My best friend from college, a dancer-turned-psychotherapist, just sent me her first "book". I finished it around three a.m., this morning. Then, I sat in the dark, trying to figure out how I felt; what would be my first response.
"Samantha" is the kind of woman who enters a room and both men and women look up. Though she will give you a hundred reasons why her body is not moving the way a "normal dancer's body should move", they are all clinical. She is a ballerina. At fifty-six, she is still, a ballerina.
Though French and German, mostly, she looks like there is Native blood flowing in those long, slender veins. She knows this and makes the most of this shocking truth: her hair is long and straight, dark as a moonless night. She tans and retains it easily. Her huge eyes are a deep brown that convinces you you might actually fall into them. She is the kind of woman who must always prove herself intellectually, because upon first notice, all one can see is this stunning exterior.
At college, because of being cast in "Godspell" together, we became friends. She, a transfer student, and me the campus politico. My "Virginia Woolf" tee-shirt caught her eye and she made the first move, tentatively approaching from stage left. I was holding a recorder, for my solo in the show. "Samm" asked if she could see the instrument. Her hand slipped and the recorder went flying across the stage. It didn't break. Neither did we. An awkward beginning to a complicated friendship.
Over the years we have flown to each other in times of celebration and in times of stress. Only one huge misunderstanding--a turning point in her life--caused a rift that kept us apart for a while. However, it allowed her to focus on a new husband and a new child and her growing practice. I continued with my books and my adventures. Our fate, however, was to reconnect. To mature a bit. To reach back and reaffirm.
Last time we compromised and met up in Arizon, she told me she was writing a novel--based, of course, on her life. (Aren't all novels based on our lives, really?) I was in it, as were her husbands and her first child. There are her family and childhood buddies and the woman who she calls her "shaman-mentor"--her first dance teacher (and oldest friend). She promised to let me see the "book" when it was finished.
It has been years and we are both back on the East Coast. We are in constant connection--thanks to e-mail and cell phones. We plan our catch-ups like strategies in battle--moving the troops and the positions even as we handle the assaults of the enemies surrounding us. So far, however, we haven't negotiated a time when we can travel and meet on neutral territory. Invitations are in place on both ends--it is logistics--time and jobs and family that prevent the journeys. So, we wait.
Now, she's completed "the book".
When I was living in L.A. in the eighties, I began writing my first attempt at a novel. Of course, I incorporated everyone I'd met since college--trying to assimilate the West and to understand it on all the deeper levels one struggles through in one's twenties. My roomie at the time read the first few chapters. She was furious.
"Do not put me in this!" She threw the pages on the kitchen table.
"It's only a novel--I changed your name--this stuff didn't really happen--" I sputtered.
"Yeah, but thoughts are things! Words can make stuff happen--really happen! I don't want what you wrote to manifest in my life...please! It's, it's like a curse, Minns!" She was shaking.
"Okay, okay. I didn't know you'd feel this way..." I apologized.
The first attempt at becoming "A Great American Novelist" went into the trash in Silverlake.
From that point on, I was very careful around my friends. Characters were amalgams of people, manipulated to add color or depth to a plot. No one I wrote was actually a full portrait. Mosaics were my mantra. And I never wrote non-fiction...at least not my books.
There have been times when all I wanted to do was to write prose: prose that would "blow the top off" of a variety of institutions, organizations, situations. Prose where I "got even" or "claimed justice" for the underdogs of the world--including myself. However, for the most part, I stood down. I cooled off. I turned the essays into poetry or fiction. (Letters to the editor don't count.) I would remember C., in Silverlake, and pull up short. I didn't want the karma of cursing anyone--not even an enemy.
Now, "Samm" has sent me her manuscript. Packed up by her husband and mailed Fed Express to my family home. I cannot ignore it. Too many people have witnessed its arrival. I asked for this--told her I wanted to read it. (I did.) I have. Now, I owe my thoughts. "Samm" wants my feelings. Of course, she wants my approval. (I have done the same to a few close friends over the years.)
Turnabout is fair play.
Karma.
In her "novel", "Samm" has done what several writers from my school years suggested: to take our lives and to make them turn out the way we wish they had. Making gold from coal, as it were. Transmutation. Alchemy. Human magic. There are scenes where I appear and I don't remember the words she has chosen as coming from my lips. (I don't recognize the words she speaks, either, frankly. There are a lot of technical, clinical bits where I often feel everyone is at a psychology convention. But that's her style.) When I hit these scenes, it takes me aback. I have no power of the character that is me--obviously me--the me she told me she was putting in there.
