DO JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Writing a book is a major achievement.  Ask anyone who has ever kissed their manuscript as they mailed it to their editor, or fist pumped right before they pressed “send.”

 

But the writing is just the beginning. With the traditional publishing industry undergoing liposuction in every way, the marketing, the talking it up, the endorsing, and the window dressing are even more critical.  That makes the cover (always an important factor in selecting your next read) of critical importance. 

 

Choosing a cover feels a bit like deciding what outfit to be buried in.  It’s an eternal, fairly final choice. Unless of course you write “The Help “ and you get a do-over on the paperback cover, swapping out the mysteriously ambiguous ravens for a picture of the movie stars.

 

So when choosing the cover do you go bold?  Or do you stick with the little black dress?  Do you tantalize or reveal?  If your book touches on a serious subject do you make the cover more…airy?  Do you merely hint at a suggestion of real life sadness?  Flap copy is designed to preview the contents of the book, but let’s be honest, don’t we all judge a book by its cover?  Aren’t we quick to flick our eyes over what appeals and then pick it up for closer inspection?

 

This is the era of Facebook and Match.com.   We can go right to the visual and decide if we want to fondle the goods or click on by.  The cover of a book is the eye candy for the IQ inside.  It’s the hooked worm on the bobber.

 

And the cover is where the author (unless they wield major New York Times Book Review list-rattling power) is merely one voice in a chorus of marketing experts. 

 

With my first two books, “In an Instant” and “Perfectly Imperfect,” this process was largely out of my hands.  My photograph appears on each of the covers, something that still makes me slightly uncomfortable.  It’s like the wealthy WASP homes I visited as a child where the ubiquitous oil portrait of “mother” in white dress and garden background lurked over the mantle.  You will never find a picture of me over my fireplace.  Not even if I was the Queen of England.  I’m not judging here, I’m just…inwardly cringing at the thought.

I framed a black and white photo of myself that was taken with one of the last giant portrait Polaroid cameras left in the world.  It was shot by iconic photographer Mary Ellen Mark and I am most proud of this picture because it was an award I got for being a mother first and an advocate second.  You can bet your sweet bippy that professional make up artists and stylists helped curate the illusion of a better me. But I will tell you that this picture hangs in my closet.  I’m frankly about the only person who gets to see it besides my husband.

In that photograph I’m fierce and strong, a warrior mother, my arms are on my hips like Linda Carter and I’m ready to Wonder Woman a lobbed spear right back at the bad guys.  But on the cover of my first book I’m in a bowel movement brown sweater looking… terribly sad.

“In an Instant” was an honest book about our family’s journey and recovery after my husband’s injury in Iraq.  It’s also a love story of sorts. So the cover had to say—“hey, remember the anchor guy on TV who got hit by a bomb, along with his devoted and egregiously sad wife?  The story lies within these pages… come get the poop.”  And then the color of the sweater kind of underscored the poop part for folks if they managed to mistake my winsome expression. 

My second book, “Perfectly Imperfect,” is a book of essays about life, some funny while others are more poignant.  I had hoped to have one lone, single inanimate object on the cover, like the jar of cream on Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”   I loved that cover.  My husband gave me a hideous turquoise ring once and I wrote about it in one of the chapters. I fancied that ring in its heart shaped fuzzy red box on the cover of the book like a whimsical smirk.  But since I am NOT Nora Ephron and people DON’T instantly recognize my name, it was decided that I myself would appear on the cover, (marketing calls this branding) bright colors and plaid sneakers and all.  

The “Perfectly Imperfect” cover showed readers that I’d regained my sense of humor, cheered up and had bought more fashionable clothing than that of my previous fecal-brown V-neck sweater-wearing phase. The carefree yet scrunched expression on my face, a kind of “what the hey” look, was meant to invite readers to sit a spell.  Looking at myself, forever preserved on the cover like a fly in amber, I am reminded of the need for more roughage in my diet, or perhaps a Metamucil colonic.

