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Muffins and Mayhem, Recipes for a Happy (if disorderly) Life
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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation today and my very good friend, author Jessica Keener is filling in for me today.
Jessica Keener's fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and been listed in The Pushcart Prize anthology under 'Outstanding Writers.' She's been the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist's Grant; a Chekhov Prize for Excellence in Fiction by the editors of Wilderness House Literary Review; and second prize in fiction from Redbook magazine. For more than a dozen years she has been a features writer for The Boston Globe, and numerous national magazines, including O, the Oprah magazine. Her first novel, Night Swim will be released January 2012/Fiction Studio Books. To learn more about Jessica, visit her website at: http://www.jessicakeener.com/ and be sure to drop her a note. You can reach her at: [email protected]
Thanks for filling in for me today Jessica...
Before I begin, I want to thank Suzanne for this opportunity to share this welcoming space. What I most admire about Suzanne (and there is so much to rave about) is her ability to open emotional doors and talk about feelings that we all struggle with. Her honesty gives me courage and permission to look at my own life with less shame and embarrassment--more joy, in fact--and reaffirms that I'm not alone; my struggles are not impossible. So, today, I'm going to talk about something difficult, a childhood event that haunted me for decades and which ultimately inspired me to write a novel.
In the nineteen sixties, a time of social restlessness and change, I was a teen growing up in a Boston suburb. One winter morning, as soon as I arrived at school, a boy in my clique informed me that my girlfriend's mother had committed suicide. This news appeared in the newspaper and traveled in passionate whispers among my friends and throughout the community. At the dinner table that night, my mother said she'd heard that my friend's mother was very smart, a Harvard grad. My parents agreed that it was a tragedy. Did I know my friend's mother?
I'd never met my friend's mother, but one thing I figured out that day: Harvard and intelligence offered no immunity against emotional despair.
When my friend returned to school, she tried to resume old routines--going to class, talking about boys and so on. But now there was a new edge around her, an invisible divider that I couldn't cross, and nor could she--an edge of silence that everyone bought into--teachers, students, parents. Many times during that year, I wanted to ask my friend how she felt? I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. I was desperate to say these things but didn't.
Thickening this community silence was an underlying, dark moral judgment: how could a mother abandon her children? The horror of suicide and abandonment broke the limits of our collective, suburban imagination. It was unspeakable, and so it remained--in silence--and shame.
I wrote my novel, Night Swim, in an attempt to open this scary, emotional door about a mother's inability to nurture her children. And I confess I wrote it because of my own very mixed feelings of love, anger and disappointment toward my parents. In Night Swim, set in 1970 in suburban New England, I created a mother who is distant, who takes pills and dies tragically, leaving her children to grow up without her. My protagonist--sixteen year-old Sarah--is a gifted singer hurtling toward her own sexual awakening and consequences while dealing with grief.
Thankfully, my friend and I have since talked about the isolation she endured because a community failed to reach out to her. In this regard, Night Swim is also a kind of apology.
Do you think a parent's suicide is still a taboo subject today? I think it is, and would love to hear your thoughts about this.
I answer all of my mail. You can reach me at: [email protected] and I'm also giving away 20 advance reader copies of Night Swim.--Jessica Keener
* This month's Penguin Classics book is THE REAL STORY OF AH-Q AND OTHER TALES OF CHINA by Lu Xun. Start reading now and enter to win a Penguin totebag. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/September11Classics
AUTHORBUZZ: A HEART REVEALED by Julie Lessman
A young woman healing from a broken past catches the eye of a confirmed bachelor. Will she give love a second chance? Filled with intense passion and longing, deception and revelation, A HEART REVEALED will hold readers in its grip until the very last page.
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader Click on A HEART REVEALED to read more. Author Julie Lessman would love to hear from you.
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