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This Is the Story of You, my monster storm Jersey Shore story, launches tomorrow. Out into the world.

Whoosh. There you go.

But in the days leading up to now, I've been spending time with the stories of others. For who among us will ever believe that our own work is the work? Who should believe that? Who does not think that, at the end of it all, the best thing about being a writer is finding the excuse to curl up with someone else's fine tale—the story another loved, hoped for and through, and found a way to launch?

Today I want to celebrate:

Cordelia Jensen's Skyscraping, a novel in verse to which I have previously alluded on this blog. Before I met Cordelia a few weeks ago in New York (odd to be meeting her there, for she lives not far from me here), I knew that she was my kind of writer—soulful, attuned to language, serious about producing lasting work. Skyscraping tells the story of Mira, who learns the secret of her parents' marriage during her senior year in high school and needs to find a way to forgive her father before he is gone from her world. Some novels in verse are just novels written with shorter lines and white space. This is a novel in actual verse, written by an actual poet, who has pondered this story for years. This is a novel whose narrator understands time and stars, the cosmos and the particulate, but is never safe (no one is) from hurt. Mira is speaking here about her mother, who has been absent for much of Mira's life:

I used to imagine she saw us as a train
she could ride at will,
instead of a station,
fixed, every day.

I wonder now if maybe
a family is neither of those things
but something stable,
yet always changing,
because the people inside it are.
 

Peter Gardos's Fever at Dawn, sent to me by Lauren Wein, an editor you know I love. It's a story based on the real-life tale of the author's parents—Hungarians who, in 1945, find themselves in Swedish hospitals miles apart. They are not well. They have been seared by death camps, racism, horror. They allow the letters they write to one another become their most extravagant form of hope. Miklos sends a blurry photograph to Lili, so that she cannot see his metal teeth. Lili stashes the political book Miklos has sent—unread. They know nothing about each other, actually, until, increasingly, they are nothing without each other. They are seducing each other, even as Gardos, in a book that seems (but isn't) utterly simple, seduces us:

That evening the men sat out in the courtyard with the radio on the long wooden table. The light bulb swung eerily in the wind. The men usually spent half an hour before bed in the open air. By now they had been playing the radio for six hours without a break. They had put on sweaters and coats and their pyjamas (stet) and wrapped blankets around themselves. They sat right up close to the radio. The green tuning light winked like the eye of an elf.

Finally, Cynthia Kadohata's National Book Award winning The Thing About Luck, which wrapped me around its many fingers this weekend. Let's just say this: Anyone who thinks writing for teens is easy should spend some time in the company of this book, which has everything to teach about mosquitoes, wheat harvesting, combines, and dinners on the road—all within the frame of one of the most likable narrators yet written, a young girl named Summer, who discovers, over the course of many exotic bread-basket weeks (yes, I know what I just wrote), that luck is made, not found:

I don't know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine. That's just the way I see things. In a short time, the combine takes something humans can't use and then turns it into something that can feed us.

Before I go, I extend Happy Book Launch greetings to Robin Black, whose collection of essays, Crash Course, debuts tomorrow in grand style. Robin will be taking the stage with grammar queen Mary Norris, at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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Think of the artist at work—the fits and starts, the long, unhappy spells, the sudden epiphanies that shrink pitiably with the light of the next day, the not knowing, the not ever actually knowing, the blind and buoying faith, the fissures of faith.

Think of a partnership of many years—the slow or sudden love, the deep and necessary trust, the private needs that are not spoken, the small infractions that are, perhaps, lies and isn't any lie a betrayal, and doesn't every betrayal hover afterward, shift the scene and change the light? Doesn't every betrayal threaten a cascade of betrayals? Where will they come from? Will we be ready?

Think of friendship—the tricky, sticky slopes, the little envies, the perfect hours, the grave misjudgments, the accusations, the cowering aftermaths, the ones left wounded on the path. Think of how easy friendship seems, and how utterly fraught, and how nearly impossible to heal when it shatters.

Think of the spooling away of memories—of a mind lost to a disease, of a man and his memories remade, of conversations that have little footing in reality, even though, of course, they are reality, they are what is happening right then. The Alzheimer's father talks. The daughter listens. Nothing is irrefutable, except for how it feels in present time.

In her penetrating and perfectly calibrated first novel, Life Drawing, Robin Black plumbs the depths of art, love, friendship, and memory and surfaces with a book of transcendent clarity. Life Drawing is a book about consequences—the consequences of an affair, the consequences of instinctive but perhaps not well-placed trust, the consequences of honesty, and anger.

Gus, the artist, and Owen, her writer husband, have retreated to a quiet country home in a land of spectral greens; the pond before them is perfectly round. The two are at work on their respective canvases. They abide by conversational rules laid down to protect each other from the things that must not be said or discussed in the aftermath of the affair Gus had several years before. They are interrupted by a neighbor who has escaped a violent husband and whose daughter, Nina, will show up before too long. Gus has a father with Alzheimer's, whom she frequently visits. She has a student, a young woman, with whom she has formed a meaningful connection.

