Melissa Fay Greene

Sorry to be out of touch here! more about Hanukah later this week, I promise!
Meanwhile, Readers Digest just published its year-end issue of “Inspiring Holiday Stories.”
They published one of mine.
It’s not inspiring.
It is about a cat’s encounter with a menorah.
(Coincidentally the fantastic photo above chosen by the RD art department looks nothing like Ladybug, the cat in the story, but looks almost exactly like Rosie, our cat now.)

Eight Candles Nine Lives

We parents work so hard to relay the historical and spiritual import of religious holidays. No, we explain, Hanukkah is not primarily about gift giving; it’s about a long-ago freedom struggle. The eight-day winter holiday celebrates the successful resistance of the Jews against King Antiochus IV Epiphanes of Syria and the restoration of the Second Temple 21 centuries ago. All our traditions — from lighting the menorah to frying the potato pancakes called latkes to spinning a top in the game of dreidel — contribute to the commemoration of these events.
Unfortunately, the Hanukkah observance that has stayed with my children as the most significant of their childhoods has nothing to do with religious freedom. One night in the 1990s, we tidied up wrapping paper and toys in the den while the lit menorah stood on the kitchen table. In our absence, as the many-colored candles snapped and dripped, our long-haired black-and-white cat, Ladybug, hopped onto the kitchen table and brushed past them.

“Do you smell something?” asked my husband, Donny.

“Is something burning?” asked Molly, our oldest, age ten.

It was Ladybug! The fur on her left flank had been singed down to the skin. She wasn’t hurt, but she wore a peeved expression all evening, and for the rest of the week she hid whenever we began chanting the Hebrew blessings over the candles. Though her fur grew out as thick as ever, Ladybug took a dim view of Hanukkah after that, clearly preferring less flammable holidays, like Labor Day.

The following year, for a fifth-grade assignment about family traditions, Molly wrote about Ladybug’s encounter with the Hanukkah candles. The teacher, Lynn Fink, a sporty and funny woman, enjoyed Molly’s story and gave it an A.

Three years later, Seth got Ms. Fink for fifth grade. He also worked the scorching of cat fur into a writing assignment, and he, too, got an A.

Ditto our son Lee, three years later: same teacher, same story, same A. We had no idea these retellings were piling up.

The year Lily got Ms. Fink for fifth grade, she also felt inspired to pen an account of the night of a feline afire. By now, we were very fond of Ms. Fink. We invited her to join us for a night of Hanukkah. It was her first time to experience the Jewish holiday. Happily, she ate her latkes with sour cream and applesauce. Gamely, she spun the dreidel. Delightedly, she opened the small gift of homemade cookies the children had prepared for her. As the evening seemed to be winding down, she clapped her hands, rubbed them together as if before a banquet, and exclaimed, “So! When do we torch the cat?”

ReadersDigestInspiringHolidayStories

A new literary website asked for an essay comparing writing books to raising children. And so, here it is. I compared them:
Inreads.com: Five Books, Nine Children

By Erik Larson for The Washington Post, 6/10/11

There are many nonfiction books that come to mind when the word “best” comes along, but the “best-ever” designation requires a good deal of agonizing. There are the works of David McCullough, of which my favorite is “Mornings on Horseback,” a moving account of the transformation of Teddy Roosevelt from asthmatic child to robust symbol of the rough-and-ready life, and of course books by the late David Halberstam, especially “The Best and the Brightest,” about the men who brought you the Vietnam War. I’d have to include “Praying for Sheetrock” by Melissa Fay Greene, a charming story of a little-known civil rights battle in coastal Georgia, and the tiny but big-hearted “Longitude” by Dava Sobel, who took a forgotten but hugely important moment in history — the development of the marine chronometer that made accurate navigation possible — and brought it back to life. But there are three books that I keep returning to time and again for stylistic and narrative counsel:

1. In Cold Blood , by Truman Capote (1965). Capote’s book about the murder of a Holcomb, Kan., family by two drifters remains just as compelling as it was when first published. His voice conveys neither judgment nor anger, but rather a kind of veiled delight with the people and places he came across in his research, which only heightens the horror. He begins, for example, by depicting the town of Holcomb in a charmingly off-hand manner, as if he were a cheerful uncle describing his own home -town over Thanksgiving dinner. Questions persist as to whether Capote fictionalized portions of the book and much to my sorrow he provided no source notes, but “In Cold Blood” continues today to serve as a model for anyone seeking to write truth as story.

2 The Guns of August , by Barbara Tuchman (1962). Whole libraries have been written about World War I, but Tuchman’s account remains the most captivating of the lot. That first paragraph describing the parade of dignitaries at the funeral of King Edward VII is one of the most beautiful, most ominous passages in prose. Tuchman lets us know her view of things — how idiotic the march toward war truly was — and succeeds because her prose is so deftly spiked with bitters and lemon. The book is dense with phrases that light the imagination, as when she describes “the red edges of war” spreading over the world, or demolishes one German commander as a man whose “training had not quite reached the adequate.”

