07/14/2010 11:25 PM Laura Ingalls Wilder, Again There’s an odd pleasure to be had from reading other people’s letters, particularly historical correspondence that captures both a character and an era. I relearned this today over at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library over in West Branch, Iowa, where I spent several hours reading years of letters between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Yes, that Laura Ingalls Wilder. The author of the Little House on the Prairie books. Although calling her “the” author takes some of the credit away from Rose, who’s widely believed to have been her mother’s ghostwriter and, based on the correspondence I read today, years earlier also functioned as her mother’s editor and writing coach. That’s what brought me to the library. Sort of. Initially I became interested last summer at the Hoover Days festival, when a representative from the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum in Burr Oak, Iowa, (one of about five such places sprinkled throughout the Midwest, one in each place she ever lived) told me her daughter Rose’s papers were archived at the Hoover Library and that they included the ur-manuscript of all the Little House books, which Rose had divvied up and shaped into the series. Rose had been a biographer and friend of the former president; that’s why her papers are there. All year, I’ve been planning to go the library to compare the original text against the final versions, mostly for my own edification as a nonfiction writer, editor and teacher. And then over the past few months, I’ve found other reasons for wanting to go, too. I’ve been considering doing some ghostwriting work—of which there’s a lot in L.A. right now, what with so many celebrity memoirs getting snapped up by publishers looking for big sales figures—and so am interested in how the Laura/Rose mother-daughter team collaborated on Laura’s life stories. Also, I’ve been having a really tough time lately selling Eden on the merits of reading. Her reading level is appropriate for her grade, even a little above, but she just isn’t interested in chapter books at all. I’m on a campaign this summer to try to get her involved in stories, preferably in a series for children, and so I thought of starting with the Little House books, which I devoured when I was about her age. Seriously. I thought I was the reincarnation of Laura and even took to wearing a bonnet around the house. It didn’t hurt that I looked like Melissa Gilbert in the TV series (or so everyone used to say). At some point I wrote a letter to Rose, unaware that she’d already died, and received a typed letter in return that, naturally, I thought had been written especially for me even as my mother tried to explain what “form letter” meant. So, back to the library. I showed up around 1:30 p.m. with two hours to spend, thinking I’d ask just to see the manuscript that developed into Little House in the Big Woods, which Eden and I are about to finish together, and to come back another day to look at the correspondence between Laura and Rose. But the librarian, Matt, convinced me to look at the whole collection which, I soon discovered, will take me about, oh, four years to read in full. He wheeled out six fat legal envelopes full of files—about four linear feet of material—most of it Xeroxed from the originals, and then ran back to retrieve the original manuscript of The First Four Years, the last book in her series. It’s kept wrapped in a complicated folder and was handwritten on grocery store writing tablets. He had to put on a pair of white gloves to handle it. I simultaneously thought, What the hell? and felt like crying from the sheer awe of it. Sort of how I once felt upon seeing handwritten royal decrees from the Middle Ages on display in the British Museum reading room, and a letter penned by Virginia Woolf in a manuscript museum. For the next two hours I became completely absorbed in letters Laura wrote to her husband back in Missouri(Almanzo; remember the hunk who played him in the TV series?) when she went to visit Rose in San Francisco in 1915, took the train across the country, and attended the Pacific International Exposition. as well as a few exchanges in which Rose encouraged Laura to write magazine articles about farm life and heavily edited her first attempt at publication, securing her a $150 fee from Country Gentlemen for a piece about kitchen renovation. (I kid you not.) But my favorite paragraph comes from a letter Rose wrote to her mother pre-1915. Here it is, verbatim: “I bet the letter you wrote for grandma and Mary about your getting started to writing could be put verbatim into that “story of my life” thing. If I were you I’d have them save it and send it back, and I’d look at it with that viewpoint and see if I’m not right. I bet it’s better than you could do trying to write it for the story.” “That ‘story of my life’ thing”--is that not the