How To Save Your Own Life

One of my favorite books is Diary of A Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman. I read it when I was twenty, purchasing a hardback copy from a used bookstore for a dollar. Actually, my dad bought it for me, along with a copy of Fear of Flying, which he, being a pilot, kind of assumed was about flying. I saw her in an interview, he said, of Erica Jong. Pretty girl. She really is afraid of planes. I loved Fear of Flying, of course, but what I really related to was Diary. The narrator is a character that described my emotional state exactly -- that ever-present anxiety that I was living with at that time, the way that the world turns on you. She blamed it on turning thirty-six, but I was only twenty and the world she described, minus New York City, was my world. I suppose this makes all those Reading Is Fundamental campaigns so important.

Sue K. wrote lots of books, most of them sad and nerve-wracked, but she always presented a happy face to the world except on a few book jacket photos where she looks fierce, but the kind of fierce that is forced, the look of someone who is really trying to get through it. She killed herself by jumping off a house -- I can't imagine a worse way to commit suicide, but it does have its metaphorical value, I suppose. I kept reading lots of books about women trapped in loveless marriages, having breakdowns, lonely, and broken. This was my world, you see, no matter how different the outward circumstances might be. On my honeymoon so many years ago, I bought Marge Piercy's Small Changes, a novel about how a woman makes a terrible mistake getting married and how she frees herself. Now there was a book I needed to learn to write.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"You're all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm." Woody Allen in response -- "In France, I could run on that slogan."

Cocktail Hour

Drinking movie suggestion: Deconstructing Harry

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Saturday!

44 days until The Sopranos airs!