For “Those We Love Most,” a work of fiction, the sky was the limit in terms of cover choice.  Smarter marketing minds at my publisher Hyperion Voice would need to put their heads together. 

“It can’t look sad” was what I heard.  And the first cover concept was an Adirondack chair on a porch with flowers and sunlight.  It looked mystical, hopeful and partially spiritual, like someone was going to slide down Jacob’s ladder from heaven and show back up at the dinner table.  But it just didn’t feel right. Not to mention there wasn’t actually one porch in the book. 

What about a mere suggestion that something is amiss?  I asked.  But the rougher stuff, the loss had to be nuanced a bit—you don’t want to scare anyone off.  We are just throttling out of an economic recession and people want to escape into bondage, Hermes scarves, S & M and futuristic worlds.  If you believe the research, that is. 

Another version of the present cover had pink flowers that seemed to originate in Hawaii, despite the fact that the book takes place in the Midwest.   It reminded me of some of the 70’s feminine hygiene boxes—before they invented the wing technology and got all graphic and real-world on the outside.   But this newer book cover had legs.  We were refining and changing.

In the end we got a cover that feels inviting and homey, like I hope my house feels.  In fact the eerie thing is that without ever having seen my home, the artist captured my mudroom almost exactly.  I figured that was some kind of sign.

So here it is.  The cover.  I hope it speaks to you too.  I hope that when you and others are walking through a book store or airport or scrolling through a website or blog you hear a little… “You hooooo… over here” from my book.  And I hope you will be compelled to pick it up.

TOO OLD TO BE A MOM?

Just this morning, I did the thing experienced mothers aren’t supposed to do.  I lost it on my daughter. She’s 11 and I’m 52.  That makes me the adult.  In fact, last year I was the oldest living mother in elementary school.  I should be a total ball of zen-nicity.  Yet suddenly I was going all Linda Blair after a morning of protracted nagging.  Perhaps this rings a bell?  “Hurry up – get dressed – brush your teeth, your hair, your tongue- shoes on- backpacks packed...move faster. Go!”  You’ve been there.  No expanded vocabulary required, just sixth grade level word retrieval.  And yet opening a can of whoop ass can feel satisfying sometimes.  Like binge eating foods dipped in Marshmallow Fluff.

 

Wasn’t it supposed to be a blissful experience entering mother hood again at 40?  Wasn’t I supposed to have more patience and understanding about “the long haul” and “how fast it all goes” with my twins? And yet here I am, shrieking as my hormones retreat, as snappish and churlish as one of those cringe-worthy reality show teen moms prevented from a night of clubbing by their colicky unwanted off-spring.

 

OK, maybe it’s not quite like that with me.  That was a tad dramatic.  But as I swam my laps this morning trying to re-balance, I wondered idly if I really was too old to have kids this young?  Was biology nature’s way of saying,  “you won’t have the energy for this in a few years?”   And yet how many of us are successful at making life fall in line with the perfect time to marry, procreate or change careers?  Is there ever a perfect time?  

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

I smile gently at the young women who emphatically tell me when they want to marry and how many kids they will have.  I long ago learned that we don’t write that script.  The friend with the repeated miscarriages knows that, the couple that can’t conceive, the mother who loses her son to a brain tumor, the wife whose husband up and leaves.  The greatest part of life is our ability to dream big, but most of us are unprepared when things go awry or when dreams don’t come true.  

 

When our first attempt to become parents at age 31 resulted in our son, my husband got on the bus to fatherhood with extreme speed.  He was thrilled and so was I, but then again I knew it wouldn’t change his life in nearly the same way that it would change mine.  But when our children didn’t come in the intervals we planned, when there was a loss and then a dry patch and then some sorrow, we were blindsided when the bad thing happened to us.  And why shouldn’t it have?  What made us any different from the family down the street?  It’s not human nature to always feel so generous, though.  The fickle finger of fate and the Ouija board are supposed to land somewhere else for the hard stuff. 