There are historical situations that I remember from a different perspective. Wholly. I read and watch myself (my literary "self") acting in ways I don't think I did act. Or, worse, fully removed in key scenes--scenes that meant so much to me but don't make the cuts in her re-worked life. I have to admit, my ego is bruised. It stings. Don't we all want to be the hero in the lives around us? (Is it just me?)
It could have been worse. "Samm" is mostly kind. Supportive. A clinician to the bone--always always always analyzing the people around her--from the passing client to her two husbands to every boss or supervisor she has crossed paths with...we all come under her lens. Her first born son is the only "character" given a free pass. He is her joy. Her angel. Her reason for life. There are no marks against him nor shadows beneath him. That's probably as it should be, if one is re-framing and re-telling one's past. "Samm" does love her children unconditionally. It is one of her best attributes. But the rest of us, well, we are sort of "diagnosed" against the crises of "Samm"s life.
It is uncomfortable to be diagnosed.
When I found a single sentence in her memoir that laid her "take" on my character out on the sand, I e-mailed and asked her if that is what she really thinks of me--if this is her professional opinion of my psyche? Her immediate response was a firm "No!" Followed by an assertion that if she did, in fact, think this was the truth of my character, she would have, long ago, shared it with me--and found me help....Little comfort.
No, she decided, along with "omitting a lot of what happened around us", to come up with this "diagnosis" to move the book along. I needn't worry. (About the diagnosis, that is.)
Phew.
Hmmmmmm...
Other key scenes that have been cornerstones in our friendship don't get mentioned. That is always difficult--we tend to think we are far more key in the reality of the people around us than we possibly are...But this is a "novel" about her clinical development as a psychotherapist and as a Mother and as a wife. Her focus is clear. In five hundredplus pages, she maps out her trek--or her character's trek. I might flinch, a bit, but this isn't my story. It isn't even my "character's" story. It is "Samm"'s tale.
For "Samm".
I suppose the lesson here, is that for all the people I've caused to flinch--in this blog--or in my novels and short prose--paybacks have arrived. And, as I hope they are, I find myself a bit flattered. I am important enough in "Samm's" life to appear on her pages. Flawed, funny, somewhat removed from the action, but present. She has created her personal mythology--at least the first volume. She has gotten it down; made it concrete; holdable. Her achievements are laid out and viewable--her blessings able to be numbered.
For all these reasons, I sent a note of congratulations. (There will be no editing suggestions...I have learned my lesson on that one!) So, one more friend has become a writer.
Welcome.
"Samantha" is the kind of woman who enters a room and both men and women look up. Though she will give you a hundred reasons why her body is not moving the way a "normal dancer's body should move", they are all clinical. She is a ballerina. At fifty-six, she is still, a ballerina.
Though French and German, mostly, she looks like there is Native blood flowing in those long, slender veins. She knows this and makes the most of this shocking truth: her hair is long and straight, dark as a moonless night. She tans and retains it easily. Her huge eyes are a deep brown that convinces you you might actually fall into them. She is the kind of woman who must always prove herself intellectually, because upon first notice, all one can see is this stunning exterior.
At college, because of being cast in "Godspell" together, we became friends. She, a transfer student, and me the campus politico. My "Virginia Woolf" tee-shirt caught her eye and she made the first move, tentatively approaching from stage left. I was holding a recorder, for my solo in the show. "Samm" asked if she could see the instrument. Her hand slipped and the recorder went flying across the stage. It didn't break. Neither did we. An awkward beginning to a complicated friendship.
Over the years we have flown to each other in times of celebration and in times of stress. Only one huge misunderstanding--a turning point in her life--caused a rift that kept us apart for a while. However, it allowed her to focus on a new husband and a new child and her growing practice. I continued with my books and my adventures. Our fate, however, was to reconnect. To mature a bit. To reach back and reaffirm.
Last time we compromised and met up in Arizon, she told me she was writing a novel--based, of course, on her life. (Aren't all novels based on our lives, really?) I was in it, as were her husbands and her first child. There are her family and childhood buddies and the woman who she calls her "shaman-mentor"--her first dance teacher (and oldest friend). She promised to let me see the "book" when it was finished.
It has been years and we are both back on the East Coast. We are in constant connection--thanks to e-mail and cell phones. We plan our catch-ups like strategies in battle--moving the troops and the positions even as we handle the assaults of the enemies surrounding us. So far, however, we haven't negotiated a time when we can travel and meet on neutral territory. Invitations are in place on both ends--it is logistics--time and jobs and family that prevent the journeys. So, we wait.
Now, she's completed "the book".
When I was living in L.A. in the eighties, I began writing my first attempt at a novel. Of course, I incorporated everyone I'd met since college--trying to assimilate the West and to understand it on all the deeper levels one struggles through in one's twenties. My roomie at the time read the first few chapters. She was furious.