understatement of the day? A dozen books and millions of dollars in royalties later: yes. It was definitely quite the thing. Posted by Hope Edelman 07/13/2010 09:44 AM The Blue Bicycle I’ve been in Iowa for a solid week now, time enough for quite a few things to happen. I could write about the amount of rain that’s come down on us in the past eight days; or how the Iowa River is at grass level in City Park and threatening to flood; or about how happy I am to be a pedestrian again for much of the day; or about the three-day road trip to Missouri that Eden and I just took to visit Maya at camp. But what I really want to write about is my new sky-blue bicycle. Eden and I found at a garage sale for $25 the day we arrived, and it’s precisely the bicycle I was looking for. Vintage, retro, recycled, the kind of bicycle that makes me happy just to look at but won’t send me into paroxysm of panic and guilt if it’s stolen. When I brought it to a bike shop in town that specializes in vintage items, they fixed the rear spokes and gave me a wider set of handlebars for a $29.41 bill, labor included. This is the bargain of the decade, folks. All these years that I lived in Iowa City and have been coming back for summers, I’ve never biked around town. As a graduate student I had an early mountain bike (circa about 1987) and would sometimes go for long trips out in the country, riding past cornfields for hours. But to get to class or just around town? No. It’s kind of mystifying in retrospect, actually. Why didn’t I ever consider biking a valid form of transportation? Only now, twenty years later, am I discovering that a whole new world opens up to you when you cruise along at 12 mph. For one thing, you make fast friends with the people at bike repair shops. When I brought the bike in on Tuesday to drop it off for repairs, the woman over at 30th Century Bikes—super short hair, piercings, tank top, tattoos, very friendly, the epitome of hip—confirmed my suspicion that this blue cruiser is, actually, just a little too small for a 5’8” person like me. But we agreed it was worth trying to make it work. “It’s exactly the bicycle I was looking for,” I told her. “And how often in life do you find exactly what you want?” She nodded. Possibly considered I might be pathetic for saying such a thing, but generally looked like she agreed. Then we debated the merits of replacing the tires this year or next. We decided next. She showed me how to date a bicycle by looking for an inscription on the wheel hub. Mine said 1950 but she explained that sometimes the rest of the bicycle is a few years newer than its wheel hub. The bike says Montgomery Ward on the frame (how fabulous is that?) and we discussed that it might have come from the catalog. Whee—I was learning a lot. On the way back home (walking, this time) I stopped in Uptown Bill's Coffee Bar on Gilbert St. How is it possible that I’ve been coming to Iowa City since 1989 and never knew about this place? It’s like stepping into a time capsule, including the three tough guys reading the day’s paper at the square linoleum tables. The only tipoff that it’s 2010 is the espresso machine behind the counter. I wandered into the used bookstore in the back—only in Iowa City would you find a random used bookstore in the back of a vintage coffeeshop—and B. came back to see if I needed any help. I noticed the NY tattoo on his forearm, and asked if he was a Yankees fan. Turns out he’s not, but he was a New York City homicide cop for 27 years before moving to Iowa. There’s bound to be a story there, but he didn’t want to tell all of it and it wasn’t my place to ask for the details. Sometimes being a writer means knowing which questions to ask, and sometimes it means knowing when to back off. So we talked about a dozen other things for the next half hour and then on a back shelf I found a copy of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which I’d been looking for since May. This pleased me to no end, and I bought it and promised B. I’d come back later in the week. The bicycle was ready on Thursday, so after I dropped Eden off at camp I walked over to pick it up. When I walked by Uptown Bill’s B. was outside sweeping the sidewalk, so I stopped to tell him this reminded me of all the doormen in New York after a big snow, and then we talked about New York for another 20 minutes before I remembered that I was expected at the bike shop. So in the interest of time I took a shortcut the back way, through an empty alley and parking lot. As I was walking south through the parking lot toward the shop, a man in an electric wheelchair came cruising north along the sidewalk on my left. Iowa City is something of a mecca for the physically and mentally disabled: it’s mostly flat, very accessible, and has a noticeably high number of group homes around town. You routinely see groups of disabled teens walking through downtown or the indoor malls with aides accompanying them. This