The book is taut, smart, a closed and inexorable world, a stunning page turner. We know from the outset that Owen is dead, and so we want to know why Owen is dead, but even more compelling, at least to this reader, are the questions: Does anyone survive the wounds they have inflicted? Is love bigger than the past?

We turn the pages because we trust Black to know. Because we believe that she has something to say—inside the novel but also outside of it—about how we live our lives. Black is an intensely intelligent writer—nothing superfluous here, every thread that rises needled back down to the open-weave cloth, every color in the tapestry checked for what it tells us about lived entanglements. Her book, deeply emotional and resonantly rendered, is, remarkably, complete. No stone unturned.

We who write, we who create, we who live—we know how elusive, how difficult, how nearly unattainable completion is. A completed conversation. A completed work of art. A completed story, told.

Life Drawing is complete.

I loved it as much as I loved Black's collection of short stories, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, which I read while I was in Berlin several years ago and reviewed here.

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Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about labels. Applied to people. Applied to literature.

Still, those of us who write young adult fiction must, at times, face those who suggest that it is a lesser form, not nearly as important as the work written expressly for adults—a problem I discussed in a story for Publishing Perspectives titled, "Removing the YA Label: A Proposal, A Fantasy."

(Those of us who write quote-unquote literary contemporary YA fiction must also endure the suggestion that John Green has singlehandedly ushered in this genre's golden era, but that's a topic for another conversation, and we must be careful not to blame John Green for what is written about him.)

The problem with the YA-is-lesser assessment is that the YA writers I respect aren't writing down, aren't writing in haste, aren't writing with any less literary ambition than those who write novels for adults. We're just writing stories that happen to have younger protagonists at their heart; often we're writing "whole family" tales. Always, if we're serious about this stuff, if we're writing not toward known trends but toward felt story, we're writing as best as we can.

And so I will admit to feeling equal measures of joy and peace at finding Going Over on the Main Line Today list of 10 great beach reads by local authors. Not 10 YA books. Just ten books by authors ranging from Robin Black and Jennifer Weiner to Kelly Corrigan and Ken Kalfus. Ten books curated by Cathy Feibach of Main Point Books, who has made it her business, in this, the first year of her store's existence, to get to know who is writing what and to evaluate each book on its own terms.

I am honored. And I am looking forward to next Saturday, when I will drive down Lancaster Avenue and stop in Bryn Mawr and spend an hour signing both Going Over and Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir in Cathy's store. My signing caps a full day of signings, the details for which are here. And when I'm not signing, you can be sure that I'll be buying the books I want, seeing straight past their labels.

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I read four books while I was away (beyond all that I read about Berlin). I reported on the first—If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black's crisp and smart debut short story collection—here. I'll be reporting on the others (The Paris Wife (hmmmmm) and The Coffins of Little Hope (a marvel!)) in days to come.

But this very early morning, I'm reflecting on the scouring brilliance of Paula Fox's Desperate Characters. It's a book I'd always meant to read, an author whose story I have followed.  That doesn't mean that I was prepared for the hard, bright smack of Fox's sentences, the relentless disintegration of a domestic arrangement that may or may not hold. We have Jonathan Franzen to thank for helping to bring Desperate Characters back into print and wide circulation. We have, in the Norton edition, his essay that suggests that the book is, "on a first reading," "a novel of suspense."

As the novel opens, Sophie Brentwood is bitten by a stray cat; Sophie's hand swells. Sophie should have the hand checked, but she is afraid.  She can imagine dire consequences—rabies, even death—but other underlying fears persist and complicate.  Three days will go by, and the wound will keep molting, oozing, disfiguring, haunting, and this is the running tension—this cat bite, this not knowing, this unwillingness to find out, this false hope that comforts lie elsewhere (in drink, in friendship, in secrets, in lashing out).  Into this strange, unsettling frame Fox inserts the fractures of a marriage in naked near stasis. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are childless.  Otto is abandoning a business partnership with a long-time friend, Charlie—bating him, hating him, feeling abandoned and abused by him. Brooklyn, finally, is scathing and scabrous and ill-equipped, in these late 1960s, to wrap this couple in a numbing sheen.

Sophie and Otto know too much. They see too much. They both despise excessively and love forlornly.  Is this all that marriage is? All it offers? Is there refuge among the refuse? In whose arms can one trustingly take shelter? Desperate Characters is a brutal book, a lacerating book, and if that makes it a hard book to read, it also makes it an impossible book to put down. I, for one, read the bulk of it while being jostled about during a long wait at the Berlin airport.

There are easy books, and there are hard books, and I will be honest: I prefer the latter.  I want to be tested.  I want to think.  I want to study a book and ask, in awe, How in the world was this made?  Desperate Characters has me asking.

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