La Dolce Vita

The year I turned thirty, I had a delicious plan for my birthday. I was part of a playwriting workshop and the best plays from the bunch would be performed on my actual birthday. I imagined champagne and desserts after the performance.

But my play was awful. It was loosely based on real life – I imagined what would happen if a group of mothers from the listserv I was on suddenly descended on my town for Oktoberfest. (Remember this was the early days of online life, almost 25 years ago.) Like me, my main character was ambivalent about the prospect, and ambivalence is never a helpful trait in a main character. Main characters have to want something. I wanted and didn’t want–and so did my main character.

My thirtieth birthday was a disappointment, sans champagne, as I watched other, far better plays succeed. That workshop helped me tremendously, though, because it taught me how to write dialogue. That was its gift to me.

But there was also something curious hidden in my terrible play: one amazing supporting character named Caramel. Because she wasn’t the focus of my attention, she was able to live and breathe, be sassy and tattooed. People in the workshop—looking for something nice to say about a play that just was dead in the water – kept commenting that Caramel was where it was at.

Fast forward a dozen or so years to the writing of my novel Ithaca. There’s a secondary character who is described as short “with a toddler in a sling on her chest, a stud in her nose, and short black hair.” She’s a hippie apple farmer and activist in Ithaca who says, “My mother named me after a mountain in the Bible. Although when you grow up on an apple farm and your name is Carmel, you get Candy Apple quite a bit.” Carmel becomes a kind of surrogate daughter for the main character, Daisy.

And now here we are in 2023, and my novel, Renaissance introduces the reader to “ a young woman sitting on top of the counter in the kitchenette. She was all arms and legs in a tank top and jeans, a tattooed vine twining down one arm, blonde hair pulled up on top of her head. She jumped up and shook my hand. Her hand was rough. ‘I’m Honey,’ she said.” Later we see that Honey had recently spent a year with a traveling carnival—not a circus, she explained—after picking almonds in California

When I wrote Ithaca, people assumed it was about me, which it wasn’t. Renaissance’s main character, Liz, is much closer to me. At the same time, just as people say every character in a dream represents some part of the dreamer, I suspect every character in a book represents some part of the author.

But what’s with these sweetly named young women – Caramel, Carmel, Honey—all of whom live outside the norm, most of them with tattoos? I also find myself writing older grandmotherly women and unprepossessing men, so psychoanalyze me as you will, but today I’m thinking about la dolce vita – the sweet life – and the sweet (and salty) characters in my fiction.

I think you’ll like Honey and the lovely relationship that develops between her and the main character, Liz, as they prune trees together, by day and then watch Italian game shows and read aloud together in the evenings. She’s a free spirit like the other sweetly named secondary characters, but she also experiences a degree of healing along the way.

And that is sweet indeed.

dancing to the algorithm

So I have a kid who gets recognized in airports and coffee shops. I think he’s pretty cool myself but let me tell you a bit about why this happens and what it has to do with me and you.

Back when he was in high school, my kid launched a YouTube channel and had a few hundred followers. He was also a runner with good grades and this got him into Harvard where he ran track, and here’s where the story gets interesting. In his freshman year, he made a video entitled “A Day in the Life of a Harvard Computer Science Student” It turned out that lots of people his age also wanted to be Harvard students or to know what it was like, so a lot of people watched it, made comments on it and liked (or disliked) it. Which got the algorithms paying attention to it.

Now I’m not a computer science student of any sort, but as we all know from using the Internet for any length of time, sites are designed to market to us, whether to sell us what we want or to make us want what they’re selling. Sometimes it seems rather Big Brother-ish but other times it’s a service that points us to something we’re genuinely interested in.

In this case, it meant that when someone of a similar demographic was on YouTube, this video was suggested to them. And the more people watched it, the more often the video was suggested and watched. It meant my kid’s subscribers skyrocketed on the basis of that video alone, which as of today has 13M views. Few people my age recognize him in public places but lots of college-aged people do. Many of them tell him that his subsequent videos on study habits and reading have changed their lives for the better.

This isn’t meant to just be a mom brag. (Although I am proud for sure.)

The reason I tell this story is that the same thing happens when it comes to books. Go on Amazon and click on a book and you’ll see “Customers who viewed this item also viewed…” On GoodReads, you’ll see “Readers also enjoyed…” on each book’s page. And those who do understand algorithms better than me explain that the more a book is reviewed and rated on either site, the far more likely it is that it will be recommended to others on the site. This is especially true on and before the day of publication (which in my case is September 12, 2023).

So here I want to ask for a favour (or a favor, if you’re from the US): if you’d be willing to pre-order Renaissance either from Amazon or from your local bookstore or from my publisher, let me know and I will send you a FREE digital copy so that you can read and review it in advance on Amazon and GoodReads. You’re also most welcome to tell family and friends and readers of your social media. Every bit helps get the book into people’s hands.

I’m hoping this is a win-win-win. You get some summer reading, I get some readers, and those readers get to discover a book that suits them. Think back to what I said about the viewers of my kid’s videos, how his content made a life-changing difference for some people. That’s my hope for readers of this book too. I love the quote from William Nicholson: “We read to know we’re not alone.” My hope is that this book will resonate with readers so they can know in their own lives that they aren’t alone. You reading and reviewing or rating this book will also do that for me. So thanks in advance. (PS If you don’t like reading digitally and want to wait for the paper copy of the book, pre-orders still help and reviews after the publication date are also most welcome.)

Grazie!

Gelato

We walk into the gelato shop just behind the American girls. Obama has made it hard for me to dislike America, but these girls renew my distaste. All the gelati are labelled in Italian and these girls, frankly, are in Italy. Admittedly the shopkeeper speaks English and is patient with them as they choose the brightly coloured mango and chocolate and ask for it in slangy English. Admittedly too, I have only eight classes of Italian behind me and no doubt sound like Tarzan as I butcher the language. I do not ask that the American girls master the language, but a simple grazie or buon giorno, tacked on would be enough, but never comes. I turn to the gelato. We know that the usual best choices are limone or caffe and we are going to try one of those when I spot a demure little white number nestled among the neon colours. Its sign reads “Crema Buontalenti.” I point to that one and in my limited Italian, ask the proprietor about it. He smiles and tells us it is his signature gelato. I ask for a taste and it slides across my tongue like a song. It is far from vanilla. It is more like sweetened condensed milk, like sweet cream. We ask for a small dish of it. “We’re not Americans,” I feel obliged to add, in Italian. (I am Canadian, was one of our class phrases.) He nods and says he has seen the small maple leaf flag on my husband’s backpack. And, I hope, he sees our gesture of attempting his language as being courteous. Because that is what it is to be Canadian, eh? We are certainly rewarded with the gelato, in any event.