particular man appeared to have some kind of palsy and he was alone. It was just the two of us back there. I watched him steer his wheelchair toward a break in the curb that sloped toward the parking lot…and from my angle I could see the opening was too narrow for his chair to fit through. That’s when I started running in his direction. What happened next happened fast. He turned the chair around backwards to back down the slope, but his left wheels caught on the curb, and instead of making a smooth transition down the slope the chair tipped wildly in my direction, as if it was going to dump him onto the asphalt. I stuck my hands out to catch him, but I was still too far away and running fast. Yet somehow, somehow, the chair righted itself. I swear to god, it felt as if my hands somehow pushed him back upright, even though I was still a good fifteen feet away when it happened. “That was close,” I told him, when I finally made it to his chair. “That was close,” he repeated. His speech was garbled, but mostly intelligible.“Thank you for that.” “No problem,” I said. “Have a nice day!” he shouted, as he zipped away north. I stood there for a moment, struck by the random encounter. Was it really random? A butterfly flaps its wings in China and…well, we all know that story by now. But here’s another one: a homicide cop in New York quits his job and a woman finds the book she’s been searching for for months. Or a woman buys the perfect $25 sky-blue bicycle in Iowa City, and by some strange twist of fate a man in a wheelchair therefore won’t tumble out onto the pavement alone and have to lie there without help. I really think we’re all connected somehow, in an intricate matrix of interdependent relationships. And I have the feeling this blue bicycle is going to be the catalyst for some very unusual and interesting times. I just do. Posted by Hope Edelman 06/17/2010 06:15 PM June 17, 2010 Today is my 46th birthday. (As well as the birthday of Barry Manilow, M.C. Escher, Igor Stravinsky, my friend Nicolle's mother and, if rumor is correct, Jesus.) I post this not so I can solicit birthday wishes --though those are always nice to receive-- but because in the past few years, birthdays have become an odd and reflective experience for me. Definitely of the love/hate variety. Like any woman approaching a (ahem) certain age, I’m ambivalent about marking the passage of time. And yet at the same time, a big part of me never expected to live this long. My mother was 42 when she died, and until I turned 43, I could never imagine myself outliving her. Every year, every month, every day since 42 has been a gift. How have I passed today? Well, by this point a birthday on a weekday is just another work day, and that’s pretty much what this has been. Took Maya to the dentist this morning, stopped at the mall for lunch and to buy a Father’s Day gift for Uzi, picked up Eden from the bus stop, dropped both kids at Uzi’s office, and hoofed it over to Culver City for the faculty meeting that kicks off the ten-day Antioch MFA residency. I felt completely dorky telling anyone it was my birthday, so I didn’t mention it. Buy my two kids think that having to work on one’s birthday is an absolute crime against humanity, and they’re cooking up something special for tonight. I know this because when I called home to say I was on my way, there was an unnaturally joyous, “Wow! Mom! Great!” and then a request to meet them at Topanga State Beach at exactly 6:40 p.m. instead. It was only 5:15 when I called, so I’ve stopped in Venice at what used to be the Novel Café (and now looks the same but has an entirely different name) for a coffee and macaroon to pass the time. I got the smart idea to put some cinnamon in my coffee but the shaker released a whole lot of cinnamon all at once, so now I’m drinking a cup of cinnamon with coffee. It’s not bad, actually. Might even become an annual birthday drink, who knows? I’m sitting at a round tiled table right in the window like a writer on display. Just outside the window two beach dudes are sitting on wicker chairs talking to everyone who passes by. One of them is wearing a pirate’s hat. The other looks like Thomas Hayden Guest with dreadlocks. I’m pretty sure it isn’t Thomas Hayden Guest with dreadlocks. He also has some pretty gnarly tattoos up both arms that look like a cross between Chinese symbols and death-metal threats. People are biking past, walking home from work, driving by with Lakers flags stuck to the window frames of their cars. It’s like a big, colorful celebration of life at 6 p.m. on a bright Thursday evening, and reminds me of when I lived on Washington Square and used to sit outside on the brownstone steps and watch the whole world go by. I’ve got another twenty minutes before I need to get back in the car and find out what’s waiting at the beach. With Maya in charge, it could be anything at all. It’s so rare to have twenty completely uncalled for