3 A Night to Remember , by Walter Lord (1955). This book returned the Titanic to national consciousness. The story advances under its own steam, as it were, with readers experiencing each day, each moment, as if we were there on the Atlantic with all those other poor souls. Whenever I read it — and I’ve done so at least four times — I find myself hoping that maybe this time the ship will not sink. As Lord writes in the acknowledgments, “This book is really about the last night of a small town.”

Erik Larson is the author of “In the Garden of Beasts” and “Devil in the White City.”

A local Fox5TV news team came to our house yesterday to report about the book & our family. I’d torn through the house at dawn to fling things into closets (important things that we shall never see again), and to wipe down the kitchen counters and to spray air freshener everywhere and to invite the dogs into my upstairs bedroom and close them in there. Out front, I hosed down the walk, cooling the burning concrete and freshening the garden and I kicked 40 soccer balls under the bushes. The children got up early and put on clothes rather than wander about the house scantily clad. Which is all to say: this wasn’t a pure slice of reality: five children up by 9 am on a summer morning, nicely dressed, in a sparkling-clean house.
Nevertheless, given those limitations, I thought the crew did capture a bit of family life.
DeKalb Family is Home to Children from Around the World

We’d all just arrived at Donny’s mother’s condo in Chevy Chase–the whole family had come in order to attend my reading that night in Washington. All dressed and ready to go, I checked my three-ring binder for my notes… and they weren’t there! It was the right binder, but it had all the wrong stuff in it–kids’ old school papers, and random newspaper clippings, and notes from earlier books. I began shoving and ripping at the papers, and strewing them all over the floor. “Not this!” “Not this!” “Not this!” until I’d made a big mess in Grammy’s pristine condo with the soft white carpet and the reproductions of French oil paintings, and the binder was empty.
As I coped with the horrible revelation that I had left my notes back home in Atlanta, I began to wake up. Instantly I reproached myself for having such a cliche’d dream. “Really? You’re about to make a speech and you can’t find your notes? Is that really the best we could do this morning?”

Published: May 19, 2011 4:44 PM
By WENDY SMITH. Special to Newsday

Four kids would probably seem like plenty to most people, but for Melissa Fay Greene they were the starter set. Greene’s charming memoir, “No Biking in the House Without a Helmet” (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), recounts her adventures as she and her husband added to their biological family five adopted children: one Romany boy from a Bulgarian orphanage and four Ethiopians who had lost their parents to AIDS. It wasn’t always easy, she acknowledges during a visit to New York from her home in Atlanta, but creating this new family was a joyful, transformative experience.

WS: You’re known for serious nonfiction like “Praying for Sheetrock,” based on reporting and research. What prompted this very personal memoir?

MFG:I felt very sheepish about it. I always say to writing students, “Don’t write memoirs. Learn something about the world; feel curious about lives outside your own.” But writers are storytellers, and you go where the good stories are. It didn’t escape my attention that we had all kinds of amazing stories piling up underfoot in our family. Parenting the first four was marvelous and surprising, full of hilarity and tears, and the five other children brought these incredible stories with them.

WS: Your longtime readers may be surprised by how funny the book is. Was that a surprise to you?

MFG:No, that was totally natural: I’d been reining it in for 20 years! Releasing that side of myself was a relief, and there were all these funny and wonderful stories about the culture clash going on as my younger children adapted to America. For the Ethiopian kids, the shock was softened because Atlanta has an Ethiopian population of close to 20,000; they weren’t the only ones who had bridged this amazing divide, leaving an African world of poverty and coming to a very diverse American world of freedom and plenty.

WS: Your biological children encouraged the adoptions, but were there moments when they felt jealous or neglected?

MFG:My very hardest time was Lily being so thrown by Jesse’s arrival. She was 7, she’d been my spoiled baby, and then she was displaced. She was so sad and confused, and that was really, really hard. Now, from the perspective of Lily being 18, she’s fabulous, and she ended up being the linchpin of the family. She went from being the youngest of four biological white children to being the oldest of six kids at home, and the only one of the biological kids. She was the entree for the others into America; she was their first guide: “This is cool, and this is not cool. This is tasty, that’s not tasty.”

WS: Now that your youngest is 13, are you finally able to look forward to an empty nest?

MFG:Not always, but there are times. . . . We’ve got five kids at home, and sometimes on a Saturday night there are 20 teenagers sleeping over. Sometimes I think it would be nice to wake up on Sunday morning and have the house look like it did when we went to bed!

