book.

In the meantime, in the newsletters that follow, I’ll often share what I’m reading, in that elusive search for “A Good Book.”

Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven feels like a great place to start the conversation.

Got a good book to share? Thoughts on Pigs in Heaven?
Drop me a line here, in the Comments,
or send me an email.