"Do not put me in this!" She threw the pages on the kitchen table.
"It's only a novel--I changed your name--this stuff didn't really happen--" I sputtered.
"Yeah, but thoughts are things! Words can make stuff happen--really happen! I don't want what you wrote to manifest in my life...please! It's, it's like a curse, Minns!" She was shaking.
"Okay, okay. I didn't know you'd feel this way..." I apologized.
The first attempt at becoming "A Great American Novelist" went into the trash in Silverlake.
From that point on, I was very careful around my friends. Characters were amalgams of people, manipulated to add color or depth to a plot. No one I wrote was actually a full portrait. Mosaics were my mantra. And I never wrote non-fiction...at least not my books.
There have been times when all I wanted to do was to write prose: prose that would "blow the top off" of a variety of institutions, organizations, situations. Prose where I "got even" or "claimed justice" for the underdogs of the world--including myself. However, for the most part, I stood down. I cooled off. I turned the essays into poetry or fiction. (Letters to the editor don't count.) I would remember C., in Silverlake, and pull up short. I didn't want the karma of cursing anyone--not even an enemy.
Now, "Samm" has sent me her manuscript. Packed up by her husband and mailed Fed Express to my family home. I cannot ignore it. Too many people have witnessed its arrival. I asked for this--told her I wanted to read it. (I did.) I have. Now, I owe my thoughts. "Samm" wants my feelings. Of course, she wants my approval. (I have done the same to a few close friends over the years.)
Turnabout is fair play.
Karma.
In her "novel", "Samm" has done what several writers from my school years suggested: to take our lives and to make them turn out the way we wish they had. Making gold from coal, as it were. Transmutation. Alchemy. Human magic. There are scenes where I appear and I don't remember the words she has chosen as coming from my lips. (I don't recognize the words she speaks, either, frankly. There are a lot of technical, clinical bits where I often feel everyone is at a psychology convention. But that's her style.) When I hit these scenes, it takes me aback. I have no power of the character that is me--obviously me--the me she told me she was putting in there.
There are historical situations that I remember from a different perspective. Wholly. I read and watch myself (my literary "self") acting in ways I don't think I did act. Or, worse, fully removed in key scenes--scenes that meant so much to me but don't make the cuts in her re-worked life. I have to admit, my ego is bruised. It stings. Don't we all want to be the hero in the lives around us? (Is it just me?)
It could have been worse. "Samm" is mostly kind. Supportive. A clinician to the bone--always always always analyzing the people around her--from the passing client to her two husbands to every boss or supervisor she has crossed paths with...we all come under her lens. Her first born son is the only "character" given a free pass. He is her joy. Her angel. Her reason for life. There are no marks against him nor shadows beneath him. That's probably as it should be, if one is re-framing and re-telling one's past. "Samm" does love her children unconditionally. It is one of her best attributes. But the rest of us, well, we are sort of "diagnosed" against the crises of "Samm"s life.
It is uncomfortable to be diagnosed.
When I found a single sentence in her memoir that laid her "take" on my character out on the sand, I e-mailed and asked her if that is what she really thinks of me--if this is her professional opinion of my psyche? Her immediate response was a firm "No!" Followed by an assertion that if she did, in fact, think this was the truth of my character, she would have, long ago, shared it with me--and found me help....Little comfort.
No, she decided, along with "omitting a lot of what happened around us", to come up with this "diagnosis" to move the book along. I needn't worry. (About the diagnosis, that is.)
Phew.
Hmmmmmm...
Other key scenes that have been cornerstones in our friendship don't get mentioned. That is always difficult--we tend to think we are far more key in the reality of the people around us than we possibly are...But this is a "novel" about her clinical development as a psychotherapist and as a Mother and as a wife. Her focus is clear. In five hundredplus pages, she maps out her trek--or her character's trek. I might flinch, a bit, but this isn't my story. It isn't even my "character's" story. It is "Samm"'s tale.
For "Samm".
I suppose the lesson here, is that for all the people I've caused to flinch--in this blog--or in my novels and short prose--paybacks have arrived. And, as I hope they are, I find myself a bit flattered. I am important enough in "Samm's" life to appear on her pages. Flawed, funny, somewhat removed from the action, but present. She has created her personal mythology--at least the first volume. She has gotten it down; made it concrete; holdable. Her achievements are laid out and viewable--her blessings able to be numbered.
For all these reasons, I sent a note of congratulations. (There will be no editing suggestions...I have learned my lesson on that one!) So, one more friend has become a writer.
Welcome.
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