 

When my twins were born at age 40, our “Team B” as my husband calls them, I resolved to work less and Mom more.  I would be the chilled out mother I never quite got to be the first time around with the older two because I had been so concerned with trying to balance it all.  And while it didn’t exactly happen that way when the girls were born, (chilled isn’t an adjective normally associated with Moms of multiples) I learned to relax into my choices, to stop trying to mute the working part in front of my stay at home friends or dial down the mother part in other facets of my life.  I learned to accept that I am a person who likes her sack stuffed really full.  What other reason could there possibly be for continuing to stuff more in it?  Saying “yes” mostly felt better.

 

 

There is no question that as an older mother I have more patience than the 31-year old I once was who never thought she’d be spontaneous again.   A six-year gap between Team A and Team B equipt me with a fish eye lens.  I don’t sweat the small stuff and I do try to cherish the ride a bit more.  On my second chance, I didn’t want to talk about mucus and home made baby food, I wanted to discuss my middle-agedness, my politics, the struggles of aging parents and husband’s snoring.  I was never great at board games or watching Dora videos with my older kids and this time around I didn’t feel the need to pretend. I am no longer half-way apologetic or conflicted about working when I’m focusing on being a Mom.  I regularly absorb the whiff of envy from friends when I spend a night away in a nice hotel with room service and first-run movies.  I’m proud of my ability to earn my own wage at a career I love, even as I miss a few soccer games and a basketball tournament or two.

 

Motherhood is a selfless business.  And like so many parts of being an adult, there are repetitive parts, as same-old as emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry.  No wonder we grumble or watch our heads spin at times like a bobble-head on a dashboard.  No wonder we lose our tempers.  We all do. There are some who will swear that the right time to have children is when you are younger and full of energy. But in my 20’s I would have been too selfish, less patient, yearning to accomplish things yet un-named.  I would have resented the recalcitrant child, the ungrateful eye roll or lip curl that soaks through their very being because that’s precisely what they are programmed to do.  Anna Quindlen, one of my all-time favorite writers, says that “sometimes taking care of children full-time feels like a cross between a carnival ride and penal servitude.” Do any right-minded adults really enjoy a two-hour marathon of Candy Land or repeated rounds of Lego towers?  Be honest. 

 

Still, I wouldn’t trade this for anything, even as my friends with their newly childless homes are crowing about their lack of schedules and the fabulous sex they are re-discovering with their husband (yes, their husbands!).  I’m still packing lunches and right now boys are still just something to giggle about behind cupped hands.   I know that’s about to change.  We’ve just had our first discussion about shaving legs and puberty lurks in the bathroom corners.  I can smell it like basement mold.  Most days, the can of whoop-ass aside, I feel incredibly lucky to be experiencing this second wave of motherhood.  The first chapter feels like a temp job in retrospect. Time wrinkles and buckles, telescoping as the calendar flips ever forward.  

 

 

There will only be a short time left when they will ask me to crawl in bed and cuddle, a limited time they’ll still believe I might have something important to contribute in the way of advice.  But they’ll be back. Yes, they’ll come crawling back someday on their bellies as I did when I had children of my own.  I take comfort in that.  It’s already happening with my older two, the slow subtle gravitational pull of interest in what perspective their father and I might have to offer.

 

I’ll be 60 when the younger two go off to college.  And Lord, that used to sound ancient.  Now I can picture myself like one of those old Euell Gibbons ads for Grape Nuts as he leaps around the outdoors, brown as a berry.  I may be gnarled and gnarly, but I’ll be at graduation day standing as proud as the 40 something parents.  That will be me, the one doing the Bronx cheer.  I’ll be celebrating and mourning in equal parts, not only for the days to come, but for the unsung ones that have flown by.