minutes these days, I’m not really sure how to spend them. Or actually, I do. It’s the novel café. And I’m supposed to be writing my first novel. So here goes. Twenty minutes. Birthday pages. Let’s go. Posted by Hope Edelman 05/07/2010 02:05 PM An Open Letter to Motherless Daughters on Mother's Day weekend (My mother and I in Florida, April 1967) On a Mother’s Day morning about eight or nine years ago, my daughter Maya, who was then still in preschool, surprised me with breakfast in bed. On the wooden tray she proudly thrust onto my lap was a cup of orange juice, a whole apple still cold from the refrigerator, and her version of a “cheese sandwich”: a slice of cheese between two slices of cheese. The cheese sandwich has become an annual tradition in our family, sometimes presented to me on the morning of my birthday as well, and there’s a good chance I might see one this Sunday morning, even though Maya is now twelve and her sister Eden nine. They’re quite capable in the kitchen these days, able to make omelets and French toast on their own, but the cheese sandwich is, well, the Cheese Sandwich. Mother’s Day isn’t Mother’s Day in our house without one now. I’m grateful for this family tradition, however small, because for many years Mother’s Day was such a dark spot on my calendar. Without a mother to honor on that day, I felt there was no place for me to fit. In the seventeen years since Motherless Daughters was first published, I’ve heard from many readers who’ve felt and still feel the same way. Even those with children of their own feel the absence of their mothers more acutely on the day set aside specifically to remember the ones who birthed us. The initiative for a national Mother’s Day was started in 1907 by a motherless daughter who was looking for a public way to honor all mothers, but somehow evolved into a day to honor only those who are living (and able to physically receive bouquets of flowers and Hallmark cards). But where did that leave women whose mothers had died or were otherwise absent? In 1996, a small group of women set out to answer this question, instituting the first Motherless Daughters Day luncheon in New York City. They chose the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend to give motherless women a special time and place to honor mothers who were no longer alive. Over the years that tradition has expanded to more than a dozen cities nationwide, including Los Angeles; Detroit; Buffalo, NY; and Orange County, CA. (For a listing, see the Support Groups page at www.hopeedelman.com.) At some point during each luncheon, women join hands and participate in the Circle of Remembrance. They go around the circle and in turn each state their names and their mothers’. “Hope, daughter of Marcia,” I say, when my turn comes around. There is something enormously powerful about standing in a roomful of motherless women simultaneously honoring dozens of lost mothers at the same time, and speaking their names out loud. How many times a year do I actually say my mother’s name out loud? Sadly, not that many. But on this weekend, she has a whole day of honor. Instead of grieving her absence, it encourages me to celebrate her influence. For me, the Sunday of Mother’s Day has become a day to spend with my two daughters, starting with a Cheese Sandwich in bed. I won’t lie to you: it’s still deeply sad for me to not have my mother to call on that day. But Motherless Daughters Day—tomorrow—has become the day I set aside to remember her. Not in her final, bedridden state, but as the dynamic, healthy presence she was for the majority of my life. The one who gave me, without either of us knowing it, the foundation I would one day need to manage without her for so long. This is my 29th Mother’s Day without a mother. A part of me can’t believe it’s even possible to write that; I still feel her presence so strongly in much of what I do. Just yesterday morning I was showing Eden how to separate an egg yolk from an egg white, and it was as if my mother’s hands were guiding mine. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that she taught me to do it herself, in the gold and avocado kitchen of my childhood. I remember the first few Mother’s Days I spent without her, and how devastatingly sad and lonely they were. And then I remember how empowering it felt to attend that first Motherless Daughters Day celebration and speak her name out loud. “I am Hope, daughter of Marcia.” No matter how many motherless Mother’s Days pass, that statement will always be true. On this Mother’s Day and Motherless Daughters Day weekend, I extend my warmest wishes to those of you who have lost mothers, the sincerest hope that you will have comfort and peace this weekend, and the blessings of a beautiful and bountiful year. Those of you who’ve written to me this past year—hundreds of you!