NEWSDAY: “BIKING a Fun Ride!”

 
Listen | StoryCorps.

Astonishing StoryCorps broadcast this morning: the healing friendship of a woman with the young man who murdered her son. “I never got to see him graduate but I hope to see you graduate.”

In 1993, Oshea Israel was a teenage gang member in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One night at a party Oshea got into a fight, which ended when he shot and killed another boy.

Now 34, Oshea has finished serving his prison sentence for second-degree murder.

At StoryCorps he spoke with Mary Johnson, the mother of the boy he killed.

Thank you once again Dave Isay (son of Jane Isay, editor of Praying for Sheetrock & lifelong friend).

I begin by quoting a remarkable email I received last night from a well-spoken 30-something reader in a suburban town near the Bay Area. It started out like many wonderful emails from readers, before taking an interesting turn:

“Hello Melissa,
I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your new book. I was drawn to your story because of adoption, and I was happy to feel even more connected with it when I read about Molly’s band, David Copperf**k. My husband and I are now settled in the suburbs across the bay from San Francisco, but we spent most of our twenties in the punk rock scene of San Francisco and have seen David Copperfuck perform several times. In fact, my husband’s band and our friends’ bands played with them a few times. If I had looked at your book cover a bit closer in the beginning, I may have recognized Molly sooner.”

Within ten seconds I had forwarded this to Molly and Molly called from her apartment in San Francisco! (Molly is now a public radio reporter and producer rather than lead-singer and bass player in a popular punk band, but she remains faithful to punk.)

“Mom!” she said. “We still have fans out there! Maybe David Copperfuck should get together for a reunion tour!”
“You could be my opening act when I give readings!”

I emailed back our new friend in the Bay area:

“You and your husband have just become Molly’s FAVORITE READERS.
She asks if this means SHE is the star of my book (since the Christian Science Monitor felt Lee was the star.)
And she’d like to know the name of your husband’s old band.”

Our new friend replied

“YES. Molly is the star of the book! You can imagine my surprise when I got to that chapter. My husband’s band was Hella Fitzgerald…they played with David Copperfuck once, maybe twice. We saw DC open for a few other bands as well. My husband remembers ordering a 7 inch (record) from Molly years ago…we still have it right here in our record collection! I say yes to a reunion tour.”

“I just realized,” Molly said later, “that this means that David Copperfuck will be in the Library of Congress, because your book will be, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “And now I’m hoping the punk scene will come through for the book.”

Lee (a college senior in Israel) saw it first, and posted it on his Facebook page: a fantastic review, by Terry Hong, in the Christian Science Monitor
which begins: “You just know that a book’s going to be good if you’ve already guffawed and the type has started to blur (even though you’re trying not to get overly emotional) when you’ve barely even finished the introduction. Welcome to two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene’s latest title, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet.”
It goes on in wonderfully generous praise, and then this sentence appears:
“Third child Lee, by the way, is quite possibly the story’s star.”

Well! Lee texted me this sentence from Israel; his message was the first thing I saw in the morning.
“Wow,” I texted back, and he replied: “This newfound celebrity has possibly already gone to my head.”

Naturally Lee posted the CSM review on his Facebook page, and I must share some of those FB comments with you all:

Lee’s friend Frank Lee: “Consider yourself on the same level as that Harry Potter dude.”

Molly: “YOU? You’re the star?? Don’t tell Yosef.”

Lee’s friend Jacob Karas: “I taught Daniel to ride a bike. Do I get any credit in this?”

Yosef: “Molly, U can’t hide that from me. I’m the star everybody knows that.”

Molly: “Yosef, we should plan an uprising.”

Lee: “Me, my fans, and my paparazzi will demolish any such uprising.

Lee’s friend Shelby: “I saw this in PEOPLE Magazine! It’s been a long time but it sounds like you all are doing well!”

Lee: “Yeah, things are good, except two of my siblings are apparently planning a coup.”

Lily: “Molly, Yosef, count me in.”

Lee’s friend Sam Schiff: “I’m glad I chose the right Samuel to be friends with. I was worried I’d made a mistake for a while there.”

Yosef: “Think again Sam.”

Our old friends Faith & Howard Levy hosted a publication party for me last night. We were welcomed at the door by a BIKE and a BIKE welcome mat, and by a BICYCLE centerpiece inside, filled with flowers and cookies. Forty close friends, my dressed-up children, wine & cheese, and an informal reading in which I explained both my sheepishness about finally writing a “memoir” and why I did it anyway.
The great thing is being able to “try out” some material on old friends; and then to know, by the depth and length of their laughter, which passages are “keepers.”



The children, naturally, feel that any excerpt about THEM is a keeper.
Yosef continues to maintain that the entire book should have been, exclusively, about him.