BIRTHING A BOOK – THOSE WE LOVE MOST

The book-as-baby analogy, birth as a metaphor for publishing a novel, is just a little too pat.  Some talented folks who write diligently each day can conceive of and pop out a book annually.  And when I grow up, I aspire to do that too, to write for three hours a day, every day.  But that doesn’t seem possible right now.  I wear too many hats, and the truth is I enjoy it.  I’m not good at saying no or making the outside world go away.

Me?  The author?  I’m more the elephant model of gestation.  Elephants take 22 months to give birth. The alpine salamander has a three-year pregnancy and the frilled shark is 3.5 years.  That was certainly more akin to my style in creating this first novel.  The goal is to get a little faster.

On September 11^th, “Those We Love Most” will come out.  This process, about as long as the Spiny Dog Fish takes to reproduce, has been roughly three years in the making.

Over the past few months I’ve been toying with how to describe my book in a few sentences.  Here is what I have so far…… “Those We Love Most” is about generations in a family, the seasons of a marriage, and whether or not a relationship can survive secrets.  It deals with how one moment of inattention can result in paying the ultimate price.  In the story, as so often in life, everyone is both right and wrong.  What endures is faith in the people we love despite their loyalties or betrayals.  Ultimately it is a love story, love of family, spouse, lover, friend and even stranger.  And it’s about forgiveness and resilience, the getting through it.  Most all of us can relate in some form.

Recently, I read about a survey that claimed during these tipsy economic times, people want to read stories about fantasy, happy endings and sex.  And I understand the “take me away Calgon” effect of imagining yourself bound and gagged with silk Hermes scarves.  I get that escaping into a fight-to–the-death nihilistic futuristic world might remove us from the reality of the mortgage, the potential for job loss, the stale marriage or life’s paper cuts of disappointment.  But I tend to be drawn to stories about real life and the complexities of human emotions.  I enjoy reading all kinds of genres but I love discovering a book that details how we move through and overcome the hard things life can throw at us to find lessons and community and resuscitation.

It’s these stories that connect us as human beings.  They are the ones that make us say “ahh, me too” or “if they can do it so can I” or even  “look how much worse I could have had it.”

I love the fiction of Anna Quindlen, Sue Miller, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Ann Hood or Sue Monk Kidd with their searing autopsies of interior lives.  The authentic dialogue of Adriana Trigiani's generational characters brings them to life.  I hated coming to the end of “Little Bee” and “The Namesake,” nodded my head with Annie Lamott’s honest memoirs and marveled at Ann Patchett's prose and intricately woven tales.  The characters in the fiction of Lionel Shriver, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen stayed with me for days.

“Those We Love Most” grew out of a real-life experience.  I was out of town and a friend called me in a panic.  I can still picture that hotel room I was in all these years later.  A seventeen-year-old driver in her town had struck a child, and she wanted to know if I would talk to the parents and provide some hope based on my own family’s experiences.  After I hung up, I kept thinking about that one pivotal “in-an-instant” moment and all the lives that had been affected by a split-second action.  That call formed the basis for a fictional story about how one pebble dropped in a pond ripples out in many directions.

The intricacies within families—the secrets people hold, the love that ebbs and flows in marriages and relationships, and the bond between a parent and child—are themes all of us can relate to.  The business of living is chock-full of so many extremes, and while there are parts of my book that deal with sadness, real life is defined by a bubbling stew of love and loss, joy and sorrow, betrayal, triumph, and achievement. 

I wanted to examine the process of life coming unglued and then look at all the strengths and the wonderful qualities that lie within us to do the right thing for the ones we love most.

There are a few months before I give birth.  I’m getting the nest ready, booking engagements for the fall and preparing to usher this new project onto the stage.  I hope like hell people want to read it.  And I look forward to sharing it with you.  I hope I have the opportunity to cross paths with you on this birthing journey in one manner or another.    

Stay posted for the next installment about "Those We Love Most."  I'll be dishing about the cover selection process and how it feels a little like picking the outfit you will be buried in.