--have warmed my heart with your stories, and inspired me with your generosity of spirit. You are all such strong, resilient, and courageous women. It has been an honor to advocate on your behalf for these past seventeen years. With all best everything, Hope Posted by Hope Edelman 05/03/2010 08:18 AM Hanging with Authors and Thinkers at the LATFOB The LA Times Festival of Books was last weekend, and like most attendees, I imagine, I was left with two overriding impressions: first, extreme jubilation that so many people showed up this year, especially this year, in support of authors and the written word; and second, total overwhelm from having been in the presence of 400 authors and 130,000 attendees on the UCLA campus over just two days. If you’re a participating author, your time at the festival always begins in the author’s green room, a huge room of tables and a buffet spread inside the UCLA faculty center which always feels like (no matter how old you get) the high school cafeterias of your past. The prom king and queen drift around the room, occasionally holding court, and you never feel like you’re sitting at the cool kids’ table. Unless you’re one of the cool kids and feeling secure in that knowledge, I suppose. The thing is, most of us who became authors were never the cool kids in high school, so probably nearly everyone in the room was feeling the way I was. (Except perhaps for T.C. Boyle, who walked between the tables wearing a black beret and dark sunglasses with everyone whispering, “That’s T.C.!” in his wake. I think if you actually know him you get to call him Tom. But I digress.) On Saturday I had the great fortune to participate in an hourlong panel titled “Memoir: Keeping the Faith” with authors Dani Shapiro (Devotion); Eric Lax (Faith, Interrupted) and William Lobdell (Losing My Religion). We joked that our panel really should have been called “Keeping the Faith, Finding the Faith, Losing the Faith, and Questioning the Faith” since we were all coming at the topic from different, yet complementary, directions. Our moderater was Jack Miles, UC Professor of Religion and author of God: A Biography, who got stuck in traffic coming up from Orange County and strolled into the room at one minute to three, picked up the mike, and got us rolling, which was kind of a wonky beginning, but he was so charming and erudite that nobody seemed to mind. Each of the panelists spoke for a few minutes about their respective books, and then Jack asked a question of each of us. These panelists were terrific, all so thoughtful and considerate, and did such a good job of getting everyone thinking about faith and writing and storytelling and personal experience that I think it might have been one of the very best panels I’ve ever participated in. During the audience Q&A section near the end, a man came up to the mike with a question for me. He said that when he hears about someone choosing to take a child to healers in Belize instead of to a psychiatrist he immediately scoffs at the idea, and he wanted to know what my suggestions I had for discussing faith with people whose beliefs are different from his own. (I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it.) It was a good question, and one worthy of consideration, I think. I spoke some about how we first have to establish there is no “right” answer, no one answer, and that because faith is so individual and personal it requires people on both sides of the discussion to maintain a healthy and genuine respect for ideas other than their own. Eric Lax spoke a bit about how that requires a certain degree of humility, to suspend one’s own disbelief (or belief) long enough to consider that perhaps the other person isn’t wrong, because only then can meaningful conversation begin. It really comes down to a discussion of arrogance, I think. In my opinion, arrogance has very bad p.r., insofar that when we hear the word we tend to bristle, reacting to it as something negative. But if you can sidestep the undertones of haughtiness and disdain that surround the word, arrogance really means steadfastly and stubbornly adhering to one’s own point of view to the exclusion of others, which can—dare I say it?—sometimes be a useful survival tool. Engaging in a respectful conversation with someone who holds a different belief system about faith does require a loosening of one’s own arrogance, I believe. To me, it’s just as arrogant to say, “There is a God because I know it to be true” as “There is no God because I haven’t seen proof that one exists.” I left the panel having reaffirmed that I have my experiences, and the belief system that have grown out of those experiences. As far as faith goes, this makes me an expert only on what I myself believe to be true--yet deeply interested in what others have to say, as well. And judging by the number of audience members who lined up to ask questions of panelists, it seems that others are, too. This is an important dialogue, especially in these difficult times. I hope it continues. Posted by Hope Edelman