New Song: “New Girl”

New girl

Andrew and I have a new song. It’s called “New Girl.” I came up with what turned out to be the bridge a couple of months ago, from an idea in the novel I’m working on. The bridge is: “Baby, leave me here with my last cigarette. You don’t want to be the only vice I’ve got left.” I liked the idea of a person or a relationship being a vice, and I like the idea of a sober addict transferring his addictive tendencies to a person, and how it might feel to be that person. This song became a warning from one of the characters in my novel to another. She ignores it, of course. 

Continue reading →

I Am Obsessed With This 1992 Axl Rose Interview

Axl

I’m not sure why I didn’t realize sooner that I should write a novel about musicians, because now my research is watching rockumentaries and reading back issues of Rolling Stone. My fingers are crossed that I’ll get Life, Keith Richards’s memoir, for Christmas, and I’m eagerly anticipating Girl in a Band, Kim Gordon’s memoir, which is due out in February. I could not love that title any more. I can now admit that Sonic Youth was a bit noisy for me even when I was seventeen, but I still think Kim Gordon is devastatingly cool. 

You know who I never, ever thought was cool? Axl Rose. By the time I was really into music, Nirvana had arrived and Guns n’ Roses seemed excessive and shallow. But I can’t get this 1992 Axl Rose interview from Rolling Stone out of my head.

Continue reading →

We Made a Song

Photo 3

Seventeen years after Andrew first walked into my dorm room bearing a few CDs he thought I might love, we wrote and recorded a song together. 

It’s here. I would love it if you listened to it. He built a thing himself so it could play music nicely, so it’s just easier if you do it there, though I know all of this back and forth is a lot to ask. 

Okay. You’re back. I hope you liked it. The process for writing this song was incredibly roundabout. We both love music and I sing (mostly around the house these days) and he plays like every instrument and is also really into digital music recording. So this seems like something we should have already done, but it’s been a struggle.

Continue reading →

I Started Writing a New Novel

012712 Barn 219

I’m just going to blurt it out: I’m working on a new novel. I have 58 pages. It’s so, so new. A lot of mystique surrounds this process. And a lot of superstition. Some authors (published ones, with books!) won’t tell anyone what their work-in-progress is about. They don’t let anyone see any of it until it’s done. They fear breaking the spell, or jinxing, it seems, rather than having to face the task of explaining what one’s novel is about. Having to explain what one’s novel is about is almost embarrassing enough to make one stop writing the novel.  

Here. I will show you by trying to describe my novel right now. It’s about musicians. See, this girl’s dad is a producer who owns a studio in Vermont. It’s in a renovated barn on many, many acres of beautiful land, and a river runs through it. Like Trey from Phish. Only he is NOT LIKE TREY FROM PHISH AT ALL. I don’t know why I even brought up Trey. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I was never into Phish. That was my husband. I mean, I never even went to one single Phish show, and I was in college in their heyday, so that was a very deliberate choice. Nothing against Trey. It just wasn’t my thing. I just happened to be googling for photos of barn studios in Vermont so I could accurately describe one, and there was Trey’s. It’s really gorgeous. Anyway, he sold it. Trey no longer has a barn studio, so let’s stop talking about it.  

Continue reading →

It’s Official: I’m a Mommy Blogger

I’m delighted to say that Mommyish has published a personal essay of mine, about how my past as a scornful teenage lifeguard caught up to me at the town pond this summer. My scorn of mommy things (and therefore of myself) lingers, and can still be experienced in things like the title of this post, but hey, I’m working on it. The scorn is slowly but surely morphing into ambivalence.

The essay is called I Used to Judge the Boring Mom at the Pool. Now I Am One. 

Continue reading →

Brutality

For the past two years, I’ve had this tacked up next to my writing desk. 

Photo 2 5

I discovered Tessa Hadley when I read her short story, “An Abduction,” in The New Yorker (I guess this makes me a late adopter). She had me from the first line: “Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed.” 

Continue reading →

Wants

Paley

When I can’t remember what a story is, I return to “Wants,” by Grace Paley. A woman returns two books to the library eighteen years late, pays her fine, checks out the same books because it’s been so long since she’s read them, and then runs into her ex-husband. “Hello, my life,” she says to him. The story is three pages long, and Paley makes it contain the entirety of her narrator’s life. 

Continue reading →